Use the force
Quality of Professional Players’ Poker Hands Is Perceived Accurately From Arm Motions
Michael Slepian et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
"In three studies with two unique video sets, observers naive to the quality of professional players’ poker hands could judge, better than chance, poker-hand quality from merely observing players’ arm actions while placing bets. The accuracy of participants’ judgments when viewing players’ upper bodies was no different from chance, and when observing players’ faces, participants’ accuracy was nearly worse than chance, which suggests that players’ facial cues were deceptive. Arm motions might provide a more diagnostic cue to poker-hand quality than other nonverbal behaviors."
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Seung-Hwan (Mark) Lee, Jeff Rotman & Andrew Perkins
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Extant embodied cognition research suggests that individuals can reduce a perceived lack of interpersonal warmth by substituting physical warmth, and vice versa. We suggest that this behavior is self-regulatory in nature and that this self-regulation can be accomplished via consumptive behavior. Experiment 1 found that consumers perceived ambient temperature to be significantly lower when eating alone compared to eating with a partner. Experiment 2 found that consuming a cool (vs. warm) drink led individuals to generate more socially-oriented attributes for a hypothetical product. Experiment 3 found that physically cooler individuals desired a social consumption setting, whereas physically warmer individuals desired a lone consumption setting. We interpret these results within the context of self-regulation, such that perceived physical temperature deviations from a steady state unconsciously motivate the individual to find bodily balance in order to alleviate that deviation.
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Bacteria as Bullies: Effects of Linguistic Agency Assignment in Health Message
Robert Bell, Matthew McGlone & Marko Dragojevic
Journal of Health Communication, forthcoming
Abstract:
When describing health threats, communicators can assign agency to the threat (e.g., “Hepatitis C has infected 4 million Americans”) or to humans (e.g., “Four million Americans have contracted hepatitis C”). In an online experiment, the authors explored how assignment of agency affects perceptions of susceptibility and severity of a health threat, response efficacy, self-efficacy, fear arousal, and intentions to adopt health-protective recommendations. Participants were 719 individuals recruited through Mechanical Turk (www.mturk.com), a crowdsource labor market run by Amazon (www. amazon.com). The participants were assigned randomly to read 1 of 8 flyers defined by a 2 × 4 (Agency Assignment × Topic) factorial design. Each flyer examined 1 health threat (E. coli, necrotizing fasciitis, salmonella, or Carbapenem-resistant Klebsiella pneumoniae) and was written in language that emphasized bacterial or human agency. Perceived susceptibility and severity were highest when bacterial agency language was used. Response efficacy, self-efficacy, and fear arousal were not significantly affected by agency assignment. Participants reported stronger intentions to adopt recommendations when bacteria agency language was used, but this effect did not reach conventional standards of significance (p < .051). The authors concluded that health communicators can increase target audiences' perceptions of susceptibility and severity by assigning agency to the threat in question when devising health messages.
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Self-Affirmation Counteracts the Effects of Burdens on Judgments of Distance
Loreal Shea & E.J. Masicampo
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2014, Pages 105–108
Abstract:
When a person’s capacity for physical movement is diminished, judgments of the environment change — unless, perhaps, the person is able to self-affirm. We observed as in previous work that physical burdens altered judgments of distance. When participants wore a heavy backpack rather than a light one, they estimated a landmark to be significantly farther away. Crucially, self-affirmation eliminated this effect. When participants self-affirmed prior to making judgments, the weight of the backpack had no effect on distance estimates. The influence of self-affirmation was not accounted for by effects of self-affirmation on mood or by increased thoughts of supportive friends and family among the self-affirmed. These data reveal a simple strategy for counteracting the effects that bodily constraints can have on visual judgments. They also expose the far reaching effects of self-affirmation, which can counteract reactions not only to psychological challenges but to physical ones as well.
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Marnix Naber et al.
PLoS ONE, August 2013
Abstract:
Pupil dilation is implicated as a marker of decision-making as well as of cognitive and emotional processes. Here we tested whether individuals can exploit another’s pupil to their advantage. We first recorded the eyes of 3 "opponents", while they were playing a modified version of the "rock-paper-scissors" childhood game. The recorded videos served as stimuli to a second set of participants. These "players" played rock-paper-scissors against the pre-recorded opponents in a variety of conditions. When players just observed the opponents’ eyes without specific instruction their probability of winning was at chance. When informed that the time of maximum pupil dilation was indicative of the opponents’ choice, however, players raised their winning probability significantly above chance. When just watching the reconstructed area of the pupil against a gray background, players achieved similar performance, showing that players indeed exploited the pupil, rather than other facial cues. Since maximum pupil dilation was correct about the opponents’ decision only in 60% of trials (chance 33%), we finally tested whether increasing this validity to 100% would allow spontaneous learning. Indeed, when players were given no information, but the pupil was informative about the opponent’s response in all trials, players performed significantly above chance on average and half (5/10) reached significance at an individual level. Together these results suggest that people can in principle use the pupil to detect cognitive decisions in another individual, but that most people have neither explicit knowledge of the pupil’s utility nor have they learnt to use it despite a lifetime of exposure.
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Popcorn in the cinema: Oral interference sabotages advertising effects
Sascha Topolinski, Sandy Lindner & Anna-Lena Freudenberg
Journal of Consumer Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
One important psychological mechanism of advertising is mere exposure inducing positive attitudes towards brands. Recent basic research has shown that the underlying mechanism of mere exposure for words, in turn, is the training of subvocal pronunciation, which can be obstructed by oral motor-interference. Commercials for foreign brands were shown in cinema sessions while participants either ate popcorn, chewed gum (oral interference) or consumed a single sugar cube (control). Brand choice and brand attitudes were assessed one week later. While control participants more likely spent money (Experiment 1, N = 188) and exhibited higher preference and physiological responses (Experiment 2, N = 96) for advertised than for novel brands, participants who had consumed popcorn or gum during commercials showed no advertising effects. It is concluded that advertising might be futile under ecological situations involving oral interference, such as snacking or talking, which ironically is often the case.
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Seeing storms behind the clouds: Biases in the attribution of anger
Andrew Galperin et al.
Evolution and Human Behavior, September 2013, Pages 358–365
Abstract:
Anger-prone individuals are volatile and frequently dangerous. Accordingly, inferring the presence of this personality trait in others was important in ancestral human populations. This inference, made under uncertainty, can result in two types of errors: underestimation or overestimation of trait anger. Averaged over evolutionary time, underestimation will have been the more costly error, as the fitness decrements resulting from physical harm or death due to insufficient vigilance are greater than those resulting from lost social opportunities due to excessive caution. We therefore hypothesized that selection has favored an upwards bias in the estimation of others' trait anger relative to estimations of other traits not characterized by such an error asymmetry. Moreover, we hypothesized that additional attributes that i) make the actor more dangerous, or ii) make the observer more vulnerable increase the error asymmetry with regard to inferring anger-proneness, and should therefore correspondingly increase this overestimation bias. In Study 1 (N = 161), a fictitious individual portrayed in a vignette was judged to have higher trait anger than trait disgust, and trait anger ratings were more responsive than trait disgust ratings to behavioral cues of emotionality. In Study 2 (N = 335), participants viewed images of angry or fearful faces. The interaction of factors indicating target's formidability (male sex), target's intent to harm (direct gaze), and perceiver's vulnerability (female sex or high belief in a dangerous world) increased ratings of the target's trait anger but not trait fear.
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Smiling after thinking increases reliance on thoughts
Borja Paredes et al.
Social Psychology, Fall 2013, Pages 349-353
Abstract:
The present research examines the impact of smiling on attitude change. Participants were first exposed to a story that elicited mostly positive thoughts (about an employee’s good day at work) or negative thoughts (about an employee’s bad day at work). After writing down their thoughts, participants were asked to hold a pen with their teeth (smile) or with their lips (control). Finally, all participants reported the extent to which they liked the story. In line with the self-validation hypothesis, we predicted and found that the effect of the initial thought direction induction on story evaluations was greater for smiling than control participants. These results conceptually replicate those obtained in previous research on embodiment (i.e., more favorable evaluations of stories when smiling; Strack, Martin, & Stepper, 1988) when participants had positive thoughts, but showed the opposite pattern of results (less favorable evaluations for smiling) for negative thoughts.
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Jane Elizabeth Aspell et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Prominent theories highlight the importance of bodily perception for self-consciousness, but it is currently not known whether bodily perception is based on interoceptive or exteroceptive signals or on integrated signals from these anatomically distinct systems. In the research reported here, we combined both types of signals by surreptitiously providing participants with visual exteroceptive information about their heartbeat: A real-time video image of a periodically illuminated silhouette outlined participants’ (projected, “virtual”) bodies and flashed in synchrony with their heartbeats. We investigated whether these “cardio-visual” signals could modulate bodily self-consciousness and tactile perception. We report two main findings. First, synchronous cardio-visual signals increased self-identification with and self-location toward the virtual body, and second, they altered the perception of tactile stimuli applied to participants’ backs so that touch was mislocalized toward the virtual body. We argue that the integration of signals from the inside and the outside of the human body is a fundamental neurobiological process underlying self-consciousness.
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The effect of facial attractiveness on temporal perception
Ruth Ogden
Cognition & Emotion, Fall 2013, Pages 1292-1304
Abstract:
Previous research suggests that feelings of fear, dislike, shame and sadness affect our perception of duration (Droit-Volet et al., 2004; Gil et al., 2009). The current study sought to expand our understanding of the variables which moderate temporal perception by examining whether the attractiveness of a face influenced its perceived duration. Participants completed a verbal estimation task in which they judged the duration of attractive, unattractive and neutral faces. The results showed that participants underestimated the duration of unattractive faces relative to attractive and neutral faces. Estimates of unattractive faces were also less accurate than those of the attractive and neutral faces. The results are consistent with Gil et al.'s (2009) suggestion that the duration of disliked stimuli are underestimated relative to liked and neutral stimuli because they detract attention from temporal perception. Analysis of the slope and intercept of the estimation gradients supports Zakay and Block's (1997) suggestion that reduced attention to time results in a multiplicative underestimation of duration.
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You Should Read This! Perceiving and Acting upon Action Primes Influences Sense of Agency
Tom Damen, Rick van Baaren & Ap Dijksterhuis
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, January 2014, Pages 21–26
Abstract:
In two studies, we investigated the degree to which action primes, and acting upon those primes affect agency ratings. Participants performed left or right button-presses that generated tones, and were subsequently asked to indicate the degree to which they felt that they, instead of the computer, had caused the tones. Prior to button-presses, participants were subliminally or supraliminally primed with “left” or “right”. Participants were free to press either button, and thus could perform prime-compatible or prime-incompatible actions. Results showed that incompatible subliminal primes lowered sense of agency compared to the effects of subliminal compatible primes. In contrast, supraliminal compatible primes lowered agency compared to incompatible primes.
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Power to the will: How exerting physical effort boosts the sense of agency
Jelle Demanet et al.
Cognition, December 2013, Pages 574–578
Abstract:
The sense of agency refers to the experience of being in control of one’s actions and their consequences. The 19th century French philosopher Maine de Biran proposed that the sensation of effort might provide an internal cue for distinguishing self-caused from other changes in the environment. The present study is the first to empirically test the philosophical idea that effort promotes self-agency. We used intentional binding, which refers to the subjective temporal attraction between an action and its sensory consequences, as an implicit measure of the sense of agency. Effort was manipulated independent of the primary task by requiring participants to pull stretch bands of varying resistance levels. We found that intentional binding was enhanced under conditions of increased effort. This suggests not only that the experience of effort directly contributes to the sense of agency, but also that the integration of effort as an agency cue is non-specific to the effort requirement of the action itself.
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Pain sensitivity during experimentally induced systemic inflammation in humans
B. Karshikoff et al.
Brain, Behavior, and Immunity, September 2013, Pages e32
Abstract:
Animal research suggests that systemic inflammation may induce pain hypersensitivity through central mechanisms such as glia cell activation, a mechanism that has also been proposed to be central in several clinical pain conditions. In two placebo controlled studies we used two low doses of lipopolysaccharide (LPS) injections (0.6 ng/kg and 0.8 ng/kg) as experimental models of systemic inflammation in healthy human subjects and investigated the effect on (a) pressure, heat, and cold pain thresholds, (b) suprathreshold noxious heat and cold sensitivity, and (c) endogenous pain modulation. LPS induced significantly lower pressure pain thresholds as compared to placebo, whereas heat and cold threshold pain thresholds remained unaffected. Women in the LPS group rated suprathreshold noxious stimuli as more painful than the placebo group, whereas suprathreshold pain ratings of LPS treated men were similar to male controls. LPS impaired endogenous pain inhibition, but this effect was also restricted to women. The pattern of results was here observed in two consecutive and independent experiments of pain sensitivity. This study extends the findings of animal research to humans, suggesting a link between inflammation and pain regulation in humans.
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‘If you are good, I get better’: The role of social hierarchy in perceptual decision-making
Hernando Santamaría-García et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
So far, it was unclear if social hierarchy could influence sensory or perceptual cognitive processes. We evaluated the effects of social hierarchy on these processes using a basic visual perceptual decision task. We constructed a social hierarchy where participants performed the perceptual task separately with two covertly simulated players (superior, inferior). Participants were faster (better) when performing the discrimination task with the superior player. We studied the time course when social hierarchy was processed using event-related potentials and observed hierarchical effects even in early stages of sensory-perceptual processing, suggesting early top–down modulation by social hierarchy. Moreover, in a parallel analysis, we fitted a drift-diffusion model (DDM) to the results to evaluate the decision making process of this perceptual task in the context of a social hierarchy. Consistently, the DDM pointed to nondecision time (probably perceptual encoding) as the principal period influenced by social hierarchy.
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Other People as Means to a Safe End: Vicarious Extinction Blocks the Return of Learned Fear
Armita Golkar et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Information about what is dangerous and safe in the environment is often transferred from other individuals through social forms of learning, such as observation. Past research has focused on the observational, or vicarious, acquisition of fears, but little is known about how social information can promote safety learning. To address this issue, we studied the effects of vicarious-extinction learning on the recovery of conditioned fear. Compared with a standard extinction procedure, vicarious extinction promoted better extinction and effectively blocked the return of previously learned fear. We confirmed that these effects could not be attributed to the presence of a learning model per se but were specifically driven by the model’s experience of safety. Our results confirm that vicarious and direct emotional learning share important characteristics but that social-safety information promotes superior down-regulation of learned fear. These findings have implications for emotional learning, social-affective processes, and clinical practice.
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Relatively random: Context effects on perceived randomness and predicted outcomes
William Matthews
Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, September 2013, Pages 1642-1648
Abstract:
This article concerns the effect of context on people’s judgments about sequences of chance outcomes. In Experiment 1, participants judged whether sequences were produced by random, mechanical processes (such as a roulette wheel) or skilled human action (such as basketball shots). Sequences with lower alternation rates were judged more likely to result from human action. However, this effect was highly context-dependent: A moderate alternation rate was judged more likely to indicate a random physical process when encountered among sequences with lower alternation rates than when embedded among sequences with higher alternation rates. Experiment 2 found the same effect for predictions of the next outcome following a streak: A streak of 3 at the end of the sequence was judged less likely to continue by participants who had encountered shorter terminal streaks in previous trials than by those who had encountered longer ones. These contrast effects (a) help to explain variability in the types of sequences that are judged to be random and that elicit the gambler’s fallacy, and urge caution about attempts to establish universal parameterizations of these effects; (b) are congruent with theories of sequence judgment that emphasize the importance of people’s actual experiences with sequences of different kinds; (c) provide a link between models of sequence judgment and broader accounts of psychophysical/economic judgment; and (d) may offer new insight into individual differences in randomness judgments and sequence predictions.