Personal relevance affects the perceived immorality of politically-charged threats.

Personal similarities to a transgressor makes one view the transgression as less immoral. We investigated whether personal relevance might also affect the perceived immorality of politically-charged threats. We hypothesized that increasing the personal relevance of a threat would lead participants to report the threat as more immoral, even for threats the participant might otherwise view indifferently.

Dimorphous expressions of positive emotion: displays of both care and aggression in response to cute stimuli.

Extremely positive experiences, and positive appraisals thereof, produce intense positive emotions that often generate both positive expressions (e.g., smiles) and expressions normatively reserved for negative emotions (e.

Automaticity in social-cognitive processes.

Over the past several years, the concept of automaticity of higher cognitive processes has permeated nearly all domains of psychological research. In this review, we highlight insights arising from studies in decision-making, moral judgments, close relationships, emotional processes, face perception and social judgment, motivation and goal pursuit, conformity and behavioral contagion, embodied cognition, and the emergence of higher-level automatic processes in early childhood. Taken together, recent work in these domains demonstrates that automaticity does not result exclusively from a process of skill acquisition (in which a process always begins as a conscious and deliberate one, becoming capable of automatic operation only with frequent use) - there are evolved substrates and early childhood learning mechanisms involved as well.