Seemingly
Andreas Olsson et al.
Emotion, forthcoming
Abstract:
The abilities to “read” other peoples’ intentions and emotions, and to learn from their experiences, are critical to survival. Previous studies have highlighted the role of sex hormones, notably testosterone and estrogen, in these processes. Yet it is unclear how these hormones affect social cognition and emotion using acute hormonal administration. In the present double-blind placebo-controlled study, we administered an acute exogenous dose of testosterone or estrogen to healthy female and male volunteers, respectively, with the aim of investigating the effects of these steroids on social-cognitive and emotional processes. Following hormonal and placebo treatment, participants made (a) facial dominance judgments, (b) mental state inferences (Reading the Mind in the Eyes Test), and (c) learned aversive associations through watching others’ emotional responses (observational fear learning [OFL]). Our results showed that testosterone administration to females enhanced ratings of facial dominance but diminished their accuracy in inferring mental states. In men, estrogen administration resulted in an increase in emotional (vicarious) reactivity when watching a distressed other during the OFL task. Taken together, these results suggest that sex hormones affect social-cognitive and emotional functions at several levels, linking our results to neuropsychiatric disorders in which these functions are impaired.
---------------------
Jean-Julien Aucouturier et al.
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
Research has shown that people often exert control over their emotions. By modulating expressions, reappraising feelings, and redirecting attention, they can regulate their emotional experience. These findings have contributed to a blurring of the traditional boundaries between cognitive and emotional processes, and it has been suggested that emotional signals are produced in a goal-directed way and monitored for errors like other intentional actions. However, this interesting possibility has never been experimentally tested. To this end, we created a digital audio platform to covertly modify the emotional tone of participants’ voices while they talked in the direction of happiness, sadness, or fear. The result showed that the audio transformations were being perceived as natural examples of the intended emotions, but the great majority of the participants, nevertheless, remained unaware that their own voices were being manipulated. This finding indicates that people are not continuously monitoring their own voice to make sure that it meets a predetermined emotional target. Instead, as a consequence of listening to their altered voices, the emotional state of the participants changed in congruence with the emotion portrayed, which was measured by both self-report and skin conductance level. This change is the first evidence, to our knowledge, of peripheral feedback effects on emotional experience in the auditory domain. As such, our result reinforces the wider framework of self-perception theory: that we often use the same inferential strategies to understand ourselves as those that we use to understand others.
---------------------
Sascha Topolinski & Lea Boecker
Appetite, forthcoming
Abstract:
We explored the impact of consonantal articulation direction of names for foods on expected palatability for these foods (total N = 256). Dishes (Experiments 1-2) and food items (Experiment 3) were labeled with names whose consonants either wandered from the front to the back of the mouth (inward, e.g., PASOKI) or from the back to the front of the mouth (outward; e.g., KASOPI). Because inward (outward) wandering consonant sequences trigger eating-like (expectoration-like) mouth movements, dishes and foods were rated higher in palatability when they bore an inward compared to an outward wandering name. This effect occurred already under silent reading and for hungry and satiated participants alike. As a boundary condition, this articulation effect did occur when also additional visual information on the product was given (Experiment 3), but vanished when this visual information was too vivid and rich in competing palatability cues (Experiment 2). Future marketing can exploit this effect by increasing the appeal of food products by using inward wandering brand names, that is, names that start with the lips and end in the throat.
---------------------
Liad Weiss & Gita Venkataramani Johar
Journal of Consumer Research, forthcoming
Abstract:
Consumers frequently evaluate their own traits before making consumption decisions (e.g., “am I thin enough for skinny jeans?”). The outcome of these self-evaluations depends on the standard consumers use and on whether they evaluate “self” in assimilation or contrast to that standard. Previous self-judgment research has focused on self-standards that arise from social aspects of the environment, including people and groups. We propose that self-judgment is sometimes made relative to other standards that originate from different aspects of the environment, namely material objects, including products and goods. Two experiments demonstrate that consumers classify products they own as “self,” and products they do not own as “not-self.” Consequently, consumers judge their own physical and personal traits (e.g., height, sincerity) in assimilation to traits of products they own, but in contrast to traits of products they do not own, even following imposed ownership, when a person acquires an object they may not have chosen themselves. Extending this paradigm, experiment three shows that simply wearing products can evoke ephemeral felt ownership, leading to consumers taking on product traits. We discuss implications for modern consumers, who often acquire objects inadvertently through gifts, and are frequently exposed to products they do not own through advertisements.
---------------------
Not Quite So Blind: Semantic Processing Despite Inattentional Blindness
Robert Schnuerch et al.
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, forthcoming
Abstract:
We often fail to detect clearly visible, yet unexpected objects when our attention is otherwise engaged, a phenomenon widely known as inattentional blindness. The potentially devastating consequences and the mediators of such failures of awareness have been studied extensively. Surprisingly, however, hardly anything is known about whether and how we process the objects that go unnoticed during inattentional blindness. In 2 experiments, we demonstrate that the meaning of objects undetected due to inattentional blindness interferes with the classification of attended stimuli. Responses were significantly slower when the semantic content of an undetected stimulus contradicted that of the attended, to-be-judged object. We thus clarify the depth of the “blindness” caused by inattention, as we provide compelling evidence that failing to detect the unexpected does not preclude its processing, even at postperceptual stages. Despite inattentional blindness, our mind obviously still has access to something as refined as meaning.
---------------------
These two are different. Yes, they’re the same: Choice blindness for facial identity
Melanie Sauerland et al.
Consciousness and Cognition, February 2016, Pages 93-104
Abstract:
We examined the manipulability of face identity judgements by combining a sorting task for unfamiliar faces with a standard test of choice blindness. In Experiment 1, 50 participants completed a sorting task and then justified grouping specific pairs of photos together or apart. On manipulated trials, the presented pairings were different from those the participants had actually produced. Detection rates for these identity manipulations were strikingly low (∼21%). Moreover, participants readily provided justifications for identity decisions that they had not made, typically referring to specific facial features. Experiment 2 was conducted along similar lines and confirmed that lower task difficulty and higher confidence in one’s face identity judgements increase detection rates. We conclude that observers can easily be led to believe that they made identity judgements they did not make. As well as underscoring the fragility of unfamiliar face matching, our findings have implications for identity judgements in legal settings.
---------------------
“Priming” Hand Hygiene Compliance in Clinical Environments
Dominic King et al.
Health Psychology, January 2016, Pages 96-101
Introduction: Effective hand hygiene is the single most important procedure in preventing hospital-acquired infections. Traditional information/education-based interventions have shown only modest benefits on compliance. This study set out to investigate whether priming via olfactory and visual cues influences hand hygiene compliance.
Method: Randomized controlled trial set in a surgical intensive care unit (SICU) at a teaching hospital in Miami, Florida. The primary outcome data involved observations - a mix of health professionals and service users were observed entering the SICU by 2 trained observers and their hand hygiene compliance was independently verified. Interventions included either an olfactory prime (clean, citrus smell) or visual prime (male or female eyes). The primary outcome measure was hand hygiene compliance (HHC) measured by the visitor using the hand gel dispenser.
Results: At a 5% level there was significant evidence that a clean, citrus smell significantly improves HHC (46.9% vs. 15.0%, p = .0001). Compared to the control group, a significant improvement in HHC was seen when a picture of “male eyes” was placed over the hand gel dispenser (33.3% vs. 15.0%, p < .038). No significant improvement in HHC was seen when a picture of female eyes was placed over the same hand gel dispenser (10.0% vs. 15.0%, p = .626).
Conclusions: This is one of the first studies to demonstrate that priming can influence HHC in a clinical setting. The findings suggest that priming interventions could be used to change other behaviors relevant to public health.
---------------------
Social learning across psychological distance
David Kalkstein et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, January 2016, Pages 1-19
Abstract:
While those we learn from are often close to us, more and more our learning environments are shifting to include more distant and dissimilar others. The question we examine in 5 studies is how whom we learn from influences what we learn and how what we learn influences from whom we choose to learn it. In Study 1, we show that social learning, in and of itself, promotes higher level (more abstract) learning than does learning based on one’s own direct experience. In Studies 2 and 3, we show that when people learn from and emulate others, they tend to do so at a higher level when learning from a distant model than from a near model. Studies 4 and 5 show that thinking about learning at a higher (compared to a lower) level leads individuals to expand the range of others that they will consider learning from. Study 6 shows that when given an actual choice, people prefer to learn low-level information from near sources and high-level information from distant sources. These results demonstrate a basic link between level of learning and psychological distance in social learning processes.