British journal of psychology最新文献

Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.

Time spent on being with others (social interactions) and being alone (solitude) in day to day life might reflect older adults' agentic regulatory strategies to balance the needs to belong and to conserve energy. Motivated from a joint lifespan psychological and social relationship theoretical perspective, this study examined how time spent on social interactions and solitude alternatively unfolds within individuals in daily life, relating to individual differences in trait-level well-being and fatigue. Over 21 days, a total of 11,172 valid records of social interactions were collected from 118 older adults (aged 65–94 years) in a smartphone-based event-contingent ambulatory assessment study in Switzerland. On average, a social interaction episode lasted 39 min and a solitude episode lasted 5.03 hr. Multilevel models showed that, at the within-person level, a longer-than-usual social interaction preceded and was followed by a longer-than-usual solitude episode. Moderator analyses showed that older adults with higher trait life satisfaction and lower trait fatigue spent even more time in social interactions after longer solitude episodes, amplifying the solitude-then-interaction association. Our findings suggest that whereas social interaction is a means to improve well-being, solitude is also an integral part in older adults' daily life supporting energy recovery.

One reason for the persistence of racial inequality may be anticipated dissimilarity with racial outgroups. In the present research, we explored the impact of perceived similarity with White and Black targets on facial identity recognition accuracy. In two studies, participants first completed an ostensible personality survey. Next, in a Learning Phase, Black and White faces were presented on one of three background colours. Participants were led to believe that these colours indicated similarities between them and the target person in the image. Specifically, they were informed that the background colours were associated with the extent to which responses by the target person on the personality survey and their own responses overlapped. In actual fact, faces were randomly assigned to colour. In both studies, non-Black participants (Experiment 1) and White participants (Experiment 2) showed better recognition of White than Black faces. More importantly in the present context, a positive linear effect of similarity was found in both studies, with better recognition of increasingly similar Black and White targets. The independent effects for race of target and similarity, with no interaction, indicated that participants responded to Black and White faces according to category membership as well as on an interpersonal level related to similarity with specific targets. Together these findings suggest that while perceived similarity may enhance identity recognition accuracy for Black and White faces, it may not reduce differences in facial memory for these racial categories.

The other-race effect (ORE) is a recognition memory advantage afforded to one's racial ingroup versus outgroup. The motivational relevance of the ingroup—because of relationships, belonging and self-esteem—is central to many theoretical explanations for the ORE. However, to date, the motivational relevance of outgroups has received considerably less attention in the ORE literature. Across six experiments, Black, White, Asian and Latinx American participants consistently demonstrated better recognition memory for the faces of relatively higher-status racial/ethnic group members than those of lower-status groups. This higher-status recognition advantage even appeared to override the ORE, such that participants better recognized members of higher-status outgroups—but not an outgroup of equivalent status—compared to members of their own ingroup. However, across a variety of self-reported perceived status measures, status differences between the high- and low-status groups generally did not moderate the documented recognition advantage. These findings provide initial evidence for the potential role of group status in the ORE and in recognition memory more broadly, but future work is needed to rule out alternative explanations.

Bayesian methods are becoming increasingly used in applied psychological research. Previous researchers have thoroughly written about much of the details already, including the philosophy underlying Bayesian methods, computational issues associated with Bayesian model estimation, Bayesian model development and summary, and the role of Bayesian methods in the so-called replication crisis. In this paper, we seek to provide case studies comparing the use of frequentist methods to the use of Bayesian methods in applied psychological research. These case studies are intended to ‘illustrate by example’ the ways that Bayesian modelling differs from frequentist modelling and the differing conclusions that one may arrive at using the two methods. The intended audience is applied psychological researchers who have been trained in the traditional frequentist framework, who are familiar with mixed-effects models and who are curious about how statistical results might look in a Bayesian context. Along with our case studies, we provide general opinions and guidance on the use of Bayesian methods in applied psychological research.

Impressions from faces are made remarkably quickly and they can underpin behaviour in a wide variety of social contexts. Over the last decade many studies have sought to trace the links between facial cues and social perception and behaviour. One such body of work has shown clear overlap between the fields of face perception and social stereotyping by demonstrating a role for conceptual stereotypes in impression formation from faces. We integrate these results involving conceptual influences on impressions with another substantial body of research in visual cognition which demonstrates that much of the variance in impressions can be predicted from perceptual, data-driven models using physical cues in face images. We relate this discussion to the phylogenetic, cultural, individual and developmental origins of facial impressions and define priority research questions for the field including investigating non-WEIRD cultures, tracking the developmental trajectory of impressions and determining the malleability of impression formation.

Humans show improved recognition for faces from their own social group relative to faces from another social group. Yet before faces can be recognized, they must first be detected in the visual field. Here, we tested whether humans also show an ingroup bias at the earliest stage of face processing – the point at which the presence of a face is first detected. To this end, we measured viewers' ability to detect ingroup (Black and White) and outgroup faces (Asian, Black, and White) in everyday scenes. Ingroup faces were detected with greater speed and accuracy relative to outgroup faces (Experiment 1). Removing face hue impaired detection generally, but the ingroup detection advantage was undiminished (Experiment 2). This same pattern was replicated by a detection algorithm using face templates derived from human data (Experiment 3). These findings demonstrate that the established ingroup bias in face processing can extend to the early process of detection. This effect is ‘colour blind’, in the sense that group membership effects are independent of general effects of image hue. Moreover, it can be captured by tuning visual templates to reflect the statistics of observers' social experience. We conclude that group bias in face detection is both a visual and a social phenomenon.

Two studies (total N = 778) looked at (1) how people react to research finding a sex difference depending on whether the research puts men or women in a better light and (2) how well people can predict the average man and average woman's reactions. Participants read a fictional popular-science article about fictional research finding either a male- or a female-favouring sex difference. The research was credited to either a male or a female lead researcher. In both studies, both sexes reacted less positively to differences favouring males; in contrast to our earlier research, however, the effect was larger among female participants. Contrary to a widespread expectation, participants did not react less positively to research led by a female. Participants did react less positively, though, to research led by a male when the research reported a male-favouring difference in a highly valued trait. Participants judged male-favouring research to be lower in quality than female-favouring research, apparently in large part because they saw the former as more harmful. In both studies, participants predicted that the average man and woman would exhibit substantial own-sex favouritism, with both sexes predicting more own-sex favouritism from the other sex than the other sex predicted from itself. In making these predictions, participants overestimated women's own-sex favouritism, and got the direction of the effect wrong for men. A greater understanding of the tendency to overestimate gender-ingroup bias could help quell antagonisms between the sexes.

Faces can be categorized along various dimensions including gender or race, an ability developing in infancy. Infant categorization studies have focused on facial attributes in isolation, but the interaction between these attributes remains poorly understood. Experiment 1 examined gender categorization of other-race faces in 9- and 12-month-old White infants. Nine- and 12-month-olds were familiarized with Asian male or female faces, and tested with a novel exemplar from the familiarized category paired with a novel exemplar from a novel category. Both age groups showed novel category preferences for novel Asian female faces after familiarization with Asian male faces, but showed no novel category preference for novel Asian male faces after familiarization with Asian female faces. This categorization asymmetry was not due to a spontaneous preference hindering novel category reaction (Experiment 2), and both age groups displayed difficulty discriminating among male, but not female, other-race faces (Experiment 3). These results indicate that category formation for male other-race faces is mediated by categorical perception. Overall, the findings suggest that even by 12 months of age, infants are not fully able to form gender category representations of other-race faces, responding categorically to male, but not female, other-race faces.