Unpleasant words can affect the detection of morphosyntactic errors: An ERP study on individual differences.

In recent years, several ERP studies have investigated whether the early computation of agreement is permeable to the emotional content of words. Some studies have reported interactive effects of grammaticality and emotionality in the left anterior negativity (LAN) component, while others have failed to replicate these results. Furthermore, novel findings suggest that grammatical processing can elicit different neural patterns across individuals.

Expensive seems better: The price of a non-effective drug modulates its perceived efficacy.

Previous studies have shown that the price of a given product impacts the perceived quality of such product. This finding was also observed in medical contexts, showing that expensive drugs increase the placebo effect compared to inexpensive ones. However, addressing a drug's efficacy requires making causal inferences between the drug and the healing.

Learning mechanisms underlying accurate and biased contingency judgments.

Many experiments have shown that humans and other animals can detect contingency between events accurately. This learning is used to make predictions and to infer causal relationships, both of which are critical for survival. Under certain conditions, however, people tend to overestimate a null contingency.

Registered Replication Report: Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998).

Dijksterhuis and van Knippenberg (1998) reported that participants primed with a category associated with intelligence ("professor") subsequently performed 13% better on a trivia test than participants primed with a category associated with a lack of intelligence ("soccer hooligans"). In two unpublished replications of this study designed to verify the appropriate testing procedures, Dijksterhuis, van Knippenberg, and Holland observed a smaller difference between conditions (2%-3%) as well as a gender difference: Men showed the effect (9.3% and 7.

Thinking in a Foreign language reduces the causality bias.

The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of a foreign language on the causality bias (i.e., the illusion that two events are causally related when they are not).

Illusions of causality: how they bias our everyday thinking and how they could be reduced.

Illusions of causality occur when people develop the belief that there is a causal connection between two events that are actually unrelated. Such illusions have been proposed to underlie pseudoscience and superstitious thinking, sometimes leading to disastrous consequences in relation to critical life areas, such as health, finances, and wellbeing. Like optical illusions, they can occur for anyone under well-known conditions.