Eye tracking unconscious face-to-face confrontations: dominance motives prolong gaze to masked angry faces

In primates, dominance/submission relationships are generally automatically and nonaggressively established in face-to-face confrontations. Researchers have argued that this process involves an explicit psychological stress-manipulation mechanism: Striding with a threatening expression, while keeping direct eye contact, outstresses rivals so that they submissively avert their gaze. In contrast, researchers have proposed a reflexive and implicit modulation of face-to-face confrontation in humans, on the basis of evidence that dominant and submissive individuals exhibit vigilant and avoidant responses, respectively, to facial anger in masked emotional Stroop tasks. However, these tasks do not provide an ecologically valid index of gaze behavior. Therefore, we directly measured gaze responses to masked angry, happy, and neutral facial expressions with a saccade-latency paradigm and found that increased dominance traits predict a more prolonged gaze to (or reluctance to avert gaze from) masked anger. Furthermore, greater non-dominance-related reward sensitivity predicts more persistent gaze to masked happiness. These results strongly suggest that implicit and reflexive mechanisms underlie dominant and submissive gaze behavior in face-to-face confrontations.     

Once the money is in sight: Distinctive effects of conscious and unconscious rewards on task performance

Monetary rewards facilitate performance on behavioral and cognitive tasks, even when these rewards are perceived without conscious awareness. Also, recent research suggests that consciously (vs. unconsciously) perceived rewards may prompt people to more strongly concentrate on task stimuli and details. Here we propose that the latter is sometimes dysfunctional, in that it prevents improvements in task performance. We used an Attentional Blink paradigm, in which such enhanced concentration on task stimuli is detrimental to performance. Participants were consciously (supraliminally) or unconsciously (subliminally) exposed to a high-value or low-value coin that they could earn by performing well on an Attentional Blink trial. As hypothesized, high-value rewards increased performance when they were presented subliminally, while this performance benefit vanished when high-value rewards were presented consciously. We discuss this finding in the context of recent research on unconscious goal pursuit.     

Behavioral cues to others’ motivation and goal pursuits: The perception of effort facilitates goal inference and contagion

Recent research demonstrates that people spontaneously, i.e., without conscious intent, infer and pursue the goals perceived in others’ behavior, a phenomenon termed goal contagion [Aarts, H., Gollwitzer, P., & Hassin, R. R. (2004). Goal contagion: perceiving is for pursuing. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 23-27]. Three experiments extend this work by studying the basic role of perceived behavioral effort in goal inference and pursuit. In an adaptation of the Animated Film Technique, participants were exposed to a movie featuring movements of a ball that implied the goal of helping. The amount of effort in pursuing the implied goal was experimentally varied. Results showed that an increase in perceived effort led to stronger inferences of the implied goal, as was established by enhanced accessibility of the goal representation in a word completion and lexical decision task. Furthermore, as a result of these inferences, participants more strongly pursued the inferred goal of helping. Implications for research on goal inferences and pursuit are briefly discussed.     

In search of the nonconscious sources of goal pursuit: Accessibility and positive affective valence of the goal state

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that the mere priming of the representation of a goal state motivates people to pursue this state to the extent that it is associated with positive affect. In Experiment 1, all participants completed an affective priming task in which the goal concept of “socializing” was primed and tested for positive valence. Subsequently, they were given an instrumental task which provided the opportunity to pursue that state. It was established that participants put more effort in the task to attain the primed goal state when the implicitly assessed affective valence of the state was more positive. Experiment 2 replicated and extended these effects by showing that a stronger association of the goal state with positive affect—as assessed by the EAST—led to more effort to attain the state, but only when “socializing” was primed.     

The role of automaticity in determining the inclination to forgive close others

Hitherto, the literature on forgiveness has almost exclusively focused on the role of deliberative processes (e.g., attribution processes) in determining forgiveness. However, in the present article, we argue that in the context of close relationships, the inclination to forgive can be relatively automatically evoked in response to an offense. Four studies provide evidence relevant to this general hypothesis. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrate that the subliminal presentation of close others (versus non-close others or a control word) induces a relatively strong inclination to forgive various offenses. Study 3 provides insight into the cognitive processes that underlie the closeness-forgiveness link, demonstrating that thinking of (a transgression of) a close other (compared to a non-close other) leads to enhanced accessibility of the construct of forgiveness. Finally, Study 4 demonstrates that forgiving responses toward a close offender are less dependent on cognitive resources than are forgiving responses toward a non-close offender, suggesting that, in close relationships, the inclination to forgive arises in a relatively effortless, habitual manner. Implications for theorizing on how people forgive are being discussed.     

Planning is for doing: Implementation intentions go beyond the mere creation of goal-directed associations

Studies on implementation intentions so far have mainly pointed towards strengthened cue-behavior associations as the mechanism underlying the effectiveness of this self-regulatory tool. However, we propose that because it triggers people to look into the future and to mentally simulate their future behavior, planning by means of implementation intentions might go beyond the creation of goal-directed associations and thus lead to more enduring effects on behavior. We tested this hypothesis in an experiment using a longitudinal design, where participants formed an intention for a behavior that deviates from their routine, and furnished it either with associative learning of cue and behavior, forming implementation intentions, or nothing at all. Results showed that initially, learning cue-behavior associations led to the same rate of goal completion as forming implementation intentions. However, only the effect of implementation intentions was maintained at the second measurement one week later. These findings suggest that planning does more than merely create goal-directed associations, which might offer a new perspective on the workings and use of this important tool for behavior change.