A Safe Haven: Investigating Social-Support Figures as Prepared Safety Stimuli
We examined whether social-support figures, who have typically benefited survival, can serve as prepared safety stimuli, a category that has not been explored previously. Across three experiments, we uncovered three key findings. First, social-support figures were less readily associated with fear than were strangers or neutral stimuli (in a retardation-of-acquisition test). Second, social-support stimuli inhibited conditional fear responses to other cues (in a summation test), and this inhibition continued even after the support stimulus was removed. Finally, these effects were not simply due to familiarity or reward beca...
Source: Psychological Science - August 4, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hornstein, E. A., Fanselow, M. S., Eisenberger, N. I. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Corrigendum: Like a Magnet: Catharsis Beliefs Attract Angry People to Violent Video Games
Bushman, B. J., & Whitaker, J. L. (2010). Like a magnet: Catharsis beliefs attract angry people to violent video games. Psychological Science, 21, 790–792. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0956797610369494) (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Tags: Corrigendum Source Type: research
Bayesian Evidence Synthesis Can Reconcile Seemingly Inconsistent Results: The Case of Hotel Towel Reuse
(Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Scheibehenne, B., Jamil, T., Wagenmakers, E.-J. Tags: Commentary Source Type: research
Marginally Significant Effects as Evidence for Hypotheses: Changing Attitudes Over Four Decades
Some effects are statistically significant. Other effects do not reach the threshold of statistical significance and are sometimes described as "marginally significant" or as "approaching significance." Although the concept of marginal significance is widely deployed in academic psychology, there has been very little systematic examination of psychologists’ attitudes toward these effects. Here, we report an observational study in which we investigated psychologists’ attitudes concerning marginal significance by examining their language in over 1,500 articles published in top-tier cognitive, developmental, and s...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Pritschet, L., Powell, D., Horne, Z. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Power of the Like in Adolescence: Effects of Peer Influence on Neural and Behavioral Responses to Social Media
We investigated a unique way in which adolescent peer influence occurs on social media. We developed a novel functional MRI (fMRI) paradigm to simulate Instagram, a popular social photo-sharing tool, and measured adolescents’ behavioral and neural responses to likes, a quantifiable form of social endorsement and potential source of peer influence. Adolescents underwent fMRI while viewing photos ostensibly submitted to Instagram. They were more likely to like photos depicted with many likes than photos with few likes; this finding showed the influence of virtual peer endorsement and held for both neutral photos and ph...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Sherman, L. E., Payton, A. A., Hernandez, L. M., Greenfield, P. M., Dapretto, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Missing-Phoneme Effect in Aural Prose Comprehension
When participants search for a target letter while reading for comprehension, they miss more instances if the target letter is embedded in frequent function words than in less frequent content words. This phenomenon, called the missing-letter effect, has been considered a window on the cognitive mechanisms involved in the visual processing of written language. In the present study, one group of participants read two texts for comprehension while searching for a target letter, and another group listened to a narration of the same two texts while listening for the target letter’s corresponding phoneme. The ubiquitous m...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Saint-Aubin, J., Klein, R. M., Babineau, M., Christie, J., Gow, D. W. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
When Lightning Strikes Twice: Profoundly Gifted, Profoundly Accomplished
The educational, occupational, and creative accomplishments of the profoundly gifted participants (IQs >= 160) in the Study of Mathematically Precocious Youth (SMPY) are astounding, but are they representative of equally able 12-year-olds? Duke University’s Talent Identification Program (TIP) identified 259 young adolescents who were equally gifted. By age 40, their life accomplishments also were extraordinary: Thirty-seven percent had earned doctorates, 7.5% had achieved academic tenure (4.3% at research-intensive universities), and 9% held patents; many were high-level leaders in major organizations. As was the ...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Makel, M. C., Kell, H. J., Lubinski, D., Putallaz, M., Benbow, C. P. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Pupillary Contagion in Infancy: Evidence for Spontaneous Transfer of Arousal
Pupillary contagion—responding to pupil size observed in other people with changes in one’s own pupil—has been found in adults and suggests that arousal and other internal states could be transferred across individuals using a subtle physiological cue. Examining this phenomenon developmentally gives insight into its origins and underlying mechanisms, such as whether it is an automatic adaptation already present in infancy. In the current study, 6- and 9-month-olds viewed schematic depictions of eyes with smaller and larger pupils—pairs of concentric circles with smaller and larger black centers&mdas...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Fawcett, C., Wesevich, V., Gredebäck, G. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
One for You, One for Me: Humans Unique Turn-Taking Skills
Long-term collaborative relationships require that any jointly produced resources be shared in mutually satisfactory ways. Prototypically, this sharing involves partners dividing up simultaneously available resources, but sometimes the collaboration makes a resource available to only one individual, and any sharing of resources must take place across repeated instances over time. Here, we show that beginning at 5 years of age, human children stabilize cooperation in such cases by taking turns across instances of obtaining a resource. In contrast, chimpanzees do not take turns in this way, and so their collaboration tends t...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Melis, A. P., Grocke, P., Kalbitz, J., Tomasello, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Reminders Through Association
People often fail to follow through on good intentions. While limited self-control is frequently the culprit, another cause is simply forgetting to enact intentions when opportunities arise. We introduce a novel, potent approach to facilitating follow-through: the reminders-through-association approach. This approach involves associating intentions (e.g., to mail a letter on your desk tomorrow) with distinctive cues that will capture attention when you have opportunities to act on those intentions (e.g., Valentine’s Day flowers that arrived late yesterday, which are sitting on your desk). We showed that cue-based rem...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Rogers, T., Milkman, K. L. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
The Genetics of Success: How Single-Nucleotide Polymorphisms Associated With Educational Attainment Relate to Life-Course Development
A previous genome-wide association study (GWAS) of more than 100,000 individuals identified molecular-genetic predictors of educational attainment. We undertook in-depth life-course investigation of the polygenic score derived from this GWAS using the four-decade Dunedin Study (N = 918). There were five main findings. First, polygenic scores predicted adult economic outcomes even after accounting for educational attainments. Second, genes and environments were correlated: Children with higher polygenic scores were born into better-off homes. Third, children’s polygenic scores predicted their adult outcomes even when ...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Belsky, D. W., Moffitt, T. E., Corcoran, D. L., Domingue, B., Harrington, H., Hogan, S., Houts, R., Ramrakha, S., Sugden, K., Williams, B. S., Poulton, R., Caspi, A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Scene Integration Without Awareness: No Conclusive Evidence for Processing Scene Congruency During Continuous Flash Suppression
A recent study showed that scenes with an object-background relationship that is semantically incongruent break interocular suppression faster than scenes with a semantically congruent relationship. These results implied that semantic relations between the objects and the background of a scene could be extracted in the absence of visual awareness of the stimulus. In the current study, we assessed the replicability of this finding and tried to rule out an alternative explanation dependent on low-level differences between the stimuli. Furthermore, we used a Bayesian analysis to quantify the evidence in favor of the presence ...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Moors, P., Boelens, D., van Overwalle, J., Wagemans, J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Fear of Ebola: The Influence of Collectivism on Xenophobic Threat Responses
In response to the Ebola scare in 2014, many people evinced strong fear and xenophobia. The present study, informed by the pathogen-prevalence hypothesis, tested the influence of individualism and collectivism on xenophobic response to the threat of Ebola. A nationally representative sample of 1,000 Americans completed a survey, indicating their perceptions of their vulnerability to Ebola, ability to protect themselves from Ebola (protection efficacy), and xenophobic tendencies. Overall, the more vulnerable people felt, the more they exhibited xenophobic responses, but this relationship was moderated by individualism and c...
Source: Psychological Science - July 13, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Kim, H. S., Sherman, D. K., Updegraff, J. A. Tags: General Article Source Type: research
Corrigendum: Low Childhood Socioeconomic Status Promotes Eating in the Absence of Energy Need
Hill, S. E., Prokosch, M. L., DelPriore, D. J., Griskevicius, V., & Kramer, A. (2016). Low childhood socioeconomic status promotes eating in the absence of energy need. Psychological Science, 27, 354–364. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0956797615621901) (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Tags: Corrigenda Source Type: research
Corrigendum: How Positive Emotions Build Physical Health: Perceived Positive Social Connections Account for the Upward Spiral Between Positive Emotions and Vagal Tone
Kok, B. E., Coffey, K. A., Cohn, M. A., Catalino, L. I., Vacharkulksemsuk, T., Algoe, S. B., . . . Fredrickson, B. L. (2013). How positive emotions build physical health: Perceived positive social connections account for the upward spiral between positive emotions and vagal tone. Psychological Science, 24, 1123–1132. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0956797612470827) (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - June 5, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Tags: Corrigenda Source Type: research
