Children's communication of the Linguistic Intergroup Bias and its impact upon cognitive inferences

The hypotheses that children use language strategically (e.g. as in the Linguistic Intergroup Bias) and with increasing strength with age were supported in an experiment with participants ranging in age from 8 to 19 years. In a second experiment, the impact of biased language use on participants' inferences was examined in a sample ranging in age from 5 to 11 years. It was shown for all age groups that participants' inferences were systematically influenced by the abstractness or concreteness of a message. The implications of these findings for the communication and transmission of stereotypes at an early age are discussed. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Interpersonal relationships moderate the effect of faces on person judgments

Previous research suggests that people form impressions of others based on their facial appearance in a very fast and automatic manner, and this especially holds for trustworthiness. However, as yet, this process has been investigated mostly in a social vacuum without taking interpersonal factors into account. In the current research, we demonstrate that both the relationship context that is salient at the moment of an interaction and the performed behavior are important moderators of the impact of facial cues on impression formation. It is shown that, when the behavior of a person we encounter is ambiguous in terms of trustworthiness, the relationship most salient at that moment is of crucial impact on whether and how we incorporate facial cues communicating (un)trustworthiness in our final evaluations. Ironically, this can result in less positive evaluations of interaction partners with a trustworthy face compared to interaction partners with an untrustworthy face. Implications for research on facial characteristics, trust, and relationship theories are discussed. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Presentation and validation of the Radboud Faces Database

Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head orientation are parametrically varied in a complete factorial design would be highly useful in many research domains. Furthermore, these stimuli should be standardised in several important, technical aspects. The present article presents the freely available Radboud Faces Database offering such a stimulus set, containing both Caucasian adult and children images. This face database is described both procedurally and in terms of content, and a validation study concerning its most important characteristics is presented. In the validation study, all frontal images were rated with respect to the shown facial expression, intensity of expression, clarity of expression, genuineness of expression, attractiveness, and valence. The results show very high recognition of the intended facial expressions.     

Warning: You are being primed! The effect of a warning on the impact of subliminal ads

As it has been demonstrated that subliminal advertising can affect consumers' decisions – if the ad is goal relevant – the question rises whether consumers are able to shield themselves from subliminal influences. In the present research it was examined whether warning people of the presence of subliminal ads could decrease subliminal advertising effects. In Study 1, it was demonstrated that warning people of subliminal ads indeed diminished priming effects on consumer choice, whereas subliminal advertising effects were replicated for people who were not warned (i.e., people for whom the primed brand was goal relevant were more likely to select it when primed). Study 2 extended these findings, revealing that both participants warned before and after the priming manipulation were less influenced by subliminal brand primes than controls. This suggests that the warning does not decrease participants' sensitivity to the prime, but instead affects the influence of the prime at the behavioral level. Several explanations and implications are discussed.