Corrigendum: Does Seeing Faces of Young Black Boys Facilitate the Identification of Threatening Stimuli?
Original article: Todd, A. R., Thiem, K. C., & Neel, R. (2016). Does seeing faces of young Black boys facilitate the identification of threatening stimuli? Psychological Science, 27, 384–393. doi:10.1177/0956797615624492 (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Tags: Corrigendum Source Type: research
How to Compare Across Species
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Haun, D. B. M., Tomasello, M. Tags: Commentaries Source Type: research
Incomparable Methods Vitiate Cross-Species Comparisons: A Comment on Haun, Rekers, and Tomasello (2014)
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Scheel, M. H., Shaw, H. L., Gardner, R. A. Tags: Commentaries Source Type: research
From Power to Inaction: Ambivalence Gives Pause to the Powerful
Research has shown that people who feel powerful are more likely to act than those who feel powerless, whereas people who feel ambivalent are less likely to act than those whose reactions are univalent (entirely positive or entirely negative). But what happens when powerful people also are ambivalent? On the basis of the self-validation theory of judgment, we hypothesized that power and ambivalence would interact to predict individuals’ action. Because power can validate individuals’ reactions, we reasoned that feeling powerful strengthens whatever reactions people have during a decision. It can strengthen univ...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Durso, G. R. O., Brinol, P., Petty, R. E. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
The Wisdom to Know the Difference: Strategy-Situation Fit in Emotion Regulation in Daily Life Is Associated With Well-Being
This study is the first to test the strategy-situation-fit hypothesis using ecological momentary assessment of cognitive reappraisal—a putatively adaptive strategy. We expected people who used reappraisal more in uncontrollable situations and less in controllable situations to have greater well-being than people with the opposite pattern of reappraisal use. Healthy participants (n = 74) completed measures of well-being in the lab and used a smartphone app to report their use of reappraisal and perceived controllability of their environment 10 times a day for 1 week. Results supported the strategy-situation-fit hypoth...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Haines, S. J., Gleeson, J., Kuppens, P., Hollenstein, T., Ciarrochi, J., Labuschagne, I., Grace, C., Koval, P. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
Reminders of Social Connection Can Attenuate Anthropomorphism: A Replication and Extension of Epley, Akalis, Waytz, and Cacioppo (2008)
It is a fundamental human need to secure and sustain a sense of social belonging. Previous research has shown that individuals who are lonely are more likely than people who are not lonely to attribute humanlike traits (e.g., free will) to nonhuman agents (e.g., an alarm clock that makes people get up by moving away from the sleeper), presumably in an attempt to fulfill unmet needs for belongingness. We directly replicated the association between loneliness and anthropomorphism in a larger sample (N = 178); furthermore, we showed that reminding people of a close, supportive relationship reduces their tendency to anthropomo...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bartz, J. A., Tchalova, K., Fenerci, C. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
Do You See the Forest or the Tree? Neural Gain and Breadth Versus Focus in Perceptual Processing
When perceiving rich sensory information, some people may integrate its various aspects, whereas other people may selectively focus on its most salient aspects. We propose that neural gain modulates the trade-off between breadth and selectivity, such that high gain focuses perception on those aspects of the information that have the strongest, most immediate influence, whereas low gain allows broader integration of different aspects. We illustrate our hypothesis using a neural-network model of ambiguous-letter perception. We then report an experiment demonstrating that, as predicted by the model, pupil-diameter indices of ...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Eldar, E., Niv, Y., Cohen, J. D. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
A Window of Opportunity for Cognitive Training in Adolescence
In the current study, we investigated windows for enhanced learning of cognitive skills during adolescence. Six hundred thirty-three participants (11–33 years old) were divided into four age groups, and each participant was randomly allocated to one of three training groups. Each training group completed up to 20 days of online training in numerosity discrimination (i.e., discriminating small from large numbers of objects), relational reasoning (i.e., detecting abstract relationships between groups of items), or face perception (i.e., identifying differences in faces). Training yielded some improvement in performance...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Knoll, L. J., Fuhrmann, D., Sakhardande, A. L., Stamp, F., Speekenbrink, M., Blakemore, S.-J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Heritability of Intraindividual Mean and Variability of Positive and Negative Affect: Genetic Analysis of Daily Affect Ratings Over a Month
We examined genetic influences on interindividual differences in the day-to-day variability of affect (i.e., ups and downs) and in average affect over the duration of a month. Once a day, 17-year-old twins in the United Kingdom (N = 447) rated their positive and negative affect online. The mean and standard deviation of each individual’s daily ratings across the month were used as the measures of that individual’s average affect and variability of affect. Analyses revealed that the average of negative affect was significantly heritable (.53), but the average of positive affect was not; instead, the latter showe...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Zheng, Y., Plomin, R., von Stumm, S. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
An Embodied Account of Early Executive-Function Development: Prospective Motor Control in Infancy Is Related to Inhibition and Working Memory
In this study, 18-month-olds performed three executive-function tasks—involving simple inhibition, working memory, and more complex inhibition—and a motion-capture task assessing prospective motor control during reaching. We demonstrated that prospective motor control, as measured by the peak velocity of the first movement unit, is related to infants’ performance on simple-inhibition and working memory tasks. The current study provides evidence that motor control and executive functioning are intertwined early in life, which suggests an embodied perspective on executive-functioning development. We argue t...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Gottwald, J. M., Achermann, S., Marciszko, C., Lindskog, M., Gredebäck, G. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Elasticity of Preferences
We explore how preferences for attributes are constructed when people choose between multiattribute options. As found in prior research, we observed that while people make decisions, their preferences for the attributes in question shift to support the emerging choice, thus enabling confident decisions. The novelty of the studies reported here is that participants repeated the same task 6 to 8 weeks later. We found that between tasks, preferences returned to near their original levels, only to shift again to support the second choice, regardless of which choice participants made. Similar patterns were observed in a free-ch...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Simon, D., Spiller, S. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Too-Much-Precision Effect: When and Why Precise Anchors Backfire With Experts
Past research has suggested a fundamental principle of price precision: The more precise an opening price, the more it anchors counteroffers. The present research challenges this principle by demonstrating a too-much-precision effect. Five experiments (involving 1,320 experts and amateurs in real-estate, jewelry, car, and human-resources negotiations) showed that increasing the precision of an opening offer had positive linear effects for amateurs but inverted-U-shaped effects for experts. Anchor precision backfired because experts saw too much precision as reflecting a lack of competence. This negative effect held unless ...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Loschelder, D. D., Friese, M., Schaerer, M., Galinsky, A. D. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Bayesian Models of Individual Differences: Combining Autistic Traits and Sensory Thresholds to Predict Motion Perception
According to Bayesian models, perception and cognition depend on the optimal combination of noisy incoming evidence with prior knowledge of the world. Individual differences in perception should therefore be jointly determined by a person’s sensitivity to incoming evidence and his or her prior expectations. It has been proposed that individuals with autism have flatter prior distributions than do nonautistic individuals, which suggests that prior variance is linked to the degree of autistic traits in the general population. We tested this idea by studying how perceived speed changes during pursuit eye movement and at...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Powell, G., Meredith, Z., McMillin, R., Freeman, T. C. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Instantaneous Conventions: The Emergence of Flexible Communicative Signals
Humans can communicate even with few existing conventions in common (e.g., when they lack a shared language). We explored what makes this phenomenon possible with a nonlinguistic experimental task requiring participants to coordinate toward a common goal. We observed participants creating new communicative conventions using the most minimal possible signals. These conventions, furthermore, changed on a trial-by-trial basis in response to shared environmental and task constraints. Strikingly, as a result, signals of the same form successfully conveyed contradictory messages from trial to trial. Such behavior is evidence for...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Misyak, J., Noguchi, T., Chater, N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Role of School Principals in Shaping Childrens Values
Instilling values in children is among the cornerstones of every society. There is wide agreement that beyond academic teaching, schools play an important role in shaping schoolchildren’s character, imparting in them values such as curiosity, achievement, benevolence, and citizenship. Despite the importance of this topic, we know very little about whether and how schools affect children’s values. In this large-scale longitudinal study, we examined school principals’ roles in the development of children’s values. We hypothesized that relationships exist between principals’ values and changes in...
Source: Psychological Science - December 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Berson, Y., Oreg, S. Tags: General Article Source Type: research
