The Role of Felt Responsibility in Climate Change Political Participation

This research letter investigates the role of feelings of responsibility to reduce climate change (i.e., “felt responsibility”) as an antecedent to climate change related political behaviors and intentions, including willingness to join a campaign, likelihood of supporting pro-climate presidential candidates, and past contact with elected officials. Using nationally representative survey data (n = 1,029) we find that felt responsibility has a significant positive relationship with future behavioral intent, but not past behavior. Implications and future research are discussed.

Social Media Influencers and The Dietary Choices Among University Students

This study investigated the attitude and subjective norms of students on Social Media Influencers (SMIs) towards the behavioural intent on their dietary choices in accordance with the Theory of Reasoned Action. Social media influencers as groups of people have had to some extent constructed a reputation for themselves through applying social media platforms to promote oneself. In completing the study, the final year students in Universiti Malaysia Sabah (UMS) were selected as the respondents. The results of the study showed there is a significant relationship between the subjective norms of students on SMIs with the behavioral intent on their dietary choices. Thus, the study concluded that attitude of students towards the SMIs does not affected their daily dietary choices, however, the subjective norms in the students’ life on the SMIs actually makes a difference in their eating habits. Based on the findings of the study, 97.6% of the students believed that they have healthy dietary choices. This study also shows that, 98.8% of the respondents subscribe to social media influencers on their social media accounts. The findings alone indicated that the students’ live are impacted by them. Furthermore, most of them follow the social media influencers on every social media platform: Instagram, Facebook, YouTube, TikTok and Twitter. However, Instagram is the most used social media platform to subscribe to them.

Emotional Gaze: The Effects of Gaze Direction on the Perception of Facial Emotions

Previous research has found that when gaze direction matches the underlying behavioral intent communicated by the expression of a specific emotion, it enhances or facilitates the perception of that emotion; this is called the shared signal hypothesis (SSH). Specifically, a direct gaze shares an approach-orientated signal with the emotions of anger and joy, whereas an averted gaze shares an avoidance-orientated signal with fear and sadness. In this research, we attempted to verify the SSH by using different materials on Asian participants. In Experiment 1 we employed photos of models exhibiting direct and averted gazes for rating tasks, in order to study the effects of gaze direction on participants’ perception of emotion. In Experiment 2 we utilized smiling faces in a similar investigation. The results show that for neutral and smiling faces, a direct gaze (relative to a gaze of avoidance) increased the likelihood of a subject perceiving a happy mood; a gaze of avoidance increased the likelihood that anger and fear would be perceived. The effect of gaze direction on emotional expression perception was verified, but a “facilitating-impairing” pattern was not. The difference between our work and previous research may be attributable to the materials employed (which were more ecological), as well as the participants, who were from a different culture.