Peer Review History
Original SubmissionJanuary 4, 2021 |
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PONE-D-21-00255 Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Affect, Higher Negative Affect, and Higher Meaning in Life PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Womick, Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. As you'll see, the reviewers are quite positive about this study, providing as it does a novel set of findings regarding authoritarianism. At the same time, however, the reviewers raised a number of issues that need to be addressed in a revision. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. Below I summarize some of the main concerns which would need to be addressed. In addition, each of the reviewers' specific comments needs be addressed (or an explanation provided for not doing so). A major limitation seems to be the lack of specificity regarding the mechanism(s) underlying the effect you are reporting (noted in one way or another by all reviewers), as well as the possibility that the underlying mechanism(s) might vary over individuals. Specifically, how and why does reading a message (or responding to a questionnaire) comprised of authoritarian values increase one’s meaning in life? Does message threat somehow increase perceived MIL? Or is it the suggested solutions to the threat such as increased group cohesion that increases MIL? It is not necessary that you provide an airtight explanation with corresponding data, but it is necessary that you articulate more clearly how this effect occurs. A second major (and related to the above) limitation is the lack of conceptual clarity regarding the major constructs that you are investigating. Take Meaning in Life for example. Obviously this construct has multiple definitions, components, etc. But what exactly are you referencing with the term? The primary dimension you measure is the presence of meaning, but what exactly is that? This is fairly critical because most conceptualizations of meaning seem to reference a construct that is relatively stable. But what you are demonstrating here is something that is much more fleeting, something that has state-like qualities. Further explication of the MIL construct is required, with some attention paid to the difference between meaning presence and meaning search (readers may conflate the two, and clearly your findings are relevant only for the former and not the latter). Similarly, the intended meaning of RWA needs some clarification, and perhaps more importantly, clarification regarding the manner in which it is related to other constructs such as SDO, nationalism, etc. For example, as one reviewer notes, the extent to which the observed effects are due uniquely to RWA (rather than say SDO or Nationalism) is unclear. The issue of LWA might merit some discussion as well; i.e., would you predict the same patter with LWA as you do with RWA? The reviewers raised a number of statistical issues (e.g., use of d as an effect size when there are more than 2 groups; homogeneity of slopes for the ANCOVAs, reporting tests for covariates, etc.) that will need to be addressed. The use of participants recruited from MTurk is not problematic by itself. However, there are certain limitations to the use of participants recruited from that platform (e.g., carelessness, lack of naivete, etc.) and these limitations should be noted in the Discussion section. In addition, the compensation paid to your participants appears to be relatively low. This requires some clarification (e.g., was it roughly equal to minimum wage?) and justification. Also, it appears that there were no attention checks and no participants were excluded from the analyses, a circumstance that seems a little unusual given the relatively large sample. This should be addressed (e.g., if no Ps were excluded simply state that). More attention should be paid to the geographic limitations of your research (noted by all reviewers but see especially Reviewer 2). You are not required to conduct a replication with a non-Western sample (although that would certainly be welcome), but you do need to go to greater (and earlier) lengths to describe the limits to generalizability with the present samples. There are a number of typos in the manuscript and it needs a thorough proofreading. Note also that there seems to be some duplication in the SI (e.g., Table 1 in the text and supplementary analyses in the SI for study 1 appear to be the same) and so that needs to be attended to as well. Finally, please add a sentence to the manuscript stating where readers can access the data. In short, I would be happy to consider a revision of your manuscript if you believe you can successfully address these issues as well as the other issues noted by the reviewers. Please submit your revised manuscript by Apr 20 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
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Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Partly Reviewer #2: Partly Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Partly ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: I Don't Know Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: I Don't Know ********** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes Reviewer #2: Yes Reviewer #3: Yes Reviewer #4: Yes ********** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: PLOS ONE Ms. No. PONE-D-21-00255: Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Affect, Higher Negative Affect, and Higher Meaning in Life The authors conduct a series of studies to test the hypothesis that exposure to authoritarian texts leads people to experience more negative affect but more meaning in life. Although the authors’ data support these hypotheses, their manuscript presents some conceptual and statistical issues: In general, the manuscript needs to be proofread more closely; it contains a number of typographical errors. The opening section of the introduction seems to be somewhat disjointed, as noted below, although the rest of the introduction is clearer. p. 3: Discussion of origins of RWA does not address Duckitt’s theory or other relevant theories, although if RWA does have a “positive influence on something that is valuable to people,” that influence probably helps to maintain authoritarian attitudes. p. 3: Informal observations are not scientific evidence. Is there any research associating RWA with mood or emotions? p. 3: Why is it “unlikely that listening to or reading about authoritarian values engenders positive feelings, generally”? It seems to me that if one had an authoritarian mindset, one would find reading about our listening to authoritarian values to be pleasing because doing so provides social support for one’s beliefs. p. 3: Why would exposure to authoritarian statements increase meaning in life? This may be true for people who hold authoritarian values, but why would it apply to people who are not authoritarian? p. 5: When the authors write “these variables have been separated into different types of well-being” do they mean that the variables have been differentially associated with the two types of well-being? That would seem to make more sense in this context. p. 5: The authors write “Consistent with past theory [30] and research [31, 32] we expected that the appeal of messages conveying authoritarian values would be existential (rather than affective).” I think that the authors needs to explicate that theory and research a bit: I don’t see the connection based on what they have written. p. 6: The authors write: “We argue that right-wing authoritarianism is not centrally about making people happy ....” Has anyone argued that RWA is about making people happy? If not, I don’t see the relevance of the authors’ statement. pp. 9-10: The authors here refer to their hypotheses as counterintuitive. However, on pp. 6-8 they provided both empirical (Womack et al. [although this does not seem to be in the reference list]) and theoretical rationales for their hypotheses. p. 10: It would be helpful if the authors explicitly stated their hypotheses and recapitulated the theoretical and empirical bases for each hypothesis. For example, the basis of the mood hypothesis in Study 2 (p. 14) was not clear to me. p. 11 and elsewhere: This is a bit nitpickish, but the authors write “Participants were 68.3% women,” implying that each participants was 68.3% woman and 31.7% man. p. 13: Did the authors test the assumption of equality of slopes for the covariate across conditions? The same question arises for the other studies. p. 20: The authors write: “the speech excerpt from Hitler led to the highest meaning in life” but they do not report a statistical test showing that it higher than any of the other authoritarian passages. I think that such a test is needed to support their statement. However, although the Hitler analyses are interesting, they do not seem to central to the goals of the authors’ research and so I think they should be put in the supplementary materials with a footnote directing readers there. p. 21, Table 2 (and elsewhere): The d statistic is designed to describe the difference between two conditions of an independent variable. How did the authors calculate it for a five-condition analysis? I think that a percentage-of-variance-account-for statistic (such as eta-squared) is more commonly used in this situation. pp. 21, 23: I assume that the control variable was entered as a covariate. The authors should report the covariate effect as they did for Study 1 (p. 13). p. 23: What follow-up tests did the authors use to compare conditions of the independent variable? By referring to Bonferroni comparisons, they imply post-hoc tests, but they had a priori hypotheses and so should have conducted a priori tests. General comment on Studies 2-5: I just got to p. 33, which addresses the question that I have here; however, because this question occurred to me here, perhaps the authors should bring this point up earlier than they do, perhaps in the introduction: It seems to me that one would expect that the effect of authoritarian messages on at least meaning in life would be strongest for people high in authoritarianism because the speeches would help affirm their worldviews. On the other hand, those messages might lead egalitarians to mentally counter-argue, thus also increasing meaning in life. Similarly, authoritarian messages may increase negative affect in authoritarians because those messages increase the salience of their disaffection with modern society and increase egalitarians’ negative affect because the messages offend their values. That is, authoritarian messages have similar effects on authoritarians and egalitarians, but for different reasons. Is there any way to test these possibilities? p. 24: The authors write “meaning in life resulting from exposure to authoritarian values could predict subsequent positive evaluations of such messages.” This implies a longitudinal approach: current exposure predicts future positive evaluations. However, the studies reported were all cross-sectional. p. 26, Table 3: (1) The table’s title says that it will include mood, but it only reports message evaluation. (2) I think that “n’s” should be “n =”. pp. 30-31: The authors are testing a mediating variable hypothesis, not a moderator variable hypothesis: Manipulated conditions —> mood and meaning —> evaluations. Therefore, their moderated regression analysis does not test their hypothesis. p. 36: The authors write “we speculate that, over time, repeated exposure to authoritarian values, followed by small boosts to meaning, and more favorable evaluations of them, eventually lead people to adopt right-wing authoritarianism.” Given the qualifications at the end of the paragraph, it might be better to say “lead some people” and then say which people in the next sentence. p. 37: The authors write “Authoritarian values clearly do not fall under the umbrella of virtuous sources of eudaimonic well-being, such as self-actualization and prosocial behavior,” but might authoritarians see it differently? That is, might they not see their values as prosocial in that acceptance of those values would lead to a better society? This idea that authoritarian values lead to better society seems to be in many of the items on the RWA scale. p. 39: Has there been any research on the complexity of messages in authoritarian versus egalitarian writings and speeches? p. 39: The Hitler quotation needs a page number as part of the citation. Reviewer #2: There are a number of issues with this paper that preclude it from publication in its present form. i) The authors provide the reader with a series of studies done in the north American context (primarily the USA, and one study with a small sample having been conducted in Canada). Essentially, this positions the series of studies within a particular cultural context, yet the vast literature on cultural psychology (of which many proponents are north American) are omitted from the theoretical discussion, experimental design, analyses, and discussions. It is far too problematic to assume these studies have any kind of applicability or insight outside the geographical region in which they are conducted given the current presentation of the paper. ii) The authors make a general comment about ‘future work’ in other contexts in the discussion. If the authors are genuinely interested in having diverse perspectives on psychological science, then perhaps they could run the study in at least one other cultural context to see what the scopes and limits of their north American findings are. iii) In study 2, and related discussions in the article, the authors assume that egalitarianism and pluralism are the same or similar. In fact, there is abundant evidence from across the social sciences showing egalitarian values (equality, similarity, etc) are often at odds with pluralistic values (space for diverse cultural values and moral worldviews). iv) Following on from this, it is unclear from the “egalitarian/pluralistic” narrative on p.16 what the implications are for those who read it? If I am an American liberal participant, and I read this passage, does this mean I should take the moral perspective of American conservatives? The last two points reflect weak theorizing and conceptualization of what pluralism and egalitarianism are and how this conflation might be (mis)understand by research participants. v) On the topic of egalitarianism, in several studies the authors pay $0.15 to an array of MTurk workers. Can the authors make clear the time it took for workers to do these surveys and whether they are paid under or over the minimum wage? vi) If one buys in to the validity of these forms of online experimental studies as saying anything important about the actual world (see next point), then it would be more convincing (as well as having non-north American samples) to have a random nationally representative sample within the USA as a further study. vii) In the introduction the authors briefly discuss observations of authoritarian rallies. Why can’t the authors systematically observe a sample of recordings from these rallies (if attending them and reporting ethnographic observations was not an option?). This would make for an integration of methods where the potential ‘counter-intuitive’ findings could be contextualized and understood in a more holistic – grounded – manner. viii) Right wing authoritarianism, meaning in life, and affect/mood are not adequately defined in the article. The ontological foundations of these (traits, concepts, ideologies, ‘scales,’?) are not discussion. Are they ‘things’ or are they ‘processes?’ If they are things, why are they things? And I suppose one could justify the broader experimental method based on an ontological conceptualization of RWA, MIL, Mood, as things. But if they are processes (which I suspect they actually are), then the experimental method in its current deployment has very little cogent to say about the nature of the relationship between RWA, MIL, and Mood. ix) There are numerous smaller issues throughout (e.g. p.3 “the number of attacks by right wing organizations quadrupled”… from what to what? P.4 “life” not “live” etc.) x) I hope the authors take seriously these comments and aim to improve their manuscript in terms of scientific soundness and ethical appropriateness. In my view the paper will be closer to publication once these flaws are remedied. Reviewer #3: I enjoyed reading the paper, i found the datasets impressive, the focus novel and interesting and the potential implications of the link betweeen authoritarianism and meaning in life very interesting. That said, I only have some minor comments and i apologise in advance for not giving more constructive feedback, but the comments refer mainly to two overall impressions left with me after reading the paper which i dont think help do the paper justice in its potential contribution and value; firstly i felt the theoretical links / framings were less clear and interconnected, with selected theories being introduced and then used differentially in the discussion to link findings. it would be useful to consider if at all any one framework offers a better alignment overall with the findings of the data, to anchor the findings more thoroughly in theory. secondly, the language of the paper overall , especially in the discussion, is less convincing, with a lot of speculation about what might/may/could potentially be the case here. while i realize the authors are exploring the different possibilities that ground their findings, i do suggest having a read through to identify where the language can be clear and direct, and where it could be framed as more of a speculation around what may/might be the case. these two things coupled together slightly undermine the value of the findings because it reads as if the authors arent fully sure of why the findings are important. lastly, proofread, some minor spelling errors/incomplete sentences, including one in the abstract (' Both studies showed that although egalitarian messages led to better mood and authoritarian messages led to higher MIL. - sentence ends here, either remove 'although' or complete). Reviewer #4: Peer Review of Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Affect, Higher Negative Affect, and Higher Meaning in Life PLoS One Spring 2021 I. Summary The current 5 studies aimed to experimentally test whether exposure to right-wing authoritarian (RWA) attitudes increased negative affect, but concurrently increased self-reported meaning in life (MIL). I must commend the authors on the amount of work they devoted to these 5 studies and the 62-page supplement! I am torn on this manuscript, as I think the hypotheses are compelling, but the evidence perhaps not as much so. I hope I have sufficiently explained my ambivalence below. Please note that I have tried to double-check the main manuscript and the supplementary material (all 124 pages) in case you already addressed some of my concerns; I apologize if I overlooked any of these circumstances. II. Major Concerns I have two major concerns that thread the entire manuscript. The first is discriminating between RWA and other similar constructs, particularly SDO (Duckitt & Sibley’s dual process model explicitly integrates the two) and nationalism/patriotism (see Osbourne et al., 2017). Neither of these constructs are directly mentioned in the main manuscript, although pilot studies did examine how much participants thought the speeches’ authors would endorse SDO. In Table S4, the “authoritarian” speeches were rated non-significantly different on SDO and RWA. We find the same pattern in Table S5, except it appears that the authors’ authoritarian speech was rated significantly higher on SDO—but barely. So, are these authoritarian speeches or social dominance-oriented speeches? Although these speeches were not rated for their level of nationalism/patriotism, I would also wonder if we can separate the nationalist vs. authoritarian sentiments from these speeches? Thus, I question overall whether—or perhaps how much—are the authors uniquely getting at authoritarianism vs. these other constructs? Is it really authoritarianism that serves as an existential cushion or these other constructs? Or a combination? Further, the authors state “The egalitarian/pluralistic passage was written to offer the opposite perspective of that conveyed in the authoritarian essay” (p. 15). It seems like egalitarianism, which m-w.com defines as “the doctrine that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities”, would be more of a direct opposite of SDO (whose two components are opposition to equality and group-based dominance), not RWA. Directly opposite attitudes/values would be anti-obedience, anti-conventionalism, and anti-aggression toward those who challenge or deviate the “rules”. I don’t see these values consistently reflected in the egalitarian speeches, especially the authors’ own. (However, I acknowledge that the “egalitarian” essays are not rated significantly higher on SDO than RWA, but I don’t know if that is partly a function of the shortened scales used.) Relatedly, I have also been intrigued by the construct of left-wing authoritarianism (LWA, essentially support for liberal authoritarianism), which a flurry of research has recently examined, with Lucian Conway leading the charge (Conway et al., 2017). If the authors acknowledge the validity of this construct (and I think recent research has provided some persuasive evidence), would we replicate the same effects we are seeing with right-wing authoritarian/social dominance-oriented/nationalistic messaging? In any case, Duckitt and Sibley’s dual process model successfully integrates SDO and RWA into a theoretical model. This model maintains that, while they can be strongly correlated, SDO and RWA are distinct constructs that predict different outcomes (e.g., prejudice toward economically competitive vs. socially deviant target groups, respectively; Duckitt, 2006). So, if we think about alt-right or right-wing rallies, there is some growing consensus that racial animosity/resentment is driving people to these rallies and voting for right-wing candidates (see Warf, 2020). That is, in the face of growing numbers of racial, ethnic (and perhaps sexual and gender minorities), it is the decline of White/cis/hetero power that is scaring the bejesus out of many people, maybe more explicitly among conservatives than liberals. As the authors discuss “the importance of group identity and group-related feelings” on p. 38 in the GD, I thought “White” (or cis or hetero) seems more akin to group identity and culture than RWA. People can strongly identify with their Whiteness or heterosexuality and talk about protecting White/straight heritage and culture. But I do not think there are a lot of folks going around identifying as an “authoritarian” or discussing “authoritarian” culture, even if to some degree they are endorsing such attitudes or if such attitudes correspond to traditionally “White” or hetero culture. And perhaps this may be why the “authoritarian” speeches produced such small or very small effects on MIL (note that the effects of these speeches on mood are more persuasive given the consistently moderate ds). Raving about protecting White culture more specifically from immigrants or racial/ethnic minorities may be more existentially fulfilling, while increasing negative affect/lowering positive affect. But let’s return to the topic of effect sizes, my second major concern. The authors did not address effect sizes for MIL in their General Discussion at all, which was a bit conspicuous. The authors did say that the effect of completing the RWA measure on MIL in S1 was “small” on p. 13, perhaps due to not controlling for mood or not having a more ecologically valid manipulation; but, the effects continued to remain rather small even with the new manipulations. Indeed, the authors admitted as much on p. 24 in discussing the Common Method for S3-S5 (“the effect of interest was likely to be relatively small”) and, the mini-meta-analysis did show an overall unadjusted d = 0.13, with the adjusted d a bit higher (d = 0.28). Cohen’s guidelines indicate that any d < |0.20| is trivial. That is, if you need over 1,000 people to detect an effect, is it really that important? Is this an efficient use of limited resources? Of course, there are cases where very small effects are truly meaningful. But is that the case here? These are pressing questions that behavioral scientists continue to wrestle with. Given the size of these effects, I think the authors may need to be a bit more tempered in their conclusion and implications in their DG, too. I am also a bit flummoxed why the adjusted mean differences in MIL, in controlling for mood, are noticeably bigger than the raw mean differences. I have taught statistics > 20 times and analyzed hundreds of datasets using various techniques, but never actually encountered a situation in which the adjusted mean differences were so much larger due to the covariate in an ANCOVA model (I assume the authors conducted ANCOVAs?). I even reached out to three colleagues about this situation, and they were a bit flummoxed, too. Interpreting adjusted means are not always straightforward to begin with (Clason & Mundfrom, 2012). My colleagues are I speculated that perhaps there was a dramatic change in df between the ANOVA vs. ANCOVA effects. Table 4 does show some differences in df, especially in S4 (btw, the df-between, 1598, for the ANOVA in S5 must be incorrect), but this does not seem to explain this phenomenon. We also considered violations of the homogeneity of slopes assumption, but that assumption was generally met (except in the pilot and S3). My colleagues and I also looked at the pattern of adjusted means; that is, the raw and adjusted Ms in the control condition did not seem that different; however, the adjusted Ms in the Egalitarian condition looked substantially lower, while the adjusted Ms in the Authoritarian condition looked substantially higher. Why are we seeing such shifts in the adjusted Ms in these two conditions, but not the control? Ultimately, the question is whether the bigger adjusted M differences reflects something meaningful or is a statistical artifice. If it is something meaningful, this may help the authors’ case a bit as we see slightly higher (but still consistently small) ds with the adjusted Ms. But I could not find anything in the manuscript that discussed this phenomenon. Maybe it’s a simple answer; I am very curious to find out. Additionally, throughout the manuscript I kept thinking that we would only find an increase in MIL after “authoritarian” messaging among conservatives; but, Figure S10 actually showed increased MIL among those low and high in conservatism. This was surprising to me, especially given that Greenberg et al. (1992) found that not only conservatives reported greater dislike of dissimilar others after mortality salience, but liberals actually reported lower dislike after mortality salience. How do the authors reconcile Greenberg et al.’s (1992) results? Lastly, I am also curious as to what would happen if participants actually knew who wrote each of the real speeches in S2? If people saw Hitler’s or Un’s name, would we still see the increase in MIL? Or would reading a Hitler speech actually alienate people (e.g., decrease belongingness) and decrease MIL? III. More minor Concerns 1. I would be careful about language. E.g., “Right-wing authoritarianism played a significant role in the 2016 U.S. presidential election” (p. 3); this study showed that RWA and SDO predicted voting intentions, and the study was cross-sectional and not longitudinal, thereby limiting our ability to establish causation. Finding multiple studies, especially longitudinal ones, would better support such a statement. Another example: “Right-wing authoritarianism involves anti-democratic and anti-social impulses, rendering their appeal baffling to those who do not endorse them”. (p. 5) This sounds a bit politically condescending, perhaps? A liberals’ belief system may seem just as baffling to conversatives’ and vice versa. 2. What do the authors mean by “Environmental coherence” (p. 6)? 3. “Instead, left-wing ideology is positively related to dispositional positive affect” (p. 9); but, it may be important to note that conservatism was related not to higher pos affect but lower neg affect in that study. 4. Nix “definitively” (p. 9), as it sounds too much like “prove”. Also, definitively seems to contradict the strength of the effects found. 5. Missing MTurk payment in S1. 6. S3-S5: The authors paid participants $0.15 vs. $1.00 in S2? Why so little? I feel it is becoming more imperative for us as researchers to pay MTurk participants fairly (indeed, Prolific institutes a min hourly wage), and if the payment does not seem fair, perhaps authors should note it or should address why. 7. I would also be concerned with non-purposeful or careless responding when the payment is so low. The authors mention “exclusions” on p. 10, but I could not find details on these exclusions in the main manuscript or the supplemental .doc. Did the authors screen data for missing responses, completion time, attention checks, etc.? This info should be included in the main paper, IMO. 8. Please put spaces in b/w symbols, operators, and #s. Reading “M(SD)=4.98(1.36), α=.92” is more difficult than “M (SD) = 4.98 (1.36), α = .92.” This aligns with APA style, too (https://www.statisticshowto.com/reporting-statistics-apa-style/). 9. Figure 1: I may recommend altering so that pos and neg affect mean bars are grouped together; the figure now makes it seem like we are supposed to be comparing pos and neg effect for/within each speech, when the authors are most concerned with comparing pos affect between speeches and then neg affect between speeches. 10. I appreciated the discussion of potential mediators in the GD; however, I think the authors need to think how these mediators would be tied to the effects on mood found in the current studies. i.e., Would any of these “cognitive changes” be linked to mood changes (higher neg or lower pos affect) after exposure to “authoritarian” messaging?
References (not cited in manuscript) Clason & Mundfrom, 2012: http://www.glmj.org/archives/articles/Clason_v38n1.pdf Conway et al., 2017: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/322031834_Finding_the_Loch_Ness_Monster_Left-Wing_Authoritarianism_in_the_United_States Duckitt, 2006: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0146167205284282? Osbourne et al., 2017: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/28903711/ Warf, 2020: https://www.routledge.com/Political-Landscapes-of-Donald-Trump/Warf/p/book/9780367197001 ********** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files. If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public. Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy. Reviewer #1: No Reviewer #2: No Reviewer #3: No Reviewer #4: No [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
Revision 1 |
PONE-D-21-00255R1 Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Affect, Higher Negative Affect, and Higher Meaning in Life PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Womick, I have read your revised manuscript (PONE-D-21-00255R1) "Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Affect, Higher Negative Affect, and Higher Meaning in Life ". I appreciate your responsiveness to the comments of the reviewers and myself on the earlier version of this manuscript. There are, however, a few additional tweaks that need to be made before your manuscript can be accepted for publication. First, for each study, please indicate when (month and year) the data was collected. Second, I’m a little confused about your response to reviewer 1’s question about testing the equality of slopes for your ANCOVAs (reviewer 4 had a somewhat related concern). Note that you don’t actually say ANCOVA in the manuscript, but I’m assuming that’s what you’ve ran. In your revision, please be more specific about the type of analyses you conducted (for all of your analyses). In response to this reviewer’s comment, you report multiple regression analyses in Table 5 designed to assess the possible moderation of condition on meaning in life by mood. Although potentially interesting, this doesn’t really address the question of equality of slopes (it hints at it but doesn’t directly address it). The point is that your main analyses testing for condition on mood controlling for meaning, and condition on meaning controlling for mood, require a test of the covariate by condition interaction to test for slope equality. This is especially important because you rely on means that are adjusted by the covariate(s), and this can be misleading if the slopes are unequal. So, please test and if the interactions are not significant, everything can be reported as is (but please note in your manuscript that this assumption was tested). If any of the interactions are significant, then the reporting of the adjusted means becomes a little more problematic. There are various options when the interaction is significant, the most common being to test the IV at different levels of the covariate (e.g., the mean and one SD above and one SD below), similar to what you do in the analyses you report in figures 3 - 5. Another option would be to report only the unadjusted means and corresponding tests. There may be other options as well. Third, the df in Table 4 seem off (e.g., for Study 5 the df for the test of the adjusted means cannot be correct). Please verify all values in this (and all other) tables. That’s it. Once you submit a revision I’ll review it and make a determination. Note that I won’t be sending this out again for review. Please submit your revised manuscript by Aug 29 2021 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file. Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:
If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter. If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols. Additionally, PLOS ONE offers an option for publishing peer-reviewed Lab Protocol articles, which describe protocols hosted on protocols.io. Read more information on sharing protocols at https://plos.org/protocols?utm_medium=editorial-email&utm_source=authorletters&utm_campaign=protocols. We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript. Kind regards, Thomas Holtgraves, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE Journal Requirements: Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] [NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.] While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step. |
Revision 2 |
Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Affect, Higher Negative Affect, and Higher Meaning in Life PONE-D-21-00255R2 Dear Dr. Womick, We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Thomas Holtgraves, Ph.D. Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-21-00255R2 Exposure to Authoritarian Values Leads to Lower Positive Affect, Higher Negative Affect, and Higher Meaning in Life Dear Dr. Womick: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Thomas Holtgraves Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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