Aidan Feeney
Biographic Data
| ID | 177840 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Aidan Feeney |
| GIVEN NAMES | Aidan |
| FAMILY NAME | Feeney |
| SIGNATURE | FEENEY A |
| AFFILIATIONS | Queen's University Belfast |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0442-1676 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 12 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 15 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 12 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
The roles of switching and inhibition in adult counterintuitive scientific thinking
Learning science often appears to involve replacement of naïve, intuitive ideas with correct, counterintuitive ones. Recent studies indicate that the old naïve, intuitive ideas are not actually replaced but exist alongside the correct but often counterintuitive ones. On this account, newer knowledge for scientific thinking might involve inhibition of the old idea. However, instead of merely inhibiting old ideas, it is possible that switching is n…
Debt-related regret and well-being in people resolving problem debts
These results suggest that (a) regret for myopic financial decisions may fade with time, even when those decisions have profound consequences, (b) people explain their debt problems in a variety of ways only some of which relate to their financial decision making, and (c) debtor well-being is associated with particular explanations and regrets. The results have implications both for delivery of debt advice and the design of interventions to encou…
Cross Cultural Differences in Essentialist Beliefs about Religion Categories: Comparing Northern Ireland to the US
To examine cultural differences in beliefs about social categories, two studies examined whether there are differences between Northern Ireland and the US in the strength of essentialist beliefs about eleven social dimensions including culturally salient dimensions of religion and race. In both studies religion categories were essentialized more by participants in Northern Ireland who viewed them as more natural but no more cohesive than US parti…
An experimental investigation of the effects of anticipating regret and relief on intentions and decisions to get the influenza vaccination
The results provide the first evidence that prompting participants to anticipate counterfactual relief increases intentions to be vaccinated compared to controls. These findings reinforce claims that the anticipation of both negative and positive decision-related counterfactual emotions may improve health-related decision-making
Poor mental health is associated with the exacerbation of personal debt problems: A study of debt advice adherence
BACKGROUND: It is known that there is an association between debt and poor mental health. However, much of the literature is observational and focuses on how debt may lead to poor mental health. Here, we are interested in how poor mental health may be associated with debt advice adherence. AIMS: The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between mental health and debt advice adherence in individuals applying for a formal debt resolu…
From Brexit to Biden: What Responses to National Outcomes Tell Us About the Nature of Relief
Recent claims contrast relief experienced because a period of unpleasant uncertainty has ended and an outcome has materialized (temporal relief)—regardless of whether it is one’s preferred outcome—with relief experienced because a particular outcome has occurred, when the alternative was unpalatable (counterfactual relief). Two studies ( N = 993), one run the day after the United Kingdom left the European Union and one the day after Joe Biden’s i…
Relief in everyday life
Despite being implicated in a wide range of psychological and behavioral phenomena, relief remains poorly understood from the perspective of psychological science. What complicates the study of relief is that people seem to use the term to describe an emotion that occurs in two distinct situations: when an unpleasant episode is over, or upon realizing that an outcome could have been worse. This study constitutes a detailed empirical investigation…
Prosocial risk taking and interpersonal regret in children: An individual differences study
The relations between prosocial risk taking (taking a risk to benefit another person; PSRT) and interpersonal regret (regret that one's choices have caused a poor outcome for another person) were examined in 192 children aged 7–9. PSRT was measured by children's choices within a gambling task in which one choice guaranteed participants a good prize whereas the other involved risking this prize to help a peer also win a good prize. Interpersonal r…
The Nature of Party Categories in Two‐Party and Multiparty Systems
Categories are one of the primary ways by which people make sense of complex environments. For political environments, parties are especially useful categories. By simplifying political life, party categories enable people to make sense of politics. A fundamental characteristic of party categories is that they minimize perceived differences of members within a party (e.g., two Democrats) and maximize perceived differences between members of diffe…
Development of essentialist thinking about religion categories in Northern Ireland (and the United States)
Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important categories. Previous evidence from Israel suggests that kindergarteners selectively engage in essentialist rea…
Politeness and Honesty Contribute Additively to the Interpretation of Scalar Expressions
Scalar terms have been the focus of much recent attention. People can interpret such terms narrowly, for example, interpreting A or B to convey A or B but not both, on the grounds that a speaker would have explicitly used a more informative term (i.e., and) had he or she been in a position to do so; or they can interpret such terms broadly ( A or B or both). Examined here are the effects of politeness contexts and self-rated honesty on people's i…
Implicit and explicit processes in a hypothesis testing task
We present the results of two experiments investigating the factors that determine responding on the pseudo‐diagnosticity task. In Expt 1 we manipulated people's beliefs about the degree to which an initial piece of evidence supported a focal hypothesis and found decreased pseudo‐diagnostic (PD) responding when the evidence offered low support for the focal hypothesis. In Expt 2 we manipulated the instructions given to participants. We found that…
Politeness and Honesty Contribute Additively to the Interpretation of Scalar Expressions
Scalar terms have been the focus of much recent attention. People can interpret such terms narrowly, for example, interpreting A or B to convey A or B but not both, on the grounds that a speaker would have explicitly used a more informative term (i.e., and) had he or she been in a position to do so; or they can interpret such terms broadly ( A or B or both). Examined here are the effects of politeness contexts and self-rated honesty on people's i…
Development of essentialist thinking about religion categories in Northern Ireland (and the United States)
Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important categories. Previous evidence from Israel suggests that kindergarteners selectively engage in essentialist rea…
The Nature of Party Categories in Two‐Party and Multiparty Systems
Categories are one of the primary ways by which people make sense of complex environments. For political environments, parties are especially useful categories. By simplifying political life, party categories enable people to make sense of politics. A fundamental characteristic of party categories is that they minimize perceived differences of members within a party (e.g., two Democrats) and maximize perceived differences between members of diffe…
Implicit and explicit processes in a hypothesis testing task
We present the results of two experiments investigating the factors that determine responding on the pseudo‐diagnosticity task. In Expt 1 we manipulated people's beliefs about the degree to which an initial piece of evidence supported a focal hypothesis and found decreased pseudo‐diagnostic (PD) responding when the evidence offered low support for the focal hypothesis. In Expt 2 we manipulated the instructions given to participants. We found that…
Politeness and Honesty Contribute Additively to the Interpretation of Scalar Expressions
Scalar terms have been the focus of much recent attention. People can interpret such terms narrowly, for example, interpreting A or B to convey A or B but not both, on the grounds that a speaker would have explicitly used a more informative term (i.e., and) had he or she been in a position to do so; or they can interpret such terms broadly ( A or B or both). Examined here are the effects of politeness contexts and self-rated honesty on people's i…
Development of essentialist thinking about religion categories in Northern Ireland (and the United States)
Social essentialism, the belief that members of certain social categories share unobservable properties, licenses expectations that those categories are natural and a good basis for inference. A challenge for cognitive developmental theory is to give an account of how children come to develop essentialist beliefs about socially important categories. Previous evidence from Israel suggests that kindergarteners selectively engage in essentialist rea…
The Nature of Party Categories in Two‐Party and Multiparty Systems
Categories are one of the primary ways by which people make sense of complex environments. For political environments, parties are especially useful categories. By simplifying political life, party categories enable people to make sense of politics. A fundamental characteristic of party categories is that they minimize perceived differences of members within a party (e.g., two Democrats) and maximize perceived differences between members of diffe…
From Brexit to Biden: What Responses to National Outcomes Tell Us About the Nature of Relief
Recent claims contrast relief experienced because a period of unpleasant uncertainty has ended and an outcome has materialized (temporal relief)—regardless of whether it is one’s preferred outcome—with relief experienced because a particular outcome has occurred, when the alternative was unpalatable (counterfactual relief). Two studies ( N = 993), one run the day after the United Kingdom left the European Union and one the day after Joe Biden’s i…
Relief in everyday life
Despite being implicated in a wide range of psychological and behavioral phenomena, relief remains poorly understood from the perspective of psychological science. What complicates the study of relief is that people seem to use the term to describe an emotion that occurs in two distinct situations: when an unpleasant episode is over, or upon realizing that an outcome could have been worse. This study constitutes a detailed empirical investigation…
Prosocial risk taking and interpersonal regret in children: An individual differences study
The relations between prosocial risk taking (taking a risk to benefit another person; PSRT) and interpersonal regret (regret that one's choices have caused a poor outcome for another person) were examined in 192 children aged 7–9. PSRT was measured by children's choices within a gambling task in which one choice guaranteed participants a good prize whereas the other involved risking this prize to help a peer also win a good prize. Interpersonal r…
Poor mental health is associated with the exacerbation of personal debt problems: A study of debt advice adherence
BACKGROUND: It is known that there is an association between debt and poor mental health. However, much of the literature is observational and focuses on how debt may lead to poor mental health. Here, we are interested in how poor mental health may be associated with debt advice adherence. AIMS: The aim of the study was to investigate the relationship between mental health and debt advice adherence in individuals applying for a formal debt resolu…
Debt-related regret and well-being in people resolving problem debts
These results suggest that (a) regret for myopic financial decisions may fade with time, even when those decisions have profound consequences, (b) people explain their debt problems in a variety of ways only some of which relate to their financial decision making, and (c) debtor well-being is associated with particular explanations and regrets. The results have implications both for delivery of debt advice and the design of interventions to encou…
Cross Cultural Differences in Essentialist Beliefs about Religion Categories: Comparing Northern Ireland to the US
To examine cultural differences in beliefs about social categories, two studies examined whether there are differences between Northern Ireland and the US in the strength of essentialist beliefs about eleven social dimensions including culturally salient dimensions of religion and race. In both studies religion categories were essentialized more by participants in Northern Ireland who viewed them as more natural but no more cohesive than US parti…
An experimental investigation of the effects of anticipating regret and relief on intentions and decisions to get the influenza vaccination
The results provide the first evidence that prompting participants to anticipate counterfactual relief increases intentions to be vaccinated compared to controls. These findings reinforce claims that the anticipation of both negative and positive decision-related counterfactual emotions may improve health-related decision-making
The roles of switching and inhibition in adult counterintuitive scientific thinking
Learning science often appears to involve replacement of naïve, intuitive ideas with correct, counterintuitive ones. Recent studies indicate that the old naïve, intuitive ideas are not actually replaced but exist alongside the correct but often counterintuitive ones. On this account, newer knowledge for scientific thinking might involve inhibition of the old idea. However, instead of merely inhibiting old ideas, it is possible that switching is n…
Psychology (9 works) · Social Psychology (8 works) · Decision-Making and Behavioral Economics (4 works) · Regret (4 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (4 works) · Social Psychology (4 works) · Child and Animal Learning Development (3 works) · Cognitive psychology (3 works) · Computer Science (3 works) · Developmental psychology (3 works)