On the naturalistic relationship between mood and entertainment choice.

People are sensitive to economic conditions, buying more during booms and less during recessions. Across seven studies, the present research examines whether the nature of their purchases also changes as diffuse, prevailing mood states shift from positive during boom periods to negative during recession periods. Existing research shows that people primarily strive to improve negative moods, whereas they are willing to encounter threatening information when they experience positive mood states.

A 68-Year-Old Man With Chronic Myelogenous Leukemia and a Large Unilateral Pleural Effusion.

A 68-year-old man with chronic myelogenous leukemia presents for evaluation of 2 months of dyspnea with exertion. He denies cough, fever, chest pain, weight gain, orthopnea, and edema. Since diagnosis of chronic myelogenous leukemia 5 years ago, he has been treated with dasatinib, with recent BCR-ABL1 assay showing no detectable disease in the peripheral blood.

Context matters: How macroeconomic forces may alter the reception of negative emotions in art.

Menninghaus et al. offer a comprehensive model to explain why people pursue darker emotions in art, but we believe they underplay the considerable role of situational factors in driving these preferences. In particular, changing mood states are likely to shape artistic preferences, in large part because positive mood states act as a protective buffer against otherwise aversive experiences.

Superior pattern detectors efficiently learn, activate, apply, and update social stereotypes.

Superior cognitive abilities are generally associated with positive outcomes such as academic achievement and social mobility. Here, we explore the darker side of cognitive ability, highlighting robust links between pattern detection and stereotyping. Across 6 studies, we find that superior pattern detectors efficiently learn and use stereotypes about social groups.

Neuromuscular weakness in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease: chest wall, diaphragm, and peripheral muscle contributions.

Purpose Of Review: Chronic obstructive lung disease affects the lung parenchyma and airways leading to well described effects in respiratory function. This review describes the current knowledge and advances regarding neuromuscular function and chest wall mechanics, which are affected in chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD).

Recent Findings: In COPD, progressive lung hyperinflation becomes constrained by a chest wall with decreasing capacity to expand, resulting in respiratory muscle inefficiency.

The "Bad Is Black" Effect: Why People Believe Evildoers Have Darker Skin Than Do-Gooders.

Across six studies, people used a "bad is black" heuristic in social judgment and assumed that immoral acts were committed by people with darker skin tones, regardless of the racial background of those immoral actors. In archival studies of news articles written about Black and White celebrities in popular culture magazines (Study 1a) and American politicians (Study 1b), the more critical rather than complimentary the stories, the darker the skin tone of the photographs printed with the article. In the remaining four studies, participants associated immoral acts with darker skinned people when examining surveillance footage (Studies 2 and 4), and when matching headshots to good and bad actions (Studies 3 and 5).

Framing charitable donations as exceptional expenses increases giving.

Many articles have examined the psychological drivers of charitable giving, but little is known about how people mentally budget for charitable gifts. The present research aims to address this gap by investigating how perceptions of donations as exceptional (uncommon and infrequent) rather than ordinary (common and frequent) expenses might affect budgeting for and giving to charity. We provide the first demonstration that exceptional framing of an identical item can directly influence mental budgeting processes, and yield societal benefits.

People search for meaning when they approach a new decade in chronological age.

Although humans measure time using a continuous scale, certain numerical ages inspire greater self-reflection than others. Six studies show that adults undertake a search for existential meaning when they approach a new decade in age (e.g.

Disfluency prompts analytic thinking--but not always greater accuracy: response to Thompson et al. (2013).

In this issue of Cognition, Thompson and her colleagues challenge the results from a paper we published several years ago (Alter, Oppenheimer, Epley, & Eyre, 2007). That paper demonstrated that metacognitive difficulty or disfluency can trigger more analytical thinking as measured by accuracy on several reasoning tasks. In their experiments, Thompson et al.

Missing the trees for the forest: a construal level account of the illusion of explanatory depth.

An illusion of explanatory depth (IOED) occurs when people believe they understand a concept more deeply than they actually do. To date, IOEDs have been identified only in mechanical and natural domains, occluding why they occur and suggesting that their implications are quite limited. Six studies illustrated that IOEDs occur because people adopt an inappropriately abstract construal style when they assess how well they understand concrete concepts.

When the association between appearance and outcome contaminates social judgment: a bidirectional model linking group homogeneity and collective treatment.

Group formation is an inevitable consequence of social life, and the tendency to perceive people as a collective unit persists once they have been categorized as a group. Drawing on the concept of homogeneity, the authors propose a model suggesting that groups may endure in part because people who are perceived as homogeneous attract collective treatment (e.g.

Suppressing secrecy through metacognitive ease: cognitive fluency encourages self-disclosure.

Understanding when people reveal unfavorable information about themselves is both practically and theoretically important. Existing research suggests that people tend not to adopt stable disclosure strategies, and consequently disclose too much information in some situations (e.g.

Uniting the tribes of fluency to form a metacognitive nation.

Processing fluency, or the subjective experience of ease with which people process information, reliably influences people's judgments across a broad range of social dimensions. Experimenters have manipulated processing fluency using a vast array of techniques, which, despite their diversity, produce remarkably similar judgmental consequences. For example, people similarly judge stimuli that are semantically primed (conceptual fluency), visually clear (perceptual fluency), and phonologically simple (linguistic fluency) as more true than their less fluent counterparts.

Easy on the mind, easy on the wrongdoer: discrepantly fluent violations are deemed less morally wrong.

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that discrepancies in processing fluency influence the perceived wrongness of moral violations. Participants were presented with numerous moral violations in easy or difficult to read font. For some violations experienced perceptual fluency was consistent with the fluency associated with previous violations, whereas for others it was more fluent or more disfluent.

Easy on the mind, easy on the wallet: the roles of familiarity and processing fluency in valuation judgments.

Although people routinely estimate the value of items in their environment, from goods and services to natural resources and lost earnings following an accident, the processes that underlie human valuation estimates are not well understood. We show that people use familiarity and fluency-the ease with which they process information-to determine an item's value. In three experiments, participants believed that familiar forms of currency (e.

Effects of fluency on psychological distance and mental construal (or why New York is a large city, but New York is a civilized jungle).

People construe the world along a continuum from concretely (focusing on specific, local details) to abstractly (focusing on global essences). We show that people are more likely to interpret the world abstractly when they experience cognitive disfluency, or difficulty processing stimuli in the environment, than when they experience cognitive fluency. We observed this effect using three instantiations of fluency: visual perceptual fluency (Study 1b), conceptual priming fluency (Study 2b), and linguistic fluency (Study 3).

Overcoming intuition: metacognitive difficulty activates analytic reasoning.

Humans appear to reason using two processing styles: System 1 processes that are quick, intuitive, and effortless and System 2 processes that are slow, analytical, and deliberate that occasionally correct the output of System 1. Four experiments suggest that System 2 processes are activated by metacognitive experiences of difficulty or disfluency during the process of reasoning. Incidental experiences of difficulty or disfluency--receiving information in a degraded font (Experiments 1 and 4), in difficult-to-read lettering (Experiment 2), or while furrowing one's brow (Experiment 3)--reduced the impact of heuristics and defaults in judgment (Experiments 1 and 3), reduced reliance on peripheral cues in persuasion (Experiment 2), and improved syllogistic reasoning (Experiment 4).

Transgression wrongfulness outweighs its harmfulness as a determinant of sentence severity.

When students suggest sentences for criminal offenders, do they rely more heavily on the harmfulness or on the wrongfulness of the offender's conduct? In Study 1, 116 Princeton University undergraduates rated the harmfulness and wrongfulness of, and suggested appropriate sentences for, a series of crimes. As expected, participants emphasized wrongfulness when choosing an appropriate criminal punishment. In Study 2, 33 Princeton undergraduates made similar ratings for violations of the University Honor Code, and rated their contempt for fabricated amendments to the Code that required sentencers to focus either only on harmfulness or only on wrongfulness.

Predicting short-term stock fluctuations by using processing fluency.

Three studies investigated the impact of the psychological principle of fluency (that people tend to prefer easily processed information) on short-term share price movements. In both a laboratory study and two analyses of naturalistic real-world stock market data, fluently named stocks robustly outperformed stocks with disfluent names in the short term. For example, in one study, an initial investment of 1,000 US dollars yielded a profit of 112 US dollars more after 1 day of trading for a basket of fluently named shares than for a basket of disfluently named shares.

Chemokine expression during development of fibrosis versus resolution in a murine model of granulomatous experimental autoimmune thyroiditis.

Severe granulomatous experimental autoimmune thyroiditis (G-EAT) in DBA/1 or CBA/J wild type (WT) mice at day 19 progresses to fibrosis by day 35, but severe G-EAT in DBA/1 interferon (IFN)-gamma-/- mice or less-severe G-EAT at day 19 in WT mice resolves by day 35. To study the role of chemokines in autoimmune diseases and fibrosis, profiles of chemokines and chemokine receptors were analyzed in DBA/1 WT versus IFN-gamma-/- and CBA/J thyroids, which have distinct outcomes of autoimmune inflammation. Gene expression of CXC chemokine ligand 1 (CXCL1) and CXC chemokine receptor 2 (CXCR2) paralleled neutrophil infiltration and thyrocyte destruction in DBA/1 WT or CBA/J thyroids, and gene expression of CC chemokine ligand 11 (CCL11), CCL8, and CC chemokine receptor 3 paralleled eosinophil infiltration in IFN-gamma-/- thyroids.