Rates of flu vaccination among healthcare professionals often remain lower than recommended guidelines. We tested whether autonomy-supportive communication styles could improve the effectiveness of statements seeking to promote professionals’ flu vaccination uptake. A pilot study established that statements presented in an autonomy-supportive communication style (i.e., upholding freedom of choice) posed a significantly lower threat to freedom compared to equivalent statements presented in a controlling communication style (i.e., thwarting choice by implying obligation). The main experiment examined the impact of these two communication styles on healthcare professionals’ behavioural intentions to vaccinate against the flu. Results replicated the dampening effect of autonomy-supportive communication style on perceived threat to freedom. Crucially, only autonomy-supportive communication styles led to a significant increase of behavioural intentions to vaccinate. Furthermore, this effect was moderated by motivational regulations (measured by the TSRQ-flu scale): it was strongest for those who tended to see flu vaccination as unimportant and unconnected with their internal values (low autonomous regulation), those who tended not to see vaccination as an act that would give them pride or reduce guilt (low introjection) or who tended to be unwilling to act to get vaccinated (high amotivation). Implications for future policy or institution-led communication campaigns are discussed.

The present study introduces a covert eye-tracking procedure as an innovative approach to investigate the adequacy of research paradigms used in psychology. In light of the ongoing debate regarding ego depletion, the frequently used “attention-control video task” was chosen to illustrate the method. Most participants did not guess that their eyes had been monitored, but some participants had to be excluded due to poor tracking ratio. The eye-tracking data revealed that the attention-control instructions had a significant impact on the number of fixations, revisits, fixation durations, and proportion of long fixation durations on the AOIs (all BF10 > 18.2). However, number of fixations and proportions of long fixation durations did not mediate cognitive performance. The results illustrate the promise of covert eye-tracking methodology to assess task compliance, as well as adding to the current discussion regarding whether the difficulties of replicating “ego depletion” may be in part due to poor task compliance in the video task.

Interactive processes configure extended systems within which each human agent is embedded. Yet much research on higher cognition, such as problem solving, reflects an implicit but deep commitment to methodological individualism that casts the agent as the ontological locus of cognition, and largely dictates the nature of the research enterprise. Conversely, a methodological interactivism forces one to acknowledge the participative yet not all-encompassing role of capacities such as working memory and thinking dispositions; it also encourages the granular mapping of the cognitive ecosystem from which new ideas emerge.

Insight is commonly viewed as originating from the restructuring of a mental representation. Distributed cognition frameworks such as the Systemic Thinking Model (SysTM, Vallée-Tourangeau & Vallée-Tourangeau, 2017), however, assumes that information processing can be transformed when it is distributed across mental and material resources. The experiments reported here showed that interactivity enhanced incubation effects with the cheap necklace problem.

Annual vaccination is the most effective way to prevent and control the health and economic burden caused by seasonal influenza. Healthcare workers (HCWs) play a crucial role in vaccine acceptance and advocacy for their patients. This study explored the drivers of HCWs’ vaccine acceptance and advocacy in six European countries.

Psychosocial studies of HCWs’ decisions to get vaccinated have commonly drawn on subjective expected utility models to assess predictors of vaccination, assuming HCWs’ choices result from a rational information-weighing process. By contrast, we recast those decisions as a commitment to vaccination and we aimed to understand why HCWs may want to (rather than believe they need to) get vaccinated against the flu. This article outlines the development and validation of two short scales to measure of cognitive empowerment towards flu vaccination and towards vaccination advocacy.

To develop a practical taxonomy to organise the myriad possible root causes of a gap in vaccination coverage rates, we performed a narrative review of the literature and tested whether all non-socio-demographic determinants of coverage could be organised into 4 dimensions: Access, Affordability, Awareness and Acceptance. Forty-three studies were reviewed, from which we identified 23 primary determinants of vaccination uptake. We identified a fifth domain, Activation, which captured interventions such as SMS reminders which effectively nudge people towards getting vaccinated.

Successful statistical reasoning emerges from a dynamic system including: a cognitive agent, material artifacts with their actions possibilities, and the thoughts and actions that are realized while reasoning takes place. Five experiments provide evidence that enabling the physical manipulation of the problem information (through the use of playing cards) substantially improves statistical reasoning, without training or instruction. Although they often go unnoticed, the action possibilities of the material artifacts available and the actions that are realized on those artifacts are constitutive of successful statistical reasoning, even in adults who have ostensibly reached cognitive maturity.

We investigated the role of interactivity in problem solving using a river-crossing problem. We found greater facility to transfer their experience of completing the problem from a low to a high interactivity condition as well as evidence that latency per move was significantly faster in the high interactivity group. So-called problem isomorphs instantiated in different task ecologies draw upon different skills and abilities; a distributed cognition analysis may provide a fruitful perspective on learning and transfer.