Perceptible
One Way and the Other: The Bidirectional Relationship Between Ambivalence and Body Movement
Iris Schneider et al.
Psychological Science, March 2013, Pages 319-325
Abstract:
Prior research exploring the relationship between evaluations and body movements has focused on one-sided evaluations. However, people regularly encounter objects or situations about which they simultaneously hold both positive and negative views, which results in the experience of ambivalence. Such experiences are often described in physical terms: For example, people say they are "wavering" between two sides of an issue or are "torn." Building on this observation, we designed two studies to explore the relationship between the experience of ambivalence and side-to-side movement, or wavering. In Study 1, we used a Wii Balance Board to measure movement and found that people who are experiencing ambivalence move from side to side more than people who are not experiencing ambivalence. In Study 2, we induced body movement to explore the reverse relationship and found that when people are made to move from side to side, their experiences of ambivalence are enhanced.
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Money is essential: Ownership intuitions are linked to physical currency
Eric Luis Uhlmann & Luke (Lei) Zhu
Cognition, May 2013, Pages 220-229
Abstract:
Due to basic processes of psychological essentialism and contagion, one particular token of monetary currency is not always interchangeable with another piece of currency of equal economic value. When money loses its physical form it is perceived as "not quite the same" money (i.e., to have partly lost the original essence that distinguished it from other monetary tokens), diminishing its intuitive link with its original owner. Participants were less likely to recommend stolen or lost money be returned when it had been subsequently deposited in an electronic bank account, as opposed to retaining its original physical form (Studies 1a and 1b). Conversely, an intuitive sense of ownership is enhanced through physical contact with a piece of hard currency. Participants felt the piece of currency a person had originally lost should be returned to him rather than another piece of currency of equivalent value, even when they did not believe he would be able to tell the difference and considered distinguishing it from other money illogical. This effect was reduced when the currency had been sterilized, wiping it clean of all physical traces of its previous owner (Studies 2a, 2b, and 3).
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Abraham Rutchick & Michael Slepian
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Abstract:
Pain contributes to health care costs, missed work and school, and lower quality of life. Extant research on psychological interventions for pain has focused primarily on developing skills that individuals can apply to manage their pain. Rather than examining internal factors that influence pain tolerance (e.g., pain management skills), the current work examines factors external to an individual that can increase pain tolerance. Specifically, the current study examined the nonconscious influence of exposure to meaningful objects on the perception of pain. Participants (N = 54) completed a cold pressor test, examined either ibuprofen or a control object, then completed another cold pressor test. In the second test, participants who previously examined ibuprofen reported experiencing less intense pain and tolerated immersion longer (relative to baseline) than those who examined the control object. Theoretical and applied implications of these findings are discussed.
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Distraction Can Reduce Age-Related Forgetting
Renée Biss et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In three experiments, we assessed whether older adults' generally greater tendency to process distracting information can be used to minimize widely reported age-related differences in forgetting. Younger and older adults studied and recalled a list of words on an initial test and again on a surprise test after a 15-min delay. In the middle (Experiments 1a and 2) or at the end (Experiment 3) of the delay, participants completed a 1-back task in which half of the studied words appeared as distractors. Across all experiments, older adults reliably forgot unrepeated words; however, older adults rarely or never forgot the words that had appeared as distractors, whereas younger adults forgot words in both categories. Exposure to distraction may serve as a rehearsal episode for older adults, and thus as a method by which general distractibility may be co-opted to boost memory.
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Tsachi Ein-Dor & Adi Perry
Journal of Personality, forthcoming
Objective: Lying is deep-rooted in our nature, as over 90% of all people lie. Laypeople, however, do only slightly better than chance when detecting lies and deceptions. Recently, attachment anxiety was linked with people's hyper-vigilance toward threat-related cues. Accordingly, we tested whether attachment anxiety predicts people's ability to detect deceit and to play poker - a game that is based on players' ability to detect cheating.
Method: In Study 1, 202 participants watch a series of interpersonal interactions that comprised subtle clues to the honesty or dishonesty of the speakers. In Study 2, 58 participants watch clips in which such cues were absent. Participants were asked to decide whether the main characters were honest or dishonest. In Study 3, we asked 35 semi-professional poker players to participate in a poker tournament, and then we predicted the amount of money won during the game.
Results: Results indicated that attachment anxiety, but not other types of anxiety, predicted more accurate detection of deceitful statements (Studies 1-2), and a greater amount of money won during a game of poker (Study 3).
Conclusions: Results are discussed in relation to the possible adaptive functions of certain personality characteristics - as attachment anxiety - often viewed as undesirable.
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Jason Rose et al.
Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, forthcoming
Abstract:
Every day we use products and treatments with unknown but expected effects, such as using medication to manage pain. In many cases, we have a choice over which products or treatments to use; however, in other cases, people choose for us or choices are unavailable. Does choosing (versus not choosing) have implications for how a product or treatment is experienced? The current experiments examined the role of choice-making in facilitating so-called expectation assimilation effects - or situations in which a person's experiences (e.g., discomfort and pain) are evaluated in a manner consistent with their expectations. In Experiment 1, participants were initially exposed to a baseline set of aversive stimuli (i.e., sounds). Next, some participants were given expectations for two "treatments" (i.e., changes in screen display) that could ostensibly reduce discomfort. Critically, participants were either given a choice or not about which of the two treatments they preferred. Participants in a control condition were not provided with treatment expectations. Results revealed that discomfort experiences assimilated to expectations only when participants were provided with choice. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and provided evidence against the idea that demand characteristics and choice-making unrelated to the core task (i.e., choices without associated expectations) could account for the results. Further, Experiment 2 showed that choosing reduced discomfort because of increased positivity about the treatment. Results are discussed in the context of extant research on choice-making and expectation effects.
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The Power of a Co-witness: When More Power Leads to More Conformity
Rolando Carol et al.
Applied Cognitive Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
The effect of the power dynamic between co-witnesses on memory conformity for images was investigated. Participant-confederate pairs were first presented with 50 images on a computer and then were randomly assigned to one of three social power role combinations analogous to those present in the workplace: manager and subordinate, subordinate and manager, or collaborators with equal power and status. After role assignment (but without ever engaging in the role-related tasks), pairs were tested on whether each of 100 images (50 old and 50 new) had or had not been shown previously. Confederates always responded before participants. Subordinates were significantly less likely to conform than managers. Findings are discussed in light of the work-related facet of social power and memory distortion.
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Can Expectations Produce Symptoms From Infrasound Associated With Wind Turbines?
Fiona Crichton et al.
Health Psychology, forthcoming
Objective: The development of new wind farms in many parts of the world has been thwarted by public concern that subaudible sound (infrasound) generated by wind turbines causes adverse health effects. Although the scientific evidence does not support a direct pathophysiological link between infrasound and health complaints, there is a body of lay information suggesting a link between infrasound exposure and health effects. This study tested the potential for such information to create symptom expectations, thereby providing a possible pathway for symptom reporting.
Method: A sham-controlled double-blind provocation study, in which participants were exposed to 10 min of infrasound and 10 min of sham infrasound, was conducted. Fifty-four participants were randomized to high- or low-expectancy groups and presented audiovisual information, integrating material from the Internet, designed to invoke either high or low expectations that exposure to infrasound causes specified symptoms.
Results: High-expectancy participants reported significant increases, from preexposure assessment, in the number and intensity of symptoms experienced during exposure to both infrasound and sham infrasound. There were no symptomatic changes in the low-expectancy group.
Conclusions: Healthy volunteers, when given information about the expected physiological effect of infrasound, reported symptoms that aligned with that information, during exposure to both infrasound and sham infrasound. Symptom expectations were created by viewing information readily available on the Internet, indicating the potential for symptom expectations to be created outside of the laboratory, in real world settings. Results suggest psychological expectations could explain the link between wind turbine exposure and health complaints.
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The Effects of Cell Phone Conversations on the Attention and Memory of Bystanders
Veronica Galván, Rosa Vessal & Matthew Golley
PLoS ONE, March 2013
Abstract:
The pervasive use of cell phones impacts many people - both cell phone users and bystanders exposed to conversations. This study examined the effects of overhearing a one-sided (cell phone) conversation versus a two-sided conversation on attention and memory. In our realistic design, participants were led to believe they were participating in a study examining the relationship between anagrams and reading comprehension. While the participant was completing an anagram task, the researcher left the room and participants overheard a scripted conversation, either two confederates talking with each other or one confederate talking on a cell phone. Upon the researcher's return, the participant took a recognition memory task with words from the conversation, and completed a questionnaire measuring the distracting nature of the conversation. Participants who overheard the one-sided conversation rated the conversation as significantly higher in distractibility than those who overheard the two-sided conversation. Also, participants in the one-sided condition scored higher on the recognition task. In particular they were more confident and accurate in their responses to words from the conversation than participants in the two-sided condition. However, participants' scores on the anagram task were not significantly different between conditions. As in real world situations, individual participants could pay varying amounts of attention to the conversation since they were not explicitly instructed to ignore it. Even though the conversation was irrelevant to the anagram task and contained less words and noise, one-sided conversations still impacted participants' self-reported distractibility and memory, thus showing people are more attentive to cell phone conversations than two-sided conversations. Cell phone conversations may be a common source of distraction causing negative consequences in workplace environments and other public places.
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Robbie Cooper et al.
Cognition & Emotion, February 2013, Pages 273-282
Abstract:
In two experiments we measured the effects of 7.5% CO2 inhalation on the interpretation of video footage recorded on closed circuit television (CCTV). As predicted, inhalation of 7.5% CO2 was associated with increases in physiological and subjective correlates of anxiety compared with inhalation of medical air (placebo). Importantly, when in the 7.5% CO2 condition, participants reported the increased presence of suspicious activity compared with placebo (Experiment 1), a finding that was replicated and extended (Experiment 2) with no concomitant increase in the reporting of the presence of positive activity. These findings support previous work on interpretative bias in anxiety but are novel in terms of how the anxiety was elicited, the nature of the interpretative bias, and the ecological validity of the task.
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Doing What Others See: Visuomotor Conversion to Informational Social Influence
Joshua Skewes et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
The effects of other people's opinions on conscious perceptual judgments are pervasive and well studied. Although existing research is suggestive, less is known about how others' opinions affect nonconscious sensorimotor behavior. In the experiment, participants were shown figures containing a visual illusion, along with judgments made by experimental confederates, which conflicted with participants' previous perceptual reports. In this context, participants were asked to perform a simple motor behavior, for which the same illusion provided the target. We found that participants' precision while performing this behavior was affected by the group decision, even though conscious perceptual reports and movement efficiency were not. We discuss the consequences of these findings for cooperative behavior and for personal autonomy.
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Making Sense of Nonsense: The Visual Salience of Units Determines Sensitivity to Magnitude
Luxi Shen & Oleg Urminsky
Psychological Science, March 2013, Pages 297-304
Abstract:
When are people sensitive to the magnitude of numerical information presented in unfamiliar units, such as a price in a foreign currency or a measurement of an unfamiliar product attribute? We propose that people exhibit deliberational blindness, a failure to consider the meaning of even unfamiliar units. When an unfamiliar unit is not salient, people fail to take their lack of knowledge into account, and their judgments reflect sensitivity to the magnitude of the number. However, subtly manipulating the visual salience of the unit (e.g., enlarging its font size relative to the font size of the number) prompts recognition of the unit's unfamiliarity and reduces magnitude sensitivity. In five experiments, we demonstrated this unit-salience effect, provided evidence for deliberational blindness, and ruled out alternative explanations, such as nonperception and fluency. These findings have implications for decision making involving numerical information expressed in both unfamiliar units and familiar but poorly calibrated units.
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Olivier Morin
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
It has often been suggested that innate features of the human mind could make some cultural forms more successful than others. This paper presents a case study consistent with this "cognitive attraction" hypothesis. Numerous studies show that direct eye-gaze catches the attention of adults and newborns. Adults find it more attractive. We explore one possible cultural consequence of this cognitive appeal. Among XVIth century European portraits, direct-gaze paintings are more likely to be featured in today's art books. In Renaissance Europe, the proportion of paintings that stare at the viewer grows gradually, strongly, and remains prevalent for centuries. A demographic analysis of this shift shows that it was due to the arrival of new generations of painters. Those artists show a preference for direct-gaze portraits as soon as they start painting, suggesting that they acquired the new style in the years of their apprenticeship. The preferences of those painters and of contemporary art critics seem consistent with the innate attentional bias that favours direct-gaze faces. The structure of the "Renaissance gaze shift" bears evidence for the importance of demographic turn-over in cultural change.
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Self-Portraits: Smartphones Reveal a Side Bias in Non-Artists
Nicola Bruno & Marco Bertamini
PLoS ONE, February 2013
Abstract:
According to surveys of art books and exhibitions, artists prefer poses showing the left side of the face when composing a portrait and the right side when composing a self-portrait. However, it is presently not known whether similar biases can be observed in individuals that lack formal artistic training. We collected self-portraits by naïve photographers who used the iPhone front camera, and confirmed a right side bias in this non-artist sample and even when biomechanical constraints would have favored the opposite. This result undermines explanations based on posing conventions due to artistic training or biomechanical factors, and is consistent with the hypothesis that side biases in portraiture and self-portraiture are caused by biologically- determined asymmetries in facial expressiveness.
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Winning or Losing a Bet and the Perception of Randomness
Leehu Zysberg & Shaul Kimhi
Journal of Gambling Studies, March 2013, Pages 109-118
Abstract:
This study examines the potential effects of random gain, loss, or neutral outcomes on individuals' judgments of randomness in life and in unpredictable life events. Based on existing evidence, we hypothesize that experiencing gain would decrease the perception of randomness, whereas loss would have the opposite effect. One-hundred and ten students participated in a random bet for academic credit required for their introductory psychology course, where they could experience gain (bonus credit), loss (no credit), or neutral (exact credit as promised) outcomes. In addition, they filled out a questionnaire on their beliefs in randomness in general and in various everyday life events, as well as their judgment of the extent to which each event was pre-determined. The results provide partial support for our hypotheses. The participants experiencing a ‘neutral' result report the highest level of randomness in general and in everyday life events, as well as the highest extent to which the events were judged as pre-determined. Randomness was judged as lower in both the ‘loss' and ‘gain' conditions. These patterns only emerge after controlling for gender and religiosity. The results are discussed in light of existing evidence and directions for future studies.
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The Temporal Doppler Effect: When the Future Feels Closer Than the Past
Eugene Caruso et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
People routinely remember events that have passed and imagine those that are yet to come. The past and the future are sometimes psychologically close ("just around the corner") and other times psychologically distant ("ages away"). Four studies demonstrate a systematic asymmetry whereby future events are psychologically closer than past events of equivalent objective distance. When considering specific times (e.g., 1 year) or events (e.g., Valentine's Day), people consistently reported that the future was closer than the past. We suggest that this asymmetry arises because the subjective experience of movement through time (whereby future events approach and past events recede) is analogous to the physical experience of movement through space. Consistent with this hypothesis, experimentally reversing the metaphorical arrow of time (by having participants move backward through virtual space) completely eliminated the past-future asymmetry. We discuss how reducing psychological distance to the future may function to prepare people for upcoming action.
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Are Men Seduced by Red? The Effect of Red Versus Black Prices on Price Perceptions
Nancy Puccinelli et al.
Journal of Retailing, forthcoming
Abstract:
Although the use of color in promotional ads is ubiquitous in the market, little is known about the impact of color on price perception. This research reports findings from four studies that assessed the impact of red on consumers' perceptions of savings. These studies reveal that the effect of red versus black prices on perception of savings is moderated by gender. Male consumers perceived greater savings when prices were presented in red than when presented in black (studies 1a and 1b). The effect persists in a multi-ad context (study 2). However, this effect of red abated when the level of involvement in the task was high (study 3). Women appeared to be naturally inclined toward greater elaboration of the ad and showed greater price recall. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
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Richard Dukes & Heather Albanesi
Social Science Journal, March 2013, Pages 96-100
Abstract:
Undergraduates read one of the four vignettes depicting a student essay on social stratification, comments by the instructor, and a grade. In a 2 × 2 factorial design we manipulate independent variables of quality of the essay and color of the grading pen. We test hypotheses that a higher quality essay and an aqua grading pen results in higher teaching evaluations. MANOVA show no statistically significant differences on two instrumental evaluation items: instructor is knowledgeable and organized. Statistically significant differences are observed for quality of the essay and color of the grading pen on three expressive items of instructor is nice, enthusiastic, and has rapport with students. Results suggest that instructors should use a grading pen of a neutral color.