Evaluative conditioning (EC) is a key effect in attitude formation, leading to changes in the liking of neutral attitude objects due to their pairing with positive or negative stimuli. Despite EC's significance, current theories and most empirical findings are limited to stimulus pairings with a single affective stimulus at a time. In contrast, social environments often involve more complex combinations

Given that creative ideation has been widely characterized as involving disinhibition, we tested whether a brief creative ideation effort increased subsequent indulgence through the choice of real or imagined rewards. Across 10 experiments (and an additional four in the Supplemental Material) and 3,412 participants (including the ones in the Supplemental Material), we show that a short creative ideation

Existing research examining the creation of positive and prosocial interpersonal relations has established moral elevation as an approach-oriented emotion to be associated with a range of positive and prosocial outcomes. In this article and with the goal to identify emotional mechanism for improving intergroup relations in contexts of conflict, we examined the effects of moral elevation on enhancing

Ostracism-being ignored and excluded-is part of many individuals' daily lives. Yet, ostracism is often studied in laboratory settings and rarely in natural settings. Here, we report one of the first investigations into ostracism in everyday life by documenting how often and where ostracism occurs; who the sources of ostracism are; and how ostracism affects targets' feelings and behaviors. Two experience

Changes in personality are often modeled linearly or curvilinearly. It is a simplifying-yet untested-assumption that the chosen sample-level model form accurately depicts all person-level trajectories within the sample. Given the complexity of personality development, it seems unlikely that imposing a single model form across all individuals is appropriate. Although typical growth models can estimate

A series of four studies systematically investigated the boundary conditions of the shame-concealment/pride-exposure relationship through an experimental paradigm. Experiment 1 developed an experimental procedure to assess the shame/pride-concealment/exposure relationship. Shame and pride were induced by randomly assigning participants to either low or high fictitious IQ score conditions, followed

Status researchers have recognized virtue, competence, and dominance as distinct, viable routes to attaining status. While acknowledging that these routes could be compatible and may not operate independently, prior research relying on a variable-centered perspective has largely neglected their potentially complex interactions. This article integrates a person-centered perspective with the variable-centered

Reasons for pursuing self-set goals have been linked to well-being. The present article examines the link between autonomous goal regulation (the why of goal pursuit) and well-being, considering the role of the basic psychological needs, effort, and goal progress. Three studies were conducted using experience sampling methods in which German-speaking participants (Study 1: N = 207, Study 2: N = 717

This study was an endeavor to map out a personality trait structure of the Swahili language that may be used to develop indigenous eastern African personality assessment instruments. We followed the psycho-lexical approach where we not only identified trait terms from the Swahili dictionary but also from free descriptions collected from indigenous Swahili speakers. In combination, these two routines

Adolescence is a formative life phase for the development of personality characteristics. Although past findings suggest Big Five traits alongside self-esteem as indicators for successful development, little is known about their longitudinal interplay. We addressed this research gap by integrating data from three longitudinal studies (NT1 = 1,088; Mage = 16.02 years, 72% female). We apply continuous

Amid heightened political polarization in the United States, have politics worked their way into the bedroom? An increase in political similarity between romantic partners has consequences not just for romantic relationships but for society as a whole; political homophily increases our political echo chambers and affects future generations. We drew upon 11 data sets with over 4,000 individuals (including

Many lifestyle and psychosocial factors are associated with a longer lifespan; central among these is social connectedness, or the feeling of belongingness, identification, and bond as part of meaningful human relationships. Decades of research have established that social connectedness is related not only to better mental health (e.g., less loneliness and depression) but also to improved physical

Intergroup crimes are a ubiquitous element of our political reality, as are attempts to redress these crimes through apologies. Six experiments (N = 2,432) demonstrate that the victim group's response to an offered apology has the power to shape uninvolved third parties' impressions of the conflicting groups and influence their willingness to support the victim group. Across a variety of intergroup

Ethnic identity is a major area of study across many disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology, and political science. Yet, little is known about changes in ethnic identity across the adult lifespan, and whether such changes are driven by normal aging processes (aging effects), unique societal influences linked with one's formative years (cohort effects), or social changes during a

Negative life events can lead to lasting changes in subjective well-being (SWB). However, people change differently in their SWB after negative life events, and our understanding of factors explaining these individual differences is still limited-possibly because research so far has neglected to investigate differences in the characteristics of the experienced events (e.g., perceived impact, causes

How different racial minorities experience racism differently remains underexplored in existing research. Here, we show that Asian and Black people are often dehumanized differently. Twelve studies spotlight a racial asymmetry in dehumanization using a wide array of methods (experimental, archival, and computational) and data sources (online samples, word embeddings, and U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

Reports an error in "Can't wait to pay: The desire for goal closure increases impatience for costs" by Annabelle R. Roberts, Alex Imas and Ayelet Fishbach (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Dec 14, 2023, np). The article is being made available open access under the CC-BY-ND-NC license. The correct copyright is "© 2023 The Author(s)." All versions of this article

Recent advances in large language models are enabling the computational intelligent analysis of psychology in natural language. Here, the Fill-Mask Association Test (FMAT) is introduced as a novel and integrative method leveraging Masked Language Models to study and measure psychology from a propositional perspective at the societal level. The FMAT uses Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers

Theoretical accounts of narcissism emphasize the dynamic shifting of self-states in response to social feedback. Status threats are thought to set narcissism's dynamics in motion. Naturalistic ecological momentary assessment (EMA) studies have characterized dynamics of narcissistic grandiosity and vulnerability in relation to perceptions of the interpersonal environment. Experimental studies have emphasized

Current psychological theories on daily social interactions emphasize individual differences yet are underspecified regarding contextual factors. We aim to extend this research by examining how two context factors shape social interactions in daily life: how many relationships people maintain and how densely people live together. In Study 1, 307 German participants (Mage = 39.44 years, SDage = 14.14)

There are notable parallels between processes leading to person-environment fit (PE-fit) and processes of selection and acculturation among U.S. immigrants. Thus, a natural question is: Do immigrants benefit from fitting their new environments? PE-fit appears to have uniformly positive effects in the education, career, and personality literatures, but it is unclear whether this would be the case for

Exposure to an organizational diversity cue may help attract Black women to professional spaces. The cue transfer framework contends that because intergroup attitudes co-occur, both cues congruent or incongruent with one's minoritized identity signal an environment that welcomes all minoritized persons. Critically, the utility of such cues had yet to be explored among Black women. Integrating cue transfer

Affective reactivity, defined as within-person increases in negative affect triggered by daily stressors, has well-established links to personal well-being. Prior work conceptualized affective reactivity as an intrapersonal phenomenon, reflecting reactions to one's own stressors. Here, we conceptualized reactivity interpersonally, examining one's responses to a romantic partner's daily stressors. Across

Despite the primacy of the face in social perception research, people often base their impressions on whole persons (i.e., faces and bodies). Yet, perceptions of whole persons remain critically underresearched. We address this knowledge gap by testing the relative contributions of faces and bodies to various fundamental social judgments. Results show that faces and bodies contribute different amounts

Decades of research have identified average patterns of normative personality development across the lifespan. However, it is unclear how well these correspond to trajectories of individual development. Past work beyond general personality development might suggest these average patterns are oversimplifications, necessitating novel examinations of how personality develops and consideration of new individual

Good fortune can be attributed to many sources, including other people, personal efforts, and various theistic and nontheistic supernatural forces (e.g., God, karma). Four studies (total N = 4,579) of religiously diverse samples from the United States and the United Kingdom investigated the distinct emotional reactions to recalled positive experiences attributed to natural and supernatural benefactors

Classic motivational conflicts theory (Lewin, 1931) distinguishes between approach-approach, and avoidance-avoidance conflicts. Previous research has focused solely on testing the theory's prediction that avoidance-avoidance conflicts are more difficult to resolve than approach-approach ones, using outcome measures (decision time and self-reports). The theory, however, specifies a force-fields mechanism

Personality variability is an important individual difference construct that is the focus of major psychological theories and relates to socioemotional functioning. Although cross-situational personality variability has been studied extensively in adult populations, little is known about variability in children's personality. In this study, we aimed to address this gap in knowledge by evaluating whether

Researchers have used eye-tracking measures to explore the relationship between face encoding and recognition, including the impact of ethnicity on this relationship. Previous studies offer a variety of conflicting conclusions. This confusion may stem from misestimation of the relationship between encoding and recognition. First, most previous models fail to account for the structure of eye-tracking

Is Conscientiousness a useful construct across cultures? Using the 2012 Program for International Student Assessment data, we examined whether perseverance, a measure of Conscientiousness, was related to achievement and truancy across 62 countries/regions (N > 470,000). We investigated whether these relationships were linear or curvilinear in nature and assessed the utility of item-level information

Many colleges and universities seek to leverage the promise of intergroup contact theory by adopting housing policies that randomly assign first-year students to roommates, with the goal of increasing intergroup contact. Yet, it is unclear whether random roommate assignment policies increase cross-race contact, whether this (potentially involuntary, but sanctioned by authorities) contact improves racial

Hedonic overconsumption (e.g., overconsumption of gratifying behaviors, e.g., eating, gaming) is common in daily life and often problematic, pointing to the need for adequate behavioral models. In this article, we develop a self-regulatory framework proposing that when an actual consumption experience falls short of hedonic expectations-such as when being distracted-people will want to consume more

Socioeconomic status (SES) predicts a large number of thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; here, we build on these findings to try to paint a comprehensive picture of what people who occupy different SES ranks are like. Existing findings attribute a mixed set of psychological patterns to people who consider themselves near the top of the socioeconomic hierarchy; these individuals are variously portrayed

Affective polarization, the extent to which political actors treat each other as disliked outgroups, is challenging political exchange and deliberation, for example, via mistrust of the "political enemy" and unwillingness to discuss political topics with them. The present experiments address this problem and study what makes people approach, and not avoid, potential discussion partners in the context

Based on the cognitive-ecological approach and on logical-functional principles, in 12 studies (11 preregistered), we examine the novel hypotheses that psychological distance and construal level (CL) are associated in people's minds with stimulus speed: the psychologically distant/abstract is slow, and the psychologically close/concrete is fast. The findings support our expectations. Study Set I examined

We introduce the test difficulty concept from classical test theory to tackle the issue of low predictive power of implicit association tests (IATs). Following classical test theory, we argue that IATs of moderate difficulty (defined as mean IAT scores of zero) have more predictive power than IATs of extreme difficulties (defined as mean IAT scores deviating strongly from zero). Furthermore, we assume

Understanding how objective quantities are translated into subjective evaluations has long been of interest to social scientists, medical professionals, and policymakers with an interest in how people process and act on quantitative information. The theory of decision by sampling proposes a comparative procedure: Values seem larger or smaller based on how they rank in a comparison set, the decision

Regardless of participant age, length of relationship, country of origin, and numerous other factors, prior research has established a robust negative association between neuroticism and relationship quality. As so much has already been studied on the topic of neuroticism and relationship quality, this study explored the association between neuroticism and relationship quality using meta-analytic methodology

White people confuse Black faces more than their own-race faces. This is an example of the other-race effect, commonly measured by the other-race face recognition task. Like this task, the "Who said what?" paradigm uses within-race confusions in memory, but to measure social categorization strength. The former finds a strongly asymmetrical pattern of interrace perception, the other-race effect, yet

Reports an error in "Evaluating categories from experience: The simple averaging heuristic" by Thomas K. A. Woiczyk and Gaël Le Mens (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2021[Oct], Vol 121[4], 747-773). There was an error in Figure 7. In the two plots of the second row, the data previously labeled as "Equal" correspond to "Natural" and the data previously labeled "Natural" correspond to "Equal

Political orientation reflects beliefs, opinions, and values that are, at least in part, rooted in stable interindividual differences. Whereas evidence has accumulated with regard to the relevance of basic personality dimensions, especially concerning the sociocultural dimension of political ideology, less attention has been paid to the more specific dispositional tendency to assign a higher weight

People's motivational processes, well-being, and performance are likely to be facilitated through the support of others. Self-determination theory argues that interpersonal supports for autonomy, competence, and relatedness are crucial to achieve these outcomes. In the present study, we provide a comprehensive examination of this formulation based on a meta-analytic database consisting of 4,561 effect

Commitment strategies are effective mechanisms individuals can use to overcome self-control problems. Across seven studies (and two supplemental studies), we explore the negative interpersonal consequences of commitment strategy choice and use. In Study 1, using an incentivized trust game, we demonstrate that individuals trust people who choose to use a commitment strategy less than those who choose

Reports an error in "Anger has benefits for attaining goals" by Heather C. Lench, Noah T. Reed, Tiffany George, Kaitlyn A. Kaiser and Sophia G. North (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Advanced Online Publication, Oct 30, 2023, np). In the article (https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa 0000350), the first paragraph in the Method section of Study 4 has been revised. All paragraphs in the Results

Early temperament precedes children's emerging Big Five personality, but shared models of temperament and personality are scarce. We wanted to estimate the genetic factor structure underlying both temperament and the Big Five in children, employing a genetically informed study. Within the Norwegian Mother and Child Cohort Study, we selected 26,354 twins, siblings, and cousins. Mothers rated their children's

Despite numerous meta-analyses, the true extent to which life satisfaction reflects personality traits has remained unclear due to overreliance on a single method to assess both and insufficient attention to construct overlaps. Using data from three samples tested in different languages (Estonian, N = 20,886; Russian, N = 768; English, N = 600), we combined self- and informant-reports to estimate personality

Life goals play a major role in shaping people's lives and careers. Although life goals have prior documented associations with occupational and other life outcomes, no prior studies have investigated associations between life goal development and occupational outcomes. Using two representative samples of Icelandic youth (Sample 1: n = 485, Sample 2: n = 1,339), followed across 12 years from adolescence

Feeling accepted by others is a fundamental human motive and an important marker of successful social interactions. This interpersonal perception, known as meta-liking, is especially relevant during adolescence, when peer relationships deepen and expand. However, knowledge is limited regarding meta-liking formation in initial social interactions. This study investigated whether adolescents (N = 293

Existing research has suggested a predominantly negative view of dependency-oriented help. In contrast, the current research aims to test the positive function of dependency-oriented help in intimate relationships where interpersonal dependency is valued. We hypothesized that dependency-oriented help-seeking could function in communicating liking and romantic interests and, therefore, can be instrumental

This meta-analysis examined the rank-order stability of domain-specific self-esteem by comprehensively synthesizing the available evidence in eight domains of self-esteem (i.e., academic, appearance, athletic, morality, romantic, social, mathematics, and verbal abilities). The analyses were based on longitudinal data from 118 independent samples, including 107,550 participants aged 4-24 years. The

Reports an error in "Digital traces of offline mobilization" by Laura G. E. Smith, Lukasz Piwek, Joanne Hinds, Olivia Brown and Adam Joinson (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023[Sep], Vol 125[3], 496-518). The following article is being corrected: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspa0000338. Cangxiong Chen is added as the fifth author in the byline and author note. Cangxiong Chen's ORCID ID

Reports an error in "What limitations are reported in short articles in social and personality psychology" by Beth Clarke, Sarah Schiavone and Simine Vazire (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023[Oct], Vol 125[4], 874-901). The following article is being corrected: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000458. The percentages in the seventh sentence in the abstract now appear as 41% and 20%, respectively

Perceptions of crime detection risk (e.g., risk of arrest) play an integral role in the criminal decision-making process. Yet, the sources of variation in those perceptions are not well understood. Do individuals respond to changes in legal policy or is perception of detection risk shaped like other perceptions-by experience, heuristics, and with biases? We applied a developmental perspective to study

Many important personal goals, such as health, career, finances, and social relationships, entail repeatedly performing the same (or similar) actions over time (e.g., to exercise daily or save money weekly). When pursuing such ongoing goals, people are likely to accumulate multiple experiences of goal conflict (e.g., multiple occasions when one failed to exercise or save as intended). How might these

There is abundant evidence that emotion categorization is influenced by the social category membership of target faces, with target sex and target race modulating the ease with which perceivers can categorize happy and angry emotional expressions. However, theoretical interpretation of these findings is constrained by gender and race imbalances in both the participant samples and target faces typically

Moral panics have regularly erupted in society, but they appear almost daily on social media. We propose that social media helps fuel moral panics by combining perceived societal threats with a powerful signal of social amplification-virality. Eight studies with multiple methods test a social amplification model of moral panics in which virality amplifies perceptions of threats posed by deviant behavior

According to the cognitive-ecological model of social perception, biases toward individuals can arise as by-products of cognitive principles that interact with the information ecology. The present work tested whether negatively biased person descriptions occur as by-products of cognitive differentiation. Later-encountered persons are described by their distinct attributes that differentiate them from

Self-control-the prioritization of valued global goals over immediate local rewards-is typically conceptualized and studied as isolated decisions. Goal pursuit, however, generally requires people to make repeated self-control decisions across contexts. We adopt a higher order, strategic level of analysis of self-control and explore, for the first time, people's preferences for abstinence (a pattern

Although loneliness has been associated with negative perceptions of social life in past research, little is known about the implications of loneliness for interpersonal perception within close relationships. The current research includes three studies (total N = 1,197) suggesting that loneliness is associated with a negative bias in perceiving relationship partners' regard and care and that this bias

Within structurally polarized and dynamic contexts, such as the U.S. 2020 presidential elections, the moralization of individuals' attitudes on a specific topic (e.g., climate policy) can dangerously escalate disagreements between groups into zero-sum conflict. However, limited knowledge exists regarding the factors that influence individuals' tendency to moralize their attitudes over time, and what