Although the research has demonstrated that outcome expectations influence physical activity, the precise underlying mechanisms remain ambiguous. Therefore, this study employed a cross-sectional research design to investigate the effect of outcome expectations on physical activity and to examine the roles of body appreciation and health status. A total of 1349 participants (M_age = 19.42, SD = 1.51; 410 males, 939 females) were recruited for this study and the data were analyzed using a combination of path analysis and network analysis. The results reveal that outcome expectations positively predict physical activity. Body appreciation mediated the relationship between outcome expectation and physical activity. Furthermore, health status moderated the relationship between body appreciation and physical activity. Specifically, body appreciation did not influence physical activity for individuals with a low health status. Network analysis further revealed that there were more edges between body appreciation and physical activity in the high health status group compared to the low health status group. For individuals with a high health status, BA1 and PA1 exhibited the strongest connection among all the edges between body appreciation and physical activity. Outcome expectations play a significant role in physical activity, with body appreciation acting as a mediator. Health status moderates the effect of body appreciation on physical activity, suggesting that interventions targeting body appreciation may be more effective for individuals with a better health status. These findings offer insights for tailored physical activity interventions.

The present study examines the moderated mediation model of resilience and meaning in life (MIL) within the Health Action Process Approach (HAPA) framework. A sample of 971 Chinese college students (mean age = 19.95; 69.5% female) completed measures of consideration of future consequences (CFCs), resilience, MIL, and perceived stress. The results supported the hypothesized model: CFCs negatively predicted perceived stress, and this relationship was partially mediated by resilience. MIL moderated the association between CFCs and perceived stress, with the search for meaning subdimension amplifying the negative relationship. In contrast, the presence of meaning did not exhibit a significant moderating effect. High levels of CFCs were significantly linked to lower perceived stress when the level of search for meaning was high. These findings highlight the dynamic interplay of cognitive and motivational factors in stress management, underscoring the potential of fostering resilience and meaning-seeking behaviors to promote well-being among college students.

Accurate comprehension of others’ thoughts and intentions is crucial for smooth social interactions, wherein understanding their perceptual experiences serves as a fundamental basis for this high-level social cognition. However, previous research has predominantly focused on the visual modality when investigating perceptual processing from others’ perspectives, leaving the exploration of multisensory inputs during this process largely unexplored. By incorporating auditory stimuli into visual perspective-taking (VPT) tasks, we have designed a novel experimental paradigm in which the spatial correspondence between visual and auditory stimuli was limited to the altercentric rather than the egocentric reference frame. Overall, we found that when individuals engaged in explicit or implicit VPT to process visual stimuli from an avatar’s viewpoint, the concomitantly presented auditory stimuli were also processed within this avatar-centered reference frame, revealing altercentric cross-modal interactions.

Background: Individuals are frequently encouraged to consider others’ perspectives to enhance social interactions. To achieve this objective, understanding others’ visual world is significantly beneficial. However, as a fundamental aspect of human cognition, to what extent can individuals effectively memorize object information when adopting another’s viewpoint? Can all features about the object be exclusively memorized in an allocentric manner or only some of them? The present study aims to investigate this issue. Methods: We designed a novel paradigm by integrating a change-detection paradigm with a perspective taking task to investigate these questions. A total of 226 undergraduates were recruited in four behavioral experiments. Participants were instructed to memorize the target dimension features of a memory array from an avatar’s perspective while ignoring irrelevant dimension features. We assessed the impact of irrelevant feature changes on individuals’ identification of memorized target features to determine whether irrelevant features are automatically memorized in an allocentric manner. Results: We found that individuals engaged in other-perspective processing can adopt either object-based encoding, where irrelevant features are automatically encoded into memory in an allocentric manner along with the target feature, or feature-based encoding, where irrelevant features will not be memorized without controlled intention. The selection of encoding mechanism depends on the discriminability of task-irrelevant dimensions. Object-based encoding is employed when the irrelevant dimension exhibits high discriminability while feature-based encoding is utilized when it demonstrates low discriminability. Moreover, these mechanisms are specific to embodied processing, and alternative strategies like object-rotation will lead to different encoding rules. Conclusions: Overall, this study revealed that individuals follow a “coarse-to-fine” principle of memorizing object features when adopting others’ perspectives and suggests the existence of allocentric memorization of irrelevant information during perspective taking.

Human beings inhabit a world abundant in environmental contexts, and our cognitive processing is invariably influenced by the contextual information surrounding us. Previous research has examined how contextual information is processed and utilized to facilitate visual processing when individuals naturally perceive the world from their own perspectives. However, as social beings, individuals are often encouraged to adopt the perspective of others to enhance social interaction. Then, how does our brain process contextual information when we are adopting someone else's perspective to perceive the world? Is it processed in an allocentric manner from the adopted perspective, or does it remain anchored egocentrically to the individual's own standpoint? The current study addresses these questions by integrating a modified contextual cueing paradigm with a perspective-taking task. By examining how prior exposure to contextual stimuli presented from an alternative perspective influences subsequent processing from one's own perspective, we found that when individuals intentionally process target objects from another's viewpoint, non-target contextual information can also be automatically processed from that perspective, rather than their own. However, the other-perspective contextual cueing is transient and diminishes with repeated practice in that perspective. These findings suggest that the processing of contextual information during perspective taking is a dynamic process rather than a static mechanism. We discussed potential causes of this phenomenon and proposed directions for future research.