Of Nice and Mean: The Personal Relevance of Others' Competence Drives Perceptions of Warmth.

Past research shows that when forming an impression of an interdependent person, perceivers are motivated to look for information relevant to their goals and interests. The present experiments examined what happens after this information-seeking stage and showed that the relevance of the target's attributes for one's goals and interests drives warmth impressions. Using both a scenario (Experiment 1) and realistic methodologies (Experiment 3), we showed that when the perceiver had to collaborate with a target, the more competent the target, the more perceivers anticipated success and the more the target came across as warm.

Intergroup relations in soccer finals: people's forecasts of the duration of emotional reactions of in-group and out-group soccer fans.

The authors examined the hypothesis that people forecast a longer duration of uniquely human secondary emotions for their in-group than for an out-group. The authors conducted a field experiment in the setting of the European soccer championship. They asked Belgian participants to forecast the intensity with which their in-group Belgian fans or the out-group Turkish fans would experience various primary and secondary emotions in response to their team's victory or loss immediately after the Turkey-Belgium match and three days later.

Asch's social psychology: not as social as you may think.

This article discusses 2 commonly held ideas about Solomon Asch's work in social psychology: (a) Asch was primarily interested in social phenomena in general and in group processes in particular, and (b) Asch was a forerunner of social cognition. Asch's studies on social influence were translations of strictly perceptual experiments. For him, social stimuli had no specificity relative to physical ones provided that the perceptual context presented similar structural properties.

The dispositional inference strikes back: situational focus and dispositional suppression in causal attribution.

The authors propose that correction of dispositional inferences involves the examination of situational constraints and the suppression of dispositional inferences. They hypothesized that suppression would result in dispositional rebound. In Study 1, participants saw a video of either a free or a forced speaker.

Task specificity in age-related slowing: word production versus conceptual comparison.

We analyzed age-related slowing in 29 younger (M = 22 years) and 30 older adults (M = 70 years) who performed a conceptual comparison task, a naming task, and a simple reaction time task. Both vocal and manual responses were elicited in all except the naming task. Results did not support the hypothesis that there is greater age-related slowing in comparison tasks than in production tasks.

The highs and lows of group homogeneity.

Two experiments yielded further evidence for the ingroup homogeneity effect (Kelly, C., 1989. Political identity and perceived intragroup homogeneity.