Each time we enter a new environment, we’re confronted by a flood of information. Our perception of a place might be influenced by the lighting, noise, the number of exits—and the occupants. When we perceive those people as symbolically threatening to our values and beliefs, whether because of their race, sexuality, political affiliation, or another identifier, we may also overestimate their presence, according to research by Rebecca Ponce de Leon (Columbia University), Jacqueline R. Rifkin (University of Missouri, Kansas City), and Richard P. Larrick (Duke University) in Psychological Science. 

This perception can cause us to perceive symbolically threatening groups as dominating an environment, even when they are in the numerical minority. 

“People commonly exaggerate the presence of certain groups simply because they are perceived as ideologically different,” wrote Ponce de Leon and colleagues. “These biased perceptions may in turn sustain intergroup conflict and the disempowerment of marginalized groups.” 

In the first of six studies, 987 non-Black participants reported the extent to which they perceived Black people as threatening “traditional societal values,” as well as how open they would be to living in a community where half of their neighbors were Black and to having a family member marry a Black person. Participants who perceived Black people as more symbolically threatening were more likely to believe that their proportion of the population would increase significantly over the next 25 years. 

Ponce de Leon and colleagues found evidence of a similar effect in a sample of 294 participants who were asked to imagine that they worked for a hypothetical company at which 25 out of 100 employees surveyed reported that they were either Black or gay. When asked what percentage of the company’s 500-person workforce belonged to either group, non-Black or heterosexual participants who reported perceiving Black or gay coworkers as more symbolically threatening were also more likely to overestimate the percentage of employees in that group, despite the fact that the survey data suggested a clear logical answer: 25%. 

To demonstrate the causal relationship between symbolic threat and overestimation of a group’s presence, the researchers presented 368 heterosexual participants with a similar scenario in a further study. This time, participants were informed that 30 out of 100 employees had reported that they either were gay or had green eyes. When asked to project what proportion of the 500-person company would be of either group, however, participants were significantly more likely to overestimate the presence of gay employees than those with green eyes. 

The researchers found evidence of a similar effect across the next three studies as well. When presented with a population map of a fictitious county, participants indicated that it contained more “immigrant neighborhoods” if they were informed that a local immigrant group had values and beliefs “threatening to American culture” than if the group was described as nonthreatening. Participants were also more likely to describe a restaurant in which a portion of customers wore clothing with a fictitious political (pro-choice or pro-life) group’s logo as a pro-choice or pro-life establishment if those beliefs conflicted with their own. 

These findings suggest that error-management theory, which states that physical threats can lead to heightened perceptions of group pervasiveness, may also apply to symbolic threats, the researchers wrote. 

“When faced with a possible threat, people are highly averse to false negatives because they are far more costly than false positives,” Ponce de Leon and colleagues explained. “It is less costly to have a smoke alarm that falsely detects smoke than it is to have a smoke alarm that fails to detect fire. Because of these cost asymmetries, people often overperceive threatening information.” 

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or comment below.

Reference 

Ponce de Leon, R., Rifkin, J. R., & Larrick, R. P. (2022). “They’re everywhere!”: Symbolically threatening groups seem more pervasive than nonthreatening groups. Psychological Science. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976211060009  

While the past several decades can rightly be called the “information age,” the rise of social media platforms makes is seem like the past few years could be considered the misinformation age. The viral nature of alternative facts, rumors, and planned disinformation campaigns has taken its toll on global politics, the economy, and healthcare. If only we could be told when we were reading “misinformation” that might just solve our problems! Or perhaps not. Does knowing that a news story is false really inoculate us against its misinformation?

Taking a new look at misinformation is “Max” Bai, a post-doctoral scholar in the Polarization and Social Change Lab as part of the Stanford Impact Labs. who presented new research at the 2022 APS Annual Convention earlier this year.

Unedited Transcript:

Blue (00:13)

While the past several decades can rightly be called the information age, the rise of social media platforms makes it seem like the past few years could be be considered the misinformation age. The viral nature of alternative facts, rumors and planned disinformation campaigns has taken its toll on global politics, the economy and healthcare. If only we could be told when we were reading misinformation that might solve all our problems. Or perhaps not. Does knowing that a news story is false really inoculate us against misinformation? This is Charles Blue with the Association for Psychological Science. And to explain one piece of this puzzle is Max By, a postdoctoral scholar in the Polarization and Social Change lab as part of the Stanford Impact Labs, who presented new research at the 2022 aPS annual convention earlier this year. Welcome to Under the Cortex.

Bai (01:15)

Thank you very much for the opportunity. Glad to be here.

Blue (01:18)

Can you explain to us in very simple terms what you found about misinformation nd why you’re researching it?

Bai (01:26)

Yeah. So in the current psychological intervention research, a lot of studies on how we can combat and address this information issue and people’s exposure to it is to help people recognize the missing information as missing information. So telling people or helping people to recognize the fake news as fake, at some point I just started to wonder, does this thing really help? And to what degree this thing can play a role in our overall strategy of combating misinformation? In particular, how it’s related to some other alternative approach such as like a counter moderation or using algorithm to potentially rank lower the misinformation in people’s environment. In the beginning, as a social psychologist, I tend to use experimental methods and look at how people respond to information like this. In one set of experiments, what I found is that by just like blatantly tell people and ensure people that what I’m showing them is missing information and fake news and things like that, are people still going to be affected by it? Are people going to believe the content that are related to it? And are people’s attitudes or behavioral intentions to be shifted around based on what I’m saying in the misinformation, again, the misinformation people know about it is not real.

Bai (02:45)

And in the end it sounds like people still are, their beliefs are still shifted around and their political attitudes really due to are still changed. So to me that sounds like it’s suggesting that, well, probably just by telling people and helping people recognize misinformation and misinformation is not going to be the entire part of the overall strategy. And sometimes we really need to gravitate towards a lot of strategies, are focusing on the macro level things, the things about reducing the presence of misinformation in our environment. In the beginning, it seems counterintuitive.

Blue (03:19)

If I were told that I’m just going to be reading essentially fiction or something that has less than factual information, I would disregard. I might read it for the amusement’s sake. But what you’re saying is even with that information, the people in your study, when asked later, expressed some agreement or some recognition that what they heard was true. Is that what you found out?

Bai (03:46)

Yeah. So I think a lot of it really depends on what people are going to do with the misinformation once they read about the false nature of that misinformation. If people are just like, stop reading and not even looking at the content or the headline, people are not going to be exposed to anything and therefore probably no change going to ever happen on their belief in attitude. But usually a lot of times when we’re seeing something in our social media feed, regardless of false, we’re not like, our attention just like, automatically drift toward it. And sometimes they can still potentially change our belief in attitude.

Blue (04:24)

Could you explain a little bit about how you actually constructed this research?

Bai (04:29)

Yeah, so I did a couple of studies. There are five experiments in their total. I have participants just, like, read a sentence, something along the line of like, okay, what you’re going to read is entirely false and made up. And also to make sure that participants understood that it is not real, they also have to type down their understanding. They couldn’t just copy and paste. They really have to type down so they understood it. Then they read one of the three versions of a false news headline. Again, all of them are entirely made up. In one version, it talks about how eating black pepper can help people prevent getting cold. One talks about how eating black pepper can lead people to have cold. And another one is something that’s just not relevant to the black pepper. So that’s designated control condition. Then I ask participants how likely they will increase or decrease their eating for black pepper in the future. So what the result shows is that people still indicated they wanted to eat more black pepper if they were in the condition that says black pepper is helping people to prevent COVID-19. And people indicated they wanted to eat less black pepper if they were in the causation where the article says that eating black pepper can lead to getting cold, 19 and the participants for sure understood what’s not real.

Blue (05:46)

So you found that even knowing it was false, people change their behavior.

Bai (05:50)

Well, in that particular study, it’s what we call the behavior intention. So it is just a question of people indicating how much they wanted to eat more and less in the future. It was not really measuring about the exact behavior that people were going to do.

Blue (06:05)

So you had a fake news article. Was it a full article or just a headline?

Bai (06:11)

Oh, yeah. So in that particular experiment, what I had is just a short Twitter like posting. So it is a headline with just like two, three sentences or maybe a couple more with a picture and that turned out to be by self sufficient to move people’s attitude.

Blue (06:28)

Well, that seems to make sense because if you had to have them read a full article there has to be some explanation of why this is or how it works or studies that have been done. But in this case it’s just a very simple statement. Black pepper either leads to covet or helps prevent COVID. Did you have the chance to go. Back and check this later down the line? So this was just an initial report after reading this and they responded yes or no far more. Do we have any information about any more ingrained impact of misinformation?

Bai (07:01)

Right.

Bai (07:02)

For that particular study I didn’t do any of the longitudinal components so I couldn’t really tell whether it actually shaped the behavior down the road or how long it lasted. But in a different side of the experiment I actually did longitudinal things. So in that experiment I did the same thing with telling people they were going to read something that’s made up that’s false and they read one of the two versions of the article. One article claimed that Republicans are more supportive of the smoking ban in the public places and the other version talks about how Democrats are more supportive of doing this than Republican. And I looked at participants own belief in how much Republican versus the Democrats are supportive of this policy and that being changed after the exposure, not just immediately after the exposure, but that was something that was observable two days later and again nine days later. And what I think is even more interesting is that I also asked participants how likely they themselves will want to support spanning smoking in the public places. And what I discovered is that people’s attitude towards it diverge based on their own political partisanship.

Bai (08:15)

So Republican people became more supportive of it if they were reading the article that talks about how other Republicans are more supportive of it, whereas the Democrats are on the reverse trajectory. They become more supportive of it if they were in the other condition that talked about how Democrats are more supportive of this. And this was something that’s also temporarily enduring. So that was something that’s observable two days later and again nine days later. So that gives us a little more evidence that this is not something that just like change your attitude in the moment but that’s something that could even lead to a temporary enduring attitude or change.

Blue (08:52)

To make sure I understand this question about whether or not you support banning smoking in indoor spaces or public spaces, this also was something where people were aware that it was fake news or was this just a general statement and they had to process as far as it was related to their politics.

Bai (09:13)

Right? So this was something that participants. They were also thoroughly instructed. It was something that’s entirely made up. There’s nothing really in there that’s remarkable. That even though people don’t know that they were reading something that was a fake comment about a political party, depending on their own party, it actually changed, at least for a week or so, what they felt about a particular social issue. Is there anything in this research that you’ve done that actually surprised you that you kind of know people are susceptible, but is there something that you uncovered that was not anticipated?

Bai (09:51)

I think that result itself is something that is quite interesting to me and quite surprising because in most of the psychological research you usually don’t see things that can last for a couple of days. Like if you can get a manipulation work in the same session, that will be great enough. And this is something that can last for a couple of days. And what it also surprised me is that it has like a very to me, it has a very frightening implication to the democracy itself, essentially suggest that there is a very easy way for people to create political division where there is none in the beginning. And it’s not something that’s just like creating in just one moment. It is something that can pick up for a while to fade away potentially. And if this is something that political actors with bad intention try to do in the electorate, they can very easily just create a real division among the citizens that just self perpetuate over time. In that study, I also just didn’t deliberately choose to not use any real issue that is harvesting the environment. And some people might say, oh okay, people probably didn’t have any attitude and belief on this in the beginning, but I think that’s precisely what is so scary about the implications. Because a lot of times when we’re looking at a novel social issue that is not yet politicized, like COVID 19 in the beginning, just like a very minor division among the polio elites, plus some repeated mission that is in people’s environment that can buy itself just perpetuate over time and exacerbate and widen the division between political partisans.

Blue (11:33)

Seems like you could even pick a topic that is completely benign and may have absolutely no prior feelings toward and wouldn’t even consider a political issue. But with this approach you could turn it into a wedge issue, hitting two sides against each other, even if they knew that the information was made up. It seems very easy then to manipulate people when politics is involved. Would you expect a similar enduring factor if it weren’t political? Say for example with your black pepper example? Is there something different in the way people process or emotionally connect to an issue that makes it uniquely powerful when it’s a political comment?

Bai (12:18)

Right. I think about politics in this context it is pretty special because people in America in particular are very motivated by their political identity. It is a combination of the group identity motivation and other psychological motivation, including sweat perception, epistemic need and all of that.

Blue (12:39)

You have a couple of very interesting results. One about people immediately saying whether or not they’ll choose to slightly modify their diet depending on how it impacts COVID. The other is creating a wedge issue where none existed before. Where does this research lead? What’s the next step for us to understand so we have a little better understanding of how fake news, how misinformation, can so easily elicit a response even when we know that it’s not true, right?

Bai (13:12)

Yeah. I think generally in the whole field of social science, more needs to be done about how to reduce people’s exposure to misinformation in the beginning, how to reduce their presence in people’s environment. That would be a lot more important in many ways than helping people to recognize them once they are already in people’s environment. Of course, helping people to recognize misinformation as fake is something that is better than nothing. But within psychology, I think also what can be done about just like helping people to reduce their sharing of missing information. A friend of mine was actually recently doing some work on this. I think he found something like people were engaged in this thing called mindless sharing. So they look at their social media feed, they see something and without knowing or verifying the authenticity of the content, they just go ahead and click sharing. And that’s one of what I think the most dangerous type of online behavior people can engage in. And I think also in the future, probably psychological researchers could engage in more for intervention research that reduces that kind of thing like sharing content that are false or misleading.

Blue (14:19)

So the idea is essentially nip it in the bud before someone has a chance to share it because once it’s essentially out of the box, it’s much harder to counteract even if you are able to flag things as misinformation.

Bai (14:37)

Right, exactly.

Blue (14:39)

Well, I guess we do have our work cut out for us as we move into the future, particularly with the upcoming elections in the United States. I’m certain we will have our fair share of less than accurate details. But if the idea then is identify it, help people identify it, and in the long run reduce the exposure to it, that sounds like as good a start as any. This has been Charles Blue with under the Cortex and I have been speaking with Max By who is with the Polarization and Social Change Lab at Stanford Impact Labs and who was one of the featured Flashtalk presenters at the 2022 APS Annual Convention earlier this year. Thanks very much for joining me.

Speaker 3 (15:20)

Thank you very much.

Speaker 2 (16:14)

Seeing news of mass shooting after mass shooting can produce both a stress response and a cynical sense that nothing will change.

…

The sites of mass shootings have become instantly recognizable markers of tragedy in the geography of recent American history: There’s Columbine, Parkland, Aurora, the Pulse nightclub in Orlando, Sandy Hook, and Virginia Tech, among many others. And now there’s the Tops market in Buffalo, and Uvalde.

Each of these events has its own particulars—and many shootings, like the (at least) 14 over Memorial Day weekend, get scant individual attention—but together they form a gutting pattern. Every successive update, every push notification and TV news alert, feels entirely preventable yet sadly inevitable. Being exposed to news of shooting after shooting, with no apparent sign that anything will change, can produce a pair of dispiriting psychological outcomes: Each additional event seems to come with a more intense stress response, while at the same time leaving people feeling even more helpless about the prospect of ending this grim cycle.

A horrific news event is a tragedy for those it directly affects, but simply reading and watching coverage of it is associated with an uptick in symptoms of acute stress, such as intrusive thoughts about the event and avoiding reminders of it. For instance, one study published in 2014 found that the more coverage people saw of the Boston Marathon bombings, the more such symptoms they experienced. Dana Rose Garfin, an adjunct professor of nursing and public health at UC Irvine and a co-author of the study, told me that some news consumers exhibited more symptoms than even those who were present at the Boston Marathon or knew someone who was, suggesting the power of being exposed repeatedly to the news.

…

Over 14 million older adults live alone in the U.S., according to the Administration on Aging^[1]. Unfortunately, loneliness and isolation are serious issues with deleterious health implications. Both are linked to decreased physical and mental health, as well as increased mortality. In fact, The National Institute on Aging notes loneliness and isolation can lead to higher risk of depression in people as they age.

Understanding how loneliness and isolation manifest in real-world scenarios can help you spot the signs in yourself or those you love and know how to help.

…

Do your facial movements broadcast your emotions to other people? If you think the answer is yes, think again. This question is under contentious debate. Some experts maintain that people around the world make specific, recognizable faces that express certain emotions, such as smiling in happiness, scowling in anger and gasping with widened eyes in fear. They point to hundreds of studies that appear to demonstrate that smiles, frowns, and so on are universal facial expressions of emotion. They also often cite Charles Darwin’s 1872 book The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals to support the claim that universal expressions evolved by natural selection.

Other scientists point to a mountain of counterevidence showing that facial movements during emotions vary too widely to be universal beacons of emotional meaning. People may smile in hatred when plotting their enemy’s downfall and scowl in delight when they hear a bad pun. In Melanesian culture, a wide-eyed gasping face is a symbol of aggression, not fear. These experts say the alleged universal expressions just represent cultural stereotypes. To be clear, both sides in the debate acknowledge that facial movements vary for a given emotion; the disagreement is about whether there is enough uniformity to detect what someone is feeling.

This debate is not just academic; the outcome has serious consequences. Today you can be turned down for a job because a so-called emotion-reading system watching you on camera applied artificial intelligence to evaluate your facial movements unfavorably during an interview. In a U.S. court of law, a judge or jury may sometimes hand down a harsher sentence, even death, if they think a defendant’s face showed a lack of remorse. Children in preschools across the country are taught to recognize smiles as happiness, scowls as anger and other expressive stereotypes from books, games and posters of disembodied faces. And for children on the autism spectrum, some of whom have difficulty perceiving emotion in others, these teachings do not translate to better communication.

…

The winners of the 2022 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions represent some of the brightest and most innovative young psychological scientists in the world. In a series of mini-episodes, Under the Cortex talks with each winner about their research and goals.

Today we hear from Brian Anderson (Texas A&M University) about his research on what captures human attention and how that influences behavior. 

Learn more about our sponsor by visiting https://macmillanlearning.com/psychsessions. 

Transcript:

Charles Blue (00:18)

This is Charles Blue with the Association for Psychological Science with the final in our series of mini episodes, talking to the winners of the APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. Today I have the pleasure of talking with Brian Anderson with Texas A&M University about his work on attention and how it can evolve into obsession. I think the best way to get started is if you just tell us a little bit about your current field of research.

Anderson (00:49)

I consider myself a perception scientist, mostly a vision scientist and a cognitive neuroscientist. I want to know what people tend to look at when they view the world in front of them and why and more specifically, how the way they process their world changes. With learning. What you pay attention to tells us something very fundamental about your mental life, since what you pay attention to determines what information you have access to and are considering when you reason about your world and decide how you should act. I’m particularly interested in how what you direct your attention to can become ingrained and habitual to the point that you selectively process certain kinds of stimuli whether you want to or not. This sort of phenomenology plays a big role in addiction and other unhealthy and undesired habits. I want to understand how it happens that what someone pays attention to can go against their conscious will, how that contributes to unhealthy decisions like persistent drug abuse and what we can do about it.

Charles Blue (01:49)

Are there any other examples for that? That’s kind of an interesting concept. So what I pay attention to, whether I want to or not, like if I happen to be trying to get work done but there’s some sports game going on in the room next to me, I divert my attention. That is something that will develop later in life or become habitual. What’s the connection there that you’re really trying to find? Am I missing something?

Anderson (02:16)

Yeah. So it’s basically how your prior experience is going to cause certain things to draw your attention and those will draw your attention, it turns out, in circumstances when you’re happy to have that happen, in circumstances where you would much rather ignore it. The TV on in the background is a good example. So if you’re a sports junkie, maybe you really love watching that at home and it’s perfectly fine for you, but then you go on a date. So the person that you are absolutely compelled to try to convince is the center of your attention is consistently irked by the fact that you’re looking past their head to the game on the television in the background. And it’s that kind of I know I shouldn’t be doing this, I know I should be looking at the person in front of me, but man, that game is drawing my attention just like it does at home and I really love whatever sport is on the TV. That’s the kind of thing where looking at that right there and right now that’s conflicting with my goals. But there’s something about that rewarding experience I get whenever I watch it that just keeps me coming back whether it’s good for me in this situation or not.

Charles Blue (03:14)

Throughout your research then, have you come up with anything that’s uniquely insightful in your opinion? What is it that we now know about this connection that we didn’t know before?

Anderson (03:23)

Well, my research really helped establish just how involuntary the orientation of attention can be to bother related and later in my career, punishment related. So when I got into attention research, the model of attentional control that stood for decades really claimed that what people pay attention to is a joint product of really two factors in underlying control mechanisms. One for your goals and intentions and another for the physical attributes of objects and specifically their perceptual salience or conspicuity like how bright they are. Under this model, you certainly tend to preferentially attend or pay attention to reward related stimuli. But it’s because you’re motivated to do that. Reward shapes your goals and intentions. So when you’re in the restaurant it’s like, well, I want to watch the game. That’s why people pay attention to the game. But that does a poor job of accounting for when it’s distracting you from this wonderful person you want to impress in front of you. And so while reward certainly kind of has that role, my research shows that kind of intentional side of reward can’t be the full story. And the same goes for why people attend aversibly, conditioned stimulus and things that they’re afraid of.

Anderson (04:31)

People are distracted by those kinds of stimuli even when they’re completely past irrelevant. They’re no longer predictive of anything. They’re not rewarding to you in this moment or haven’t been for a little while. There’s nothing about them that causes them to stand out more than anything else from the background in terms of how physically bright or sailing they are. What my research shows is that these kinds of previously rewarded stimuli will draw your attention when everything about historical theories of attention says they shouldn’t. Which gives us pretty compelling evidence that you really can’t help it. So let me give you a really compelling experimental example of how this works, please. Let’s say I just show you an object. So right here in my office, I’m sitting on my desk, a tissue box. I’m going to pick it up. If I gave you money every time you looked away from it, can’t look at it. You got to look away from it to get money. What do you think that would do you?

Charles Blue (05:21)

I’d be forced to stare at the darn thing because it’s like whatever you do, don’t think about elephants kind of situation.

Anderson (05:27)

Yeah, in that particular situation. But I could throw a little twist on there and I can give you lots of practice. So you look away from it. I pay you. You look away from it. I pay you. You look away from it, I pay you. You do that over and over and over again.

Charles Blue (05:42)

I’d be getting really good at it.

Anderson (05:43)

Yeah, you think you’d be really good at looking away from it. You think everything in your body, everything in your brain would propel you away from it. But it turns out it’s the exact opposite. The more that I pay you to look away, and the more you get paid for looking away, the more you develop a tendency to look at it, because your brain is just wired to orient you, to rewarding things, whether it’s good for you or not. And so let me throw another twist on that. Let’s say I show you the tushy box, and every time you look at it, I shock you, and it hurts a little bit. Not much. A little bit. It’s very uncomfortable. What do you think that would do to you?

Charles Blue (06:18)

I would definitely try to look away at that point. I like to avoid pain.

Anderson (06:23)

Don’t do that. It’s like a slap on the wrist. Right. For most kinds of behavior, that’s exactly what happens. You do the thing that causes you to experience an aversive event less frequently. It’s just basic reinforcement learning, but it turns out, with attention, the more I shock you for looking at it, the more you ironically tend to look at it.

Charles Blue (06:44)

And I’m really trying not to look at it right now.

Anderson (06:46)

Yeah, it’s very effective. And that’s that white bear, right? That’s a different phenomenon. Don’t look at it, and it causes you to look at it. We actually have really clever ways, experimentally, of ruling that out. We don’t tell people, don’t look at the box, because that will have an ironic effect like you hinted at earlier. But we can take that out of the equation and show, the more I shock you for looking at it, the more you tend to look at it, because your brain is wired to orientate the threat, and you just do that automatically whether you want to or not.

Charles Blue (07:17)

So there’s a shifting of attention. But this is not anything that’s related to people with attention deficit disorder or anything that is, I guess, would be considered slightly away from what we would consider normal. This is normal. This is the way that the human brain just naturally perceives the world and gets behaviors ingrained.

Charles Blue (07:38)

Yeah, absolutely. That’s one of the things that I found most fascinating in my career, is that when I got into this, it was known that attention can have this kind of pattern sometimes, but it was thought to be the consequence of a broken attention system and addiction. So when you’re addicted to a substance, it’s not uncommon to have a really difficult time ignoring cues for the drug, even though you want to be absent and you know it’s bad for you. You don’t want to keep going back. Attention just keeps going back. And we kind of knew that for some time, but it was only in the context of addiction. And people just kind of assume that, oh, this is what addiction does to you. It breaks you in kind of interesting ways, and that is unique to addiction. But it turns out through a lot of the research that I and my colleagues have done, that actually what you experience with drug dependence in that case is just drugs having working on you in the same kind of way that reward works on anybody else. It may be amplified by drugs because it’s a very powerful reward experience. But the process by which that affects you is a normal, healthy process that drugs are co opting. There the kind of way that everybody’s attention system works.

Charles Blue (08:45)

So looking to the future then, if you needed to advance this research, where are the gaps? What don’t we yet know? What would you like to be able to find out to take this to the next level of understanding and maybe even some sort of therapeutic intervention if it were necessary?

Anderson (09:02)

Yeah, I think you hit the nail on the head there. The main challenge I see in my field these days is what to do about these kinds of attentional biases, especially in the case of addiction, anxiety disorders, other conditions in which attentional biases contribute to mental health issues. You can’t get your eyes off the drug. What do we do about it? Approaches to attention and bias modification have a dismal history in my field. They really just don’t work well at all. I don’t have a good solution right now, and I don’t know anyone else who does either. But I think we’re making progress. And at the very least, I can give you some really good insights into why some historical approaches for intentional bias modification and addiction and other conditions didn’t work so well and maybe a little bit better on what to try moving forward as a potentially more promising approach.

Charles Blue (09:50)

Sorry, I had my mic on you. Maybe if you could just point to something that we can do. Is there something that people in the public or therapists or people can actually work towards to help break this unhealthy attention bias?

Anderson (10:07)

Yeah. So don’t reward people for ignoring something. If you do that, you’re just going to wind up making it all the more attention grabbing. So that’s a bad thing to do. So don’t give them incentives to try to practice ignoring something. You just make it all the more attention grabbing.

Charles Blue (10:23)

Something like if you have children and they want to play video games, you don’t say, well, if you stop playing video games for a week or if you stop at 06:00, I’ll give you a dollar every night. That’s a bad idea.

Charles Blue (10:35)

Wind up making it all the more attention grabbing. And don’t overtly punish people for paying attention to it either, because that just makes it an aversively, conditioned stimulus that’s also going to be attention grabbing. And so if you see your kids looking at stuff you’d rather have not have them look at, if you punish them right sharply right then and there, it just makes it all the more attention grabbing. Attention is a habit driven thing. So what do you want to do? You want to create new habits that can compete with those old habits. So don’t think about what you want to do to make something less attention grabbing. Think about what you want to do to make something else more attention grabbing that can compete for your attention. When you have that thing in your environment you want to ignore. Attention is a competitive process. So my recommendation, based on my findings so far is rather than try to fight against that, plug into it and train attention to favor some other stimulus through reward learning and other kinds of habit learning in order to create a more effective competitor for the things that you don’t want to pay attention to.

Charles Blue (11:29)

I’d like to thank Brian Anderson very much for chatting with us. This has been under the Cortex. Thanks again for your time.

Anderson (11:35)

Thank you.

n a time when traumatic events such as pandemics, shootings and loss seem never-ending, mindfulness can be a tool for feeling capable during periods of uncertainty.

“Mindfulness is a collection of practices nowadays, aimed to help most of us cultivate moment-to-moment awareness,” said Monica Vermani, a clinical psychologist based in Toronto and author of “A Deeper Wellness: Conquering Stress, Mood, Anxiety and Traumas.”

“You’re not only aware of your body; you’re aware of your surroundings and your world,” she added. “It forces you to pay attention to life (rather) than get caught up in your head with anxious thoughts, worries and ruminating about the future.”

…

On vital measures that predict later success in school and life, small children in the U.S. do worse than kids in comparable countries. This distressing information comes from an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) study of five-year-olds. For years the OECD has been examining the academic achievement of 15-year-old students from around the world, and recently it extended this work to the younger group. On average, American children had lower literacy and numeracy scores, poorer self-regulation skills, and engaged in fewer acts of cooperation, kindness and other prosocial behaviors than did children in England and Estonia, the other countries studied. Just about the only bright spot was that U.S. children were roughly equivalent to their international peers on some—but not all—social-emotional measures.

These findings did not get the attention they deserved, because they were announced in March 2020, a few days after the World Health Organization declared that COVID had become a pandemic. But they did not come as a surprise—other recent research has shown that about half of American children are not “on track” in at least one critical area of school readiness. Because the OECD report looked at kids who were just starting school, it was a powerful reminder that we have lost sight of something basic: Learning begins on the first day of life—and not the first day of class. The earliest years of a child’s life are full of opportunity. A child’s brain will never be more receptive to experience, more plastic, than it is during this pivotal time. Nearly 85 percent of brain growth occurs between birth and the age of three. During this period one million neural connections per second are formed.

…

Over the past two years, I like to think I’ve gotten practiced at a type of wretched multivariable calculus: pandemic decision-making. The process starts with the blue bubble of a texted invitation or a date flagged on the calendar—a party Saturday, a sibling’s high-school basketball game, a second cousin’s middle-school Quidditch match, a cross-country flight for a grandparent’s 90th birthday. Then other factors pile on like dog hair accumulates on a white couch.

What’s the transmission rate right now and is that number even reliable, if it’s reported at all? If I get sick, what’s the likeliest outcome, given how long it’s been since my last jab, age and other risk factors? How many attendees will be at an event? What do we know about the newest entry in our ever-expanding alphabet of variants? What is the CDC even advising about masks these days? Would I miss anything important if I caught Covid? How badly do I want to go?

…

Depression has long been known to interfere with our ability to set realistic expectations, casting a pessimistic pall over the future. More recently, however, researchers have started to link the negative outlook brought about by depression to an impaired ability to update expectations.  

The cognitive inflexibility found in people with depression may contribute to a form of “cognitive immunization” against positive feedback, wrote Tobias Kube (University of Koblenz-Landau) and colleagues in Clinical Psychological Science. This can cause people to disregard information that conflicts with their negative expectations, but findings on how exactly this occurs are mixed. 

Previous findings, the researchers explained, have suggested that people with depression may be likelier to perceive positive feedback as lacking credibility, causing them to maintain low expectations of future events. Kube and colleagues’ work indicates that although people with depression may, in fact, perceive positive feedback related to a specific experience as credible, they’re less likely to generalize that feedback as an indicator of future success. 

“Our results suggest that people with depression use positive feedback to update their expectations in a specific task but have difficulty generalizing this positive learning experience,” Kube and colleagues wrote. “People with increased symptoms of depression tended to consider the positive feedback as an exception.” 

In the first of two studies, the researchers focused on how people with and without depression used positive feedback to update their expectations related to future performance. All 379 participants—200 of whom reported experiencing at least mild symptoms of depression—completed a challenging test of emotional intelligence. The test, which involved using empathy to correctly identify another person’s emotional reaction to a hypothetical situation, was chosen because participants have been found to struggle with accurately evaluating their performance, the researchers note.  

Participants reported how they expected to perform on that test, and how they might perform on similar tasks, before completing it. They then randomly received slightly, clearly, or extremely positive feedback placing them in the top 50%, 10%, or 1% of participants, regardless of their actual performance. After receiving feedback, they reported how they would expect to perform if they took that specific test again and, more generally, on related tasks. 

Across all three conditions, participants with and without symptoms of depression updated their expectations for that specific test in proportion to how positive their feedback was. However, only participants without depression symptoms updated their general expectations for future performance, whereas those with symptoms of depression kept their general expectations low regardless of feedback. “Participants with elevated levels of depression considered their positive feedback to be an exception rather than the rule (while not questioning its credibility) … preventing them from updating their generalized performance expectations,” Kube and colleagues wrote, adding that this finding did not rise to the level of statistical significance. 

In the second study, Kube and colleagues zoned in on social expectations. Two hundred ninety-two participants—59% of whom reported at least mild symptoms of depression—were asked to imagine that they had accepted an invitation to attend a party hosted by a friend from school. The party would be attended by three acquaintances with whom the participant had an uncomfortable relationship.  

Participants reported their social expectations before and after receiving positive feedback about hypothetical conversations with each of the three acquaintances. The conversations were described as varying from polite and friendly chats (slightly positive) to deeper exchanges in which the acquaintance asked warm questions about the participant’s life (clearly positive) or conversations demonstrating a degree of closeness that contradicted their previously uncomfortable relationship (extremely positive). 

Unlike in the previous study, participants in both groups appeared to update their expectations more in response to feedback that was clearly positive than to feedback that was extremely positive. Although these findings did not rise to the level of statistical significance, future research could take a closer look at whether there is a “tipping point” at which even people without depression begin to perceive glowing praise as inauthentic, the researchers suggested. 

In addition, participants with and without depression reported perceiving clearly positive feedback as most credible. However, participants with symptoms of depression viewed positive feedback of any kind as less credible than participants without symptoms. They also had more negative expectations for their interactions with acquaintances before and after receiving feedback, though they did not demonstrate statistically significant differences in the strength of their responses to positive feedback.  

“Participants with elevated levels of depression had overall more negative expectations for social interactions than people without depressive symptoms,” Kube and colleagues wrote. This suggests that people with symptoms of depression are more cognitively immunized against updating their expectations, the researchers explained, but additional work will be needed to determine why their expectations for the future remain so low. 

Future work could help clarify these findings by comparing patients who have been formally diagnosed with depression to a healthy control group, Kube and colleagues noted. 

Feedback on this article? Email apsobserver@psychologicalscience.org or comment below.

Reference 

Kube, T., Kirchner, L., Lemmer, G., & Glombiewski, J. A. (2022). How the discrepancy between prior expectations and new information influences expectation updating in depression—The greater, the better? Clinical Psychological Science, 10(3), 430–449. https://doi.org/10.1177/21677026211024644  

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Summary: The more a person stares at themselves while talking with a partner in an online chat, the more their mood degrades over the course of the conversation, a new study finds. Alcohol use appears to worsen this effect.

As many social gatherings—dates, game nights among friends, and family hangouts—have migrated to an online environment, seeing ourselves on-screen while talking to others has become commonplace. These virtual-doppelganger encounters, however, have their downsides, including diverting attention away from our partners and encouraging us to fixate on our own appearance. 

New research soon to be published in the journal Clinical Psychological Science, found that the more a person stares at themselves in an online chat, the more their mood worsens. Alcohol appears to intensify this problem. This research sheds new light on the relationship between mood, alcohol, and attentional focus during virtual social interactions.

“These findings point to a potentially problematic role of online meeting platforms in exacerbating psychological problems like anxiety and depression,” said Talia Ariss, a doctoral candidate at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign who co-led the research with psychology professor Catharine Fairbairn. “The findings add to previous studies suggesting that people who focus more on themselves than on external realities—especially during social interactions—may be susceptible to mood disorders.”

“A lot of folks are struggling with fatigue and melancholy after a full day of Zoom meetings. Our work suggests the self-view offered in many online video platforms might make those interactions more of a slog than they need to be.”

— C. Fairbairn (University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign)

For the study, participants answered questions about their emotional status before and after online conversations. They were instructed to discuss their musical preferences and what they liked and disliked about living in the local community during the chats. Participants could see themselves and their conversation partners on a split-screen monitor. Some consumed an alcoholic beverage before talking, and others drank a nonalcoholic beverage.

“By using eye-tracking technology, we found that participants who spent more time looking at themselves during the conversation felt worse after the call, even after controlling for pre-interaction negative mood,” said Ariss. “Those who were under the influence of alcohol spent more time looking at themselves.”

In general, participants stared at their conversation partners on the monitor much more than they looked at themselves. But there were significant differences in the amount of time individual participants spent gazing at themselves. The more self-focused a person is, the more likely they are to report feeling emotions associated with anxiety and even depression, the researchers said.

“The cool thing about virtual social interactions, especially in platforms like Zoom, is that you can simulate the experience of looking in a mirror,” Ariss explained. This allows researchers to explore how self-focus influences a host of other factors, she said.

Adding alcohol to the experiment and using eye-tracking technology also allowed the scientists to explore how mild inebriation affected where a person focused their attention.

“In the context of in-person social interactions, there is strong evidence that alcohol acts as a social lubricant among drinkers and has these mood-enhancing properties,” Ariss said. “This did not hold true, however, in the online conversations, where alcohol consumption corresponded to more self-focus and had none of its typical mood-boosting effects.”

Users of the virtual meeting platform Zoom increased 30-fold during the pandemic, from 10 million in December 2019 to 300 million by April 2020, the researchers wrote. The pandemic also yielded surges in depression and anxiety. Given reports of heightened self-awareness and “fatigue” during virtual exchanges, they noted, some have blamed virtual interactions for exacerbating those trends.

“At this point in the pandemic, many of us have come to the realization that virtual interactions just aren’t the same as face-to-face,” Fairbairn said. “A lot of folks are struggling with fatigue and melancholy after a full day of Zoom meetings. Our work suggests the self-view offered in many online video platforms might make those interactions more of a slog than they need to be.”

The National Institutes of Health supported this research.

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Reference: Ariss, T., Fairbairn, C., Sayette, M., Velia, B., Berenbaum, H., & Brown-Schmidt, S. (in press). Where to look? Alcohol, affect, and gaze behavior during a virtual social interaction. Clinical Psychological Science.  

The Sweet Spot: When Children’s Developing Abilities, Brains, and Knowledge Make Them Better Learners Than Adults
Samantha Gualtieri and Amy S. Finn

Gualtieri and Finn outline the instances in which young children outperform older children and adults across domains, including mastering language, using probabilistic information, detecting causal relations, remembering certain information, and even solving problems. They then examine how children’s reduced cognitive abilities, ongoing brain development, more limited prior knowledge, and heightened tendency to explore may benefit their cognitive performance. They hold that considering all of these factors together is essential for understanding the ways in which children’s learning is unique and that science has much to learn from a careful consideration of childhood.

Measuring Racial Discrimination Remotely: A Contemporary Review of Unobtrusive Measures
Samantha J. Kellar and Erika V. Hall

Kellar and Hall discuss how to adapt classic face-to-face measures to remote/online platforms and provide recommendations for implementing unobtrusive measures—those that assess a participant’s discriminatory action without their knowledge that the specific discriminatory action is under observation—into remote examinations of discrimination. They address the pattern of socially desirable responding in examinations of racial discrimination, in which participants are particularly determined to present themselves as ethical and moral. Kellar and Hall analyze the concern that remote platforms may foster inauthentic participant responses and review unobtrusive studies, discussing how unobtrusive measures have changed over time.

Well-Being Science for Teaching and the General Public
William Tov, Derrick Wirtz, Kostadin Kushlev, Robert Biswas-Diener, and Ed Diener

Tov and colleagues present an overview of eight findings from well-being research that they believe teachers and authors should consider when covering well-being in the classroom and in material for the public in general. These findings include the benefits of well-being, cultural and societal diversity in well-being, processes such as adaptation, and influences such as income. They also explored the prevalence of these topics in 15 of the most popular introductory psychology textbooks. Nearly all discussed some of these topics, such as social relationships and well-being, but there was less frequent coverage of other topics, including the impact of culture and society.

Psychological Selfishness
Ryan W. Carlson, Chance Adkins, M. J. Crockett, and Margaret S. Clark

Carlson and colleagues propose a framework in which selfishness is seen as a psychological construction. According to this framework, people perceive selfishness when they detect someone’s situation-specific desire to benefit the self as disregarding others’ desires and the situation’s prevailing social expectations. The authors argue that detecting and deterring such psychological selfishness in both oneself and others facilitates the maintenance of social cohesion and close relationships. They also show how using this psychological framework may promote coherence in interdisciplinary research on selfishness and provide insights for interventions to prevent or remediate its negative effects.

A Community-Embedded Implementation Model for Mental-Health Interventions: Reaching the Hardest to Reach
Eve S. Puffer and David Ayuku

The mental-health-care treatment gap remains very large in low-resource communities. Puffer and Ayuku propose an implementation model—the community-embedded model (CEM)—to expand access to and address the burden of mental-health disorders. Key elements of the CEM include (a) embedding the model in an existing, community-based social setting; (b) delivering prevention and treatment in tandem; (c) using multiproblem interventions; (d) delivering treatment through lay providers within the social setting; and (e) facilitating relationships between community settings and external systems of care. They use a case study to illustrate the application of the CEM within the social setting of religious congregations in Kenya.

Understanding the Magnitude of Psychological Differences Between Women and Men Requires Seeing the Forest and the Trees
Alice H. Eagly and William Revelle

Whether women and men are psychologically similar or different is a contentious issue in psychological science. This article demonstrates that larger and smaller sex/gender differences might reflect different ways of organizing the same data. For single psychological constructs, larger differences emerge from averaging multiple components that differ by sex/gender to produce measures of the construct’s overall typicality for each sex/gender. For example, averaging self-ratings on personality traits yields larger sex/gender differences on measures of femininity and masculinity relative to differences in their components. These analyses encourage researchers to recognize that in psychological data, sex/gender similarities and differences are interdependent. 

Toward a New Science of Psychedelic Social Psychology: The Effects of MDMA (Ecstasy) on Social Connection
Sonja Lyubomirsky

Lyubomirsky proposes that social psychologists have much to gain by incorporating psychoactive substances into their research programs. She uses MDMA, a manmade stimulant and psychedelic drug that is currently illegal, as an example. MDMA allows investigators to isolate the psychological mechanisms—and brain pathways—underlying felt social connection and thus to reveal what should be targeted in future (nondrug) studies. Lyubomirsky introduces a conceptual model that presents psychological mechanisms that MDMA stimulates (lowered fear, increased sociability, more chemistry), as well as its potential long-term impacts (improved relationships, reduced loneliness, stronger therapeutic alliances). She discusses promising research areas for building a new science of psychedelic social psychology that ultimately might inform interventions to directly improve people’s lives.

Neoliberalism and the Ideological Construction of Equity Beliefs
Shahrzad Goudarzi, Vivienne Badaan, and Eric D. Knowles

Distributive beliefs based on equity (rewards proportionate to merit) have dominated research into how people evaluate the fairness of resource distributions, to the detriment of beliefs based on need (distributions are proportioned according to individuals’ needs) and equality (distributions are equal for all). However, Goudarzi and colleagues review research suggesting that distributive beliefs vary across developmental stages, persons, cultures, and economic structures. They present data from more than 160 countries indicating that neoliberal economic structures—the globally dominant socioeconomic model that advocates for privatization, abolition of the welfare state, and curtailment of redistributive programs—contribute to equity-based distributive beliefs. This suggests that distributive beliefs can result from ideologies and are contingent on the socioeconomic and historical contexts in which people are embedded.

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Melody M. Moore and Elizabeth A. Martin

Moore and Martin provide an overview of the literature on mixed emotions and discuss factors contributing to the lack of integration within and between fields. They propose an organizing framework for the literature on the basis of two goals: solving the bipolar–bivariate debate (positive and negative emotion are bipolar endpoints of a single valence dimension, rather than separate dimensions) and understanding the subjective experience of mixed emotions. They present an individual-focused personalized perspective that can be used when studying the subjective experience of mixed emotions and emphasize the importance of assessing both state and trait emotions and contexts.

Adopted Utility Calculus: Origins of a Concept of Social Affiliation
Lindsey J. Powell

Powell proposes that the concept of social affiliation, available in infancy, is based on the extent to which individuals evaluate the goals and needs of others This proposal grounds affiliation in intuitive psychology as formalized in the naive-utility-calculus model. This model describes how an observer expects an actor to calculate the utility (or value) of an action as the difference between the outcome’s expected reward and the action’s expected cost. Thinking of social affiliation within the naive-utility-calculus model can account for findings from studies of infants’ social-affiliation reasoning without the need of using additional innate mechanisms (e.g., moral sense). Powell discusses how this conceptualization might be relevant to social reasoning and learning across the life span.

Americans like to spend. Unfortunately, 70% of Americans admit to bad spending habits, leading them to overspend by nearly $7,500 per year. Unless we change our spending habits and learn how to save, we will soon be facing a full blown retirement crisis. The Center for Retirement Research at Boston College estimates that about half of working-age households are “at risk” when it comes to their retirements. This means they will not have the savings they need to retire comfortably.

What’s the solution to the problem? Education or awareness isn’t the primary issue. A whopping 80% of those surveyed believed they were fully capable of improving their spending habits. The psychological aspect of money is a key driver in spending beyond one’s means. While there is no quick fix, this simple psychological tip can help you reach your financial goals faster.

…

Performing well, getting things done and constantly improving are part of the human experience. People have an instinct to matter—and you want to do great things in your work and in your personal life. And now is the perfect time to reset your motivation and reengage your efforts.

Science has discovered new ways to get motivated and improve performance—and certain tactics work better than others. The research is well-timed: Performance is top-of-mind for the majority of people. According to a study by Monster, a third of workers regularly think about quitting their jobs, and research from Fidelity reveals 61% already have.

Whether you’re thinking about your performance in light of quitting, staying or starting something new, it’s all about feeling like you matter, knowing you’re valued and craving to make a contribution—it’s about motivating performance.

…

When the pandemic first began, many experts feared that even people who managed to avoid the virus would suffer from unprecedented levels of loneliness. What would happen when millions of people were told to stay at home and distance themselves from friends and loved ones?

Two years of research later, experts have found that the pandemic did make Americans slightly more lonely—but loneliness levels were already dire enough to pose a threat to mental and physical health. Here’s what you need to know about loneliness and how to address it in your own life.

…

We are in a “narrative crisis” according to Bryan Stevenson, the author of Just Mercy. Mr. Stevenson was a keynote speaker at the Association for Psychological Science annual meetings last week that I attended. He spoke eloquently about the role of narrative in creating a shared American story, often called “The American Dream.” But this narrative is in crisis as we struggle to achieve social justice, to achieve a narrative that encompasses all of us, a story that foregrounds the challenges while simultaneously championing the triumphs. We need an American story that holds our sorrows as well as sings our praises.

…

The winners of the 2022 APS Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions represent some of the brightest and most innovative young psychological scientists in the world. In a series of mini-episodes, Under the Cortex talks with each winner about their research and goals.

Today we hear from Patricia Lockwood (University of Birmingham), who is researching the foundations of social learning and decision-making throughout life. 

Learn more about our sponsor by visiting https://macmillanlearning.com/psychsessions. 

Transcript: 

Charles Blue (00:00)

Under the Cortex is brought to you by McMillan Learning Psychology.

(00:11)This is Charles Blue with the Association for Psychological Science with another in our series of mini episodes of under the Cortex. This series presents the compelling and innovative research of our 2022 recipients of the Janet Taylor Spence Award for Transformative Early Career Contributions. Today I’m talking with Pat Lockwood with Birmingham University. Thank you for joining me.

Lockwood (00:36)

Thanks so much for the invitation to speak to you today.

Charles Blue (00:40)

Can you tell us a little bit about your current field of research? What are you most interested in looking into? What are you trying to solve?

Lockwood (00:49)

What we’re trying to solve is to understand the cognitive, computational and neural mechanisms that determine how we learn and decide in social situations. And one thing that we’re really interested in is how these processes change across the lifespan. So how they might be different from when we’re a young adult to when we enter older age.

Charles Blue (01:12)

And what have you been able to determine that researchers didn’t know prior to your research?

Lockwood (01:19)

One of the things we’ve discovered recently is that something called prosocial behavior, so decisions that we make that help other people so they have a direct benefit for someone else. These processes seem to maybe change a bit, or at least they differ as we get older. And I think this is really interesting because most research on aging had focused on non social differences or changes. So we know lots of things happen just with the normal process of aging. So things like our working memory might get a bit worse or our physical abilities might decline a little bit. But we didn’t know so much about what happens to our social behavior. So we’ve been interested in looking at what happens to our social behavior and trying to answer the question of whether older people become more prosocial as they get older.

Charles Blue (02:08)

And what was the result of this research? What did you take away or actually what most excites you about the findings you’ve had so far?

Lockwood (02:17)

One of the things we found recently was we were lucky enough to be part of the global collaboration that was looking at the impact of the pandemic on social and moral psychology across the world. And we thought this is a great opportunity to be able to look at the effects of age in this dataset. And what we saw was that actually in most countries around the world, this link between age and prosocial behavior was there. So kind of wherever you are in the world, the older people were, the more pro social they seemed to be in terms of how much money they were willing to donate to a charity helping victims of coronavirus. And we thought that was really exciting because we’d seen in the lab in a few of our more precise, longer experiments that older people seem to be prosocial, but then we kind of replicated that effect around the world have there.

Charles Blue (03:06)

Have there been other concrete examples of this increased prosocial behavior in older people? Are there other examples that would be particularly striking?

Lockwood (03:16)

Yes. In our lab studies, what we saw. So we have this task where we can very precisely measure how willing people are to put in physical effort to help other people. And we tested this in a large number of younger adults, and we saw that people are willing to put in physical effort to help others, but they seem to be less willing to do so than they are for themselves. And when we tested this in older adults, it was quite interesting because we found that older adults were more willing to put in physical effort than younger adults when it helped someone else. And this is kind of despite, as I mentioned, maybe you think that kind of physical abilities might change as you get older, but actually the older people in the lab seem to be more willing to put in effort to help others.

Charles Blue (04:01)

Well, that gives me something else to look forward to in the next few decades of my life. Actually looking forward, what are the current hurdles, what are the areas that are not really yet well defined or the major challenges in your field that you would like to see address that would help advance this research?

Lockwood (04:21)

I believe one of the main challenges is linking up these different levels of explanation. So I’m really interested in what happens in the brain, but when you study something like prosocial behavior, you have to be able to link what’s happening in people’s behavior to what’s happening in the brain. And recently there’s been some statistical approaches to do this, so we can build these computational models of behavior, and we can also use these what’s known as multivariate techniques. And what’s really cool about both of these approaches is we can actually link people’s behavior directly to the brain, so we can test what people do on a task and see the signals that happen in response to that. And that’s quite different from when we were looking at the brain without these statistical approaches, because you just have to subtract activity from two conditions so you could show a part of the brain responded more to faces compared to houses, but you can’t really do that to link the behavior. So I think some of these statistical approaches that sometimes come from other fields are really influencing social cognition and helping us get a handle on linking brain and behavior.

Lockwood (05:28)

I think the second challenge related to that is whether we have good theories of kind of how social learning and decision making works and whether it’s different from how we learn and decide for ourselves. And I think solving that challenge is really important. If we want to increase prosocial behaviors in people or treat disorders of social cognition, we need to know, do we just enhance learning and decision making in general, or is there something quite specific or special about social behavior, which is what we need to change.

Charles Blue (05:59)

Well, this is Charles Blue and I would like to thank my guest, Pat Lockwood for her time and discussion on her current research and congratulate you on receiving the 2022 Spence Award by APS. Thank you for joining me.

Lockwood (06:13)

Thank you very much.

Identifying Long- and Short-Term Processes in Perceptual Learning
Jia Yang et al.

Yang and colleagues developed a multicomponent theoretical framework to model contributions of both long- and short-term processes to perceptual learning. They applied the framework to the learning curves of 49 participants in seven perceptual tasks. Results indicated long-term general learning and within-session relearning in most tasks. Researchers also found between-session forgetting in several of the tasks, including visual and auditory discrimination tasks; between-session gain in a visual shape search task; and within-session adaptation, between-session forgetting, and between-session gain in a contrast detection task. The multicomponent model may provide a potential tool to optimize learning in normal and clinical populations.

Detecting Prejudice From Egalitarianism: Why Black Americans Don’t Trust White Egalitarians’ Claims
Michael Rosenblum, Drew S. Jacoby-Senghor, and N. Derek Brown

This research suggests that the way White Americans express egalitarian views may inadvertently reveal inegalitarian tendencies and sow mistrust with Black Americans. Asked to read White writers’ declarations that they are nonprejudiced and egalitarian, Black perceivers inferred likability and trustworthiness and accurately inferred underlying racial attitudes and motivations. But White writers believed that their egalitarianism seemed more indicative of allyship than Black Americans perceived it to be. Linguistic analysis revealed that Black perceivers accurately attended to language emphasizing humanization, support for equal opportunity, personal responsibility, and the idea that equality already exists. Moreover, White egalitarians’ underlying racial beliefs predicted Black participants’ actual trust and cooperation.

Melting Ice With Your Mind: Representational Momentum for Physical States
Alon Hafri, Tal Boger, and Chaz Firestone

How does the mind represent changes of state, such as the melting of ice? Hafri and colleagues explored representational momentum—how memory extrapolates the spatial positions of moving objects—to investigate mental representations of state. Participants who viewed objects undergoing state changes (e.g., ice melting, logs burning, grapes shriveling) remembered them as more melted, burned, or shriveled than they actually were. Thus, memory distorted these state changes forward in time, indicating that mental representations of objects actively incorporate how they change—not only in their relation to their environment but also in their essential qualities.

Material Benefits Crowd Out Moralistic Punishment
Tage S. Rai

Rai found that paying people to engage in punishment might reduce their willingness to do so under certain circumstances. In an economic game, providing a monetary bonus for punishing unfair offers nearly cut participants’ willingness to do so in half. Separately, in judgments of hypothetical transgressions, participants viewed punishers who accepted payment as having worse character and rated their punitive actions as less morally acceptable. However, large enough payments or reassurance that punishment accompanied by payment still signals moral virtue restored participants’ willingness to punish. Data were consistent with a signal-corruption mechanism whereby payment interferes with the prosocial signal that moralistic punishment provides about a punisher’s motives.

Can Feelings “Feel” Wrong? Similarities Between Counter-Normative Emotion Reports and Perceptual Errors
Ella Givon et al.

This research suggests that experiencing emotions that deviate from social norms might feel as “wrong” as making perceptual errors. In four experiments, participants made perceptual decisions (reported the gender of faces) and, separately, provided emotion reports (reported their pleasant or unpleasant feelings in response to emotion-invoking pictures, such as an angry tiger or a puppy). Although electroencephalogram findings were inconclusive, counter-normative emotions and perceptual errors were marked by post-error slowing and speed/accuracy trade-offs and showed similar reaction-time distributions. Thus, the experience of reporting counter-normative emotions resembled that accompanying perceptual-decision errors, indicating similar cognitive processing of “wrong” emotions and perceptions.

Development of Visual Memory Capacity Following Early-Onset and Extended Blindness
Priti Gupta et al.

Gupta and colleagues studied whether visual memory capacity can develop in congenitally blind individuals after sight surgery. The researchers used an image-memorization task to longitudinally evaluate the visual memory of 12 congenitally blind individuals ranging in age from 8 to 22 years. Results indicated poor visual memory capacity soon after surgery but significant improvement in subsequent months, with performance 1 year after surgery comparable to that of control participants with matched visual acuity. These findings provide evidence for the plasticity of visual memory mechanisms into late childhood but do not rule out vulnerability to early deprivation of sight.

“They’re Everywhere!”: Symbolically Threatening Groups Seem More Pervasive Than Nonthreatening Groups
Rebecca Ponce de Leon, Jacqueline R. Rifkin, and Richard P. Larrick

The meaning of places is socially constructed, often informed by the groups that others perceive to be pervasive there. Across six studies using surveys, experiments, and archival data, Ponce de Leon and colleagues examined the factors that influence the formation of these perceptions of places and groups. Results indicated a role of symbolic threat (i.e., perceived differences in values and worldviews) in how groups may shape places. Specifically, they demonstrated that groups higher in symbolic threat appear to be perceived as more populous in a place and more associated with that place than groups lower in symbolic threat.

Navigable Space and Traversable Edges Differentially Influence Reorientation in Sighted and Blind Mice
Marc E. Normandin et al.

This research suggests that vision may not be necessary for the effective use of geometry during spatial reorientation (i.e., when navigators are lost, their internal sense of direction is unreliable, and they must reorient themselves), at least in mice. Normandin and colleagues manipulated the navigational affordances of a chamber (i.e., a traversable space), used 3D edges to increase the salience of its borders, and evaluated how these variables influenced the use of geometry during reorientation in sighted and congenitally blind mice. Restricting navigational affordances to the task-relevant area facilitated the use of geometric strategies, such as using geometrically correct axes to reorient themselves, in all mice. However, increasing the saliency of borders improved geometry-based reorientation only in blind mice, who extensively patrolled the borders.

Exceptional researchers from all over the world—Chile and China, Israel and India, Poland and Portugal, South Korea and the United Arab Emirates, and beyond—cast their vote for in-person psychological science in Chicago in May at the 2022 APS Annual Convention. “An exhausting (but awesome) five days at #apschi22,” as one of the 2,500 attendees tweeted, the event featured a diverse variety of presentations across the major fields of psychological science, including biological/neuroscience, clinical, developmental, and industrial/organizational.

Sessions also brought together leading researchers from across subdisciplines and outstanding keynote speakers on topics such as curbing police violence, restoring trust in institutions, boosting vaccine acceptance, and, in Bryan Stevenson’s electrifying opening keynote, race and the criminal justice system. 

For some attendees, the convention marked a welcome return to the camaraderie, networking, and collegiality that have always made APS conferences rewarding. For hundreds of first-time attendees, including many students ranging from undergraduates to doctoral candidates, the experience was exciting, inspiring, and in at least one case, “everything I could’ve hoped for.”

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The dominance of neoliberalism is turning societies against income equality. 

At least, that’s according to a study published Tuesday in Perspectives on Psychological Science. A team of researchers at New York University and the American University of Beirut performed an analysis of roughly 20 years of data on from more than 160 countries and found that the dominance of neoliberalism across social and economic institutions has ingrained a widespread acceptance of income inequality across our value systems in turn.

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