Bringing out the agreeableness in everyone: Using a cognitive self-regulation model to reduce aggression

Research has shown that those individuals high in agreeableness recruit helpful thoughts in hostile contexts, presumably in the service of controlling aggressive behavior. The present experiment follows from such work, but importantly does so in a manner seeking to support causal conclusions. Participants were randomly assigned to an experimental training condition, in which hostile prime words were followed by helpful target words, or to a control condition that did not involve such pairings. Those assigned to the experimental condition subsequently exhibited lower levels of aggression in a laboratory task. Additional considerations and findings support the potential involvement of self-regulation processes. In general terms, the experiment reveals that a brief cognitive manipulation targeting processes thought to underlie aggression control was in fact causally effective in reducing subsequent levels of aggressive behavior.     

Anti-egalitarians for Obama? Group-dominance motivation and the Obama vote

The election of the first Black president was a watershed moment in American race relations, and many Obama voters saw their choice as affirming and furthering the dream of racial equality. However, the present study provides evidence that Obama also garnered votes from an unlikely source: those wishing to maintain racial disparities. Data from a longitudinal study of the election suggest that, while some anti-egalitarian voters opposed Obama due to his perceived “foreignness,” others voted for him in order to underwrite the hierarchy-enhancing claim that US racism has been eliminated. Anti-egalitarianism was only associated with an increased tendency to vote for Obama among individuals who claimed that his victory signals the end of racism.     

Feeling of knowing for names in response to faces

Participants were asked to recall the names when shown photographs of faces in both a semantic task (Experiment 1) and an episodic task (Experiments 2 and 3). When recall failed, feeling of knowing (FOK) ratings were solicited. In addition, participants reported on the strategies that they used to make their ratings, whether they could recall other pieces of information (the target-accessibility strategy, e.g., Koriat, A. (1993). How do we know that? The accessibility model of the feeling of knowing. Psychological Review, 100, 609–639) or whether the faces simply looked familiar (the cue-familiarity strategy, e.g., Schwartz, B. L., & Metcalfe, J. (1992). Cue familiarity but not target accessibility enhances feeling of knowing ratings. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18, 1074–1083). In all experiments, FOK ratings were fairly accurate in that participants were successful in predicting their performance on a subsequent recognition test. More importantly, participants reported using the cue-familiarity strategy more often, although they gave higher FOK ratings when they reported using the target-accessibility strategy. The FOK ratings that were given using the two strategies were equally accurate.     

Effects of experienced disgust on habituation during repeated exposure to threat-relevant stimuli in blood-injection-injury phobia

Despite growing evidence implicating disgust in the etiology of blood-injection-injury (BII) phobia, the relevance of disgust for exposure-based treatment of BII phobia remains largely unknown. Individuals with BII phobia were randomly assigned to a disgust (view vomit videos) or neutral activation (view waterfall videos) condition. They were then exposed to 14 videotaped blood draws, during which fear and disgust levels were repeatedly assessed. Participants then engaged in a behavioral avoidance test (BAT) consisting of exposure to threat-relevant stimuli. Examination of outcome comparing the identical first and last blood-draw clips revealed that fear and disgust toward blood draws was significantly reduced in both groups. Disgust levels were also found to be more intense for the video stimuli relative to fear levels whereas the opposite was true for BAT stimuli. Contrary to predictions, the disgust induction did not enhance reductions in negative responses to the target video or reduce behavioral avoidance. Growth curve analyses did show that individuals with BII phobia exposed to the disgust induction showed greater initial fear levels during repeated exposure than those in the neutral condition. However, this effect was not consistently observed across different analytic approaches. Changes in fear during exposure were also found to be independent of changes in disgust but not vice versa, and greater initial fear levels during repeated exposure to threat was associated with fear and disgust levels during the BAT. The implications of these findings for conceptualizing the role of disgust in etiology and treatment of BII phobia are discussed.     

How social is the social psychology of emotion?

Two classic studies published 50 years ago showed how other people provide information that shapes the activation and interpretation of emotions. The present paper traces development of the social psychology of emotions from this starting point. Subsequent research into group-based and social appraisal has advanced understanding of the impact of social information on emotions and suggested new ways of investigating associated phenomena. Although potential integrations of interpersonal and group-oriented approaches offer promise for the future, the continuing focus on emotions as cognitively mediated effects of social factors should broaden to encompass dynamic relational processes.     

Paying a price: culture, trust, and negotiation consequences

Three studies contrasting Indian and American negotiators tested hypotheses derived from theory proposing why there are cultural differences in trust and how cultural differences in trust influence negotiation strategy. Study 1 (a survey) documented that Indian negotiators trust their counterparts less than American negotiators. Study 2 (a negotiation simulation) linked American and Indian negotiators' self-reported trust and strategy to their insight and joint gains. Study 3 replicated and extended Study 2 using independently coded negotiation strategy data, allowing for stronger causal inference. Overall, the strategy associated with Indian negotiators' reluctance to extend interpersonal (as opposed to institutional) trust produced relatively poor outcomes. Our data support an expanded theoretical model of negotiation, linking culture to trust, strategies, and outcomes.     

Error monitoring dysfunction across the illness course of schizophrenia

Response monitoring abnormalities have been reported in chronic schizophrenia patients, but it is unknown whether they predate the onset of psychosis, are present in early stages of illness, or are late-developing abnormalities associated with illness progression. Response-synchronized event-related potentials (ERP) recorded during a picture-word matching task yielded error-related negativity (ERN), correct-response negativity (CRN), and error positivity (Pe) from 84 schizophrenia patients (SZ), 48 clinical high risk patients (CHR), and their age-matched healthy controls (HC; n = 110 and 88, respectively). A sub-sample of 35 early illness schizophrenia patients (ESZ) was compared to 93 age-matched HC and the CHR patients (after statistically removing the effects of normal aging). Relative to HC, 1) SZ, ESZ, and CHR had smaller ERNs, and 2) SZ and ESZ had larger CRNs and smaller Pes. Within the SZ, longer illness duration was associated with larger CRNs but was unrelated to ERN or Pe. CHR and ESZ did not differ on ERN or CRN, although Pe was smaller in ESZ than CHR. These results indicate that while ERN, CRN, and Pe abnormalities are present early in the illness, only the ERN abnormality is evident prior to psychosis onset, and only the CRN abnormality appears to worsen progressively over the illness course. Brain regions subserving response monitoring may be compromised early in the illness and possibly during its clinical prodrome.     

The effect of category learning on sensitivity to within-category correlations

A salient property of many categories is that they are not just sets of independent features but consist of clusters of correlated features. Although there is much evidence that people are sensitive to between-categories correlations, the evidence about within-category correlations is mixed. Two experiments tested whether the disparities might be due to different learning and test tasks. Subjects learned about categories either by classifying items or by inferring missing features of items. Their knowledge of the correlations was measured with classification, prediction, typicality, and production tests. The inference learners, but not the classification learners, showed sensitivity to the correlations, although different tests were differentially sensitive. These results reconcile some earlier disparities and provide a more complete understanding of people's sensitivities to within-category correlations.