Age and regulatory focus determine preferences for health-related role models

The authors hypothesized that the effectiveness of role models varies across the adult life span because of differences in health-related regulatory orientations. Because young adults have strong health-related promotion orientations, they should be motivated by positive models who illustrate the benefits of good health. Because older adults have more balanced health-related promotion and prevention orientations, they should be motivated not only by positive models but also by negative models who illustrate the costs of poor health. Results indicated that both young and older adults perceived positive models to be motivating, but older adults found negative models to be more motivating than did young adults. Age differences in responses to negative models were partially mediated by differences in health-related prevention orientation.     

The Effect of Inhibition of Return on Lexical Access

Abstract—Inhibition of return refers to a bias against returning attention to a location or object that has been recently attended. Recent research has shown that inhibition of return can be found not only in simple detection tasks, but also in tasks requiring relatively simple discrimination judgments. The present experiments examined whether inhibition of return occurs in tasks that require complex discriminations such as lexical decision and categorization tasks. Not only was inhibition of return found in both experiments, but a greater amount of inhibition was found for low-frequency words than for high-frequency words. These findings suggest that inhibition of return not only inhibits returning attention to previously attended locations, but can also affect the processing that is required for lexical access.     

Large-scale investigation of the role of trait activation theory for understanding assessment center convergent and discriminant validity

This study used trait activation theory as a theoretical framework to conduct a large-scale test of the interactionist explanation of the convergent and discriminant validity findings obtained in assessment centers. Trait activation theory specifies the conditions in which cross-situationally consistent and inconsistent candidate performances are likely to occur. Results obtained by aggregating correlations across 30 multitrait-multimethod matrices supported the propositions of trait activation theory, shedding a more positive light on the construct validity puzzle in assessment centers. Overall, convergence among assessment center ratings was better between exercises that provided an opportunity to observe behavior related to the same trait, and discrimination among ratings within exercises was generally better for dimensions that were not expressions of the same underlying traits. Implications for assessment center research and practice are discussed.     

Examining task difficulty and the time course of inhibition of return: detecting perceptually degraded targets.

The ability to efficiently direct visual attention to salient features in the environment is a critical function of the visual system. The finding that people are slower to detect a target that appears at a previously cued location is thought to reflect a mechanism known as inhibition of return (IOR). Past research has shown that difficult target discriminations result in a greater amount of time needed to inhibit previously attended locations (i.e., a delayed onset of inhibition), suggesting that task difficulty plays a critical role in the allocation of attention. In this study, IOR was measured at a wide range of SOAs while participants detected either a perceptually degraded target or a standard, high luminance target. When responses were made to a perceptually degraded target, the time course of IOR was delayed by approximately 250 ms (relative to the control group), suggesting that the difficulty in detecting targets also influences the allocation of attention. The results are consistent with the notion that IOR is not simply a reflexive subcortical mechanism but rather involves top-down attentional control settings.     

Stereotypes as dominant responses: on the "social facilitation" of prejudice in anticipated public contexts

This article challenges the highly intuitive assumption that prejudice should be less likely in public compared with private settings. It proposes that stereotypes may be conceptualized as a type of dominant response (C. L. Hull, 1943; R. B. Zajonc, 1965) whose expression may be enhanced in public settings, especially among individuals high in social anxiety. Support was found for this framework in an impression formation paradigm (Experiment 1) and in a speeded task designed to measure stereotypic errors in perceptual identification (Experiment 2). Use of the process dissociation procedure (B. K. Payne, L. L. Jacoby, & A. J. Lambert, in press) demonstrated that these effects were due to decreases in cognitive control rather than increases in stereotype accessibility. The findings highlight a heretofore unknown and ironic consequence of anticipated public settings: Warning people that others may be privy to their responses may actually increase prejudice among the very people who are most worried about doing the wrong thing in public.     

Juggling Multiple Roles and the Act of Resistance

This article addresses some ways mothers cope with the multiple stresses associated with their dual roles as workers and primary family caregivers. During the often stressful family life-cycle when adolescent children are individuating, a mother's active resistance can call attention to her need for support and validation of her efforts. While both parents are in the process of negotiating the intricate balance between letting go and forming new collaborative relationships with their soon to be adult children, heavy responsibilities associated with the maternal role can be especially challenging. In addition to gender-sensitive family interventions, mutual support groups for women who parent can help explore ways to effectively respond to cross-generational conflicts and problem solving.     

Concealability beliefs facilitate navigating intergroup contexts

Living in a diverse world requires the ability to navigate intergroup contexts. However, interacting with outgroup members can cause anxiety that leads to lower-quality interactions and avoidance of future contact. One reason people experience this anxiety is the concern that others will judge them on the basis of an identity. These concerns may be reduced among people who believe the identity is unperceivable by others. The belief that one's identity is concealable may therefore reduce intergroup anxiety and ease people's experiences in intergroup contexts. The present work tests this proposition in two studies and finds that individual differences in concealability beliefs are negatively associated with intergroup anxiety and positively associated with the propensity to initiate intergroup contact and with the quantity and quality of people's cross-group friendships. Materials, data, and code for both studies and a pre-registration for Study 2 are available online ( https://osf.io/4cjhg/ ).     

Does imagery reduce stigma against depression? Testing the efficacy of imagined contact and perspective‐taking

While the stigma surrounding mental illness has been well‐established, less is known about methods for reducing that bias. In both laboratory (Study 1) and community (Study 2) samples, we tested the efficacy of imagined contact and perspective‐taking for reducing stigma against depression. Participants first read a vignette about an individual with depression and then imagined either interacting with the individual (imagined contact), putting themselves in the individual's shoes (perspective‐taking) or a neutral scene (control). In both samples, imagined contact was more effective in reducing stigma against depression than perspective‐taking. The findings suggest that different prejudice reduction strategies should be used for different stigmatized groups.     

Typicality and group variability as dual moderators of category-based inferences

We propose and test two alternative hypotheses bearing on the dual roles of group variability and typicality when people form impressions of single category members. The latitude of acceptance hypothesis suggests that a wider range of individual group members are likely to be seen as good-fitting members (i.e., typical) if the group is heterogeneous, thereby increasing the extent to which stereotypical attitudes are used as a basis for responding to these persons. In contrast, the typicality-functionality hypothesis suggests that typicality plays different roles depending on group variability. This view suggests that typicality plays the “gatekeeper function” as postulated by Fiske and Neuberg (1990) when the group is homogeneous, but not when it is heterogeneous. Across two studies, stronger support was found for the typicality-functionality hypothesis. Implications for the extant literature on category-based processing are discussed.     

Object- and location-based inhibition of return in younger and older adults

When a cued object moves to new spatial coordinates, inhibition of return (IOR) with younger adults is found at the original cued location (location-based IOR) and at the current location of the object (object-based IOR). Older adults, however, show only location-based IOR. To determine whether this pattern of results represents a general age-related deficit in object-based IOR, the authors used static displays in which the placeholders (i.e., objects) were either present (location-based IOR+object-based IOR) or absent (location-based IOR only). Both age groups showed location-based IOR, but the older adults failed to show object-based IOR, consistent with age-related differences in visual pathways.