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Do They Look the Same Unless They Are Angry? Investigating the Other-Race Effect in the Presence of Angry Expressions Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-03-15 Roland Imhoff, Barbara C. N. Müller, Verena Heidrich
Ethnic out-group members are disproportionately more often the victim of misidentifications. The so-called other-race effect (ORE), the tendency to better remember faces of individuals belonging to one’s own ethnic in-group than faces belonging to an ethnic out-group, has been identified as one causal ingredient in such tragic incidents. Investigating an important aspect for the ORE—that is, emotional
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Can Invalid Information Be Ignored When It Is Detected? Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Adam T. Ramsey, Yanjun Liu, Jennifer S. Trueblood
With the rapid spread of information via social media, individuals are prone to misinformation exposure that they may utilize when forming beliefs. Over five experiments (total N = 815 adults, recruited through Amazon Mechanical Turk in the United States), we investigated whether people could ignore quantitative information when they judged for themselves that it was misreported. Participants recruited
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The Interactive Effect of Incentive Salience and Prosocial Motivation on Prosocial Behavior Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-03-13 Y. Rin Yoon, Kaitlin Woolley
Charities often use incentives to increase prosocial action. However, charities sometimes downplay these incentives in their messaging (pilot study), possibly to avoid demotivating donors. We challenge this strategy, examining whether increasing the salience of incentives for prosocial action can in fact motivate charitable behavior. Three controlled experiments ( N = 2,203 adults) and a field study
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Multivariate Assessment of Inhibitory Control in Youth: Links With Psychopathology and Brain Function Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-03-06 Elise M. Cardinale, Jessica Bezek, Olivia Siegal, Gabrielle F. Freitag, Anni Subar, Parmis Khosravi, Ajitha Mallidi, Olivia Peterson, Isaac Morales, Simone P. Haller, Courtney Filippi, Kyunghun Lee, Melissa A. Brotman, Ellen Leibenluft, Daniel S. Pine, Julia O. Linke, Katharina Kircanski
Inhibitory control is central to many theories of cognitive and brain development, and impairments in inhibitory control are posited to underlie developmental psychopathology. In this study, we tested the possibility of shared versus unique associations between inhibitory control and three common symptom dimensions in youth psychopathology: attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), anxiety,
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A Practical Significance Bias in Laypeople’s Evaluation of Scientific Findings Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-03-04 Audrey L. Michal, Priti Shah
People often rely on scientific findings to help them make decisions—however, failing to report effect magnitudes might lead to a potential bias in assuming findings are practically significant. Across two online studies (Prolific; N = 800), we measured U.S. adults’ endorsements of expensive interventions described in media reports that led to effects that were small, large, or of unreported magnitude
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Manipulating Prior Beliefs Causally Induces Under- and Overconfidence Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-03-01 Hélène Van Marcke, Pierre Le Denmat, Tom Verguts, Kobe Desender
Humans differ vastly in the confidence they assign to decisions. Although such under- and overconfidence relate to fundamental life outcomes, a computational account specifying the underlying mechanisms is currently lacking. We propose that prior beliefs in the ability to perform a task explain confidence differences across participants and tasks, despite similar performance. In two perceptual decision-making
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Bridging the Gap Between Self-Report and Behavioral Laboratory Measures: A Real-Time Driving Task With Inverse Reinforcement Learning Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-02-26 Sang Ho Lee, Myeong Seop Song, Min-hwan Oh, Woo-Young Ahn
A major challenge in assessing psychological constructs such as impulsivity is the weak correlation between self-report and behavioral task measures that are supposed to assess the same construct. To address this issue, we developed a real-time driving task called the “highway task,” in which participants often exhibit impulsive behaviors mirroring real-life impulsive traits captured by self-report
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A Universal Cognitive Bias in Word Order: Evidence From Speakers Whose Language Goes Against It Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-02-22 Alexander Martin, David Adger, Klaus Abels, Patrick Kanampiu, Jennifer Culbertson
There is a long-standing debate in cognitive science surrounding the source of commonalities among languages of the world. Indeed, there are many potential explanations for such commonalities—accidents of history, common processes of language change, memory limitations, constraints on linguistic representations, and so on. Recent research has used psycholinguistic experiments to provide empirical evidence
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Verbal Aggressions Against Major League Baseball Umpires Affect Their Decision Making Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Joël Guérette, Caroline Blais, Daniel Fiset
Excessively criticizing a perceived unfair decision is considered to be common behavior among people seeking to restore fairness. However, the effectiveness of this strategy remains unclear. Using an ecological environment where excessive criticism is rampant—Major League Baseball—we assess the impact of verbal aggression on subsequent home-plate umpire decision making during the 2010 to 2019 seasons
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Assessing Verbal Eyewitness Confidence Statements Using Natural Language Processing Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Rachel Leigh Greenspan, Alex Lyman, Paul Heaton
After an eyewitness completes a lineup, officers are advised to ask witnesses how confident they are in their identification. Although researchers in the lab typically study eyewitness confidence numerically, confidence in the field is primarily gathered verbally. In the current study, we used a natural language-processing approach to develop an automated model to classify verbal eyewitness confidence
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Unlocking the Benefits of Gender Diversity: How an Ecological-Belonging Intervention Enhances Performance in Science Classrooms Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-02-12 Kevin R. Binning, Danny Doucette, Beverly G. Conrique, Chandralekha Singh
Gender diversity signals inclusivity, but meta-analyses suggest that it does not boost individual or group performance. This research examined whether a social-psychological intervention can unlock the benefits of gender diversity on college physics students’ social and academic outcomes. Analyses of 124 introductory physics classrooms at a large research institution in the eastern United States (
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Racial Prejudice Affects Representations of Facial Trustworthiness Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-02-01 Ryan J. Hutchings, Erin Freiburger, Mattea Sim, Kurt Hugenberg
What makes faces seem trustworthy? We investigated how racial prejudice predicts the extent to which perceivers employ racially prototypical cues to infer trustworthiness from faces. We constructed participant-level computational models of trustworthiness and White-to-Black prototypicality from U.S. college students’ judgments of White (Study 1, N = 206) and Black–White morphed (Study 3, N = 386) synthetic
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Effects of Voice Pitch on Social Perceptions Vary With Relational Mobility and Homicide Rate Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-30 Toe Aung, Alexander K. Hill, Jessica K. Hlay, Catherine Hess, Michael Hess, Janie Johnson, Leslie Doll, Sara M. Carlson, Caroline Magdinec, Isaac G-Santoyo, Robert S. Walker, Drew Bailey, Steven Arnocky, Shanmukh Kamble, Tom Vardy, Thanos Kyritsis, Quentin Atkinson, Benedict Jones, Jessica Burns, Jeremy Koster, Gonzalo Palomo-Vélez, Joshua M. Tybur, José Muñoz-Reyes, Bryan K. C. Choy, Norman P. Li
Fundamental frequency ( fo) is the most perceptually salient vocal acoustic parameter, yet little is known about how its perceptual influence varies across societies. We examined how fo affects key social perceptions and how socioecological variables modulate these effects in 2,647 adult listeners sampled from 44 locations across 22 nations. Low male fo increased men’s perceptions of formidability
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Synchrony Influences Estimates of Cooperation in a Public-Goods Game Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Luke McEllin, Natalie Sebanz
Benefiting from a cooperative interaction requires people to estimate how cooperatively other members of a group will act so that they can calibrate their own behavior accordingly. We investigated whether the synchrony of a group’s actions influences observers’ estimates of cooperation. Participants (recruited through Prolific) watched animations of actors deciding how much to donate in a public-goods
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Devaluation by Omission: Limited Identity Options Elicit Anger and Increase Identification Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-29 Sean Fath, Devon Proudfoot
In the present research, we explored social-identity threat caused by subtle acts of omission, specifically situations in which social-identity information is requested but one’s identity is not among the options provided. We predicted that being unable to identify with one’s group—that is, in the demographics section of a survey—may signal social-identity devaluation, eliciting negative affect (e
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When and Why People Conceal Infectious Disease Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-24 Wilson N. Merrell, Soyeon Choi, Joshua M. Ackerman
People sick with infectious illnesses face negative social outcomes, like exclusion, and may take steps to conceal their illnesses from others. In 10 studies of past, current, and projected illness, we examined the prevalence and predictors of infection concealment in adult samples of U.S. university students, health-care employees, and online crowdsourced workers (total N = 4,110). About 75% reported
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The (Un)ideal Physicist: How Humans Rely on Object Interaction for Friction Estimates Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-22 Harun Karimpur, Christian Wolf, Katja Fiehler
To estimate object properties such as mass or friction, our brain relies on visual information to efficiently compute approximations. The role of sensorimotor feedback, however, is not well understood. Here we tested healthy adults ( N = 79) in an inclined-plane problem, that is, how much a plane can be tilted before an object starts to slide, and contrasted the interaction group with observation groups
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Dissociable Codes in Motor Working Memory Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Hanna Hillman, Tabea Botthof, Alexander D. Forrence, Samuel D. McDougle
Working memory has been comprehensively studied in sensory domains, like vision, but little attention has been paid to how motor information (e.g., kinematics of recent movements) is maintained and manipulated in working memory. “Motor working memory” (MWM) is important for short-term behavioral control and skill learning. Here, we employed tasks that required participants to encode and recall reaching
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Observers Efficiently Extract the Minimal and Maximal Element in Perceptual Magnitude Sets: Evidence for a Bipartite Format Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Darko Odic, Tyler Knowlton, Alexis Wellwood, Paul Pietroski, Jeffrey Lidz, Justin Halberda
The mind represents abstract magnitude information, including time, space, and number, but in what format is this information stored? We show support for the bipartite format of perceptual magnitudes, in which the measured value on a dimension is scaled to the dynamic range of the input, leading to a privileged status for values at the lowest and highest end of the range. In six experiments with college
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Perceptions of Falling Behind “Most White People”: Within-Group Status Comparisons Predict Fewer Positive Emotions and Worse Health Over Time Among White (but Not Black) Americans Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-18 Nava Caluori, Erin Cooley, Jazmin L. Brown-Iannuzzi, Emma Klein, Ryan F. Lei, William Cipolli, Lauren E. Philbrook
Despite the persistence of anti-Black racism, White Americans report feeling worse off than Black Americans. We suggest that some White Americans may report low well-being despite high group-level status because of perceptions that they are falling behind their in-group. Using census-based quota sampling, we measured status comparisons and health among Black ( N = 452, Wave 1) and White ( N = 439,
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Mindful-Gratitude Practice Reduces Prejudice at High Levels of Collective Narcissism Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-17 Agnieszka Golec de Zavala, Oliver Keenan, Matthias Ziegler, Magdalena Mazurkiewicz, Maria Nalberczak-Skóra, Pawel Ciesielski, Julia E. Wahl, Constantine Sedikides
This research tested the hypothesis that mindful-gratitude practice attenuates the robust association between collective narcissism and prejudice. In Study 1 (a between-subjects study using a nationally representative sample of 569 Polish adults; 313 female), 10 min of mindful-gratitude practice—compared to mindful-attention practice and control—did not decrease prejudice (anti-Semitism), but weakened
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Identity Concealment May Discourage Health-Seeking Behaviors: Evidence From Sexual-Minority Men During the 2022 Global Mpox Outbreak Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-12 Joel M. Le Forestier, Elizabeth Page-Gould, Alison Chasteen
People who conceal their stigmatized identities often experience worse physical health. One possibility for why is that concealment may render certain health-seeking behaviors more difficult. We tested this possibility during the 2022 global mpox outbreak, a public-health emergency that disproportionately affected sexual-minority men. We recruited adult sexual-minority men from Prolific at two time
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Attitudes and Laws About Abortion Are Linked to Extrinsic Mortality Risk: A Life-History Perspective on Variability in Reproductive Rights Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-10 Elena Brandt, Jon K. Maner
Abortion policy is conventionally viewed as a political matter with religious overtones. This article offers a different view. From the perspective of evolutionary biology, abortion at a young age can represent prioritization of long-term development over immediate reproduction, a pattern established in other animal species as resulting from stable ecologies with low mortality risk. We examine whether
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Distinct Inhibitory-Control Processes Underlie Children’s Judgments of Fairness Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-08 David M. Sobel, David G. Kamper, Joo-Hyun Song
We examined how 5- to 8-year-olds ( N = 51; Mage = 83 months; 27 female, 24 male; 69% White, 12% Black/African American, 8% Asian/Asian American, 6% Hispanic, 6% not reported) and adults ( N = 18; Mage = 20.13 years; 11 female, 7 male) accepted or rejected different distributions of resources between themselves and others. We used a reach-tracking method to track finger movement in 3D space over time
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Improving Memory Search Through Model-Based Cue Selection Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Charlotte A. Cornell, Kenneth A. Norman, Thomas L. Griffiths, Qiong Zhang
We often use cues from our environment when we get stuck searching our memories, but prior research has failed to show benefits of cuing with other, randomly selected list items during memory search. What accounts for this discrepancy? We proposed that cues’ content critically determines their effectiveness and sought to select the right cues by building a computational model of how cues affect memory
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Investigating Inattentional Blindness Through the Lens of Fear Chemosignals. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-11-29 Gün R Semin,Michael DePhillips,Nuno Gomes
Inattentional blindness is a phenomenon wherein people fail to perceive obvious stimuli within their vision, sometimes leading to dramatic consequences. Research on the effects of fear chemosignals suggests that they facilitate receivers' sensory acquisition. We aimed to examine the interplay between these phenomena, investigating whether exposure to fear chemosignals (vs. rest body odors) can reduce
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Vaccine Nationalism Counterintuitively Erodes Public Trust in Leaders. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Clara Colombatto,Jim A C Everett,Julien Senn,Michel André Maréchal,M J Crockett
Global access to resources like vaccines is key for containing the spread of infectious diseases. However, wealthy countries often pursue nationalistic policies, stockpiling doses rather than redistributing them globally. One possible motivation behind vaccine nationalism is a belief among policymakers that citizens will mistrust leaders who prioritize global needs over domestic protection. In seven
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AI Hyperrealism: Why AI Faces Are Perceived as More Real Than Human Ones. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Elizabeth J Miller,Ben A Steward,Zak Witkower,Clare A M Sutherland,Eva G Krumhuber,Amy Dawel
Recent evidence shows that AI-generated faces are now indistinguishable from human faces. However, algorithms are trained disproportionately on White faces, and thus White AI faces may appear especially realistic. In Experiment 1 (N = 124 adults), alongside our reanalysis of previously published data, we showed that White AI faces are judged as human more often than actual human faces-a phenomenon
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The Gender-Equality Paradox in Chess Holds Among Young Players: A Commentary on the Vishkin (2022) Study. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Clotilde Napp,Thomas Breda
Vishkin (2022) shows that female participation in chess is lower in more gender equal countries (the "gender-equality paradox") but that this relation is driven by the mean age of the players in a country, which makes it more of an epiphenomenon than a real paradox. Relying on the same data on competitive chess players (N = 768,480 from 91 countries) as well as on data on 15-year-old students (N =
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The Gender-Equality Paradox in Chess Participation Is Partially Explained by the Generational-Shift Account but Fully Inconsistent With Existing Alternative Accounts: A Partial Concession and Reply to Napp and Breda (2023). Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-11-08 Allon Vishkin
Napp and Breda (2023) raised three arguments against the generational-shift account of the gender-equality paradox (GEP) in chess participation. First, using finer operationalizations of the age structure of players, they showed that it partially but not fully accounts for the GEP in chess participation. I find merit in these analyses and conclusion. Second, they argued that the country-level age structure
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Reason Defaults: Presenting Defaults With Reasons for Choosing Each Option Helps Decision-Makers With Minority Interests. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Shweta Desiraju,Berkeley J Dietvorst
Defaults are powerful tools for nudging individuals toward potentially beneficial options. However, defaults typically guide all decision-makers toward the same option and, consequently, may misguide individuals with minority interests. We test whether presenting defaults with information about heterogeneity can help individuals with minority interests select alternative options, and we dub this intervention
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Fluctuations in Sustained Attention Explain Moment-to-Moment Shifts in Children's Memory Formation. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-11-06 Alexandra L Decker,Katherine Duncan,Amy S Finn
Why do children's memories often differ from adults' after the same experience? Whereas prior work has focused on children's immature memory mechanisms to answer this question, here we focus on the costs of attentional lapses for learning. We track sustained attention and memory formation across time in 7- to 10-year-old children and adults (n = 120) to show that sustained attention causally shapes
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Concepts Are Restructured During Language Contact: The Birth of Blue and Other Color Concepts in Tsimane'-Spanish Bilinguals. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Saima Malik-Moraleda,Kyle Mahowald,Bevil R Conway,Edward Gibson
Words and the concepts they represent vary across languages. Here we ask if mother-tongue concepts are altered by learning a second language. What happens when speakers of Tsimane', a language with few consensus color terms, learn Bolivian Spanish, a language with more terms? Three possibilities arise: Concepts in Tsimane' may remain unaffected, or they may be remapped, either by Tsimane' terms taking
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Numerical Representation for Action in Crows Obeys the Weber-Fechner Law. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Maximilian E Kirschhock,Andreas Nieder
The psychophysical laws governing the judgment of perceived numbers of objects or events, called the number sense, have been studied in detail. However, the behavioral principles of equally important numerical representations for action are largely unexplored in both humans and animals. We trained two male carrion crows (Corvus corone) to judge numerical values of instruction stimuli from one to five
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Visual Distraction's "Silver Lining": Distractor Suppression Boosts Attention to Competing Stimuli. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Xiaojin Ma,Richard A Abrams
Efficient search of the environment requires that people attend to the desired elements in a scene and ignore the undesired ones. Recent research has shown that this endeavor can benefit from the ability to proactively suppress distractors with known features, but little is known about the mechanisms that produce the suppression. We show here in five experiments (N = 120 college students) that, surprisingly
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Rational Simplification and Rigidity in Human Planning. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Mark K Ho,Jonathan D Cohen,Thomas L Griffiths
Planning underpins the impressive flexibility of goal-directed behavior. However, even when planning, people can display surprising rigidity in how they think about problems (e.g., "functional fixedness") that lead them astray. How can our capacity for behavioral flexibility be reconciled with our susceptibility to conceptual inflexibility? We propose that these tendencies reflect avoidance of two
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Political Person-Culture Match and Longevity: The Partisanship-Mortality Link Depends on the Cultural Context. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-24 Tobias Ebert,Jana B Berkessel,Thorsteinn Jonsson
Recent studies demonstrate that Republicans live longer than Democrats. We examined whether these longevity benefits are universal or culturally varying. Following a person-culture match perspective, we hypothesized that Republicans' longevity benefits occur in Republican, but not in Democratic, states. To test this argument, we conducted two studies among U.S. adults. In preregistered Study 1, we
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The Role of Humor Production and Perception in the Daily Life of Couples: An Interest-Indicator Perspective. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Kenneth Tan,Bryan K C Choy,Norman P Li
In established relationships, are couples who are funny more satisfied with each other, or are satisfied couples more able to see the funny side of their partners? Much research has examined the evolutionary function of humor in relationship initiation, but not in relationship maintenance. Using a dyadic daily-diary study composed of college students from Singapore, results showed that relationship
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Gaze-Triggered Communicative Intention Compresses Perceived Temporal Duration. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Yiwen Yu,Li Wang,Yi Jiang
Eye gaze communicates a person's attentional state and intentions toward objects. Here we demonstrate that this important social signal has the potential to distort time perception of gazed-at objects (N = 70 adults). By using a novel gaze-associated learning paradigm combined with the time-discrimination task, we showed that objects previously associated with others' eye gaze were perceived as significantly
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Knowledge About the Source of Emotion Predicts Emotion-Regulation Attempts, Strategies, and Perceived Emotion-Regulation Success. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-05 Yael Millgram,Matthew K Nock,David D Bailey,Amit Goldenberg
People's ability to regulate emotions is crucial to healthy emotional functioning. One overlooked aspect in emotion-regulation research is that knowledge about the source of emotions can vary across situations and individuals, which could impact people's ability to regulate emotion. Using ecological momentary assessments (N = 396; 7 days; 5,466 observations), we measured adults' degree of knowledge
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Different Mechanisms for Supporting Mental Imagery and Perceptual Representations: Modulation Versus Excitation. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-10-02 Thomas Pace,Roger Koenig-Robert,Joel Pearson
Recent research suggests imagery is functionally equivalent to a weak form of visual perception. Here we report evidence across five independent experiments on adults that perception and imagery are supported by fundamentally different mechanisms: Whereas perceptual representations are largely formed via increases in excitatory activity, imagery representations are largely supported by modulating nonimagined
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If They Won't Know, I Won't Wait: Anticipated Social Consequences Drive Children's Performance on Self-Control Tasks. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-25 Fengling Ma,Xinxin Gu,Linghui Tang,Xianming Luo,Brian J Compton,Gail D Heyman
This research evaluated the hypothesis that the act of offering an incentive produces anticipated social benefits that are distinct from the benefits associated with the incentive itself. Across three preregistered studies, 3- to 5-year-old children in China (total N = 210) were given an opportunity to wait for an additional sticker (Studies 1 and 3) or an edible treat (Study 2). Rewards were dispensed
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Compassion Fatigue as a Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: Believing Compassion Is Limited Increases Fatigue and Decreases Compassion. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-22 Izzy Gainsburg,Julia Lee Cunningham
People's compassion responses often weaken with repeated exposure to suffering, a phenomenon known as compassion fatigue. Why is it so difficult to continue feeling compassion in response to others' suffering? We propose that people's limited-compassion mindsets-beliefs about compassion as a limited resource and a fatiguing experience-can result in a self-fulfilling prophecy that reinforces compassion
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Oppressed Groups Engender Implicit Positivity: Seven Demonstrations Using Novel and Familiar Targets. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Benedek Kurdi,Amy R Krosch,Melissa J Ferguson
Across seven preregistered studies in online adult volunteer samples (N = 5,323), we measured implicit evaluations of social groups following exposure to historical narratives about their oppression. Although the valence of such information is highly negative and its interpretation was left up to participants, implicit evaluations of oppressed groups shifted toward positivity, including in designs
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Parenting Practices May Buffer the Impact of Adversity on Epigenetic Age Acceleration Among Young Children With Developmental Delays. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-21 Alexandra D W Sullivan,Anne K Bozack,Andres Cardenas,Jonathan S Comer,Daniel M Bagner,Rex Forehand,Justin Parent
This study examined whether children exposed to adversity would exhibit lower epigenetic age acceleration in the context of improved parenting. Children with developmental delays and externalizing behavior problems (N = 62; Mage = 36.26 months; 70.97% boys, 29.03% girls; 71% Latinx, 22.6% Black) were drawn from a larger randomized controlled trial (RCT), which randomized them to receive Internet-delivered
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Online Interaction Turns the Congeniality Bias Into an Uncongeniality Bias. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-18 Jürgen Buder,Anja Zimmermann,Brett Buttliere,Lisa Rabl,Moritz Vogel,Markus Huff
Online phenomena like echo chambers and polarization are believed to be driven by humans' penchant to selectively expose themselves to attitudinally congenial content. However, if like-minded content were the only predictor of online behavior, heated debate and flaming on the Internet would hardly occur. Research has overlooked how online behavior changes when people are given an opportunity to reply
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Perceptual Generalization of Alcohol-Related Value Characterizes Risky Drinkers. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-08 Sanghoon Kang,Grace Larrabee,Sanya Nair,Elizabeth V Goldfarb
Generalizing from past experiences to novel situations is critical for adaptive behavior, whereas overgeneralization can promote maladaptive responses (e.g., context-inappropriate fear in anxiety). Here, we propose that overgeneralizing alcohol-related associations characterizes risky drinking. We conducted two online experiments assessing generalization of alcohol-related gains (Study 1) and losses
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Comprehensive Social Trait Judgments From Faces in Autism Spectrum Disorder. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-06 Runnan Cao,Na Zhang,Hongbo Yu,Paula J Webster,Lynn K Paul,Xin Li,Chujun Lin,Shuo Wang
Processing social information from faces is difficult for individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). However, it remains unclear whether individuals with ASD make high-level social trait judgments from faces in the same way as neurotypical individuals. Here, we comprehensively addressed this question using naturalistic face images and representatively sampled traits. Despite similar underlying
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Changing What You Like: Modifying Contour Properties Shifts Aesthetic Valuations of Scenes. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Delaram Farzanfar,Dirk B Walther
To what extent do aesthetic experiences arise from the human ability to perceive and extract meaning from visual features? Ordinary scenes, such as a beach sunset, can elicit a sense of beauty in most observers. Although it appears that aesthetic responses can be shared among humans, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms that underlie this phenomenon. We developed a contour model of aesthetics
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Learning-Induced Plasticity Enhances the Capacity of Visual Working Memory. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Markus Conci,Nuno Busch,Robert P Rozek,Hermann J Müller
Visual working memory (VWM) is limited in capacity, though memorizing meaningful objects may refine this limitation. However, meaningful and meaningless stimuli typically differ perceptually, and objects' associations with meaning are usually already established outside the laboratory, potentially confounding experimental findings. Here, in two experiments with young adults (N = 45 and N = 20), we
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Perceptual Awareness Occurs Along a Graded Continuum: No Evidence of All-or-None Failures in Continuous Reproduction Tasks. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-08-31 Michael A Cohen,Jonathan Keefe,Timothy F Brady
Does sensory information reach conscious awareness in a discrete, all-or-nothing manner or a gradual, continuous manner? To answer this question, we examined behavioral performance across four different paradigms that manipulate visual awareness: the attentional blink, backward masking, the Sperling iconic memory paradigm, and retro-cuing. We then asked how well we could account for participants' (N
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Are Empathic People Better Adjusted? A Test of Competing Models of Empathic Accuracy and Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Facets of Adjustment Using Self- and Peer Reports. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-08-25 Joyce C He,Stéphane Côté
Are individuals adept at perceiving others' emotions optimally adjusted? We extend past research by conducting a high-powered preregistered study that comprehensively tests five theoretical models of empathic accuracy (i.e., emotion-recognition ability) and self-views and intra- and interpersonal facets of adjustment in a sample of 1,126 undergraduate students from Canada and 2,205 informants. We obtained
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Corrigendum to "Growth-Mindset Intervention Delivered by Teachers Boosts Achievement in Early Adolescence". Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-08-21
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Ego-Boosting Hormone: Self-Reported and Blood-Based Testosterone Are Associated With Higher Narcissism. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-08-18 Marcin Zajenkowski,Gilles E Gignac,Radosław Rogoza,Jeremiasz Górniak,Oliwia Maciantowicz,Maria Leniarska,Peter K Jonason,Konrad S Jankowski
Grandiose narcissism is defined as increased motivation for status and viewing oneself as entitled and superior to others. We hypothesized that these tendencies might be associated with basal levels of testosterone because testosterone is considered the most social hormone-driving dominance and the motivation to achieve social status. We distinguished between two facets of grandiose narcissism: agentic
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Self-Relevance Predicts the Aesthetic Appeal of Real and Synthetic Artworks Generated via Neural Style Transfer. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-08-14 Edward A Vessel,Laura Pasqualette,Cem Uran,Sarah Koldehoff,Giacomo Bignardi,Martin Vinck
What determines the aesthetic appeal of artworks? Recent work suggests that aesthetic appeal can, to some extent, be predicted from a visual artwork's image features. Yet a large fraction of variance in aesthetic ratings remains unexplained and may relate to individual preferences. We hypothesized that an artwork's aesthetic appeal depends strongly on self-relevance. In a first study (N = 33 adults
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Are People Generous When the Financial Stakes Are High? Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-08-02 Ryan J Dwyer,William J Brady,Chris Anderson,Elizabeth W Dunn
How generous are people when making consequential financial decisions in the real world? We took advantage of a rare opportunity to examine generosity among a diverse sample of adults who received a gift of U.S. $10,000 from a pair of wealthy donors, with nearly no strings attached. Two-hundred participants were drawn from three low-income countries (Indonesia, Brazil, and Kenya) and four high-income
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Peripheral Visual Information Halves Attentional Choice Biases. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Brenden Eum,Stephanie Dolbier,Antonio Rangel
A growing body of research has shown that simple choices involve the construction and comparison of values at the time of decision. These processes are modulated by attention in a way that leaves decision makers susceptible to attentional biases. Here, we studied the role of peripheral visual information on the choice process and on attentional choice biases. We used an eye-tracking experiment in which
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Social Concepts Simplify Complex Reinforcement Learning. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-07-20 Leor M Hackel,David A Kalkstein
Humans often generalize rewarding experiences across abstract social roles. Theories of reward learning suggest that people generalize through model-based learning, but such learning is cognitively costly. Why do people seem to generalize across social roles with ease? Humans are social experts who easily recognize social roles that reflect familiar semantic concepts (e.g., "helper" or "teacher").
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Fade In, Fade Out: Do Shifts in Visual Perspective Predict the Consistency of Real-World Memories? Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-07-13 Victoria Wardell,Taylyn Jameson,Oliver J R Bontkes,M Lindy Le,Tz-Yu Duan,Peggy L St Jacques,Christopher R Madan,Daniela J Palombo
Memories of our personal past are not exact accounts of what occurred. Instead, memory reconstructs the past in adaptive-though not always faithful-ways. Using a naturalistic design, we asked how the visual perspective adopted in the mind's eye when recalling the past-namely, an "own eyes" versus "observer" perspective-relates to the stability of autobiographical memories. We hypothesized that changes
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Adding Up Peer Beliefs: Experimental and Field Evidence on the Effect of Peer Influence on Math Performance. Psychol. Sci. (IF 10.172) Pub Date : 2023-07-10 Sherry Jueyu Wu,Xiqian Cai
We studied how gendered beliefs about intellectual abilities transmit through peers and differentially impact girls' academic performance relative to boys'. Study 1 (N = 8,029; 208 classrooms) exploited randomly assigned variation in the proportion of a child's middle school classmates who believe that boys are innately better than girls at learning math. An increase in exposure to peers who report