What's in a Forename? Cue Familiarity and Stereotypical Thinking

Recent research has characterized categorical thinking as an essential component of the person perception process. Yet relatively little is known about the myriad factors that moderate the accessibility of this mode of thought. With regard to this we hypothesized that the subjective familiarity of a person's forename may play an important role in triggering categorical thinking. Specifically, category-based knowledge may be more accessible when triggered by familiar than unfamiliar forenames. We report the results of three experiments that supported this prediction. Relative to unfamiliar names, participants required less time to verify the gender of familiar forenames (Experiment 1) and semantic priming was more pronounced when stereotype-related material followed the presentation of familiar than unfamiliar items (Experiment 2). Also, familiar forenames attracted more extreme gender-based evaluations than their unfamiliar counterparts (Experiment 3). We consider the theoretical and methodological implications of these findings for a variety of issues in person perception.     

Electrodermal responses to sources of dual-task interference

There is a response selection bottleneck that is responsible for dual-task interference. How the response selection bottleneck operates was addressed in three dual-task experiments. The overlap between two tasks (as indexed by the stimulus onset asynchrony [SOA]) was systematically manipulated, and both reaction time and electrodermal activity were measured. In addition, each experiment also manipulated some aspect of the difficulty of either task. Both increasing task overlap by reducing SOA and increasing the difficulty of either task lengthened reaction times. Electrodermal response was strongly affected by task difficulty but was only weakly affected by SOA, and in a different manner from reaction time. A fourth experiment found that the subjectively perceived difficulty of a dual-task trial was affected both by task difficulty and by SOA, but in different ways than electrodermal activity. Overall, the results were not consistent with a response selection bottleneck that involves processes of voluntary, executive attention. Instead, the results converge with findings from neural network modeling to suggest that the delay of one task while another is being processed reflects the operation of a routing mechanism that can process only one stream of information for action at a time and of a passive, structural store that temporarily holds information for the delayed task. The results suggest that conventional blocked or event-related neuroimaging designs may be inadequate to identify the mechanism of operation of the response selection bottleneck.     

Sex differences in how erotic and painful stimuli impair inhibitory control

Witnessing emotional events such as arousal or pain may impair ongoing cognitive processes such as inhibitory control. We found that this may be true only half of the time. Erotic images and painful video clips were shown to men and women shortly before a stop signal task, which measures cognitive inhibitory control. These stimuli impaired inhibitory control only in men and not in women, suggesting that emotional stimuli may be processed with different weights depending on gender.     

Using confidence ratings to identify a target among foils

Sauer, Brewer, and Weber (2008) advanced a novel procedure for testing eyewitness recognition memory. Rather than providing a single decision (i.e., identifying a lineup member or rejecting the lineup as a whole), participants rated their confidence that each lineup member was the culprit. Classification algorithms determined when patterns of confidence ratings indicated suspect guilt or innocence. Across varied test stimuli, confidence-based classifications equalled or out-performed single decisions. However, Sauer et al.’s classification criteria were designed to optimize performance for the data to which they were applied. If effective classification using confidence ratings requires such idiosyncratic criteria, the applied utility of the confidence procedure is nil. We re-analysed the data from Sauer et al.’s two identification experiments and demonstrated that confidence-based classification performance exceeding that of a traditional lineup task did not depend on uniquely developed classification criteria. Confidence-rating lineups offer a potentially promising alternative to procedures requiring single decisions from witnesses.     

Privacy and the Human Genome Project

The Human Genome Project has raised many issues regarding the contributions of genetics to a variety of diseases and societal conditions. With genetic testing now easily conducted with lowered costs in nonmedical domains, a variety of privacy issues must be considered. Such testing will result in the loss of significant privacy rights for the individual. Society must now consider such issues as the ownership of genetic data, confidentiality rights to such information, limits placed on genetic screening, and legislation to control genetic testing and its applications. There is often a conflict between individual rights to privacy and the need for societal protection.     

Putting It on the Line: Telephone Counseling for Adolescent Smokers

Adolescent smokers need cessation help, but the question of how best to intervene remains unanswered. This article describes the empirically validated protocol of an established, well‐utilized adolescent telephone counseling program for smoking cessation, tailored to adolescent developmental needs and shown to increase clients' 6‐month prolonged abstinence rate significantly. Clinical issues addressed include client assessment, motivation, self‐efficacy, familial and social support, planning, coping, relapse‐sensitive call scheduling, and self‐image. Counselor training considerations are also discussed.     

Ruminative coping and post-event processing in social anxiety

Cognitive models of social anxiety implicate various factors in the initiation and maintenance of socially anxious states, including anticipatory processing, self-focused attention and post-event processing. The present study focused on post-event processing, which is a post-mortem analysis following a social event that is described as ruminative in nature and serves to maintain social anxiety. Participants (N=112; 64 women, 48 men) were presented with vignettes that involved making mistakes in public and were instructed to record their thoughts to allow for the examination of the content of post-event processing. Ruminative coping and distraction were assessed via self-report. Results indicated that participants high in social anxiety (n=55) were more likely to ruminate and less likely to distract when faced with socially anxious stressors compared to those low in social anxiety (n=57). Further, as hypothesized, participants high in social anxiety recorded more negative thoughts and more upward counterfactual thoughts ('if only' type thoughts on how things could have been better; associated with negative affect) compared to those low in social anxiety. These results are discussed in terms of cognitive models of social anxiety.     

The perceptual determinants of person construal: reopening the social-cognitive toolbox

Guided by a heuristic account of social-cognitive functioning, researchers have attempted to identify the cognitive benefits that derive from a categorical approach to person construal. While revealing, this work has overlooked the fact that, prior to the application of categorical thinking as an economizing mental tool, perceivers must first extract category-triggering information from available stimulus cues. It is possible, therefore, that basic perceptual processes may also contribute to people's propensity to view others in a category-based manner. This possibility was explored in 3 experiments in which the authors investigated the ease with which perceivers can extract categorical and identity-based knowledge from faces under both optimal and suboptimal (i.e., inverted faces, blurred faces, rapidly presented faces) processing conditions. The results confirmed that categorical knowledge is extracted from faces more efficiently than identity-related knowledge, a finding that underscores the importance of perceptual operations in the generation of categorical thinking.     

The look of love: gaze shifts and person perception

Gaze direction is a vital communicative channel through which people transmit information to each other. By signaling the locus of social attention, gaze cues convey information about the relative importance of objects, including other people, in the environment. For the most part, this information is communicated via patterns of gaze direction, with gaze shifts signaling changes in the objects of attention. Noting the relevance of gaze cues in social cognition, we speculated that gaze shifts may modulate people's evaluations of others. We investigated this possibility by asking participants to judge the likability (Experiment 1) and physical attractiveness (Experiment 2) of targets displaying gaze shifts indicative of attentional engagement or disengagement with the participants. As expected, person evaluation was moderated by the direction of gaze shifts, but only when the judgment under consideration was relevant to participants. We consider how and when gaze shifts may modulate person perception and its associated behavioral products.