Motivated Implicit Theories of Personality: My Weaknesses Will Go Away, but My Strengths Are Here to Stay

Implicit theories of body weight and engagement in healthy lifestyles among young adults: The mediating effect of self-control

Engaging in a healthy lifestyle could be helpful to decrease lifestyle-related health risks and bring long-term health benefits. This research investigated how implicit theories of body weight influence people's engagement in healthy lifestyle among young adults in China. The results suggested that implicit theories of body weight significantly influence people's engagement in heathy eating behaviors and physical activity. Self-control mediated the effect of implicit (incremental) theories of body weight on people's engagement in healthy eating. Implications of the current research for understanding how to promote engagement in healthy lifestyle and directions for future research are discussed.

Stranger or a clone? Future self-connectedness depends on who you ask, when you ask, and what dimension you focus on

A fast-growing body of evidence suggests that people have difficulties in envisioning how their future selves will look like and behave. So, what determines that one's future self feels like a dissimilar stranger or exactly the same person? Here, we review relevant work and propose a three-factor framework in an effort to organize and highlight important findings. Our review suggests that who we are, what dimension we focus on, as well as the cognitive and affective states we are in, impact the way we envision our future self being similar or different from our current self. We conclude with remaining questions that are yet to be explored.

Motivated reasoning in the prediction of sports outcomes and the belief in the "hot hand"

The present paper explores the role of motivation to observe a certain outcome in people's predictions, causal attributions, and beliefs about a streak of binary outcomes (basketball scoring shots). In two studies we found that positive streaks (points scored by the participants' favourite team) lead participants to predict the streak's continuation (belief in the hot hand), but negative streaks lead to predictions of its end (gambler's fallacy). More importantly, these wishful predictions are supported by strategic attributions and beliefs about how and why a streak might unfold. Results suggest that the effect of motivation on predictions is mediated by a serial path via causal attributions to the teams at play and belief in the hot hand.