Wearing a Bicycle Helmet Can Increase Risk Taking and Sensation Seeking in Adults
Humans adapt their risk-taking behavior on the basis of perceptions of safety; this risk-compensation phenomenon is typified by people taking increased risks when using protective equipment. Existing studies have looked at people who know they are using safety equipment and have specifically focused on changes in behaviors for which that equipment might reduce risk. Here, we demonstrated that risk taking increases in people who are not explicitly aware they are wearing protective equipment; furthermore, this happens for behaviors that could not be made safer by that equipment. In a controlled study in which a helmet, compa...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Gamble, T., Walker, I. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
Internalized Impressions: The Link Between Apparent Facial Trustworthiness and Deceptive Behavior Is Mediated by Targets Expectations of How They Will Be Judged
Researchers have debated whether a person’s behavior can be predicted from his or her face. In particular, it is unclear whether people’s trustworthiness can be predicted from their facial appearance. In the present study, we implemented conceptual and methodological advances in this area of inquiry, taking a new approach to capturing trustworthy behavior and measuring targets’ own self-expectations as a mediator between consensual appearance-based judgments and the trustworthiness of targets’ behavior. Using this novel paradigm to capture 900 observations of targets’ behavior (as trustworthy ...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Slepian, M. L., Ames, D. R. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
Absent but Not Gone: Interdependence in Couples Quality of Life Persists After a Partners Death
Spouses influence each other’s psychological functioning and quality of life. To explore whether this interdependence continues after a person becomes widowed, we tested whether deceased spouses’ characteristics were associated with their widowed partners’ later quality of life using couples drawn from a multinational sample of aging adults. Independent subsamples (ns = 221 and 325) were assessed before and after a spouse’s death. Regressions revealed that deceased partners’ quality of life prior to their death positively predicted their spouses’ quality of life after the partners’...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bourassa, K. J., Knowles, L. M., Sbarra, D. A., OConnor, M.-F. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Variation in an Iron Metabolism Gene Moderates the Association Between Blood Lead Levels and Attention-Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder in Children
Although attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a heritable neurodevelopmental condition, there is also considerable scientific and public interest in environmental modulators of its etiology. Exposure to neurotoxins is one potential source of perturbation of neural, and hence psychological, development. Exposure to lead in particular has been widely investigated and is correlated with neurodevelopmental outcomes, including ADHD. To investigate whether this effect is likely to be causal, we used a Mendelian randomization design with a functional gene variant. In a case-control study, we examined the association...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Nigg, J. T., Elmore, A. L., Natarajan, N., Friderici, K. H., Nikolas, M. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Five-Month-Old Infants Have General Knowledge of How Nonsolid Substances Behave and Interact
Experience puts people in touch with nonsolid substances, such as water, blood, and milk, which are crucial to survival. People must be able to understand the behavior of these substances and to differentiate their properties from those of solid objects. We investigated whether infants represent nonsolid substances as a conceptual category distinct from solid objects on the basis of differences in cohesiveness. Experiment 1 established that infants can distinguish water from a perceptually matched solid and can correctly predict whether the item will pass through or be trapped by a grid. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that inf...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hespos, S. J., Ferry, A. L., Anderson, E. M., Hollenbeck, E. N., Rips, L. J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Propensity for Risk Taking Across the Life Span and Around the Globe
Past empirical work suggests that aging is associated with decreases in risk taking. But are such effects universal? Life-history theory suggests that the link between age and risk taking is a function of specific reproductive strategies that can be more or less risky depending on the ecology. We assessed variation in the age-risk curve using World Values Survey data from 77 countries (N = 147,118). The results suggest that propensity for risk taking tends to decline across the life span in the vast majority of countries. In addition, there is systematic variation among countries: Countries in which hardship (e.g., high in...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mata, R., Josef, A. K., Hertwig, R. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Critical Importance of Retrieval--and Spacing--for Learning
We examined the impact of repeated testing and repeated studying on long-term learning. In Experiment 1, we replicated Karpicke and Roediger’s (2008) influential results showing that once information can be recalled, repeated testing on that information enhances learning, whereas restudying that information does not. We then examined whether the apparent ineffectiveness of restudying might be attributable to the spacing differences between items that were inherent in the between-subjects design employed by Karpicke and Roediger. When we controlled for these spacing differences by manipulating the various learning con...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Soderstrom, N. C., Kerr, T. K., Bjork, R. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Beyond Faces and Expertise: Facelike Holistic Processing of Nonface Objects in the Absence of Expertise
Holistic processing—the tendency to perceive objects as indecomposable wholes—has long been viewed as a process specific to faces or objects of expertise. Although current theories differ in what causes holistic processing, they share a fundamental constraint for its generalization: Nonface objects cannot elicit facelike holistic processing in the absence of expertise. Contrary to this prevailing view, here we show that line patterns with salient Gestalt information (i.e., connectedness, closure, and continuity between parts) can be processed as holistically as faces without any training. Moreover, weakening th...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Zhao, M., Bülthoff, H. H., Bülthoff, I. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Establishing the Attention-Distractibility Trait
In this study, we examined whether the inability to maintain attentional focus varies in the overall population in the form of an attention-distractibility trait. To test this idea, we administered an ADHD diagnostic tool to a sample of healthy participants and assessed the relationship between ADHD symptoms and task distraction. ADHD symptom summary scores were significantly positively associated with distractor interference in letter-search and name-classification tasks (as measured by reaction time), as long as the distractors were irrelevant (cartoon images) rather than relevant (i.e., compatible or incompatible with t...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Forster, S., Lavie, N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Individual Differences in Nonsymbolic Ratio Processing Predict Symbolic Math Performance
What basic capacities lay the foundation for advanced numerical cognition? Are there basic nonsymbolic abilities that support the understanding of advanced numerical concepts, such as fractions? To date, most theories have posited that previously identified core numerical systems, such as the approximate number system (ANS), are ill-suited for learning fraction concepts. However, recent research in developmental psychology and neuroscience has revealed a ratio-processing system (RPS) that is sensitive to magnitudes of nonsymbolic ratios and may be ideally suited for supporting fraction concepts. We provide evidence for thi...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Matthews, P. G., Lewis, M. R., Hubbard, E. M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Location-Unbound Color-Shape Binding Representations in Visual Working Memory
The mechanism by which nonspatial features, such as color and shape, are bound in visual working memory, and the role of those features’ location in their binding, remains unknown. In the current study, I modified a redundancy-gain paradigm to investigate these issues. A set of features was presented in a two-object memory display, followed by a single object probe. Participants judged whether the probe contained any features of the memory display, regardless of its location. Response time distributions revealed feature coactivation only when both features of a single object in the memory display appeared together in...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Saiki, J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Boosting Belligerence: How the July 7, 2005, London Bombings Affected Liberals Moral Foundations and Prejudice
Major terrorist events, such as the recent attacks in Ankara, Sinai, and Paris, can have profound effects on a nation’s values, attitudes, and prejudices. Yet psychological evidence testing the impact of such events via data collected immediately before and after an attack is understandably rare. In the present research, we tested the independent and joint effects of threat (the July 7, 2005, London bombings) and political ideology on endorsement of moral foundations and prejudices among two nationally representative samples (combined N = 2,031) about 6 weeks before and 1 month after the London bombings. After the bo...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Van de Vyver, J., Houston, D. M., Abrams, D., Vasiljevic, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Evaluative Advantage of Novel Alternatives: An Information-Sampling Account
New products, services, and ideas are often evaluated more favorably than similar but older ones. Although several explanations of this phenomenon have been proposed, we identify an overlooked asymmetry in information about new and old items that emerges when people seek positive experiences and learn about the qualities of (noisy) alternatives by experiencing them. The reason for the asymmetry is that people avoid rechoosing alternatives that previously led to poor outcomes; hence, additional feedback on their qualities is precluded. Negative quality estimates, even when caused by noise, thus tend to persist. This negativ...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Le Mens, G., Kareev, Y., Avrahami, J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Changing Environments by Changing Individuals: The Emergent Effects of Psychological Intervention
The two studies reported here tested whether a classroom-based psychological intervention that benefited a few African American 7th graders could trigger emergent ecological effects that benefited their entire classrooms. Multilevel analyses were conducted on data that previously documented the benefits of values affirmations on African American students’ grades. The density of African American students who received the intervention in each classroom (i.e., treatment density) was used as an independent predictor of grades. Within a classroom, the greater the density of African American students who participated in th...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Powers, J. T., Cook, J. E., Purdie-Vaughns, V., Garcia, J., Apfel, N., Cohen, G. L. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Large Cross-National Differences in Gene x Socioeconomic Status Interaction on Intelligence
A core hypothesis in developmental theory predicts that genetic influences on intelligence and academic achievement are suppressed under conditions of socioeconomic privation and more fully realized under conditions of socioeconomic advantage: a Gene x Childhood Socioeconomic Status (SES) interaction. Tests of this hypothesis have produced apparently inconsistent results. We performed a meta-analysis of tests of Gene x SES interaction on intelligence and academic-achievement test scores, allowing for stratification by nation (United States vs. non–United States), and we conducted rigorous tests for publication bias a...
Source: Psychological Science - February 9, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tucker-Drob, E. M., Bates, T. C. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
