Meta-lay theories of scientific potential drive underrepresented students' sense of belonging to science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM).

The current research investigates people's perceptions of others' lay theories (or mindsets), an understudied construct that we call meta-lay theories. Six studies examine whether underrepresented students' meta-lay theories influence their sense of belonging to science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). The studies tested whether underrepresented students who perceive their faculty as believing most students have high scientific aptitude (a universal metatheory) would report a stronger sense of belonging to STEM than those who think their faculty believe that not everyone has high scientific aptitude (a nonuniversal metatheory).

Motivation alters impression formation and related neural systems.

Observers frequently form impressions of other people based on complex or conflicting information. Rather than being objective, these impressions are often biased by observers' motives. For instance, observers often downplay negative information they learn about ingroup members.

Trusting outgroup, but not ingroup members, requires control: neural and behavioral evidence.

Trust and cooperation often break down across group boundaries, contributing to pernicious consequences, from polarized political structures to intractable conflict. As such, addressing such conflicts require first understanding why trust is reduced in intergroup settings. Here, we clarify the structure of intergroup trust using neuroscientific and behavioral methods.

Subtle perceptions of male sexual orientation influence occupational opportunities.

Theories linking the literatures on stereotyping and human resource management have proposed that individuals may enjoy greater success obtaining jobs congruent with stereotypes about their social categories or traits. Here, we explored such effects for a detectable, but not obvious, social group distinction: male sexual orientation. Bridging previous work on prejudice and occupational success with that on social perception, we found that perceivers rated gay and straight men as more suited to professions consistent with stereotypes about their groups (nurses, pediatricians, and English teachers vs.

Perceptions of variability in facial emotion influence beliefs about the stability of psychological characteristics.

Beliefs about the malleability versus stability of traits (incremental vs. entity lay theories) have a profound impact on social cognition and self-regulation, shaping phenomena that range from the fundamental attribution error and group-based stereotyping to academic motivation and achievement. Less is known about the causes than the effects of these lay theories, and in the current work the authors examine the perception of facial emotion as a causal influence on lay theories.

Power Heightens Sensitivity to Unfairness Against the Self.

Power is accompanied by a sense of entitlement, which shapes reactions to self-relevant injustices. We propose that powerful people more strongly expect to be treated fairly and are faster to perceive unjust treatment that violates these expectations. After preliminary data demonstrated that power leads people to expect fair outcomes for themselves, we conducted four experiments.

The dissociable effects of stereotype threat on older adults' memory encoding and retrieval.

The present study asks how subliminal exposure to negative stereotypes about age-related memory deficits affects older adults' memory performance. Whereas prior research has focused on the effect of "stereotype threat" on older adults' memory for neutral material, the present study additionally examines the effect on memory for positive and negative words, as well as whether the subliminal "threat" has a larger impact on memory performance when it occurs prior to encoding or prior to retrieval (as compared to a control condition). Results revealed that older adults' memory impairments were most pronounced when the threat was placed prior to retrieval as compared to when the threat was placed prior to encoding or no threat occurred.

Cognition from on high and down low: Verticality and construal level.

Across 7 studies, the authors examined the relationship between experiences of verticality and abstract versus concrete processing. Experiencing high, relative to low, verticality led to higher level identifications for actions (Study 1), greater willingness to delay short-term monetary gains for larger long-term monetary gains (Studies 2 and 5), and more frequent perceptions of meaningful relationships between objects and categories (Studies 3, 4, and 6), demonstrating that high verticality leads to more high-level construals. Mechanisms of these effects were explored, and the studies present evidence suggesting that mood (Studies 3 and 4), felt power (Study 4), arousal (Study 4), perceptual scope (Study 4), superficial semantic associations (Study 5), and movement (Study 5) do not mediate these effects.

Does aging impair first impression accuracy? Differentiating emotion recognition from complex social inferences.

Young adults can be surprisingly accurate at making inferences about people from their faces. Although these first impressions have important consequences for both the perceiver and the target, it remains an open question whether first impression accuracy is preserved with age. Specifically, could age differences in impressions toward others stem from age-related deficits in accurately detecting complex social cues? Research on aging and impression formation suggests that young and older adults show relative consensus in their first impressions, but it is unknown whether they differ in accuracy.

Group-based discrimination in judgments of moral purity-related behaviors: experimental and archival evidence.

Knowledge of individuals' group membership can alter moral judgments of their behavior. We found that such moral judgments were amplified when judgers learned that a person belonged to a group shown to elicit disgust in others. When a person was labeled as obese, a hippie, or "trailer trash," people judged that person's behavior differently than when such descriptors were omitted: Virtuous behaviors were more highly praised, and moral violations were more severely criticized.

Monoracial and biracial children: effects of racial identity saliency on social learning and social preferences.

Children prefer learning from, and affiliating with, their racial in-group but those preferences may vary for biracial children. Monoracial (White, Black, Asian) and biracial (Black/White, Asian/White) children (N = 246, 3-8 years) had their racial identity primed. In a learning preferences task, participants determined the function of a novel object after watching adults (White, Black, and Asian) demonstrate its uses.

Communicating without the Face: Holistic Perception of Emotions of People with Facial Paralysis.

People with facial paralysis (FP) report social difficulties, but some attempt to compensate by increasing expressivity in their bodies and voices. We examined perceivers' emotion judgments of videos of people with FP to understand how they interpret the combination of an inexpressive face with an expressive body and voice. Results suggest perceivers form less favorable impressions of people with severe FP, but compensatory expression is effective in improving impressions.

Investigating the early stages of person perception: the asymmetry of social categorization by sex vs. age.

Early perceptual operations are central components of the dynamics of social categorization. The wealth of information provided by facial cues presents challenges to our understanding of these early stages of person perception. The current study aimed to uncover the dynamics of processing multiply categorizable faces, notably as a function of their gender and age.

How "it gets better": effectively communicating support to targets of prejudice.

What is said when communicating intergroup support to targets of prejudice, and how do targets react? We hypothesized that people not targeted by prejudice reference social connection (e.g., social support) more than social change (e.

Thin-slice judgments in the clinical context.

Clinicians make a variety of assessments about their clients, from judging personality traits to making diagnoses, and a variety of methods are available to do so, ranging from observations to structured interviews. A large body of work demonstrates that from a brief glimpse of another's nonverbal behavior, a variety of traits and inner states can be accurately perceived. Additionally, from these "thin slices" of behavior, even future outcomes can be predicted with some accuracy.

Simulating sensorimotor metaphors: novel metaphors influence sensory judgments.

Embodied cognition theory proposes that individuals' abstract concepts can be associated with sensorimotor processes. The authors examined the effects of teaching participants novel embodied metaphors, not based in prior physical experience, and found evidence suggesting that they lead to embodied simulation, suggesting refinements to current models of embodied cognition. Creating novel embodiments of abstract concepts in the laboratory may be a useful method for examining mechanisms of embodied cognition.

Fluid movement and fluid social cognition: bodily movement influences essentialist thought.

Rigid social categorization can lead to negative social consequences such as stereotyping and prejudice. The authors hypothesized that bodily experiences of fluidity would promote fluidity in social-categorical thinking. Across a series of experiments, fluid movements compared with nonfluid movements led to more fluid lay theories of social categories, more fluidity in social categorization, and consequences of fluid social-categorical thinking, decreased stereotype endorsement, and increased concern for social inequalities.

Nonverbal expressions of status and system legitimacy: an interactive influence on race bias.

A voluminous literature has examined how primates respond to nonverbal expressions of status, such as taking the high ground, expanding one's posture, and tilting one's head. We extend this research to human intergroup processes in general and interracial processes in particular. Perceivers may be sensitive to whether racial group status is reflected in group members' nonverbal expressions of status.

The neural basis of contextual influences on face categorization.

From only brief exposure to a face, individuals spontaneously categorize another's race. Recent behavioral evidence suggests that visual context may affect such categorizations. We used fMRI to examine the neural basis of contextual influences on the race categorization of faces.

The role of non-verbal behaviour in racial disparities in health care: implications and solutions.

Context: People from racial minority backgrounds report less trust in their doctors and have poorer health outcomes. Although these deficiencies have multiple roots, one important set of explanations involves racial bias, which may be non-conscious, on the part of providers, and minority patients' fears that they will be treated in a biased way. Here, we focus on one mechanism by which this bias may be communicated and reinforced: namely, non-verbal behaviour in the doctor-patient interaction.

Essentialist thinking predicts decrements in children's memory for racially ambiguous faces.

Past research shows that adults often display poor memory for racially ambiguous and racial outgroup faces, with both face types remembered worse than own-race faces. In the present study, the authors examined whether children also show this pattern of results. They also examined whether emerging essentialist thinking about race predicts children's memory for faces.

Red enhances the processing of facial expressions of anger.

Emotional expressions convey important social information. Given the social importance of decoding emotions, expressive faces wield great influence on cognition and perception. However, contextual factors also exert a top-down influence on emotion detection, privileging particular expressions over others.

Influences of Culture and Visual Context on Real-Time Social Categorization.

Social categorization is often thought to be based on facial features and immune to visual context. Moreover, East Asians have been argued to attend to context more than Westerners. American and Chinese participants were presented with faces varying along a White-Asian morph continuum either in American, neutral, or Chinese contexts.

Accuracy and consensus in judgments of trustworthiness from faces: behavioral and neural correlates.

Perceivers' inferences about individuals based on their faces often show high interrater consensus and can even accurately predict behavior in some domains. Here we investigated the consensus and accuracy of judgments of trustworthiness. In Study 1, we showed that the type of photo judged makes a significant difference for whether an individual is judged as trustworthy.