Cultural differences in the primacy effect for person perception

Previous work has shown there are robust differences in how North Americans and East Asians form impressions of people. The present research examines whether the tendency to weigh initial information more heavily—the primacy effect—may be another component of these cultural differences. Specifically, we tested whether Americans would be more likely to use first impressions to guide person perception, compared to Japanese participants. In this experiment, participants read a vignette that described a target person's behaviour, then rated the target's personality. Before reading the vignette, some trait information was given to create an expectation about the target's personality. The data revealed that Americans used this initial information to guide their judgments of the target, whereas the Japanese sample based their judgments on all the information more evenly. Thus, Americans showed a stronger primacy effect in their impression formation than Japanese participants, who engaged in more data‐driven processing.     

Going where the action is to conceptualize the person

Contemporary psychology is highly structured in terms of conventional and traditional methodological practices, including fragmenting, objectifying, and aggregating. Such practices sometimes impede understanding and investigating the person in terms of what he/she does as an integrated active individual who develops. The goal of this paper is to outline a systems conceptualization of the person as a developing individual who acts in relation to others in cultural practices. Such action is conceptualized as emerging through multiple and interrelated individual, social, and cultural processes, as well as in terms of multiple and interrelated domains of functioning that develop. This conceptualization is applicable to a wide range of issues in psychology as a whole. Moreover, starting with an overall conceptualization of action provides ways to overcome some limitations of conventional practices, and also provides a basis for conducting systematic and integrative research on the person.     

Female sexual orientation and menstrual influences on person perception

Heterosexual women have previously been shown to display enhanced sensitivity to information that is both reproductively- and sexually-relevant (e.g., sexually mature male faces) during phases of high fertility. In the present study, homosexual women who maintained a regular menstrual cycle and did not use hormonal contraceptives completed a sex-categorization task at periods of high and low fertility within their menstrual cycle. For homosexual women there is a separation between reproductively-relevant (i.e., sexually mature males) and sexually-relevant (i.e., sexually mature females) targets. Our participants showed enhanced sensitivity to sexually-relevant information (i.e., female faces) at high fertility but showed no fluctuation in sensitivity to reproductively-relevant information (i.e., male faces) across testing sessions. These findings are considered in terms of adaptive person perception and the impact of sexual desire on mate preferences.     

Parts and wholes in person recognition: developmental trends

This study's aim is the investigation of short-term visual person recognition in 8- and 10-year-olds and adults, within the part-whole paradigm introduced by. Natural unfamiliar whole persons were contrasted with natural unfamiliar faces to test for differences between person processing and face processing. Two experiments showed advantages of whole face recognition over isolated face feature recognition. Also, these was a complete over part probe advantage (CPA, ) for person recognition in all age groups. Thus, recognition became more accurate between 8 years and adulthood, but no developmental shift in visual information processing was observable with face and whole person recognition. I conclude that person recognition does not rely on processes completely different from those of face recognition and that this holds for 8- and 10-year-olds as well as for adults.     

The role of audiovisual asynchrony in person recognition

Audiovisual integration (AVI) has been demonstrated to play a major role in speech comprehension. Previous research suggests that AVI in speech comprehension tolerates a temporal window of audiovisual asynchrony. However, few studies have employed audiovisual presentation to investigate AVI in person recognition. Here, participants completed an audiovisual voice familiarity task in which the synchrony of the auditory and visual stimuli was manipulated, and in which visual speaker identity could be corresponding or noncorresponding to the voice. Recognition of personally familiar voices systematically improved when corresponding visual speakers were presented near synchrony or with slight auditory lag. Moreover, when faces of different familiarity were presented with a voice, recognition accuracy suffered at near synchrony to slight auditory lag only. These results provide the first evidence for a temporal window for AVI in person recognition between approximately 100 ms auditory lead and 300 ms auditory lag.     

A matter of design: Priming context and person perception

A matter of considerable debate is whether people spontaneously use categorical knowledge (i.e., stereotypes) to guide their interactions with others. Despite initial evidence for the unconditional automaticity of category activation, recent research has identified a range of factors that moderate this process. Extending this line of inquiry, the current investigation explored the extent to which contextual influences—specifically the order in which priming stimuli are presented to participants—may modulate person categorization. Using a standard semantic-priming paradigm to index category and stereotype activation, participants were presented with priming stimuli that were either intermixed or blocked by sex. The results revealed that: (i) category and stereotype activation are moderated by the order in which priming stimuli are presented; and (ii) priming effects decrease monotonically as a function of category repetition. The theoretical implications of these findings are considered.     

A model of “substance” and “evaluation” in person judgments

For decades, person perception research has grappled with the distinction between the targets’ actual characteristics (“substance”) and how positively or negatively those characteristics are viewed by perceivers (“evaluation”); however, lack of an overarching theoretical framework makes it difficult to establish connections between related lines of research. We review the relevant literature, and present and test an algebraic model that incorporates the major insights from that literature. The model posits that all person judgments reflect substance and evaluation to different extents. The evaluation component reflects an interaction between the item’s evaluative tone and the perceiver’s evaluative attitude regarding the target person. The model may function as an integrative framework that helps improve conceptual clarity and cumulative progress in person perception research.     

Healing and health care of the whole person

What happened to the ancient art of healing when the modern science of medicine came into being? Recent alternatives of treating the body to keep it well are intrinsically linked to the social and religious development of our society. Holistic medicine may involve the rediscovery of many old ways that have been lost or forgotten. This article attempts to introduce healing as an aspect of all health care and particularly of the holistic model of health care. This model certainly includes biomedicine, but its parameters may be very much greater.     

Processing style and person recognition: Exploring the face inversion effect

It has frequently been reported that recognition performance is impaired when faces are presented in an inverted rather than upright orientation, a phenomenon termed the face inversion effect (FIE). Extending previous work on this topic, the current investigation explored whether individual differences in global precedence—the propensity to process nonfacial stimuli in a configural manner—impacts memory for faces. Based on performance on the Navon letter-classification task, two experimental groups were created that differed in relative global precedence (i.e., strong global precedence [SGP] and weak global precedence [WGP]). In a subsequent face-recognition task, results revealed that while both groups demonstrated a reliable FIE, this effect was attenuated among participants displaying WGP. These findings suggest that individual differences in general processing style modulate face recognition.     

What emotional reactions can tell us about the nature of others: An appraisal perspective on person perception

The present research aimed to assess how people use knowledge about the emotional reactions of others to make inferences about their character. Specifically, we postulate that people can reconstruct or “reverse engineer” the appraisals underlying an emotional reaction and use this appraisal information to draw person perception inferences. As predicted, a person who reacted with anger to blame was perceived as more aggressive, and self-confident, but also as less warm and gentle than a person who reacted with sadness (Study 1). A person who reacted with a smile (Study 1) or remained neutral (Study 2) was perceived as self-confident but also as unemotional. These perceptions were mediated by perceived appraisals.     

Folk concepts of person and identity: A response to Nichols and Bruno

Nichols and Bruno (2010) claim that the folk judge that psychological continuity is necessary for personal identity. In this article, we evaluate this claim. First, we argue that it is likely that in thinking about hypothetical cases of transformations, the folk do not use a unitary concept of personal identity, but instead rely on different concepts of ‘person’, ‘identity’, and ‘individual’. Identity can be ascribed even when post-transformation individuals are no longer categorized as persons. Second, we provide new empirical evidence suggesting that the folk do not consider psychological continuity to be necessary for an individual to be categorized as a person or for ascribing identity over time and through transformations. In this, we assume, along with Nichols and Bruno, that folk judgments about identity can be read off the use of proper names. Furthermore, we raise some doubts about the ability of current experimental designs to adequately distinguish between qualitative and numerical identity judgments. We conclude that these claims give us a good reason to be skeptical about the prospects of using folk intuitions in philosophical theorizing about personal identity.     

Social neuroscience: understanding the pieces fosters understanding the whole and vice versa

Social science and neuroscience perspectives represent two ends of a continuum of levels of organization studied in psychology. Human behavior as a whole unfolds at social levels of organization, whereas much of the research in psychology has focused on cognitive and biological pieces of this whole. Recent evidence underscores the complementary nature of social, cognitive, and biological levels of analysis and how research integrating these levels can foster more comprehensive theories of the mechanisms underlying complex behavior and the mind. This research underscores the unity of psychology and the importance of retaining multilevel integrative research that spans molar and molecular levels of analysis.     

When feeling bad makes you look good: Guilt,shame, and person perception

In two studies, we examined how expressions of guilt and shame affected person perception. In the first study, participants read an autobiographical vignette in which the writer did something wrong and reported feeling either guilt, shame, or no emotion. The participants then rated the writer's motivations, beliefs, and traits, as well as their own feelings toward the writer. The person expressing feelings of guilt or shame was perceived more positively on a number of attributes, including moral motivation and social attunement, than the person who reported feeling no emotion. In the second study, the writer of the vignette reported experiencing (or not experiencing) cognitive and motivational aspects of guilt or shame. Expressing a desire to apologise (guilt) or feelings of worthlessness (private shame) resulted in more positive impressions than did reputational concerns (public shame) or a lack of any of these feelings. Our results indicate that verbal expressions of moral emotions such as guilt and shame influence perception of moral character as well as likeability.     

The stories we tell,the reputations we form: Narrative identity and person perception

We explored the degree of consensus and accuracy in observers’ ratings of targets’ traits and autobiographical narratives. Targets narrated life high, low, and turning points and reported their personality traits. The conceptual content of these stories had previously been quantified. Here, groups of observers provided ratings of targets’ traits, knowability (how well the observer felt they ‘knew’ the target), and story conventionality, after reading each narrative. Observers exhibited consensus in perceptions of traits, knowability, and story conventionality. These ratings corresponded with targets’ self-ratings of traits, to a modest degree. The knowability of narrators did not moderate this relation, nor did key scene type. The conceptual content of targets’ narratives partially accounted for the relation between observer-reported and target-reported traits.     

Figural emphasis and person perception

Based on Jones and Nisbett's (1972) proposition that actor-observer differences in causal attributions derive from differences in attentional focus, it was hypothesized that observers' focus of attention would influence their causal attributions for an actor's behavior. More specifically, it was predicted that the behavior of an actor who was the focus of attention by virtue of some salient physical attribute would be attributed by observers more to dispositional causes and less to situational causes than would the behavior of a less physically salient actor. The manipulations of physical salience were based upon Gestalt laws of figural emphasis in object perception. They included brightness (Study I), motion (Study II), pattern complexity (Study III), and contextual novelty (Studies IV and V). The results revealed that the salinece of the actors' environments (i.e., the other people present) rather than the salience of the actor him/herself had the most consistent influence on causal attributions. When environmental salience was high, behavior was attributed relatively more situationally than when it was low. Prior research findings are considered in light of the proposition that causal attributions for an actor's behavior vary only with the salience of his/her environment, and additional implications of this phenomenon are suggested. Some ambiguities in the application of Gestalt principles to the perception of people are discussed.     

Trait expectancies and stereotype expectancies have the same effect on person memory

Two studies examined whether trait expectancies and stereotype expectancies similarly affected memory for expectancy-relevant behaviors. The results of both studies showed that, when activated in identical ways, trait expectancies and stereotype expectancies had similar effects on recall. Better recall was obtained for expectancy-incongruent items when expectancies were activated in relatively overt ways, while better recall for expectancy-congruent items was obtained when expectancies were activated in less overt ways. Additional analyses examining the order of events that emerged in the recall protocols provided little evidence that participants attempted to reconcile the items, as would be predicted by some earlier models of person memory (e.g., Srull, 1981). The implications of these findings for how social expectancies guide social information processing are discussed.     

The how and why of disagreement among perceivers: An exploration of person models

Impression formation has been conceptualized as a process whereby perceivers form person models of others, describing what the person is like and why (Park, DeKay, & Kraus, 1994). If they exist, person models could help explain why there appears to be little consensus in personality judgments; perceivers forming different models of a person would also view them differently on trait and affect ratings. Two experiments were conducted to test assumptions of the person-model paradigm using naturalistic targets. The structure of person models was examined, along with their content. Results demonstrated that three distinct person models emerge for each target and that the majority of perceivers can easily identify with one of the three models. We found that person models were valid across different groups of perceivers, and that the models differed in terms of masculinity-femininity and affect. Implications for the person model formulation process are discussed.     

Supervising the person of the therapist: Issues,challenges and dilemmas

A major critical issue in marriage and family therapy today is the professionalization of the discipline. Thus the focus on training individuals for a career in marriage and family therapy necessitates the revisitation of the debate over personal growth versus skill development. The trend toward training the person of the therapist, however, would suggest that the field is moving toward the integration of self awareness and skill in the therapeutic system. With the popularization of training the person of the therapist comes other issues, challenges, and dilemmas for the field, including the crucial issue of training gender and culturally sensitive therapists. The potential for creating dual relationships when training the person of the therapist is both a dilemma and a challenge.     

Emerging themes and challenges in understanding youth violence involvement

Identifies emerging key themes in the articles in this special section regarding child and adolescent involvement in violence. Using a developmental-ecological framework and drawing on consistencies across other studies and reviews, this article is intended to summarize the pertinent findings for clinical child psychology. Current knowledge status, needed further research, clinical implications (preventive and treatment), and relevant policy issues are noted.