Publications by authors named "William A Cunningham"

People generate evaluations of different attitude objects based on their goals and aspects of the social context. Prior research suggests that people can shift between at least three types of evaluations to judge whether something is good or bad: (how costly or beneficial it is), (whether it is aligned with moral norms), and (whether it feels good; Van Bavel et al., 2012).

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Aim: We examined associations among injury severity, white matter structural connectivity within functionally defined brain networks and psychosocial/adaptive outcomes in children with traumatic brain injury (TBI).

Method: Participants included 58 youths (39 male) with complicated-mild TBI (cmTBI;  = 12, age =  12.6 ± 2.

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Background: Camouflaging, the strategies that some autistic people use to hide their differences, has been hypothesized to trigger mental health ramifications. Camouflaging might reflect ubiquitous impression management experiences that are not unique to autistic people and similarly impact the mental health of non-autistic people.

Aims: We first examined whether individuals in the general population camouflage and manage impressions while experiencing mental health repercussions, and how gender and neurodivergent traits modified these associations.

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Objectives: Some autistic people "camouflage" their differences by modeling neurotypical behaviors to survive in a neurotypical-dominant social world. It remains elusive whether camouflaging is unique to autism or if it entails similar experiences across human groups as part of ubiquitous impression management (IM). Here we examined camouflaging engagement and theoretical drivers in the general population, drawing on the transactional IM framework and contextualizing findings within both contemporary autism research and the past IM literature.

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Self-reports remain affective science's only direct measure of subjective affective experiences. Yet, little research has sought to understand the psychological process that transforms subjective experience into self-reports. Here, we propose that by framing these self-reports as dynamic affective decisions, affective scientists may leverage the computational tools of decision-making research, sequential sampling models specifically, to better disentangle affective experience from the noisy decision processes that constitute self-report.

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Gender differences in appraisals of first intercourse are among the largest in sexuality research, with women indicating less satisfying "sexual debuts" than men. Dispositional or "actor-level" explanations for this gender gap are pervasive, yet research has largely examined heterosexual debuts in which actor gender and partner gender are confounded. We assessed whether women's less satisfying sexual debuts are better explained by actor gender or partner gender, comparing experiences of women who debuted with men (WDM) with those of men and women who debuted with women (MDW, WDW).

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Activating relevant responses is a key function of automatic processes in De Neys's model; however, what determines the order or magnitude of such activation is ambiguous. Focusing on recently developed sequential sampling models of choice, we argue that proactive control shapes response generation but does not cleanly fit into De Neys's automatic-deliberative distinction, highlighting the need for further model development.

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Social categories like race and gender often give rise to stereotypes and prejudice, and a great deal of research has focused on how motivations influence these biased beliefs. Here, we focus on potential biases in how these categories are even formed in the first place, suggesting that motivations can influence the very categories people use to group others. We propose that motivations to share schemas with other people and to gain resources shape people's attention to dimensions like race, gender, and age in different contexts.

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Article Synopsis
  • The COVID-19 pandemic has significantly impacted various aspects of human life, focusing on public health management through effective communication and behavior change strategies.
  • A large dataset of 51,404 individuals from 69 countries was created for the ICSMP COVID-19 project to analyze the social and moral psychology related to public health behaviors during the early pandemic phase (April-June 2020).
  • The survey included diverse questions on topics like COVID-19 beliefs, social attitudes, ideologies, health, moral beliefs, personality traits, and demographics, and provides raw and cleaned data along with survey materials and psychometric evaluations.
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Implicit measures of attitudes have classically focused on the association between a social group and generalized valence, but debate exists surrounding how these associations arise and what they can tell us about beliefs and attitudes. Here, we suggest that representations of oppression, which relate positively to implicitly measured prejudice but negatively to explicitly measured prejudice, can serve to decrease the predictive validity of implicit measures through statistical suppression. We had participants complete a Black-White implicit association test (IAT) and an IAT measuring representations of oppression, and find that oppression-related representations statistically suppress the relation between IAT scores and explicit attitudes, such that accounting for these representations increases the total amount of variance explained by implicit measures.

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This pilot study examined the associations among functional connectivity in the salience, central executive, and default mode networks, and neurocognition in pediatric brain tumor survivors and healthy children. Thirteen pediatric brain tumor survivors (9 boys, M = 12.76 years) and 10 healthy children (6 boys, M = 12.

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Both novelty and uncertainty are potent features guiding exploration; however, they are often experimentally conflated, and an understanding of how they interact to regulate the balance between exploration and exploitation has proved elusive. Using a task designed to decouple the influence of novelty and uncertainty, we identify separable mechanisms through which exploration is directed. We show that uncertainty-directed exploration is sensitive to the prospective benefit offered by new information, whereas novelty-directed exploration is maintained regardless of its potential advantage.

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Pietraszewski contends that group representations that rely on a "containment metaphor" fail to adequately capture phenomena of group dynamics such as shifts in allegiances. We argue, in contrast, that social categories allow for computationally efficient, richly structured, and flexible group representations that explain some of the most intriguing aspects of social group behaviour.

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Social performances pervade human interactions. Some autistic people describe their social performances as 'camouflaging' and engage in these performances to mitigate social challenges and survive in the neurotypical world. Here, we reconsider autistic camouflaging under the unifying framework of impression management (IM) by examining overlapping and unique motivations, neurocognitive mechanisms, and consequences.

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Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g.

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Quickly scanning an environment to determine relative threat is an essential part of survival. Scene gist extracted rapidly from the environment may help people detect threats. Here, we probed this link between emotional judgements and features of visual scenes.

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Research on stereotype formation has proposed a variety of reasons for how inaccurate stereotypes arise, focusing largely on accounts of motivation and cognitive efficiency. Here, we instead consider how stereotypes arise from basic processes of approach and avoidance in social learning. Across five studies, we show that initial negative interactions with some members of a group can cause subsequent avoidance of the entire group, and that this avoidance perpetuates stereotypes in two ways.

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Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

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Background: Neuroimaging studies have found a substantial overlap between self-related and social cognitive processes. This study examines three different ways of conceptualizing a person - one that requires considering how they are embedded in their social environment (roles), one that requires considering their generalized qualities (traits), and one that identifies their relevant group memberships. To the extent that relational aspects of identity require considering how a person is embedded in their social environment we should find greater activation for role judgements in regions associated with social cognitive processes.

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Dual-process models of altruistic choice assume that automatic responses give way to deliberation over time, and are a popular way to conceptualize how people make generous choices and why those choices might change under time pressure. However, these models have led to conflicting interpretations of behaviour and underlying psychological dynamics. Here, we propose that flexible, goal-directed deployment of attention towards information priorities provides a more parsimonious account of altruistic choice dynamics.

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Data analysis workflows in many scientific domains have become increasingly complex and flexible. Here we assess the effect of this flexibility on the results of functional magnetic resonance imaging by asking 70 independent teams to analyse the same dataset, testing the same 9 ex-ante hypotheses. The flexibility of analytical approaches is exemplified by the fact that no two teams chose identical workflows to analyse the data.

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Much of human thought, feeling, and behavior unfolds automatically. Indirect measures of cognition capture such processes by observing responding under corresponding conditions (e.g.

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Although rationalization about one's own beliefs and actions can improve an individual's future decisions, beliefs can provide other benefits unrelated to their epistemic truth value, such as group cohesion and identity. A model of resource-rational cognition that accounts for these benefits may explain unexpected and seemingly irrational thought patterns, such as belief polarization.

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