Why would someone's judgments and choices disregard the consequences he or she cares about most? Considerable research appears to show that in many contexts, people show precisely this paradoxical tendency. Researchers interpret these results as showing that people sometimes make choices on the basis of moral factors -- factors that...
The current research tested the principles of role congruity theory of prejudice, which states that prejudice arises from an incongruity between a group stereotype and social role characteristics (i.e., the attributes and behaviors prescribed by the social role), such that prejudice occurs when members of a group enter or attempt...
The aim of the present investigation was to examine the nature of individuals' parasocial relationships (one-sided attachments to media figures, Horton & Wohl, 1956). Five studies were designed to assess the prevalence and strength of individuals' attachments to their favorite television characters, manipulate exposure to the character or control targets,...
Expanding on research done on the mental health and happiness benefits associated with romantic relationships, this study investigates whether identity denial, the experience of being socially denied one’s chosen identity by having others refuse to acknowledge that identity, presents a challenge for bisexual people within committed romantic relationships. For straight,...
Physiological linkage (i.e., the covariation of moment-to-moment physiology between individuals) is thought to play an important role in relationship functioning. The present study examined physiological linkage across interbeat interval (IBI) and skin conductance levels (SCL) in a sample of married spouses (N=106) during both a pleasant and a conflict conversation...
The representation and communication of spatial information is important to the functioning of children and adults in the physical world. Yet little research has included both areas in the same studies. This research program was designed to investigate both the communication and representation of spatial information within a developmental context....
Recent work exploring children's verb learning in the laboratory has generated some interesting contradictions. Some studies have found that children as old as 4 years old are unable to reliably map a novel verb to an action (e.g., Kersten & Smith, 2002; Imai, Haryu, & Okada, 2005), even though much...
Across all levels of education, persistent academic achievement gaps exist between students from higher and lower socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. Despite these daunting odds, many students from lower-SES backgrounds manage to maintain high levels of academic motivation and persist in the face of difficulty. One factor that has been shown...
A survey of adults (n = 706) found low levels of awareness of two social movements aimed at decreasing weight stigma: the Fat Acceptance Movement and Health at Every Size movement. For HAES, providing a brief story of an overweight person who endorses HAES improved perceptions of the movement.
According to Lisjak, Lee, and Gardner (2012), a threat to a brand can elicit the same response as a threat to the self. The current research examined whether people react differently to brand threats as a function of East Asian versus North American culture and as a function of whether...
Marital emotional functioning is one of the most important predictors of marital outcomes (e.g., marital satisfaction), which in turn has important consequences for wellbeing and health factors for both spouses and their children. Thus far, negative emotions (e.g., anger) have been the central focus in distinguishing dissatisfied from satisfied couples...
Affective science has long been interested in the coherence between different emotion response systems (e.g., subjective emotional experience, behavior, physiology). Although evolutionary functionalist accounts of emotion hold that emotional coherence should be related to greater adaptation, few studies have analyzed links between emotional coherence and wellbeing. Thus, in this laboratory-based...
This dissertation presents a program of research on cultural cognition of the natural world, involving long-term research with indigenous Ngöbe partner communities (Panama) and selected comparisons to Western samples (US). In two series of experiments focused on agency concepts, we show that cultural frameworks recruit distinct principles for inferring agency...
Traditionally, research on perception and sensory systems has considered the senses as independent and modular functions that only converge after sufficient processing in unisensory areas. Recently, however, that view has been called into question with a number of demonstrations of multisensory interactions that may occur as early as primary cortex....
A failure to effectively regulate emotions elicited by a stressful life event contributes to symptoms of psychopathology. This regulatory failure may result from a deficit in executive control. For some individuals, executive control is impaired following stress exposure. Thus, for some individuals, when executive control is needed to regulate emotions...
This dissertation aims to address a gap in the literature regarding the effect of the achievement-focused student identity on prosocial values and behaviors, specifically among students who predominantly value prosociality. Largely, research on identity and motivation addresses academic outcomes and psychological well-being outcomes (Settles, Sellers, & Damas, 2002; Jaret &...