Regulatory Fit,Processing Fluency,and Narrative Persuasion

For millennia, people have used narratives to inform and persuade. However, little social psychological research addresses how and when narrative persuasion occurs, perhaps because narratives are complex stimuli that are difficult to vary without significantly changing the plot or characters. Existing research suggests that regulatory fit and/or processing fluency can be varied easily and in ways completely exterior to narrative content but that nonetheless affect how much narratives engage, transport, and persuade. We review research on narrative transportation and persuasion and then discuss regulatory fit and its relationship to processing fluency. Afterward, we discuss how regulatory fit and processing fluency may affect psychological engagement, transportation, and persuasion via narratives.     

The role of gaze direction and mutual exclusivity in guiding 24‐month‐olds' word mappings

In these studies, we examined how a default assumption about word meaning, the mutual exclusivity assumption and an intentional cue, gaze direction, interacted to guide 24‐month‐olds' object‐word mappings. In Expt 1, when the experimenter's gaze was consistent with the mutual exclusivity assumption, novel word mappings were facilitated. When the experimenter's eye‐gaze was in conflict with the mutual exclusivity cue, children demonstrated a tendency to rely on the mutual exclusivity assumption rather than follow the experimenter's gaze to map the label to the object. In Expt 2, children relied on the experimenter's gaze direction to successfully map both a first label to a novel object and a second label to a familiar object. Moreover, infants mapped second labels to familiar objects to the same degree that they mapped first labels to novel objects. These findings are discussed with regard to children's use of convergent and divergent cues in indirect word mapping contexts.     

Effect of racial bias on composite construction

We investigated how prior bias about a face's racial characteristics can affect its encoding and resultant facial composite construction. In total, 61 participants (24 Europeans, 18 Indians living in India and 19 Indians living in Europe) saw a racially ambiguous unfamiliar face and were led to believe it was either European or Indian. They created a composite of this face, using EFIT6. Two groups of independent raters (one Indian, the other European) then assessed the apparent race of each composite. A different two groups (one Indian, one European) assessed each composite's degree of resemblance to the target face, to determine whether this was influenced by the constructors' initial categorisation of the target face as “own-race” or “other-race.” Composites appeared significantly more “Asian” or “European” according to the bias induced in their creators, but there was no evidence of any own-race bias in the resemblance ratings for the composites.     

Household clutter and crowding constrain associations between maternal sensitivity and child theory of mind

Social interactions between parents and children are important for developing theory of mind, but these may be disrupted by aspects of the proximal home environment. The current study observed maternal sensitivity and its associations with child theory of mind and the housing environment (index by clutter and crowding) in a sample of mothers and their 3.5-year-old twins (N = 250 children). Maternal sensitivity and housing environment were measured from experimenter report and child theory of mind was measured through behavioural tasks. Results show that the association between maternal sensitivity and child theory of mind was moderated by the housing environment, where the positive associations between maternal sensitivity and child theory of mind were only observed at lower levels of clutter and crowding in the housing environment. Additional contextual variables and processes are discussed.     

Mood as input and perseverative worrying following the induction of discrete negative moods

Previous research has demonstrated that a combination of negative mood and rigorous "as many as can" stop rules can be used to help explain a range of perseverative psychopathologies such as pathological worrying, compulsive checking, and depressive rumination (known as the mood-as-input hypothesis). The aim of the present study was to extend this work and examine whether specific emotions of the same valence will have similar or differential effects on task perseveration. The study experimentally induced discrete moods and manipulated task stop rules in an analog population. Results showed that perseveration at a worry-based interview task conformed to standard mood-as-input predictions in which perseveration was significantly greater when an "as many as can" stop rule was paired with a negative mood or a "feel like continuing" stop rule was paired with a positively valenced mood. The pattern of results revealed no significant inherent differences in processing depending on the type of discrete negative mood being experienced. These findings support a view of mood-as-input effects where overall valency is the important factor in determining perseveration.