The ecology of relatedness: How living around family (or not) matters.

How does living in an environment with many or few family relatives shape our psychology? Here, we draw upon ideas from behavioral ecology to explore the psychological effects of ecological relatedness-the prevalence of family relatives in one's environment. We present six studies, both correlational and experimental, that examine this. In general, people and populations that live in ecologies with more family relatives (Studies 1-4b), or who imagine themselves to be living in such ecologies (Studies 2/3a/3b/4b), engage in more extreme pro-group behavior (e.

When and Why People Conceal Infectious Disease.

People sick with infectious illnesses face negative social outcomes, like exclusion, and may take steps to conceal their illnesses from others. In 10 studies of past, current, and projected illness, we examined the prevalence and predictors of infection concealment in adult samples of U.S.

The Association of Perceived Vulnerability to Disease with Cognitive Restraint and Compensatory Behaviors.

Individual differences exist in perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD). PVD is associated with negative responses (e.g.

Keep your distance: Different roles for knowledge and affect in predicting social distancing behavior.

The current study examines predictors of social distancing behavior across populations (students and community members) and across time in the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on two factors commonly associated with risk perception and prevention: knowledge and affect. Results showed that, despite similar levels of social distancing, student distancing was predicted only by feelings of threat about COVID-19, whereas community distancing was predicted by both feeling informed and threatened. Examining longitudinal effects, which were limited to students only, students became more informed about COVID-19 over time, and increases in being informed (but not feeling threatened) predicted more distancing.

Under-standing: How embodied states shape inference-making.

How do embodied states influence the inferences people make about the meaning that is intended by communicators? We propose that embodied states encourage mental representation of certain meanings while inhibiting others, thereby facilitating or hindering comprehension in social interactions and potentially causing miscommunication. Four experiments demonstrate that bodily postures incompatible with the intended meaning of a sentence attenuated inferences of those meanings, especially when the intended meaning was not articulated directly and required more extensive inference-making effort. Participants were faster at responding to sentences containing verbs inferring a sitting position when they were sitting than when they were standing, and vice versa.

COVID-19 stress and eating and drinking behaviors in the United States during the early stages of the pandemic.

The coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) pandemic has created widespread stress. Since many people cope with stress by eating, the current study investigated whether eating behaviors shifted among U.S.

What Role Does Pathogen-Avoidance Psychology Play in Pandemics?

A substantial body of research has illuminated psychological adaptations motivating pathogen avoidance, mechanisms collectively known as the behavioral immune system. Can knowledge about these mechanisms inform how people respond to widespread disease outbreaks, such as the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) [coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19)] pandemic? We review evidence suggesting that the evolutionary history of the behavioral immune system, and the cues that activate it, are distinct in many ways from modern human experiences with pandemics. Moreover, the behaviors engaged by this system may have limited utility for combating pandemic diseases like COVID-19.

Medication and substance use increases among people using cannabis medically during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Background: The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic strains the medical system, limiting access to healthcare services. Many people use cannabis medically for chronic health conditions and as a substitute for other medications. As such, changes in cannabis access associated with COVID-19 may result in increased non-cannabis drug use.

Interdependent self-construal predicts reduced sensitivity to norms under pathogen threat: An electrocortical investigation.

Prior evidence suggests that external threat motivates people to monitor norm violations. However, the effect of threat may be attenuated for those high in interdependent self-construal (SC) because this SC affords a sense of protection against the threat. Here, we tested this possibility by priming or not priming young American adults with a pathogen threat.

Preregistered Direct Replication of "Sick Body, Vigilant Mind: The Biological Immune System Activates the Behavioral Immune System".

The tendency to attend to and avoid cues to pathogens varies across individuals and contexts. Researchers have proposed that this variation is partially driven by immunological vulnerability to infection, though support for this hypothesis is equivocal. One key piece of evidence (Miller & Maner, 2011) shows that participants who have recently been ill-and hence may have a reduced ability to combat subsequent infection-allocate more attention to faces with infectious-disease cues than do participants who have not recently been ill.

What people believe about detecting infectious disease using the senses.

Do you believe you can tell if people are sick with infectious diseases by looking at, listening to, or smelling them? Research on pathogen detection and avoidance suggests that perceivers respond with caution both to true signs of infection and to cues only heuristically associated with infection threat. But what do perceivers actually believe about the effectiveness and use of specific sensory modalities for infection detection? In several studies, U.S.

Confidence is sexy and it can be trained: Examining male social confidence in initial, opposite-sex interactions.

Objective: We investigated whether men's social confidence in an initial, opposite-sex chatting context can be improved through a video tutorial and the extent to which being perceived as socially confident results in being seen as more romantically desirable and worthy of future contact.

Method: Women chatted with men who had received or not received a tutorial on how to handle speed-dating chats (Study 1: N = 129; Study 2: N = 60) or with male targets selected for having high versus moderate confidence in handling initial, opposite-sex encounters (Study 3: N = 46).

Results: Tutorial-trained men felt more confident going into the chats and they, as well as male targets selected for their confidence, were perceived by female chat partners to be higher in social confidence, status, and dominance.

A multimethod approach to measuring mental representations of threatening others.

How do people mentally represent distinct interpersonal threats? Across human history, interpersonal threats such as infectious disease and violence have posed powerful selection pressures. Such pressures selected for psychological systems that help identify and reduce threats posed by other people. In the case of infectious disease, psychology researchers have found that such systems respond to a variety of infection cues (e.

Common Academic Experiences No One Talks About: Repeated Rejection, Impostor Syndrome, and Burnout.

Academic life is full of learning, excitement, and discovery. However, academics also experience professional challenges at various points in their career, including repeated rejection, impostor syndrome, and burnout. These negative experiences are rarely talked about publicly, creating a sense of loneliness and isolation for people who presume they are the only ones affected by such setbacks.

Ecological Sex Ratios and Human Mating.

The ratio of men to women in a given ecology can have profound influences on a range of interpersonal processes, from marriage and divorce rates to risk-taking and violent crime. Here, we organize such processes into two categories - intersexual choice and intrasexual competition - representing focal effects of imbalanced sex ratios.

Too many people, women, men? The psychological effects of population density and sex ratio.

Has your environment become more crowded over time? Do you find yourself surrounded by mostly men or mostly women? Here, we review recent work on the psychological effects of two key ecological dimensions: population density-the number of people in a given space-and sex ratio-the relative proportion of men to women in a group. Higher population densities are associated with a future-oriented psychology, increased educational investment, and a focus on 'quality over quantity' in family size and relationship preferences. Unequal sex ratios are associated with increased competition and risky behaviors amongst individuals of the more prevalent sex, and a general shift toward the relationship preferences of the scarcer sex.

I'm so touched! Self-touch increases attitude extremity via self-focused attention.

In everyday life, people often engage in behaviors like chin touching, hand clasping, and arm crossing. Such self-touching behaviors have been found to emerge under emotional stress and while performing tasks requiring concentration and focus. In contrast to work examining antecedents of self-touch, the current research experimentally investigates the causal outcomes of self-touch, specifically its influence on evaluative cognitions such as attitudes toward external objects and events.

The Infectiousness of Crowds: Crowding Experiences Are Amplified by Pathogen Threats.

People sometimes perceive social environments as unpleasantly crowded. Previous work has linked these experiences to incidental factors such as being hungry or hot and to the relevance of the social environment for an individual's current goals. Here, we demonstrate that crowding perceptions and evaluations also depend on specific, active threats for perceivers.

Infectious Disease and Imperfections of Self-Image.

Infectious disease is an ever-present threat in daily life. Recent literature indicates that people manage this threat with a suite of antipathogenic psychological and behavioral defense mechanisms, which motivate the avoidance of people and objects bearing cues to pathogen risk. Here, we demonstrate that self-image is also impacted by these mechanisms.

Going All In: Unfavorable Sex Ratios Attenuate Choice Diversification.

When faced with risky decisions, people typically choose to diversify their choices by allocating resources across a variety of options and thus avoid putting "all their eggs in one basket." The current research revealed that this tendency is reversed when people face an important cue to mating-related risk: skew in the operational sex ratio, or the ratio of men to women in the local environment. Counter to the typical strategy of choice diversification, findings from four studies demonstrated that the presence of romantically unfavorable sex ratios (those featuring more same-sex than opposite-sex individuals) led heterosexual people to diversify financial resources less and instead concentrate investment in high-risk/high-return options when making lottery, stock-pool, retirement-account, and research-funding decisions.

Superman to the rescue: Simulating physical invulnerability attenuates exclusion-related interpersonal biases.

People cope with social exclusion both by seeking reconnection with familiar individuals and by denigrating unfamiliar and disliked others. These reactions can be seen as adaptive responses in ancestral environments where ostracism exposed people to physical dangers and even death. To the extent that reactions to ostracism evolved to minimize exposure to danger, alleviating these foundational concerns with danger may lessen people's need to cope with exclusion.

When the economy falters, do people spend or save? Responses to resource scarcity depend on childhood environments.

Just as modern economies undergo periods of boom and bust, human ancestors experienced cycles of abundance and famine. Is the adaptive response when resources become scarce to save for the future or to spend money on immediate gains? Drawing on life-history theory, we propose that people's responses to resource scarcity depend on the harshness of their early-life environment, as reflected by childhood socioeconomic status (SES). In the three experiments reported here, we tested how people from different childhood environments responded to resource scarcity.

Immunizing against prejudice: effects of disease protection on attitudes toward out-groups.

Contemporary interpersonal biases are partially derived from psychological mechanisms that evolved to protect people against the threat of contagious disease. This behavioral immune system effectively promotes disease avoidance but also results in an overgeneralized prejudice toward people who are not legitimate carriers of disease. In three studies, we tested whether experiences with two modern forms of disease protection (vaccination and hand washing) attenuate the relationship between concerns about disease and prejudice against out-groups.

Signal detection on the battlefield: priming self-protection vs. revenge-mindedness differentially modulates the detection of enemies and allies.

Detecting signs that someone is a member of a hostile outgroup can depend on very subtle cues. How do ecology-relevant motivational states affect such detections? This research investigated the detection of briefly-presented enemy (versus friend) insignias after participants were primed to be self-protective or revenge-minded. Despite being told to ignore the objectively nondiagnostic cues of ethnicity (Arab vs.