The presence of fear: How subjective fear, not physiological changes, shapes the experience of presence.

When we become engrossed in novels, films, games, or even our own wandering thoughts, we can feel present in a reality distinct from the real world. Although this subjective sense of presence is, presumably, a ubiquitous aspect of conscious experience, the mechanisms that produce it are unknown. Correlational studies conducted in virtual reality have shown that we feel more present when we are afraid, motivating claims that physiological changes contribute to presence; however, such causal claims remain to be evaluated.

Emotion in motion: perceiving fear in the behaviour of individuals from minimal motion capture displays.

The ability to quickly and accurately recognise emotional states is adaptive for numerous social functions. Although body movements are a potentially crucial cue for inferring emotions, few studies have studied the perception of body movements made in naturalistic emotional states. The current research focuses on the use of body movement information in the perception of fear expressed by targets in a virtual heights paradigm.

Age is positively associated with fading affect bias: A cross-sectional comparison.

Emotions elicited by personal event memories change over time such that negative affect fades more quickly than positive affect. This asymmetric fade is called the fading affect bias (FAB) and has been posited as a mechanism that helps promote a positive outlook on life. A similar bias toward positive information (i.

Time heals all wounds? Naïve theories about the fading of affect associated with autobiographical events.

The current research examined the naïve theories that individuals hold about how affect fades over time. In three studies (with various replications), participants read about positive and negative events and estimated the emotional impact of those events on either themselves or a hypothetical other over different time frames (i.e.

Holding on & letting go: romantic attachment and fading affect bias.

The current research examined the phenomenon of fading affect bias - the tendency for affect associated with negative events to fade more than affect associated with positive events - within the context of romantic relationships. Participants recalled and evaluated positive and negative relationship-specific and non-relationship autobiographical events. Participants also completed measures of attachment avoidance and anxiety.

To which world regions does the valence-dominance model of social perception apply?

Over the past 10 years, Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgements of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions.

Thinking about negative life events as a mediator between depression and fading affect bias.

The current research examined the links between depressive symptomology and anxiety on the fading of affect associated with positive and negative autobiographical memories. Participants (N = 296) recalled and rated positive and negative events in terms of how pleasant or unpleasant they were at the time they occurred and at the time of event recollection. Multilevel mediation analyses identified evidence that higher levels of depressive symptoms were directly associated with lower affect fade for both negative and positive memories.

Stereotypic vision: how stereotypes disambiguate visual stimuli.

Three studies examined how participants use race to disambiguate visual stimuli. Participants performed a first-person-shooter task in which Black and White targets appeared holding either a gun or an innocuous object (e.g.

A pancultural perspective on the fading affect bias in autobiographical memory.

The fading affect bias (FAB) refers to the negative affect associated with autobiographical events fading faster than the positive affect associated with such events, a reliable and valid valence effect established by researchers in the USA. The present study examined the idea that the FAB is a ubiquitous emotion regulating phenomenon in autobiographical memory that is present in people from a variety of cultures. We tested for evidence of the FAB by sampling more than 2400 autobiographical event descriptions from 562 participants in 10 cultures around the world.

Attributions about persons with brain injury: the effects of knowledge and familiarity about brain injury.

Primary Objective: To determine how visible markers of brain injury interact with people's knowledge about brain injury to influence people's attributions for undesirable behaviours of a person with brain injury. RESEARCH DESIGN, METHOD AND PROCEDURES: Scenarios in Experiment 1 (n = 98) and Experiment 2 (n = 148) described an adolescent pictured with or without a head scar, who showed four behavioural changes. Participants rated two causal attributions for each behaviour: brain injury and adolescence.

Inferences are for doing: the impact of approach and avoidance states on the generation of spontaneous trait inferences.

Spontaneous trait inferences (STIs) are ubiquitous and occur when perceivers spontaneously infer actor traits from actor behaviors. Previous research has elucidated the processes underlying STIs, but little work has focused on the functions of STIs. This article proposes that these unintentional early inferences serve a general approach or avoidance function.

The role of eye movements in decision making and the prospect of exposure effects.

The aim of the current study was to follow on from previous findings that eye movements can have a causal influence on preference formation. Shimojo et al. (2003) previously found that faces that were presented for a longer duration in a two alternative forced choice task were more likely to be judged as more attractive.

Hemispheric differences in the processing of attachment words.

Inconsistent findings regarding the valence hypothesis might relate to ambiguously valenced stimuli used in some studies. To account for this potential caveat, we used positive and negative attachment words. A total of 50 participants made lexical decisions in a bilateral simultaneous presentation paradigm.

Interfering with inferential, but not associative, processes underlying spontaneous trait inference.

Three studies explore mental processes underlying spontaneous trait inferences about self-informants and the spontaneous trait transference characterizing third-party informants. Process differences are suggested in that instructions prompting a nontrait inference (truth or lie?) reduce self-informant trait-savings effects and lower self-informant trait judgments. For third-party informants, such instructions have no effect on these outcome variables.

Perceived entitativity, stereotype formation, and the interchangeability of group members.

The authors investigated the effects of perceived entitativity of a group on the processing of behavioral information about individual group members and the extent to which such information was transferred to other group members. The results of 3 experiments using a savings-in-relearning paradigm showed that trait inferences about a group member, based on that member's behavior, were stronger for low entitative groups and for collections of individuals. However, the transference of traits from 1 group member to other members of the group was stronger for high entitative groups.