Infections and Elections: Did an Ebola Outbreak Influence the 2014 U.S. Federal Elections (and if so, How)?
In the studies reported here, we conducted longitudinal analyses of preelection polling data to test whether an Ebola outbreak predicted voting intentions preceding the 2014 U.S. federal elections. Analyses were conducted on nationwide polls pertaining to 435 House of Representatives elections and on state-specific polls pertaining to 34 Senate elections. Analyses compared voting intentions before and after the initial Ebola outbreak and assessed correlations between Internet search activity for the term "Ebola" and voting intentions. Results revealed that (a) the psychological salience of Ebola was associated with increas...
Source: Psychological Science - May 8, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Beall, A. T., Hofer, M. K., Schaller, M. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Corrigendum: Exogenous Attention Enables Perceptual Learning
Szpiro, S. F. A., & Carrasco, M. (2015). Exogenous attention enables perceptual learning. Psychological Science, 26, 1854–1862. (Original DOI: 10.1177/0956797615598976)
In the second paragraph of the Testing Sessions section of this article, the t value for the between-group difference in spatial-frequency differences was incorrectly reported as 9.49, p > .1, rather than 0.95, p > .1. The sentence should read as follows:
There was no significant difference between groups for the orientation differences, t(12) = 1.51, p > .1, or for the spatial-frequency differences, t(12) = 0.95, p > .1.
Thus, the con...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Tags: Corrigendum Source Type: research
The Brains Tendency to Bind Audiovisual Signals Is Stable but Not General
We report for the first time that individuals’ binding tendencies are stable across time but are task-specific. These results provide evidence against the hypothesis that sensory integration is governed by a single, global parameter in the brain. (Source: Psychological Science)
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Odegaard, B., Shams, L. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
Dynamic Engagement of Cognitive Control Modulates Recovery From Misinterpretation During Real-Time Language Processing
Speech unfolds swiftly, yet listeners keep pace by rapidly assigning meaning to what they hear. Sometimes, though, initial interpretations turn out to be wrong. How do listeners revise misinterpretations of language input moment by moment to avoid comprehension errors? Cognitive control may play a role by detecting when processing has gone awry and then initiating behavioral adjustments accordingly. However, no research to date has investigated a cause-and-effect interplay between cognitive-control engagement and the overriding of erroneous interpretations in real time. Using a novel cross-task paradigm, we showed that Str...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Hsu, N. S., Novick, J. M. Tags: Research Reports Source Type: research
Attention Alters Perceived Attractiveness
Can attention alter the impression of a face? Previous studies showed that attention modulates the appearance of lower-level visual features. For instance, attention can make a simple stimulus appear to have higher contrast than it actually does. We tested whether attention can also alter the perception of a higher-order property—namely, facial attractiveness. We asked participants to judge the relative attractiveness of two faces after summoning their attention to one of the faces using a briefly presented visual cue. Across trials, participants judged the attended face to be more attractive than the same face when ...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Störmer, V. S., Alvarez, G. A. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
When Is an Adolescent an Adult? Assessing Cognitive Control in Emotional and Nonemotional Contexts
An individual is typically considered an adult at age 18, although the age of adulthood varies for different legal and social policies. A key question is how cognitive capacities relevant to these policies change with development. The current study used an emotional go/no-go paradigm and functional neuroimaging to assess cognitive control under sustained states of negative and positive arousal in a community sample of one hundred ten 13- to 25-year-olds from New York City and Los Angeles. The results showed diminished cognitive performance under brief and prolonged negative emotional arousal in 18- to 21-year-olds relative...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Cohen, A. O., Breiner, K., Steinberg, L., Bonnie, R. J., Scott, E. S., Taylor-Thompson, K. A., Rudolph, M. D., Chein, J., Richeson, J. A., Heller, A. S., Silverman, M. R., Dellarco, D. V., Fair, D. A., Galvan, A., Casey, B. J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Infants Understand Others Needs
Infants begin to help other individuals in the second year of life. However, it is still unclear whether early helping behavior is based on an understanding of other individuals’ needs and is thus motivated prosocially. In the present eye-tracking study, 9- to 18-month-old infants (N = 71) saw a character in need of help, unable to reach its goal because of an obstacle, and a second character that was able to achieve a goal on its own. When a third individual (a helper) initiated an action, the infants expected the helper to help the character in need (as indicated during the anticipatory-looking and violation-of-exp...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Köster, M., Ohmer, X., Nguyen, T. D., Kärtner, J. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Supportive Family Environments Ameliorate the Link Between Racial Discrimination and Epigenetic Aging: A Replication Across Two Longitudinal Cohorts
This study tested the hypothesis that supportive family environments during adolescence buffer exposure to racial discrimination, reducing its impact on biological weathering and its manifestation in cellular aging. Perceived racial discrimination, support in the family environment, and confounder variables were assessed for 3 consecutive years across adolescence in two independent cohorts of African American youth from rural Georgia. DNA was extracted from peripheral blood mononuclear cells collected during young adulthood. Patterns of methylation were used to index the epigenetic ages of these cells and the extent to whi...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Brody, G. H., Miller, G. E., Yu, T., Beach, S. R. H., Chen, E. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Think Fast, Feel Fine, Live Long: A 29-Year Study of Cognition, Health, and Survival in Middle-Aged and Older Adults
In a 29-year study of 6,203 individuals ranging in age from 41 to 96 years at initial assessment, we evaluated the relative and combined influence of 65 mortality risk factors, which included sociodemographic variables, lifestyle attributes, medical indices, and multiple cognitive abilities. Reductions in mortality risk were most associated with higher self-rated health, female gender, fewer years as a smoker, and smaller decrements in processing speed with age. Thus, two psychological variables—subjective health status and processing speed—were among the top predictors of survival. We suggest that these psycho...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Aichele, S., Rabbitt, P., Ghisletta, P. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
A Perceptual Pathway to Bias: Interracial Exposure Reduces Abrupt Shifts in Real-Time Race Perception That Predict Mixed-Race Bias
In two national samples, we examined the influence of interracial exposure in one’s local environment on the dynamic process underlying race perception and its evaluative consequences. Using a mouse-tracking paradigm, we found in Study 1 that White individuals with low interracial exposure exhibited a unique effect of abrupt, unstable White-Black category shifting during real-time perception of mixed-race faces, consistent with predictions from a neural-dynamic model of social categorization and computational simulations. In Study 2, this shifting effect was replicated and shown to predict a trust bias against mixed-...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Freeman, J. B., Pauker, K., Sanchez, D. T. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
For 5-Month-Old Infants, Melodies Are Social
For 1 to 2 weeks, 5-month-old infants listened at home to one of two novel songs with identical lyrics and rhythms, but different melodies; the song was sung by a parent, emanated from a toy, or was sung live by a friendly but unfamiliar adult first in person and subsequently via interactive video. We then tested the infants’ selective attention to two novel individuals after one sang the familiar song and the other sang the unfamiliar song. Infants who had experienced a parent singing looked longer at the new person who had sung the familiar melody than at the new person who had sung the unfamiliar melody, and the a...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Mehr, S. A., Song, L. A., Spelke, E. S. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Taming the White Bear: Initial Costs and Eventual Benefits of Distractor Inhibition
Previous research indicates that prior information about a target feature, such as its color, can speed search. Can search also be speeded by knowing what a target will not look like? In the two experiments reported here, participants searched for target letters. Prior to viewing search displays, participants were prompted either with the color in which one or more nontarget letters would appear (ignore trials) or with no information about the search display (neutral trials). Critically, when participants were given one consistent color to ignore for the duration of the experiment, compared with when they were given no inf...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Cunningham, C. A., Egeth, H. E. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
I Think, Therefore Eyeblink: The Importance of Contingency Awareness in Conditioning
Can conditioning occur without conscious awareness of the contingency between the stimuli? We trained participants on two separate reaction time tasks that ensured attention to the experimental stimuli. The tasks were then interleaved to create a differential Pavlovian contingency between visual stimuli from one task and an airpuff stimulus from the other. Many participants were unaware of the contingency and failed to show differential eyeblink conditioning, despite attending to a salient stimulus that was contingently and contiguously related to the airpuff stimulus over many trials. Manipulation of awareness by verbal i...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Weidemann, G., Satkunarajah, M., Lovibond, P. F. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Self-Affirmation Activates the Ventral Striatum: A Possible Reward-Related Mechanism for Self-Affirmation
Self-affirmation (reflecting on important personal values) has been shown to have a range of positive effects; however, the neural basis of self-affirmation is not known. Building on studies showing that thinking about self-preferences activates neural reward pathways, we hypothesized that self-affirmation would activate brain reward circuitry during functional MRI (fMRI) studies. In Study 1, with college students, making judgments about important personal values during self-affirmation activated neural reward regions (i.e., ventral striatum), whereas making preference judgments that were not self-relevant did not. Study 2...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Dutcher, J. M., Creswell, J. D., Pacilio, L. E., Harris, P. R., Klein, W. M. P., Levine, J. M., Bower, J. E., Muscatell, K. A., Eisenberger, N. I. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
Economic Insecurity Increases Physical Pain
The past decade has seen a rise in both economic insecurity and frequency of physical pain. The current research reveals a causal connection between these two growing and consequential social trends. In five studies, we found that economic insecurity produced physical pain and reduced pain tolerance. In a sixth study, with data from 33,720 geographically diverse households across the United States, economic insecurity predicted consumption of over-the-counter painkillers. The link between economic insecurity and physical pain emerged when people experienced the insecurity personally (unemployment), when they were in an ins...
Source: Psychological Science - April 12, 2016 Category: Psychiatry & Psychology Authors: Chou, E. Y., Parmar, B. L., Galinsky, A. D. Tags: Research Articles Source Type: research
