Influences of appearance-behaviour congruity on memory and social judgements

Prior work shows that appearance-behaviour congruity impacts memory and evaluations. Building upon prior work, we assessed influences of appearance-behaviour congruity on source memory and judgement strength to illustrate ways congruity effects permeate social cognition. We paired faces varying on trustworthiness with valenced behaviours to create congruent and incongruent face-behaviour pairs. Young and older adults remembered congruent pairs better than incongruent, but both were remembered better than pairs with faces rated average in appearance. This suggests that multiple, even conflicting, valenced cues improve memory over receiving fewer cues. Consistent with our manipulation of facial trustworthiness, congruity effects were present in the strength of trustworthiness-related but not dominance judgements. Subtle age differences emerged in congruity effects when learning about others, with older adults showing effects for approach judgements given both high and low arousal behaviours. Young adults had congruity effects for approach, prosociality and trustworthiness judgements, given high arousal behaviours only. These findings deepen our understanding of how appearance-behaviour congruity impacts memory for and evaluations of others.     

Effects of self-referencing on feeling-of-knowing accuracy and recollective experience

The current research investigated the impact of self-referencing (SR) on feeling-of-knowing (FOK) judgements to improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying these metamemory judgements and specifically test the relationship between recollective experiences and FOK accuracy within the accessibility framework FOK judgements are thought to be by-products of the retrieval process and are therefore closely related to memory performance. Because relating information to one's self is one of the factors enhancing memory performance, we investigated the effect of self-related encoding on FOK accuracy and recollective experience. We compared performance on this condition to a separate deep processing condition in which participants reported the frequency of occurrence of pairs of words. Participants encoded pairs of words incidentally, and following a delay interval, they attempted at retrieving each target prompted by its cue. Then, they were re-presented with all cues and asked to provide FOK ratings regarding their likelihood of recognising the targets amongst distractors. Finally, they were given a surprise recognition task in which following each response they identified whether the response was remembered, known or just guessed. Our results showed that only SR at encoding resulted in better memory, higher FOK accuracy and increased recollective experience.     

Reason explanation a first-order rationalizing account

In this article, I discuss whether intuitive moral judgements have epistemic value. Are they mere expressions of irrational feelings that should be disregarded or should they be taken seriously? In section 2, I discuss the view of some social psychologists that moral intuitions are, like other social intuitions, under certain conditions more reliable than conscious deliberative judgements. In sections 3 and 4, I examine whether intuitive moral judgements can be said not to need inferential justification. I outline a concept of moral intuition as a seeming whose seemingness resides in special, phenomenological features such as a felt veridicality, appropriateness, familiarity, or confidence, and whose justificatory force is influenced by the reliability of the belief-producing procedures and by a subject's competence in applying moral concepts. I argue that subjects can come to realise that the beliefs expressed in their intuitive judgements evoke a sense of non-inferential credibility. In section 5, I first discuss the contribution of moral expertise to the non-inferential credibility of a person's intuitions. Subsequently, I discuss whether Walter Sinnott-Armstrong is right in saying that we can never claim non-inferential justification for our intuitions because they are subject to all kinds of distorting influences.     

The Role of Dysphoria in Social Thinking and Behaviour

In response to Palermo (2016, Australian Psychologist, in press) comments, some aspects of the target paper are further elaborated here. In particular, given Palermo's timely emphasis on the potential social and cultural implications of research demonstrating the beneficial consequences of negative affect, the historical background, and practical implications of the experimental evidence are elaborated. Furthermore, the reviewer also comments on the applicability of alternative theoretical conceptualizations to the data reported here, and this issue also receives further attention. Overall, it is concluded that there is now strong and convergent evidence for the often beneficial consequences of mild negative affect, and these findings deserve serious consideration in practical applications of psychology, and in our conceptions of what represents a healthy and balanced emotional life. Embracing and accepting periods of negative affectivity should be recognised as a normal and healthy part of the human condition, and the cultural bias towards positive affect should be tempered by an appreciation of the adaptive benefits of dysphoria.     

The Function of Moods and Emotions: Comment on “Can Sadness Be Good for You? On the Cognitive,Motivational and Interpersonal Benefits of Mild Negative Affect” (Forgas, 2017)

Evolutionary theories suggest that all affective states have a function. The fascinating review “Can Sadness Be Good for You? On the Cognitive, Motivational and Interpersonal Benefits of Mild Negative Affect” by Joseph Forgas is a welcome reminder that happiness is not the be all and end all—sadness can also be beneficial. In this commentary, I summarise the studies conducted by Forgas et al. that demonstrate the benefit of mild negative affect for memory, judgement, motivation, and interpersonal behaviour (and those that do not), link them to current theories and models, and discuss avenues for future research.     

在不同注意定向条件下是否出现返回抑制的知觉优先

返回控制中的知觉优先是指相对于非线索化位置,线索化位置的刺激被优先知觉到的现象。研究采用时序判断方法对不同注意定向下返回抑制的知觉优先现象进行了两个实验。实验１采用连续线索化的安排,发现当注意从线索化位置移开后知觉优先仍然存在;实验２采用同时呈现双线索的安排发现知觉优先也存在。     

Defensive emotions and evaluative judgements: Sensitivity to anger and fear predicts moral judgements,whereas sensitivity to disgust predicts aesthetic judgements

Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.     

The role of analytic thinking in moral judgements and values

While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a “Reflectionist” view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values.     

Factors that affect action possibility judgements: Recent experience with the action and the current body state

It has been suggested that action possibility judgements are formed through a covert simulation of the to-be-executed action. We sought to determine whether the motor system (via a common coding mechanism) influences this simulation, by investigating whether action possibility judgements are influenced by experience with the movement task (Experiments 1 and 2) and current body states (Experiment 3). The judgement task in each experiment involved judging whether it was possible for a person's hand to accurately move between two targets at presented speeds. In Experiment 1, participants completed the action judgements before and after executing the movement they were required to judge. Results were that judged movement times after execution were closer to the actual execution time than those prior to execution. The results of Experiment 2 suggest that the effects of execution on judgements were not due to motor activation or perceptual task experience—alternative explanations of the execution-mediated judgement effects. Experiment 3 examined how judged movement times were influenced by participants wearing weights. Results revealed that wearing weights increased judged movement times. These results suggest that the simulation underlying the judgement process is connected to the motor system, and that simulations are dynamically generated, taking into account recent experience and current body state.