Something's off
How inferred contagion biases dispositional judgments of others
Sean Hingston, Justin McManus & Theodore Noseworthy
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Drawing on recent evidence suggesting that beliefs about contagion underlie the market for celebrity-contaminated objects, the current work investigates how people can make biased dispositional judgments about consumers who own such objects. Results from four experiments indicate that when a consumer comes in contact with a celebrity-contaminated object and behaves in a manner that is inconsistent with the traits associated with that celebrity, people tend to make more extreme judgments of them. For instance, if the celebrity excels at a particular task, but the target who has come into contact with the celebrity-contaminated object performs poorly, people reflect more harshly on the target. This occurs because observers implicitly expect that a consumer will behave in a way that is consistent with the traits associated with the source of contamination. Consistent with the law of contagion, these expectations only emerge when contact occurs. Our findings suggest that owning celebrity-contaminated objects signals information about how one might behave in the future, which consequently has social implications for consumers who own such objects.
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Maria Eugenia Panero et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Fiction simulates the social world and invites us into the minds of characters. This has led various researchers to suggest that reading fiction improves our understanding of others’ cognitive and emotional states. Kidd and Castano (2013) received a great deal of attention by providing support for this claim. Their article reported that reading segments of literary fiction (but not popular fiction or nonfiction) immediately and significantly improved performance on the Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test (RMET), an advanced theory-of-mind test. Here we report a replication attempt by 3 independent research groups, with 792 participants randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions (literary fiction, popular fiction, nonfiction, and no reading). In contrast to Kidd and Castano (2013), we found no significant advantage in RMET scores for literary fiction compared to any of the other conditions. However, as in Kidd and Castano and previous research, the Author Recognition Test, a measure of lifetime exposure to fiction, consistently predicted RMET scores across conditions. We conclude that the most plausible link between reading fiction and theory of mind is either that individuals with strong theory of mind are drawn to fiction and/or that a lifetime of reading gradually strengthens theory of mind, but other variables, such as verbal ability, may also be at play.
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The effect of enclothed cognition on empathic responses and helping behavior
Belén López-Pérez et al.
Social Psychology, July/August 2016, Pages 223-231
Abstract:
Based on the enclothed cognition framework, we tested whether the physical experience of wearing a tunic and identifying it with a nursing scrub may enhance empathic and helping responding, compared to the solely physical experience of wearing the scrub or associating with its symbolic meaning. Results of Study 1 (United Kingdom; n = 150) showed that participants who wore a tunic and identified it with a nursing scrub reported higher empathic concern and helped more in a punctual scenario, compared to the other two conditions. Results of Study 2 (Spain; n = 100) supported findings from Study 1 and showed that participants who wore a tunic and identified it with a nursing scrub volunteered more hours and showed higher response latency for altruistic motivation relevant words. Thus, the current research supports the enclothed cognition framework and shows that it also affects vicarious emotions and prosocial behavior.
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Homelike thermoregulation: How physical coldness makes an advertised house a home
Bram Van Acker et al.
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, November 2016, Pages 20–27
Abstract:
House brokers typically intuit that any type of warmth causes people to buy houses more frequently. Is this empirical reality? The authors investigated this through people's attachment towards advertised houses. A wealth of research has now linked thermoregulation to relationships (cf. IJzerman et al., 2015), and here the authors purport that this extends to people's relationships with house as a more novel solution to an ancient problem: shielding from the cold. The present package tests a preregistered idea that colder temperatures increase people's need to affiliate and, in turn, increase people's estimations of how homely a house is (measured through communality). The hypotheses of the first two studies were partly right: the authors only found that actual lower temperatures (not motivation and through a cup and outside temperature) induced people to find a house more communal, predicted by their need to affiliate. Importantly, this even predicts whether people find the house more attractive, and increases their willingness to pay for the house (Studies 1 and 2). The third study did not pan out as predicted, but still affected people's need to affiliate. The authors reason that this was caused by a methodological shortcoming (namely not as strongly being affected by temperature). The present work provides novel insights into how a house becomes a home.
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Knowing your heart and your mind: The relationships between metamemory and interoception
Elizabeth Chua & Eliza Bliss-Moreau
Consciousness and Cognition, October 2016, Pages 146–158
Abstract:
Humans experience a unified self that integrates our mental lives and physical bodies, but many studies focus on isolated domains of self-knowledge. We tested the hypothesis that knowledge of one’s mind and body are related by examining metamemory and interoception. We evaluated two dimensions of metamemory and interoception: subjective beliefs and the accuracy of those beliefs compared to objective criteria. We first demonstrated, in two studies, that metamemory beliefs were positively correlated with interoceptive beliefs, and this was not due to domain-general confidence. Finally, we showed that individuals with better metamemory accuracy also had better interoceptive accuracy. Taken together, these findings suggest a common mechanism subserving knowledge of our cognitive and bodily states.
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What’s in a Face? How Face Gender and Current Affect Influence Perceived Emotion
Daniel Harris, Sarah Hayes-Skelton & Vivian Ciaramitaro
Frontiers in Psychology, September 2016
Abstract:
Faces drive our social interactions. A vast literature suggests an interaction between gender and emotional face perception, with studies using different methodologies demonstrating that the gender of a face can affect how emotions are processed. However, how different is our perception of affective male and female faces? Furthermore, how does our current affective state when viewing faces influence our perceptual biases? We presented participants with a series of faces morphed along an emotional continuum from happy to angry. Participants judged each face morph as either happy or angry. We determined each participant’s unique emotional ‘neutral’ point, defined as the face morph judged to be perceived equally happy and angry, separately for male and female faces. We also assessed how current state affect influenced these perceptual neutral points. Our results indicate that, for both male and female participants, the emotional neutral point for male faces is perceptually biased to be happier than for female faces. This bias suggests that more happiness is required to perceive a male face as emotionally neutral, i.e., we are biased to perceive a male face as more negative. Interestingly, we also find that perceptual biases in perceiving female faces are correlated with current mood, such that positive state affect correlates with perceiving female faces as happier, while we find no significant correlation between negative state affect and the perception of facial emotion. Furthermore, we find reaction time biases, with slower responses for angry male faces compared to angry female faces.
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Anticipated Ambiguity Prolongs the Present: Evidence of a Return Trip Effect
Sam Maglio & Cherrie Kwok
Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, forthcoming
Abstract:
Every event that can occupy a span of time can also warp how long that duration feels. No shortage of factors configures such duration estimates, yet they remain largely confined to events experienced in the present moment. Might future events similarly impact duration? The present investigation leverages a phenomenological return trip effect, which documents subjectively longer outbound journeys relative to identical inbound journeys, to inform this question. Through this lens, the focal event (that which will transpire at the destination) can be decoupled from the focal duration (the span of time between the present moment and arrival at that destination). Four studies document a consistent effect in which ambiguity awaiting at a future event (occurring at the destination) expands the subjective magnitude of present durations (the travel time to the destination). Duration judgments thus appear sensitive to an increasingly broad scope of factors, informing models of temporal cognition.
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Passport Checks: Interactions Between Matching Faces and Biographical Details
Jennifer McCaffery & Mike Burton
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Matching unfamiliar faces is known to be a difficult task. However, most research has tested viewers' ability to match pairs of faces presented in isolation. In real settings, professionals are commonly required to examine photo ID that contains other biographical information too. In three experiments, we present faces embedded in passport frames and ask viewers to make face matching decisions and to check biographical information. We find that the inclusion of a passport frame reduces viewers' ability to detect a face mismatch. Furthermore, the nature of the face match influences biographical data checking — true matches lead to fewer detections of invalid data. In general, viewers were poor at spotting errors in biographical information. This pattern suggests that detection of fraudulent photo ID is even harder than current experimental studies suggest. Possible mechanisms for these effects are discussed.
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Oxytocin Modulates Semantic Integration in Speech Comprehension
Zheng Ye et al.
Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Listeners interpret utterances by integrating information from multiple sources including word level semantics and world knowledge. When the semantics of an expression is inconsistent with his or her knowledge about the world, the listener may have to search through the conceptual space for alternative possible world scenarios that can make the expression more acceptable. Such cognitive exploration requires considerable computational resources and might depend on motivational factors. This study explores whether and how oxytocin, a neuropeptide known to influence social motivation by reducing social anxiety and enhancing affiliative tendencies, can modulate the integration of world knowledge and sentence meanings. The study used a between-participant double-blind randomized placebo-controlled design. Semantic integration, indexed with magnetoencephalography through the N400m marker, was quantified while 45 healthy male participants listened to sentences that were either congruent or incongruent with facts of the world, after receiving intranasally delivered oxytocin or placebo. Compared with congruent sentences, world knowledge incongruent sentences elicited a stronger N400m signal from the left inferior frontal and anterior temporal regions and medial pFC (the N400m effect) in the placebo group. Oxytocin administration significantly attenuated the N400m effect at both sensor and cortical source levels throughout the experiment, in a state-like manner. Additional electrophysiological markers suggest that the absence of the N400m effect in the oxytocin group is unlikely due to the lack of early sensory or semantic processing or a general downregulation of attention. These findings suggest that oxytocin drives listeners to resolve challenges of semantic integration, possibly by promoting the cognitive exploration of alternative possible world scenarios.
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Jason Deska, Steven Almaraz & Kurt Hugenberg
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Recent research has demonstrated that ascribing minds to humanlike stimuli is a product of both their perceptual similarity to human faces and whether they engaged configural face processing. We present the findings of two experiments in which we both manipulate the amount of humanlike features in faces (in a doll-to-human morph continuum) and manipulate perceivers’ ability to employ configural face processing (via face inversion) while measuring explicit ratings of mind ascription (Study 1) and the spontaneous activation of humanlike concepts (Study 2). In both studies, we find novel evidence that ascribing minds to entities is an interactive product of both having strong perceptual similarity to human faces and being processed using configural processing mechanisms typical of normal face perception. In short, ascribing mind to others is bounded jointly by the featural cues of the target and by processes employed by the perceiver.
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People are unable to recognize or report on their own eye movements
Alasdair Clarke et al.
Quarterly Journal of Experimental Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Eye movements bring new information into our visual system. The selection of each fixation is the result of a complex interplay of image features, task goals, and biases in motor control and perception. To what extent are we aware of the selection of saccades and their consequences? Here we use a converging methods approach to answer this question in three diverse experiments. In Experiment 1, participants were directed to find a target in a scene by a verbal description of it. We then presented the path the eyes took together with those of another participant. Participants could only identify their own path when the comparison scanpath was searching for a different target. In Experiment 2, participants viewed a scene for three seconds and then named objects from the scene. When asked whether they had looked directly at a given object, participants' responses were primarily determined by whether or not the object had been named, and not by whether it had been fixated. In Experiment 3, participants executed saccades towards single targets, and then viewed a replay of either the eye movement they just executed, or that of someone else. Participants were at chance to identify their own saccade, even when it contained under- and overshoot corrections. The consistent inability to report on one’s own eye movements across experiments suggests awareness of eye movements is extremely impoverished or altogether absent. This is surprising given that information about prior eye movements is clearly used during visual search, motor error correction, and learning.