The Social Feedback Hypothesis and Communicative Development in Autism Spectrum Disorder: A Response to Akhtar, Jaswal, Dinishak, and Stephan (2016)
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Warlaumont, A. S., Richards, J. A., Gilkerson, J., Messinger, D. S., Oller, D. K. Tags: Commentaries Source Type: research
On Social Feedback Loops and Cascading Effects in Autism: A Commentary on Warlaumont, Richards, Gilkerson, and Oller (2014)
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Akhtar, N., Jaswal, V. K., Dinishak, J., Stephan, C. Tags: Commentaries Source Type: research
Social Class and the Motivational Relevance of Other Human Beings: Evidence From Visual Attention
We theorize that people’s social class affects their appraisals of others’ motivational relevance—the degree to which others are seen as potentially rewarding, threatening, or otherwise worth attending to. Supporting this account, three studies indicate that social classes differ in the amount of attention their members direct toward other human beings. In Study 1, wearable technology was used to film the visual fields of pedestrians on city streets; higher-class participants looked less at other people than did lower-class participants. In Studies 2a and 2b, participants’ eye movements were tracked...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Dietze, P., Knowles, E. D. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
A Tale of Two Types of Perspective Taking: Sex Differences in Spatial Ability
Sex differences in favor of males have been documented in measures of spatial perspective taking. In this research, we examined whether social factors (i.e., stereotype threat and the inclusion of human figures in tasks) account for these differences. In Experiment 1, we evaluated performance when perspective-taking tests were framed as measuring either spatial or social (empathetic) perspective-taking abilities. In the spatial condition, tasks were framed as measures of spatial ability on which males have an advantage. In the social condition, modified tasks contained human figures and were framed as measures of empathy o...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tarampi, M. R., Heydari, N., Hegarty, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
When the Spirit Is Willing, but the Flesh Is Weak: Developmental Differences in Judgments About Inner Moral Conflict
Sometimes it is easy to do the right thing. But often, people act morally only after overcoming competing immoral desires. How does learning about someone’s inner moral conflict influence children’s and adults’ moral judgments about that person? Across four studies, we discovered a striking developmental difference: When the outcome is held constant, 3- to 8-year-old children judge someone who does the right thing without experiencing immoral desires to be morally superior to someone who does the right thing through overcoming conflicting desires—but adults have the opposite intuition. This developm...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Starmans, C., Bloom, P. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Creating Body Shapes From Verbal Descriptions by Linking Similarity Spaces
Brief verbal descriptions of people’s bodies (e.g., "curvy," "long-legged") can elicit vivid mental images. The ease with which these mental images are created belies the complexity of three-dimensional body shapes. We explored the relationship between body shapes and body descriptions and showed that a small number of words can be used to generate categorically accurate representations of three-dimensional bodies. The dimensions of body-shape variation that emerged in a language-based similarity space were related to major dimensions of variation computed directly from three-dimensional laser scans of 2,094 bodies. ...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hill, M. Q., Streuber, S., Hahn, C. A., Black, M. J., OToole, A. J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Impaired Velocity Processing Reveals an Agnosia for Motion in Depth
Many individuals with normal visual acuity are unable to discriminate the direction of 3-D motion in a portion of their visual field, a deficit previously referred to as a stereomotion scotoma. The origin of this visual deficit has remained unclear. We hypothesized that the impairment is due to a failure in the processing of one of the two binocular cues to motion in depth: changes in binocular disparity over time or interocular velocity differences. We isolated the contributions of these two cues and found that sensitivity to interocular velocity differences, but not changes in binocular disparity, varied systematically w...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Barendregt, M., Dumoulin, S. O., Rokers, B. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
From Caregivers to Peers: Puberty Shapes Human Face Perception
Puberty prepares mammals to sexually reproduce during adolescence. It is also hypothesized to invoke a social metamorphosis that prepares adolescents to take on adult social roles. We provide the first evidence to support this hypothesis in humans and show that pubertal development retunes the face-processing system from a caregiver bias to a peer bias. Prior to puberty, children exhibit enhanced recognition for adult female faces. With puberty, superior recognition emerges for peer faces that match one’s pubertal status. As puberty progresses, so does the peer recognition bias. Adolescents become better at recognizi...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Picci, G., Scherf, K. S. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Your Understanding Is My Understanding: Evidence for a Community of Knowledge
In four experiments, we tested the community-of-knowledge hypothesis, that people fail to distinguish their own knowledge from other people’s knowledge. In all the experiments, despite the absence of any actual explanatory information, people rated their own understanding of novel natural phenomena as higher when they were told that scientists understood the phenomena than when they were told that scientists did not yet understand them. In Experiment 2, we found that this occurs only when people have ostensible access to the scientists’ explanations; the effect does not occur when the explanations exist but are...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sloman, S. A., Rabb, N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Long Reach of Nurturing Family Environments: Links With Midlife Emotion-Regulatory Styles and Late-Life Security in Intimate Relationships
Does the warmth of children’s family environments predict the quality of their intimate relationships at the other end of the life span? Using data collected prospectively on 81 men from adolescence through the eighth and ninth decades of life, this study tested the hypotheses that warmer relationships with parents in childhood predict greater security of attachment to intimate partners in late life, and that this link is mediated in part by the degree to which individuals in midlife rely on emotion-regulatory styles that facilitate or inhibit close relationship connections. Findings supported this mediational model,...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Waldinger, R. J., Schulz, M. S. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Emotions in "Black and White" or Shades of Gray? How We Think About Emotion Shapes Our Perception and Neural Representation of Emotion
The demands of social life often require categorically judging whether someone’s continuously varying facial movements express "calm" or "fear," or whether one’s fluctuating internal states mean one feels "good" or "bad." In two studies, we asked whether this kind of categorical, "black and white," thinking can shape the perception and neural representation of emotion. Using psychometric and neuroimaging methods, we found that (a) across participants, judging emotions using a categorical, "black and white" scale relative to judging emotions using a continuous, "shades of gray," scale shifted subjective emotion ...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Satpute, A. B., Nook, E. C., Narayanan, S., Shu, J., Weber, J., Ochsner, K. N. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Conscious Access to Suppressed Threatening Information Is Modulated by Working Memory
Previous research has demonstrated that emotional information processing can be modulated by what is being held in working memory (WM). Here, we showed that such content-based WM effects can occur even when the emotional information is suppressed from conscious awareness. Using the delayed-match-to-sample paradigm in conjunction with continuous flash suppression, we found that suppressed threatening (fearful and angry) faces emerged from suppression faster when they matched the emotional valence of WM contents than when they did not. This effect cannot be explained by perceptual priming, as it disappeared when the faces we...
Source: Psychological Science - November 3, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Liu, D., Wang, L., Wang, Y., Jiang, Y. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Each Reader Decides if a Replication Counts: Reply to Schwarz and Clore (2016)
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Simonsohn, U. Tags: Commentaries Source Type: research
Evaluating Psychological Research Requires More Than Attention to the N: A Comment on Simonsohns (2015) "Small Telescopes"
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Schwarz, N., Clore, G. L. Tags: Commentaries Source Type: research
Beliefs About the Causal Structure of the Self-Concept Determine Which Changes Disrupt Personal Identity
We examined the impact of the causal centrality of a feature, a key determinant of the extent to which a feature defines a concept, on judgments of identity continuity. We found support for this approach in three experiments using both measured and manipulated causal centrality. For judgments both of one’s self and of others, we found that some features are perceived to be more causally central than others and that changes in such causally central features are believed to be more disruptive to identity. (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - October 6, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Chen, S. Y., Urminsky, O., Bartels, D. M. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
