Do people want to be vaccinated against COVID-19? Herd immunity is dependent on individuals’ willingness to be vaccinated since vaccination is not mandatory. Our main goal was to investigate people’s intention to be vaccinated and their intentions to vaccinate their children. Moreover, we were interested in understanding the role of the personal characteristics, psychological factors, and the lockdown context on that decision. Therefore, we conducted an online survey during the lockdown in Portugal (15 January 2021 until 14 March 2021). Participants completed a socio-demographic questionnaire, questions about their intentions of being vaccinated, concerns about the vaccine, a COVID-19 attitudes and beliefs scale, a COVID-19 vaccine attitudes and beliefs scale, and the Domain-Specific Risk-Taking (DOSPERT) Scale. Our results showed that from the 649 participants, 63% of the participants reported being very likely to have the vaccine, while 60% reported being very likely to vaccinate their children. We conducted two linear regression models, explaining 65% of the variance for personal vaccination and 56% of the variance for children vaccination. We found that the COVID-19 vaccine general beliefs and attitudes were the main determinants of vaccination intention. Additionally, our proposed artificial neural network model was able to predict with 85% accuracy vaccination intention. Thus, our results suggest that psychological factors are an essential determinant of vaccination intention. Thus, public policy decision makers may use these insights for predicting vaccine hesitancy and designing effective vaccination communication strategies.

Uncertainty has been shown to reduce the willingness to cooperate in various social dilemmas and negatively affect prosocial behavior. However, some studies showed that uncertainty does not always decrease prosocial behavior, depending on the type of uncertainty. More specifically, recent research has shown that prosocial behavior tends to increase under impact uncertainty—uncertainty about the consequences for others if they become infected. In addition, researchers have argued that intuition favors prosocial behavior while deliberation leads to selfish behavior. Our study explored how intuitive (time pressure) or deliberate mental processing, under outcome, or impact uncertainty affect prosocial behavior in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our sample consists of 496 participants, and we used a 4 (COVID-19 scenario: Control vs. Impact Uncertainty vs. Worst-Case vs. Indirect Transmission) by 2 (decision time: time delay vs. time pressure) between-subjects design. Results suggest that participants are more inclined to stay at home (prosocial intention) when forced to make their decisions intuitively rather than deliberately. Additionally, we found that uncertainty does not always decrease prosocial behavior. It seems that uncertainty does not affect the prosocial intention in a scenario with a real infectious disease. These findings suggest that the distinction between outcome and impact uncertainty may be due to the realism of experimental stimuli interventions.

Accurate time measurement is essential for organisms to synchronize their internal biological cycles with the external environment, crucial for reproductive success and survival. This study examines fluctuations in time perception across different phases of the menstrual cycle in response to visual and vocal attractiveness, building on previous research showing that women estimate longer viewing times for attractive male photos compared to unattractive ones. Forty-eight females participated in the experiment during both the menstruation and ovulation phases of their menstrual cycles, completing visual and auditory oddball tasks. Participants viewed a series of five stimuli and reproduced the duration of the last stimulus by pressing a mouse button. The final stimulus could be identical to the previous four (control trials), an attractive or unattractive male photo (visual attractiveness block), a masculinized or feminized male face (visual sexually dimorphic block), or a masculinized or feminized male voice (auditory sexually dimorphic block). Results indicated that duration estimates for masculinized male voices were significantly longer compared to feminized voices, while no differences were found for the menstruation phase. However, no differences were observed between the phases of the menstrual cycle in the visual conditions. Nevertheless, we replicate the temporal dilation effect associated with viewing attractive stimuli, suggesting an acceleration of the internal clock related to attractiveness perception. Our findings align with the literature on this phenomenon and provide initial evidence for an adaptive time perception mechanism influenced by the menstrual cycle, contributing to the understanding of the complex interactions between biological cycles and perceptual processes.