Variability across time in implicit weight-related bias: Random noise or meaningful fluctuations?

Social psychologists have struggled with the vexing problem of variability over time in implicit bias. While many treat such variability as unexplainable error, we posit that some temporal variability, whether within persons or across society at large, reflects meaningful and predictable fluctuation based on shifts in the social-cultural context. We first examined fluctuations at the group-level in a data set of female participants who completed the Weight Implicit Association Test between 2004 and 2018 ( = 259,613).

Visuospatial perspective shifting and relational self-association in dispositional shame and guilt.

Although dispositional shame and guilt have been distinguished by perceptions of the self and behavioral responses, the underlying information processing patterns remain unclear. We hypothesized that an ability to contemplate alternatives to perceptions of the current environment, i.e.

The effects of suppressing the biological stress systems on social threat-assessment following acute stress.

Rationale: Stress is associated with increased sensitivity to threat. Previous investigations examining how stress affects threat processing have largely focused on biomarker responses associated with either the sympathetic-nervous-system (SNS) or the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis.

Objectives: We pharmacologically suppressed activations of SNS, HPA, or both, prior to stress and investigated how each stress system modulates social threat assessment.

Systematic manipulations of the biological stress systems result in sex-specific compensatory stress responses and negative mood outcomes.

Women are twice as likely as men to be diagnosed with anxiety and mood disorders. One potential underlying mechanism is sex differences in physiological and psychological responses to stress; however, no studies to date have investigated this proposed mechanism experimentally. In a double-blind, placebo-controlled design, pharmacological challenges were administered to individually suppress the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (HPA) axis, or the sympathetic nervous system (SNS) prior to stress exposure, to investigate sex differences in the resulting cross talk among the physiological and psychological stress responses.

Insecurity about getting old: age-contingent self-worth, attentional bias, and well-being.

Older adulthood has often been recognized as a time of increased well-being and positive cognitive biases. However, older adults can also experience many social and identity challenges. We sought to investigate which older adults might be most vulnerable to these difficulties.

Psychological, endocrine, and neural correlates of attentional bias in subclinical depression.

Background: Our knowledge with respect to psychological, endocrine, and neural correlates of attentional bias in individuals with high vulnerability to developing depression - the subclinically depressed, still remains limited.

Design: The study used a 2 × 2 mixed design.

Methods: Attentional bias toward happy and sad faces in healthy (N = 26) and subclinically depressed individuals (N = 22) was assessed via a neuroimaging dot-probe attention task.

The "Rod and Fran Test": relationship priming influences cognitive-perceptual performance.

We theorized that interpersonal relationships can provide structures for experience. In particular, we tested whether primes of same-sex versus mixed-sex relationships could foster cognitive-perceptual processing styles known to be associated with independence versus interdependence respectively. Seventy-two participants visualized either a same-sex or other-sex relationship partner and then performed two measures of cognitive-perceptual style.

A signal detection analysis of chronic attachment anxiety at speed dating: being unpopular is only the first part of the problem.

Initiating a romantic relationship invokes an approach-avoidance conflict between the desire for affiliation and the fear of rejection; optimally, people should selectively approach potential partners who reciprocate their interest. This may be difficult for anxiously attached people: They may be unpopular, and their ambivalence could lead to either a fearfully selective approach at the cost of missed opportunities or an unselective, indiscriminate approach at the cost of increasing rejection. Using a speed-dating paradigm, data were collected from 116 participants, and a signal detection framework was applied to examine the outcomes.

Cutting stress off at the pass: reducing vigilance and responsiveness to social threat by manipulating attention.

Personality processes relating to social perception have been shown to play a significant role in the experience of stress. In 5 studies, the authors demonstrate that early stage attentional processes influence the perception of social threat and modify the human stress response. The authors first show that cortisol release in response to a stressful situation correlates with selective attention toward social threat.

Self-esteem, locus of control, hippocampal volume, and cortisol regulation in young and old adulthood.

Self-esteem, the value we place on ourselves, has been associated with effects on health, life expectancy, and life satisfaction. Correlated with self-esteem is internal locus of control, the individual's perception of being in control of his or her outcomes. Recently, variations in self-esteem and internal locus of control have been shown to predict the neuroendocrine cortisol response to stress.

Increasing implicit self-esteem through classical conditioning.

Implicit self-esteem is the automatic, nonconscious aspect of self-esteem. This study demonstrated that implicit self-esteem can be increased using a computer game that repeatedly pairs self-relevant information with smiling faces. These findings, which are consistent with principles of classical conditioning, establish the associative and interpersonal nature of implicit self-esteem and demonstrate the potential benefit of applying basic learning principles in this domain.