Responding to social and symbolic extrafoveal cues: cue shape trumps biological relevance

Psychological Research - Social cues presented at visual fixation have been shown to strongly influence an observer’s attention and response selection. Here we ask whether the same holds for...     

Personality Traits Predict Smartphone Usage

The present study investigates to what degree individual differences can predict frequency and duration of actual behaviour, manifested in mobile application (app) usage on smartphones. In particular, this work focuses on the identification of stable associations between personality on the factor and facet level, fluid intelligence, demography and app usage in 16 distinct categories. A total of 137 subjects (87 women and 50 men), with an average age of 24 (SD = 4.72), participated in a 90‐min psychometric lab session as well as in a subsequent 60‐day data logging study in the field. Our data suggest that personality traits predict mobile application usage in several specific categories such as communication, photography, gaming, transportation and entertainment. Extraversion, conscientiousness and agreeableness are better predictors of mobile application usage than basic demographic variables in several distinct categories. Furthermore, predictive performance is slightly higher for single factor—in comparison with facet‐level personality scores. Fluid intelligence and demographics additionally show stable associations with categorical app usage. In sum, this study demonstrates how individual differences can be effectively related to actual behaviour and how this can assist in understanding the behavioural underpinnings of personality. Copyright © 2017 European Association of Personality Psychology     

The Relationship Between Perceived Violation of Social Norms and Social Control: Situational Factors Influencing the Reaction to Deviance

Social control is the generic term for all reactions through which people express their disapproval to someone who engages in a counternormative behavior or who holds a counter-normative attitude. The literature on helping behavior suggests that perceived personal implication should play an important role in the decision of whether or not to exert social control. A field study involving 5 different experimental settings was conducted in order to test this hypothesis. Confederates engaged in a variety of behaviors that violated social norms. Perceived personal implication was consistently the best predictor of social control behavior, such that the more someone felt that a deviant behavior affected him or her personally, the more he or she was likely to communicate his or her disapproval to the deviant confederate. Perceived deviance of the behavior was a less powerful predictor of social control. These findings speak to the moderating factors of social control behavior and to the circumstances under which social norms protecting public property are likely to be perpetuated.     

The Effects of Race and Social Dominance Orientation in Simulated Juror Decision Making1

Recent mock‐jury research often has found no evidence that White jurors are more likely to convict and impose harsher sentences on Black compared to White defendants. Drawing on social dominance theory (Sidanius & Pratto, 1999), this paper argues that this apparent null effect reflects that different racial biases shown by White jurors varying in social dominance orientation (SDO) cancel each other out. A mock‐jury study (n= 70) found no main effect for defendant race, but evidence for a crossover interaction with high SDO individuals showing an anti‐Black bias and with low SDO individuals showing a pro‐Black bias in their guilty judgments and sentence recommendations. The discussion argues race is still a critical factor in White jurors’ decision making.     

Attentional spread in deaf and hearing participants: Face and object distractor processing under perceptual load

The case of human deafness constitutes a unique opportunity to examine possible consequences for perceptual processing due to altered sensory experiences. We tested whether deaf??in contrast to hearing??individuals are more susceptible to visual distraction from peripheral than from central face versus object stimuli. The participants were required to classify the gender of a target male or female symbol presented either alone (low perceptual load) or together with three filler symbols (high perceptual load), while ignoring gender-congruent or -incongruent face versus object distractors presented at central or peripheral positions. The gender classifications were affected by distractor gender under low, but not under high, perceptual load in hearing participants. In contrast, the responses of deaf participants were similarly influenced by distractor gender under both levels of perceptual load. There was no evidence for generally enhanced attention to the visual periphery in deaf individuals. Our results indicate that auditory deprivation may result in enhanced attentional capacities under high perceptual load.     

A person‐centred approach to investigate the development trajectories of job‐related affective well‐being: A 10‐year follow‐up study

The primary aim of this three‐wave 10‐year follow‐up study was to investigate the intra‐individual change trajectories of job‐related affective well‐being among Finnish managers (n= 402). Job‐related affective well‐being as indicated by anxiety, depression, comfort, and enthusiasm was measured in 1996, 1999, and 2006. The characteristics of the trajectories were sought from experienced career disruptions (i.e., periods of unemployment or lay‐offs) and perceived job insecurity. The growth mixture modelling (GMM) revealed altogether three latent trajectories that differed from each other in their mean levels and regard to changes in job‐related affective well‐being over time: (1) high and improving well‐being (n= 347), (2) decreased well‐being (n= 32), and (3) low and improving well‐being (n= 23). The associations between job‐related affective well‐being trajectories and career disruptions depended upon the timing of the career disruptions. In addition, perceived job insecurity is associated with concurrently decreased occupational well‐being. Overall, the results highlighted both typical and untypical development trajectories of job‐related affective well‐being and related career characteristics.     

Continuous visual cues trigger automatic spatial target updating in dynamic scenes

Dynamic tasks often require fast adaptations to new viewpoints. It has been shown that automatic spatial updating is triggered by proprioceptive motion cues. Here, we demonstrate that purely visual cues are sufficient to trigger automatic updating. In five experiments, we examined spatial updating in a dynamic attention task in which participants had to track three objects across scene rotations that occurred while the objects were temporarily invisible. The objects moved on a floor plane acting as a reference frame and unpredictably either were relocated when reference frame rotations occurred or remained in place. Although participants were aware of this dissociation they were unable to ignore continuous visual cues about scene rotations (Experiments 1a and 1b). This even held when common rotations of floor plane and objects were less likely than a dissociated rotation (Experiments 2a and 2b). However, identifying only the spatial reference direction was not sufficient to trigger updating (Experiment 3). Thus we conclude that automatic spatial target updating occurs with pure visual information.     

Authoritarianism and its relationship with intuitive-experiential cognitive style and heuristic processing

Two studies examined the relationship between authoritarianism, cognitive style and heuristic processing. Focusing on Epstein’s (2003) cognitive-experiential self-theory, Study 1 shows that authoritarianism is related to Epstein’s dimension of faith in intuition, but not need for cognition, even when controlling for individual differences in need for structure. Study 2 confirms that authoritarianism is related to greater heuristic processing. The discussion suggests ways in which individual differences in cognitive style and heuristic processing may account for established effects of authoritarianism.