Psychological Science最新文献

Knowing the similarities among others is critical for navigating our social environments and building relationships. However, people can evaluate the similarity among others using two perspectives: other-to-other differences (allocentric similarity) or self-to-other differences (egocentric similarity). Here, we use functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test whether the similarity of brain-response patterns when thinking of others and the self is predicted by behavioral models of allocentric and egocentric similarity in the representations of acquainted peers from 20 independent groups of adults (total N = 108; within-subjects design). Results show that both allocentric and egocentric similarity during person representation are reflected in brain-response similarity patterns when thinking of others, but they do so differentially and in nonoverlapping brain systems. These results suggest that the brain independently processes both allocentric and egocentric reference frames to encode trait information about conspecifics that we use to represent person knowledge about others within real-world social networks.

How do people remember when something occurred? One obvious possibility is that, in the absence of explicit cues, people remember on the basis of memory strength. If a memory is fuzzy, it likely occurred longer ago than a memory that is vivid. Here, we demonstrate a robust illusion of time that stands in stark contrast with this prediction. In six experiments testing adults via an online research platform, we show that experiences that are repeated (and, consequently, better remembered) are counterintuitively remembered as having initially occurred further back in time. This illusion is robust (amounting to as much as a 25% distortion in perceived time), consistent (exhibited by the vast majority of participants tested), and applicable at the scale of ordinary day-to-day experience (occurring even when tested over one full week). We argue that this may be one of the key mechanisms underlying why people's sense of time often deviates from reality.

In face-to-face conversation, people use speech and gesture to convey meaning. Seeing gestures alongside speech facilitates comprehenders' language processing, but crucially, the mechanisms underlying this facilitation remain unclear. We investigated whether comprehenders use the semantic information in gestures, typically preceding related speech, to predict upcoming meaning. Dutch adults listened to questions asked by a virtual avatar. Questions were accompanied by an iconic gesture (e.g., typing) or meaningless control movement (e.g., arm scratch) followed by a short pause and target word (e.g., "type"). A Cloze experiment showed that gestures improved explicit predictions of upcoming target words. Moreover, an EEG experiment showed that gestures reduced alpha and beta power during the pause, indicating anticipation, and reduced N400 amplitudes, demonstrating facilitated semantic processing. Thus, comprehenders use iconic gestures to predict upcoming meaning. Theories of linguistic prediction should incorporate communicative bodily signals as predictive cues to capture how language is processed in face-to-face interaction.

Recently, it has been demonstrated that taking a disagreeing perspective increases the accuracy of inner crowds by enhancing estimation diversity. An insightful commentary reanalyzed the data using maximal random structure models and found no increase in accuracy when taking a disagreeing perspective. These findings present a curious challenge for inner-crowd research and hint at the importance of question variability. Here, we present the results of three preregistered experiments (total N = 2,884, with online adult participants from the United States and the United Kingdom) that reconcile these findings by discerning between the ease and difficulty of questions. The results support the notion that taking a disagreeing perspective is beneficial for difficult questions, yet harmful for easier questions. We emphasize that question difficulty is a key factor to consider when evaluating the effectiveness of any intervention designed to improve the accuracy of aggregate estimates through the enhancement of diversity.

Understanding how the structure of cognitive abilities changes depending on age and ability (age and ability differentiation) has critical implications for cognitive-ability assessments and cognitive-developmental theories. Most differentiation research has focused on general intelligence; however, we argue that the investments children make in specific domains and school-taught subjects should rather affect their domain-specific ability structures. Leveraging a representative longitudinal sample of 17,979 U.S. children who were assessed in mathematics, reading, science, working memory, and cognitive flexibility, we found that loadings on a general intelligence factor remained similar, whereas most domain-specific factor loadings increased over time. Hence, age and ability differentiation are conceptually distinct, with the former pertaining to specific abilities and the latter to general intelligence. We find some evidence that domain-specific abilities can compensate for lower general intelligence. Overall, our results encourage a nuanced understanding of children's cognitive development.

ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia often co-occur, and the underlying continuous traits are correlated (ADHD symptoms, reading, spelling, and math skills). This may be explained by trait-to-trait causal effects, shared genetic and environmental factors, or both. We studied a sample of ≤ 19,125 twin children and 2,150 siblings from the Netherlands Twin Register, assessed at ages 7 and 10. Children with a condition, compared to those without that condition, were 2.1 to 3.1 times more likely to have a second condition. Still, most children (77.3%) with ADHD, dyslexia, or dyscalculia had just one condition. Cross-lagged modeling suggested that reading causally influences spelling (β = 0.44). For all other trait combinations, cross-lagged modeling suggested that the trait correlations are attributable to genetic influences common to all traits, rather than causal influences. Thus, ADHD, dyslexia, and dyscalculia seem to co-occur because of correlated genetic risks, rather than causality.

The study aimed to investigate the within-person relationship between religious-service attendance and mental health using data from the British Household Panel Survey (N = 29,298), a longitudinal survey of adult British households between 1991 and 2009. The outcome variables were mental health (as measured with the General Health Questionnaire) and life satisfaction. Using random-intercept cross-lagged panel models over 10 waves of data spanning over 18 years, the associations between religious-service attendance and mental health at the within-person level were mostly nonsignificant. The few significant findings indicated that an increase in religious-service attendance is associated subsequently with either higher or lower levels of mental health, suggesting both detrimental and beneficial effects. A series of robustness analyses (including the use of marginal structural models) mainly supported these findings. The results suggest that there is a need to question the assumption that religious-service attendance provides mental health benefits.

A common-sense moral intuition is that bad acts should be condemned according to severity. Yet seven experiments (N = 6,075 U.S. adults) show that the extent to which people differentiate between transgressions hinges on the direction of comparison. When scaling up from a less severe transgression to a more severe one, people readily express stronger condemnation of the worse transgression. But when scaling down from a more severe transgression to a less severe one, they differentiate less, often condemning the lesser transgression just as strongly as one that is transparently worse. Indicating that one transgression is less bad than another can be construed as downplaying such transgressions, signaling bad moral character. Supporting this account, the asymmetry is larger for judgments that implicate moral character and for transgressions that seem especially important to condemn. Observers' moral-character judgments reveal a similar pattern, suggesting that the asymmetry is reinforced by social incentives.

Intelligence is known to predict survival, but it remains unclear whether cognitive abilities differ in their relationship to survival in old age. We analyzed longitudinal data of 516 healthy adults (age: M = 84.92 years, SD = 8.66 years at Wave 1) from the Berlin Aging Study (Germany) on nine tasks of perceptual speed, episodic memory, verbal fluency, and verbal knowledge, and a general composite intelligence score. There were eight waves, with up to 18 years of follow-up; all participants were deceased by the time of analysis. We used a joint multivariate longitudinal survival model to estimate the unique contribution of each cognitive ability in terms of true (i.e., error-free) current value and current rate of change when predicting survival. Additional survival covariates included age at first occasion, sex, sociobiographical status, and suspected dementia. Only the two verbal-fluency measures were uniquely predictive of mortality risk. Thus, verbal fluency showed more salient associations with mortality risk than did measures of perceptual speed, episodic memory, and verbal knowledge.

Automatic evaluation has emerged as a central concept in contemporary thinking about prejudice. The current research tested a quintessential aspect of prejudice: whether group affiliation dominates the automatic evaluation of individual group members even when diagnostic evaluative information about the individuals is available. Participants read a list of descriptions about the behaviors of two individuals: one from a typically liked group and one from a typically disliked group. The list portrayed one individual more positively than the other, and we manipulated the extremity and direction of that difference. We conducted six studies (N = 11,572) with samples consisting of U.S. adults across different regions and group types (age, gender, and race) and two indirect measures that purportedly measure automatic evaluation: the implicit association test (IAT) and the evaluative priming task (EPT). Group affiliation (relative to personal characteristics) influenced the IAT and the EPT more than it influenced the self-reported evaluation. These results may suggest that the automatic evaluation of individuals is more prejudiced than nonautomatic evaluation.