Examining modal and amodal language processing in proficient bilinguals: evidence from the modality-switch paradigm.

Recent discussions have emphasized the significance of embodied processing in language comprehension. Nevertheless, continuous debates persist regarding the relative contribution of modal (embodied) and amodal (abstract) processing of language. The current study investigated the contribution of modal processing in the first (L1) and second (L2) language, hypothesizing higher level of abstract amodal symbol processing in L2 than L1, since the correspondence of L1 and L2 (i.

The COVID-19 pandemic and changes in social behavior: Protective face masks reduce deliberate social distancing preferences while leaving automatic avoidance behavior unaffected.

Protective face masks were one of the central measures to counteract viral transmission in the COVID-19 pandemic. Prior research indicates that face masks impact various aspects of social cognition, such as emotion recognition and social evaluation. Whether protective masks also influence social avoidance behavior is less clear.

Shooter biases and stereotypes among police and civilians.

The present research assesses potential correlates of discriminatory police behavior, comparing police and civilian participants in a first person shooter task (FPST) as well as on various self-report measures of intergroup contact, intergroup attitudes, and ideological beliefs in three preregistered studies. Study 1 (N = 330), using a FPST with a short response window (630 ms), did not observe shooter biases in reaction times, error rates and signal detection parameters in neither police nor civilian participants. Study 2a (N = 290), using a longer response window (850 ms), observed a shooter bias in reaction times, error rates, and response criterion in both civilian and police participants.

Real-life outgroup exposure, self-reported outgroup contact and the other-race effect.

People are better at recognizing faces from their own racial or ethnic group compared with faces from other racial or ethnic groups, known as the other-'race' effect (ORE). Several theories of the ORE assume that memory for other-race faces is impaired because people have less contact with members of other racial or ethnic groups, resulting in lower visual expertise. The present research investigates contact theories of the ORE, using self-report contact measures and objective measures of potential outgroup exposure (estimated from participants' residential location and from GPS tracking).

Spontaneous Trait Inferences From Behavior: A Systematic Meta-Analysis.

Research suggests that people spontaneously infer traits from behavioral information, thus forming impressions of actors' personalities. Such spontaneous trait inferences (STI) have been examined in a wide range of studies in the last four decades. Here, we provide the first systematic meta-analysis of this vast literature.

Beyond stereotypes: Prejudice as an important missing force explaining group disparities.

We comment on Cesario's assertion that social psychological intergroup research focuses solely on stereotypes, neglecting actual differences between groups to explain group disparities. This reasoning, however, misses yet another explaining force: In addition to stereotypes, ample laboratory and field research documents relationships between group disparities, discrimination, and prejudice, which cannot be explained by people's accurate judgments of real-world group differences.

Racial Bias in Police Traffic Stops: White Residents' County-Level Prejudice and Stereotypes Are Related to Disproportionate Stopping of Black Drivers.

Racial disparities in policing are well documented, but the reasons for such disparities are often debated. In the current research, we weighed in on this debate using a regional-level bias framework: We investigated the link between racial disparities in police traffic stops and regional-level racial bias, employing data from more than 130 million police traffic stops in 1,413 U.S.

Do Members of Disadvantaged Groups Explain Group Status With Group Stereotypes?

Recent research on group attitudes in members of disadvantaged groups has provided evidence that group evaluations closely align with societal stigma, reflecting outgroup favoritism in members of those groups that are most strongly stigmatized. While outgroup favoritism is clearly evident among some groups, there is still debate about the psychological mechanisms underlying outgroup favoritism. The current research focuses on a less intensively examined aspect of outgroup favoritism, namely the use of status-legitimizing group stereotypes.

Spontaneous state inferences.

Perceivers routinely draw inferences about others from their behavior in an attempt to make sense of the world. Previous research has established that spontaneous inferences include stable characteristics such as traits and a number of variable person-related concepts such as goals, intentions, and motivations. The current research investigated the occurrence of more general spontaneous state inferences.

Emotion misattribution from complex scene pictures: Evidence for affective processing beyond valence.

The present experiments employed an emotion misattribution procedure to investigate if, and to what extent, emotional pictures are automatically processed on an emotion-specific level. We employed emotional pictures from the International Affective Picture System (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008) depicting joy-, anger-, fear-, and sadness-related contents as prime stimuli in the four-category emotion misattribution procedure (Rohr, Degner, & Wentura, 2015). Pictures were presented briefly and masked to avoid intentional responding.

Subjective status and perceived legitimacy across countries.

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries ( = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced.

Moderators of intergroup evaluation in disadvantaged groups: A comprehensive test of predictions from system justification theory.

We examined hypotheses proposed by System Justification Theory (SJT; Jost, Banaji, & Nosek, 2004) regarding intergroup evaluation in disadvantaged groups, using large samples of online participants (total N = 715,721), spanning 8 intergroup domains and 14 nations. Using a meta-analytic approach, we tested these hypotheses at the individual level (as SJT is generally articulated), as well as at the social group level. Consistent with SJT, individual-level analyses revealed that disadvantaged groups demonstrated outgroup favoritism on Implicit Association Tests (IATs; i.

Recognizing Emily and Latisha: Inconsistent Effects of Name Stereotypicality on the Other-Race Effect.

A person's name may activate social category information, which has been shown to lead to stereotyping and discrimination in various contexts. However, no previous research has investigated the influence of names on more basic processes of person perception. We present a set of seven experimental studies examining the influence of names on face recognition, namely, on the other-race effect (i.

Investigating the other-race effect in working memory.

People have difficulties in remembering other-race faces; this so-called other-race effect (ORE) has been frequently observed in long-term recognition memory (LTM). Several theories argue that the ORE in LTM is caused by differences in earlier processing stages, such as encoding of ingroup and outgroup faces. We test this hypothesis by exploring whether the ORE can already be observed in visual working memory (VWM)-an intermediate system located between encoding processes and LTM storage.

Masked emotional priming: A double dissociation between direct and indirect effects reveals non-conscious processing of emotional information beyond valence.

We demonstrate non-conscious processing beyond valence by employing the masked emotional priming paradigm (Rohr, Degner, & Wentura, 2012) with a stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) variation. Emotional faces were briefly presented and directly masked, followed by the target face, using a SOA of either 43ms or 143ms. Targets were categorized as happy, angry, fearful, or sad.

The "emotion misattribution" procedure: processing beyond good and bad under masked and unmasked presentation conditions.

In general, it is assumed that misattribution in the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) is restricted to crude affect due to its unbound nature, especially under limited presentation conditions. In two experiments, we investigated whether emotion-specific misattributions occur using a four-category misattribution procedure. Experiment 1 yielded emotion-specific misattribution effects under clearly visible presentation conditions demonstrating that the procedure is principally susceptible for emotion-specific effects.

The apple does not fall far from the tree, or does it? A meta-analysis of parent-child similarity in intergroup attitudes.

Understanding the formation of prejudice, stereotypes, and discrimination has long been a core topic of social psychology. Since the seminal theorizing by Allport in 1954, different views on childhood origins of prejudice have been discussed, in which the role of parental socialization varies on a scale from fundamental to negligible. This meta-analysis integrates the available empirical evidence of the past 60 years and critically discusses the current state of knowledge on parental socialization of intergroup attitudes.

Emotionality in a second language: it's a matter of time.

The present study investigated the well acknowledged phenomenon of a different sense of emotionality in a person's first (L1) and second language (L2). Event-related potentials were recorded during the reading of pleasant, unpleasant and neutral words in L1 and L2. Enhanced processing of both emotional compared to neutral words was reflected in an amplified early posterior negativity (EPN) about 280-430 ms after word onset.

Masked emotional priming beyond global valence activations.

An immense body of research demonstrates that emotional facial expressions can be processed unconsciously. However, it has been assumed that such processing takes place solely on a global valence-based level, allowing individuals to disentangle positive from negative emotions but not the specific emotion. In three studies, we investigated the specificity of emotion processing under conditions of limited awareness using a modified variant of an affective priming task.

Automatic prejudice in childhood and early adolescence.

Four cross-sectional studies are presented that investigated the automatic activation of prejudice in children and adolescents (aged 9 years to 15 years). Therefore, 4 different versions of the affective priming task were used, with pictures of ingroup and outgroup members being presented as prejudice-related prime stimuli. In all 4 studies, a pattern occurred that suggests a linear developmental increase of automatic prejudice with significant effects of outgroup negativity appearing only around the ages of 12 to 13 years.

Assessing automatic activation of valence: a multinomial model of EAST performance.

The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST; De Houwer, 2003) has been introduced as an indirect measure of automatic activation of valence. EAST effects provide nonrelative valence measures of single stimuli compared to relative measures (e.g.