Sensitive liberals and unfeeling conservatives? .

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality-and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this registered report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitivity-that is, a person's attunement to their own internal bodily states and signals (e.g.

For whom do boundaries become restrictions? The role of political orientation.

While the global pandemic highlighted the importance of adhering to boundaries (e.g., social distancing rules), compliance with these boundary-imposing measures has been politically divided.

A gateway conspiracy? Belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories prospectively predicts greater conspiracist ideation.

A primary focus of research on conspiracy theories has been understanding the psychological characteristics that predict people's level of conspiracist ideation. However, the dynamics of conspiracist ideation-i.e.

Contracting COVID-19: a longitudinal investigation of the impact of beliefs and knowledge.

Recent work has found that an individual's beliefs and personal characteristics can impact perceptions of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Certain individuals-such as those who are politically conservative or who endorse conspiracy theories-are less likely to engage in preventative behaviors like social distancing. The current research aims to address whether these individual differences not only affect people's reactions to the pandemic, but also their actual likelihood of contracting COVID-19.

Examining the Left-Right Divide Through the Lens of a Global Crisis: Ideological Differences and Their Implications for Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic.

The COVID-19 disease pandemic is one of the most pressing global health issues of our time. Nevertheless, responses to the pandemic exhibit a stark ideological divide, with political conservatives (versus liberals/progressives) expressing less concern about the virus and less behavioral compliance with efforts to combat it. Drawing from decades of research on the psychological underpinnings of ideology, in four studies (total  = 4441) we examine the factors that contribute to the ideological gap in pandemic response-across domains including personality (e.

Who is (not) complying with the U. S. social distancing directive and why? Testing a general framework of compliance with virtual measures of social distancing.

A study involving over 2000 online participants (US residents) tested a general framework regarding compliance with a directive in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study featured not only a self-report measure of social distancing but also virtual behavior measures-simulations that presented participants with graphical depictions mirroring multiple real-world scenarios and asked them to position themselves in relation to others in the scene. The conceptual framework highlights three essential components of a directive: (1) the source, some entity is advocating for a behavioral change; (2) the surrounding context, the directive is in response to some challenge; and (3) the target, the persons to whom the directive is addressed.

Social distancing decreases an individual's likelihood of contracting COVID-19.

Past research has established the value of social distancing as a means of deterring the spread of COVID-19 largely by examining aggregate level data. Locales in which efforts were undertaken to encourage distancing experienced reductions in their rate of transmission. However, these aggregate results tell us little about the effectiveness of social distancing at the level of the individual, which is the question addressed by the current research.

Of unbiased beans and slanted stocks: Neutral stimuli reveal the fundamental relation between political ideology and exploratory behaviour.

Fiagbenu et al. (2019, British Journal of Psychology) questioned the nature and extent of ideological differences in learning and behaviour documented by Shook and Fazio (2009, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 995). We correct a mischaracterization in their depiction of Shook & Fazio's research, and in doing so, we outline why the original findings represent domain-general ideological differences in attitude-formation processes, rather than simple differences in responses to physical threat.

From trust in caregivers' support to exploration: The role of openness to negative affect and self-regulation.

Attachment theory assumes that trust in caregivers' support and exploration are closely related. Little research tried to investigate this link, nor focuses on mechanisms that might explain this association. The present studies examined whether trust is related to exploration through a serial indirect effect of openness to negative affect and self-regulation.

Does the future look bright? Processing style determines the impact of valence weighting biases and self-beliefs on expectations.

People regularly form expectations about their future, and whether those expectations are positive or negative can have important consequences. So, what determines the valence of people's expectations? Research seeking to answer this question by using an individual-differences approach has established that trait biases in optimistic/pessimistic self-beliefs and, more recently, trait biases in behavioral tendencies to weight one's past positive versus negative experiences more heavily each predict the valence of people's typical expectations. However, these two biases do not correlate, suggesting limits on a purely individual-differences approach to predicting people's expectations.

Attitude Accessibility as a Function of Emotionality.

Despite the centrality of both attitude accessibility and attitude basis to the last 30 years of theoretical and empirical work concerning attitudes, little work has systematically investigated their relation. The research that does exist provides conflicting results and is not at all conclusive given the methodology that has been used. The current research uses recent advances in statistical modeling and attitude measurement to provide the most systematic examination of the relation between attitude accessibility and basis to date.

Are Some Attitudes More Self-Defining Than Others? Assessing Self-Related Attitude Functions and Their Consequences.

Attitudes serve multiple functions, some related to the self-concept. We call attitudes that help people define who they are "self-defining." Across four studies, we tested a brief self-report measure of the extent to which an attitude is self-defining.

On the generalization of attitude accessibility after repeated attitude expression.

The more accessible an attitude is, the stronger is its influence on information processing and behavior. Accessibility can be increased through attitude rehearsal, but it remains unknown whether attitude rehearsal also affects the accessibility of related attitudes. To investigate this hypothesis, participants in an experimental condition repeatedly expressed their attitudes towards exemplars of several semantic categories during an evaluative categorization task.

Generalization of evaluative conditioning toward foods: Increasing sensitivity to health in eating intentions.

Objective: Evaluative conditioning (EC), the pairing of objects (conditioned stimuli; CS) with positive and negative unconditioned stimuli (US) in order to induce attitude change, has proven to be a viable method of changing attitudes toward foods and corresponding eating behaviors. Positively conditioning healthy foods and negatively conditioning unhealthy foods should result in healthier food choices. Of interest in the current research is the extent to which EC can generalize beyond the conditioned foods to entire dimensions underlying food judgment, such as health and taste.

On the Dominance of Attitude Emotionality.

Many situations in our lives require us to make relatively quick decisions as whether to approach or avoid a person or object, buy or pass on a product, or accept or reject an offer. These decisions are particularly difficult when there are both positive and negative aspects to the object. How do people go about navigating this conflict to come to a summary judgment? Using the Evaluative Lexicon (EL), we demonstrate across three studies, 7,700 attitude expressions, and nearly 50 different attitude objects that when positivity and negativity conflict, the valence that is based more on emotion is more likely to dominate.

Directed abstraction: Encouraging broad, personal generalizations following a success experience.

People with negative self-views may fail to generalize appropriately from success experiences (e.g., Wood, Heimpel, Newby-Clark, & Ross, 2005).

What changes in cognitive therapy for depression? An examination of cognitive therapy skills and maladaptive beliefs.

This study examined effortful cognitive skills and underlying maladaptive beliefs among patients treated with cognitive therapy (CT) for depression. Depressed patients (n=44) completed cognitive measures before and after 16 weeks of CT. Measures included an assessment of CT skills (Ways of Responding Scale; WOR), an implicit test of maladaptive beliefs (Implicit Association Test; IAT), and a self-report questionnaire of maladaptive beliefs (Dysfunctional Attitude Scale; DAS).

Political attitudes bias the mental representation of a presidential candidate's face.

Using a technique known as reverse-correlation image classification, we demonstrated that the face of Mitt Romney as represented in people's minds varies as a function of their attitudes toward Mitt Romney. Our findings provide evidence that attitudes bias how people see something as concrete and well learned as the face of a political candidate during an election. Practically, our findings imply that citizens may not merely interpret political information about a candidate to fit their opinion, but also may construct a political world in which they literally see candidates differently.

Approach behavior can mitigate predominately univalent negative attitudes: evidence regarding insects and spiders.

Three experiments tested whether disliking of predominately univalently negative attitude objects could be reduced by a procedure pairing approach behaviors with subliminally presented images of the objects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants who approached images of insects rated insects less negatively than participants who did not approach insect pictures. Experiment 2 extended this effect to spiders and used an implicit measure of spider attitudes.

Predicting return of fear following exposure therapy with an implicit measure of attitudes.

We sought to advance understanding of the processes underlying the efficacy of exposure therapy and particularly the phenomenon of return of fear (ROF) following treatment by drawing on a social psychological view of phobias as attitudes. Specifically, a dual process theory of attitude-related behavior predicts that a positive response to exposure therapy may reflect change in either the automatic (the attitude representation itself) or controlled (skills and confidence at coping with the fear) responses to the phobic stimulus, or both. However, if the attitude representation remains negative following treatment, ROF should be more likely.

Attentional Control Buffers the Effect of Public Speaking Anxiety on Performance.

We explored dispositional differences in the ability to self-regulate attentional processes in the domain of public speaking. Participants first completed measures of speech anxiety and attentional control. In a second session, participants prepared and performed a short speech.

Weighting positive versus negative: the fundamental nature of valence asymmetry.

Objective: The relation between weighting of valence information in attitude generalization and evaluation of novel/hypothetical situations was explored.

Method: Undergraduate participants played a computer game requiring them to learn which stimuli (beans) would increase/decrease their points. Later, participants classified the valence of game beans and novel ones varying in resemblance to game beans.

It was as big as my head, I swear! Biased spider size estimation in spider phobia.

The current study tested the association between fear and perception in spider phobic individuals (n=57) within the context of a treatment outcome study. Participants completed 5 post-treatment Behavioral Approach Tasks (BATs) in which they encountered a live spider and were asked to provide spider size estimates. Consistent with predictions, results indicated that high levels of fear were associated with magnified perception of phobic stimuli.