Familiarity can increase stereotyping

Two experiments show that repeated exposure to information about a target person reduces individuation and thereby increases stereotyping of the target person based on social group memberships. The effect is not due to familiarity-induced liking (the mere exposure effect), nor is it mediated by increased accessibility of the target’s social category, nor by increases in perceived social judgeability. The results are most consistent with the use of feelings of familiarity as a regulator of processing mode, such that familiar objects receive less systematic or analytic processing. In everyday life, frequent exposure to another person ordinarily produces not only familiarity but also liking, individuated knowledge, and friendship, factors that may effectively limit stereotyping. But when previous exposure is unconfounded from these other factors, its effect can be to increase stereotyping.     

Familiarity impacts person perception

We investigated the effects of familiarity on person perception. We predicted that familiarity would increase non‐analytic processing, reducing attention to and the impact of individuating information, and increasing the impact of category labels on judgments about a target person. In two studies participants read either incriminating or exculpatory individuating information about a defendant in a criminal case and made judgments of guilt. In Study 1, participants were subliminally exposed to the defendant's photo, another matched photo, or no photo before seeing the evidence. Participants familiar with the defendant's photo both processed and used the individuating information less. In Study 2, participants were subtly made familiar or not with the incriminating and exculpatory information itself, and the defendant was described either as a priest or as a skinhead. Familiarity with the information reduced attention to its content and also tended to increase reliance on category information in guilt judgments. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Positive and negative effects of physical context reinstatement on eyewitness recall and identification

The impact of context reinstatement (CR) on eyewitness recall and identification was explored in this study. Participants viewed a video of a staged theft and, following a 1‐week interval, were asked to identify the culprit and recall the event in either the same or in a different physical environment. Results suggested that CR enhanced the perceived familiarity of the lineup members, which in turn increased participants' willingness to identify someone in the lineup. Although CR significantly improved facial discrimination and identification accuracy when the target was present, it also increased confidence ratings beyond that warranted by the increase in accuracy. In terms of recall, reinstating the study context improved participants' free recall of both central and peripheral details and cued recall of peripheral details. The results were consistent with a (mis)attribution of familiarity and the outshining hypothesis. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Familiarity does indeed promote attraction in live interaction

Does familiarity promote attraction? Prior research has generally suggested that it does, but a recent set of studies by Norton, Frost, and Ariely (2007) challenged that assumption. Instead, they found that more information about another person, when that information was randomly selected from lists of trait adjectives, using a trait evaluation paradigm, promoted perceptions of dissimilarity and, hence, disliking. The present research began with the assumption that natural social interaction involves contexts and processes not present in Norton et al.'s research or in the typical familiarity experiment. We theorized that these processes imply a favorable impact of familiarity on attraction. Two experiments are reported using a live interaction paradigm in which two previously unacquainted same-sex persons interacted with each other for varying amounts of time. Findings strongly supported the "familiarity leads to attraction" hypothesis: The more participants interacted, the more attracted they were to each other. Mediation analyses identified three processes that contribute to this effect: perceived responsiveness, increased comfort and satisfaction during interaction, and perceived knowledge.     

Quantifying the role of context in visual object recognition

An object's context may serve as a source of information for recognition when the object's image is degraded. The current study aimed to quantify this source of information. Stimuli were photographs of objects divided into quantized blocks. Participants decreased block size (increasing resolution) until identification. Critical resolution was compared across three conditions: (1) when the picture of the target object was shown in isolation, (2) in the object's contextual setting where that context was unfamiliar to the participant, and (3) where that context was familiar to the participant. A second experiment assessed the role of object familiarity without context. Results showed a profound effect of context: Participants identified objects in familiar contexts with minimal resolution. Unfamiliar contexts required higher-resolution images, but much less so than those without context. Experiment 2 found a much smaller effect of familiarity without context, suggesting that recognition in familiar contexts is primarily based on object-location memory.     

The Impact of Depression on Self–Other Discrepancies in Decision Making

Although there is a small but growing body of literature on how people make risky decisions for others and predict others' decisions, results seem to be contradictory. The authors contribute to the understanding of these mixed results by investigating how depression affects self–other discrepancies in decision making and the psychological processes that underlie these discrepancies. In an experiment, depressed and nondepressed individuals read a series of scenarios involving decisions about health, money, and interpersonal relationships. They then indicated which of two options they would choose for themselves or for another person, or predicted which option this person would choose for himself or herself. Finally, participants reported benefits and drawbacks of the decisions (i.e., cognitions) and feelings about risk. Depressed individuals were less prone to bias when they predicted others' decisions than nondepressed individuals. Feelings about risk played a key role in determining the direction and the magnitude of this bias. In contrast, both depressed and nondepressed individuals showed bias when they made decisions for others. This bias affected their decisions in opposing ways and was determined by cognitions. This bias is consistent with literature showing that depression is associated with an increased sensitivity to social risks. The authors provide a theoretical explanation of self–other discrepancies in decision making in depressed and nondepressed individuals and conclude that the results support the assumption that depression is associated with psychological processes whose role is to increase sensitivity to social threats rather than with a more general negative bias in cognitive functioning. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Familiarity and person construal: Individuating knowledge moderates the automaticity of category activation

In this experiment, we examined how perceivers' familiarity with targets moderates person construal. Based on evidence from object categorization that level of construal varies with expertise in a manner that maximizes cue validity, we reasoned that although social (i.e., group‐level) categorization is functional for construing unfamiliar others (about whom little or no individuating information is available), it is less functional for familiar others (about whom a great deal of individuating information is available). Results from an automatic priming paradigm provided evidence for our reasoning: Participants categorized unfamiliar faces according to the most salient categorical dimension available in the visual information (in this case, sex), but did not do so for familiar faces. Implications for models of person perception are discussed. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The causal role of theories of relationships: consequences for satisfaction and cognitive strategies

Two studies demonstrated the causal role of relationship theories in influencing relationship satisfaction and the processes affecting satisfaction. In both studies, participants were induced to hold either the soulmate or work-it-out theory. Feelings that one's partner was ideal (or not) were associated with relationship satisfaction more strongly for people induced to hold the soulmate theory than the work-it-out theory (Study 1). In Study 2, participants' beliefs about their relationships were threatened, and strategies for responding to this threat were assessed. Inducing people to hold the soulmate theory resulted in more relationship-enhancing cognitions if participants believed they were with the right person but more relationship-detracting cognitions if participants did not believe they were with the right person. These polarizing tendencies were enhanced under threat. In contrast, inducing people to hold a work-it-out theory produced almost no biased processing, leading people to process information similarly, regardless of their feelings about their partner.     

Athens' failed bid for the Olympic Games: The role of ego-involvement and affect on the collective self-esteem of Greek-Canadians

For Canadian-born Greek-Canadians, the failure of Athens' bid for the 1996 Olympic Summer Games was presumed to evoke social comparison at a group level. Although this process may influence social identity (collective self-esteem), the effect was expected to be qualified by the subject's degree of involvement or self-engagement with the event. Pre-event (prior to the announcement of the awarding of the Games to Atlanta, U.S.A.) and post-event responses were obtained from 63 female and 44 male Canadian-born Greek-Canadian university students. In a series of hierarchical multiple regression analyses controlling for pre-event collective self-esteem, involvement and levels of post-event positive emotions enhanced the prediction of post-event collective self-esteem on three subscales directly related to self. Low involvement subjects and those experiencing less post-event positive emotion evidenced a decline in post-event collective self-esteem, whereas their high counterparts exhibited a relative stability in esteem scores. With a comparison group of 84 Canadian-born Italian-Canadian university students, for whom the outcome of the Olympic bid was irrelevant to their ethnic origin, involvement and affect were unrelated to post-event collective self-esteem. Results were interpreted as consistent with previous research linking group failure to increased group cohesion and involvement with stability in the attitude-change literature.     

一体化促进联结记忆的作用机制：熟悉性和回想加工

当两个或两个以上项目进行一体化编码时, 熟悉性也能够支持联结再认, 这一观点已经得到大量研究证据的支持。然而, 关于一体化如何影响联结再认和构成联结的单个项目再认仍存在分歧。通过回顾现有研究发现：(1)一体化一致性是调节一体化与联结再认关系的重要因素; (2)认知资源有限和新/旧词语义相关性是影响一体化对项目再认作用的重要因素; (3)一体化的发生机制存在“项目假说”、“图式假说”以及“精细加工假说”三种可能的理论解释。未来研究不仅需要控制一体化一致性, 还可以比较不同一体化方式的作用大小以及探索一体化效应的毕生发展规律。     

A Sense of ‘unrealness’ about the death of a loved‐one: An exploratory study of its role in emotional complications among bereaved individuals

After a loss, some people develop complicated grief (CG) and depression. A recent cognitive‐behavioural model postulates that three processes account for such problems: (a) lack of integration of the loss with implicit autobiographical knowledge about the relationship with the lost person, (b) negative cognitions and (c) avoidance behaviours. In the current study, it was proposed that the ‘lack of integration of the loss’ is mainly an implicit process, but has an explicit, introspectively accessible counterpart in the form of ‘a sense of unrealness’ that can be defined as a subjective sense of uncertainty or ambivalence about the irreversibility of the separation. The role of this ‘sense of unrealness’ was studied using self‐reported data from 397 mourners. Among other things, findings showed that items constituting unrealness were distinct from those of CG and depression. In addition, unrealness was significantly associated with CG, when controlling for negative cognitions, avoidance and concomitant depression. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Sleep enhances explicit recollection in recognition memory

Recognition memory is considered to be supported by two different memory processes, i.e., the explicit recollection of information about a previous event and an implicit process of recognition based on an acontextual sense of familiarity. Both types of memory supposedly rely on distinct memory systems. Sleep is known to enhance the consolidation of memories, with the different sleep stages affecting different types of memory. In the present study, we used the process-dissociation procedure to compare the effects of sleep on estimates of explicit (recollection) and implicit (familiarity) memory formation on a word-list discrimination task. Subjects studied two lists of words before a 3-h retention interval of sleep or wakefulness, and recognition was tested afterward. The retention intervals were positioned either in the early night when sleep is dominated by slow-wave sleep (SWS), or in the late night, when sleep is dominated by REM sleep. Sleep enhanced explicit recognition memory, as compared with wakefulness (P < 0.05), whereas familiarity was not affected by sleep. Moreover, explicit recognition was particularly enhanced after sleep in the early-night retention interval, and especially when the words were presented with the same contextual features as during learning, i.e., in the same font (P < 0.05). The data indicate that in a task that allows separating the contribution of explicit and implicit memory, sleep particularly supports explicit memory formation. The mechanism of this effect appears to be linked to SWS.     

Reactions to an offense in relation to authoritarianism,knowledge about risk,and freedom of action

This research investigated a situation where a fictitious company distributed contaminated meat that led to serious food poisoning. Participants (N = 241) responded to scenarios that varied information about knowledge of risk (aware, unaware) and freedom of action (free to act, constrained by higher authority). They provided judgments concerning compliance, foreseeability, negligence, recklessness, seriousness of offense, responsibility, deservingness, anger, sympathy, harshness/leniency of penalty, compensation, jail sentence, and community service. They also completed Altemeyer's Right‐Wing Authoritarianism Scale. Results implied that high authoritarians were less sensitive and less responsive to information about the risk of contamination and more sensitive and more responsive to information about constraints from the higher authority when compared with low authoritarians. These interaction effects involving authoritarianism and the two contextual variables occurred for judgments that related to the organizations and to the executive officers within them. These differences in the reactions of high and low authoritarians to the contextual cues were interpreted as reflecting the effects of value differences and possible differences in the way information was subsequently processed. Copyright © 2001 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Meet The Simpsons: top-down effects in face learning

We examined whether prior knowledge of a person affects the visual processes involved in learning a face. In two experiments, subjects were taught to associate human faces with characters they knew (from the TV show The Simpsons) or characters they did not (novel names). In each experiment, knowledge of the character predicted performance in a recognition memory test, relying only on old/new confidence ratings. In experiment 1, we established the technique and showed that there is a face-learning advantage for known people, even when face items are counterbalanced for familiarity across the experiment. In experiment 2 we replicated the effect in a setting which discouraged subjects from attending more to known than unknown people, and eliminated any visual association between face stimuli and a character from The Simpsons. We conclude that prior knowledge about a person can enhance learning of a new face.     

Suggestibility and state anxiety: how the two concepts relate in a source identification paradigm

Source identification tests provide a stringent method for testing the suggestibility of memory because they reduce response bias and experimental demand characteristics. Using the techniques and materials of Maria Zaragoza and her colleagues, we investigated how state anxiety affects the ability of undergraduates to identify correctly the source of misleading post-event information. The results showed that individuals high in state anxiety were less likely to make source misattributions of misleading information, indicating lower levels of suggestibility. This effect was strengthened when forgotten or non-recognised misleading items (for which a source identification task is not possible) were excluded from the analysis. Confidence in the correct attribution of misleading post-event information to its source was significantly less than confidence in source misattributions. Participants who were high in state anxiety tended to be less confident than those lower in state anxiety when they correctly identified the source of both misleading post-event information and non-misled items. The implications of these findings are discussed, drawing on the literature on anxiety and cognition as well as suggestibility.     

Trait and situational attributions in a naturalistic setting: Familiarity, liking, and attribution validity

Student dormitory advisors (n = 16) made trait/situation attributions to themselves and also identified three friends and three acquaintances. Friends (n = 41) and acquaintances (n = 43) then made attributions to themselves along with attributions and familiarity ratings of the advisors who identified them. The actor-observer effect was obtained for situational but not for trait attributions, both when advisors' self-attributions were compared to attributions made about them by friends and acquaintances (common target) and when the latter's self attributions were compared to their target attributions (common rater). Among friends and acquaintances, target familiarity was positively related to trait attributions and was negatively related to uncertainty attributions. Also, familiarity was positively related to the validity of situational but not of trait attributions. It was concluded that familiarity appears to influence the process of attribution, but differentially for dispositional vs. situational attributions and for actor-observer differences vs. observer variations in attributions. Moreover, increased information about the actor as a result of greater familiarity may lead to both more accurate and more favorable attributions.     

How does familiarity with a voice affect trait judgements?

From only a single spoken word, listeners can form a wealth of first impressions of a person’s character traits and personality based on their voice. However, due to the substantial within-person variability in voices, these trait judgements are likely to be highly stimulus-dependent for unfamiliar voices: The same person may sound very trustworthy in one recording but less trustworthy in another. How trait judgements differ when listeners are familiar with a voice is unclear: Are listeners who are familiar with the voices as susceptible to the effects of within-person variability? Does the semantic knowledge listeners have about a familiar person influence their judgements? In the current study, we tested the effect of familiarity on listeners’ trait judgements from variable voices across 3 experiments. Using a between-subjects design, we contrasted trait judgements by listeners who were familiar with a set of voices – either through laboratory-based training or through watching a TV show – with listeners who were unfamiliar with the voices. We predicted that familiarity with the voices would reduce variability in trait judgements for variable voice recordings from the same identity (cf. Mileva, Kramer & Burton, Perception, 48, 471 and 2019, for faces). However, across the 3 studies and two types of measures to assess variability, we found no compelling evidence to suggest that trait impressions were systematically affected by familiarity.     

I Recognise You but I Can't Place You: An Investigation of Familiar-only Experiences during Tests of Voice and Face Recognition

In this paper, we examine in detail the situation in which a subject finds that a face or voice is familiar but is unable to retrieve any biographical information about the person concerned. In two experiments, subjects were asked to identify a set of 40 celebrities either from hearing their voice or from seeing their face. Although many more celebrities were identified and named in response to their face than their voice, the results showed that there was a very large number of occasions when a celebrity's voice was felt to be familiar but the subject was unable to retrieve any biographical information about the person. This situation occurred less frequently in response to seeing a celebrity's face; when a face was found familiar, the subject was much more likely to be able to recall the celebrity's occupation. The possibility that these results might have come about because subjects were using different criteria to determine familiarity in the face and voice conditions was investigated and discounted. An additional finding was that when subjects found a face to be familiar-only, they were able to recall significantly more additional information about the person when they were cued by the person's voice than when they simply saw the face again. These results are discussed in relation to the models of person recognition put forward by Bruce and Y oung (1986) and Burton, Bruce, and Johnston (1990).     

The impact of contextual priors and anxiety on performance effectiveness and processing efficiency in anticipation

It is proposed that experts are able to integrate prior contextual knowledge with emergent visual information to make complex predictive judgments about the world around them, often under heightened levels of uncertainty and extreme time constraints. However, limited knowledge exists about the impact of anxiety on the use of such contextual priors when forming our decisions. We provide a novel insight into the combined impact of contextual priors and anxiety on anticipation in soccer. Altogether, 12 expert soccer players were required to predict the actions of an oncoming opponent while viewing life-sized video simulations of 2-versus-2 defensive scenarios. Performance effectiveness and processing efficiency were measured under four conditions: no contextual priors (CP) about the action tendencies of the opponent and low anxiety (LA); no CP and high anxiety (HA); CP and LA; CP and HA. The provision of contextual priors did not affect processing efficiency, but it improved performance effectiveness on congruent trials. Anxiety negatively affected processing efficiency, but this did not affect the use of contextual priors or influence performance effectiveness. It appears that anxiety and prior contextual information impact attentional resources independent of each other. Findings are discussed with reference to current models of anticipation and anxiety.