Unfair Lineups Make Witnesses More Likely to Confuse Innocent and Guilty Suspects
We examined whether unfair lineups also influence subjects’ ability to distinguish between innocent and guilty suspects and their ability to judge the accuracy of their identification. In a single experiment (N = 8,925), we compared three fair-lineup techniques used by the police with unfair lineups in which we did nothing to prevent distinctive suspects from standing out. Compared with the fair lineups, doing nothing not only increased subjects’ willingness to identify the suspect but also markedly impaired subjects’ ability to distinguish between innocent and guilty suspects. Accuracy was also reduced a...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Colloff, M. F., Wade, K. A., Strange, D. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Hidden Stages of Cognition Revealed in Patterns of Brain Activation
We examined whether these stages corresponded to their ascribed functions by testing whether they are affected by appropriate factors. Planning-stage duration increased as the method for solving the problem became less obvious, whereas solving-stage duration increased as the number of calculations to produce the answer increased. Responding-stage duration increased with the difficulty of the motor actions required to produce the answer. (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Anderson, J. R., Pyke, A. A., Fincham, J. M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Bitter Truth About Sugar and Willpower: The Limited Evidential Value of the Glucose Model of Ego Depletion
The idea behind ego depletion is that willpower draws on a limited mental resource, so that engaging in an act of self-control impairs self-control in subsequent tasks. To present ego depletion as more than a convenient metaphor, some researchers have proposed that glucose is the limited resource that becomes depleted with self-control. However, there have been theoretical challenges to the proposed glucose mechanism, and the experiments that have tested it have found mixed results. We used a new meta-analytic tool, p-curve analysis, to examine the reliability of the evidence from these experiments. We found that the effec...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Vadillo, M. A., Gold, N., Osman, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Cooperation, Fast and Slow: Meta-Analytic Evidence for a Theory of Social Heuristics and Self-Interested Deliberation
Does cooperating require the inhibition of selfish urges? Or does "rational" self-interest constrain cooperative impulses? I investigated the role of intuition and deliberation in cooperation by meta-analyzing 67 studies in which cognitive-processing manipulations were applied to economic cooperation games (total N = 17,647; no indication of publication bias using Egger’s test, Begg’s test, or p-curve). My meta-analysis was guided by the social heuristics hypothesis, which proposes that intuition favors behavior that typically maximizes payoffs, whereas deliberation favors behavior that maximizes one’s pa...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Rand, D. G. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Spontaneous Metacognition in Rhesus Monkeys
Metacognition is the ability to think about thinking. Although monitoring and controlling one’s knowledge is a key feature of human cognition, its evolutionary origins are debated. In the current study, we examined whether rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta; N = 120) could make metacognitive inferences in a one-shot decision. Each monkey experienced one of four conditions, observing a human appearing to hide a food reward in an apparatus consisting of either one or two tubes. The monkeys tended to search the correct location when they observed this baiting event, but engaged in information seeking—by peering into a...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Rosati, A. G., Santos, L. R. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Treating Generational Stress: Effect of Paternal Stress on Development of Memory and Extinction in Offspring Is Reversed by Probiotic Treatment
Early-life adversity is a potent risk factor for mental-health disorders in exposed individuals, and effects of adversity are exhibited across generations. Such adversities are also associated with poor gastrointestinal outcomes. In addition, emerging evidence suggests that microbiota-gut-brain interactions may mediate the effects of early-life stress on psychological dysfunction. In the present study, we administered an early-life stressor (i.e., maternal separation) to infant male rats, and we investigated the effects of this stressor on conditioned aversive reactions in the rats’ subsequent infant male offspring. ...
Source: Psychological Science - September 7, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Callaghan, B. L., Cowan, C. S. M., Richardson, R. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Strategically Stunning: The Professional Motivations Behind the Lipstick Effect
The phenomenon of increased desire for, and use of, appearance-enhancing items during times of economic recession has been termed the lipstick effect. The motivation underlying this effect has been attributed to women’s desires to enhance their attractiveness to financially stable partners (Hill, Rodeheffer, Griskevicius, Durante, & White, 2012). In the present research, we found evidence for our proposal that during times of economic recession, the heightened economic concern experienced by women translates into increased desire to use appearance-enhancing items to both attract romantic partners and create a fav...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Netchaeva, E., Rees, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Reconsidering Temporal Selection in the Attentional Blink
Two episodes of attentional selection cannot occur very close in time. This is the traditional account of the attentional blink, whereby observers fail to report the second of two temporally proximal targets. Recent analyses have challenged this simple account, suggesting that attentional selection during the attentional blink is not only (a) suppressed, but also (b) temporally advanced then delayed, and (c) temporally diffused. Here, we reanalyzed six data sets using mixture modeling of report errors, and revealed much simpler dynamics. Exposing a problem inherent in previous analyses, we found evidence of a second attent...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Goodbourn, P. T., Martini, P., Barnett-Cowan, M., Harris, I. M., Livesey, E. J., Holcombe, A. O. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Effect of Relative Encoding on Memory-Based Judgments
Several models of judgment propose that people struggle with absolute judgments and instead represent options on the basis of their relative standing. This leads to a conundrum when people make judgments from memory: They may encode an option’s ordinal rank relative to the surrounding options but later observe a different distribution of options. Do people update their representations when making judgments from memory, or do they maintain their representations based on the initial encoding? In three studies, we found that people making memory-based judgments rely on a stimulus’s relative standing in the distrib...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sharif, M. A., Oppenheimer, D. M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Heart Rate Variability Moderates the Association Between Separation-Related Psychological Distress and Blood Pressure Reactivity Over Time
Divorce is a stressor associated with long-term health risk, though the mechanisms of this effect are poorly understood. Cardiovascular reactivity is one biological pathway implicated as a predictor of poor long-term health after divorce. A sample of recently separated and divorced adults (N = 138) was assessed over an average of 7.5 months to explore whether individual differences in heart rate variability—assessed by respiratory sinus arrhythmia—operate in combination with subjective reports of separation-related distress to predict prospective changes in cardiovascular reactivity, as indexed by blood pressur...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bourassa, K. J., Hasselmo, K., Sbarra, D. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Why Do People Tend to Infer "Ought" From "Is"? The Role of Biases in Explanation
People tend to judge what is typical as also good and appropriate—as what ought to be. What accounts for the prevalence of these judgments, given that their validity is at best uncertain? We hypothesized that the tendency to reason from "is" to "ought" is due in part to a systematic bias in people’s (nonmoral) explanations, whereby regularities (e.g., giving roses on Valentine’s Day) are explained predominantly via inherent or intrinsic facts (e.g., roses are beautiful). In turn, these inherence-biased explanations lead to value-laden downstream conclusions (e.g., it is good to give roses). Consistent wit...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tworek, C. M., Cimpian, A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Playing Action Video Games Improves Visuomotor Control
Can playing action video games improve visuomotor control? If so, can these games be used in training people to perform daily visuomotor-control tasks, such as driving? We found that action gamers have better lane-keeping and visuomotor-control skills than do non–action gamers. We then trained non–action gamers with action or nonaction video games. After they played a driving or first-person-shooter video game for 5 or 10 hr, their visuomotor control improved significantly. In contrast, non–action gamers showed no such improvement after they played a nonaction video game. Our model-driven analysis reveale...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Li, L., Chen, R., Chen, J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
How to Improve Adolescent Stress Responses: Insights From Integrating Implicit Theories of Personality and Biopsychosocial Models
This research integrated implicit theories of personality and the biopsychosocial model of challenge and threat, hypothesizing that adolescents would be more likely to conclude that they can meet the demands of an evaluative social situation when they were taught that people have the potential to change their socially relevant traits. In Study 1 (N = 60), high school students were assigned to an incremental-theory-of-personality or a control condition and then given a social-stress task. Relative to control participants, incremental-theory participants exhibited improved stress appraisals, more adaptive neuroendocrine and ...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Yeager, D. S., Lee, H. Y., Jamieson, J. P. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Researchers Intuitions About Power in Psychological Research
Many psychology studies are statistically underpowered. In part, this may be because many researchers rely on intuition, rules of thumb, and prior practice (along with practical considerations) to determine the number of subjects to test. In Study 1, we surveyed 291 published research psychologists and found large discrepancies between their reports of their preferred amount of power and the actual power of their studies (calculated from their reported typical cell size, typical effect size, and acceptable alpha). Furthermore, in Study 2, 89% of the 214 respondents overestimated the power of specific research designs with ...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Bakker, M., Hartgerink, C. H. J., Wicherts, J. M., van der Maas, H. L. J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Dogs Identify Agents in Third-Party Interactions on the Basis of the Observed Degree of Contingency
To investigate whether dogs could recognize contingent reactivity as a marker of agents’ interaction, we performed an experiment in which dogs were presented with third-party contingent events. In the perfect-contingency condition, dogs were shown an unfamiliar self-propelled agent (SPA) that performed actions corresponding to audio clips of verbal commands played by a computer. In the high-but-imperfect-contingency condition, the SPA responded to the verbal commands on only two thirds of the trials; in the low-contingency condition, the SPA responded to the commands on only one third of the trials. In the test phase...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Tauzin, T., Kovacs, K., Topal, J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
