Psychological science
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Psychological science · Nov 2015
Conceptual Conditioning: Mechanisms Mediating Conditioning Effects on Pain.
Classical conditioning can profoundly modify subsequent pain responses, but the mechanisms that drive this effect are unresolved. In pain-conditioning studies, cues are typically conditioned to primary aversive reinforcers; hence, subsequent pain modulation could reflect learned precognitive associations (i.e., those involving neural plasticity independent of expectations and other forms of conceptual thought) or conceptual expectancies. We isolated conceptual contributions using a thermal pain-conditioning procedure in which different conditioned stimulus (CS) cues were repeatedly paired with symbolic representations of high and low noxious heat. ⋯ These effects were mediated by participants' self-reported expectancies. CS cues associated with high temperature also evoked larger anticipatory SCRs than did CS cues associated with low temperature, but larger anticipatory SCRs predicted smaller subsequent heat-evoked SCRs. These results provide novel evidence that conditioned modulation of pain physiology can be acquired through purely conceptual processes, and that self-reported expectancies and physiological threat responses have opposing effects on pain.
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Psychological science · Oct 2015
Essentialism and Racial Bias Jointly Contribute to the Categorization of Multiracial Individuals.
Categorizations of multiracial individuals provide insight into the psychological mechanisms driving social stratification, but few studies have explored the interplay of cognitive and motivational underpinnings of these categorizations. In the present study, we integrated research on racial essentialism (i.e., the belief that race demarcates unobservable and immutable properties) and negativity bias (i.e., the tendency to weigh negative entities more heavily than positive entities) to explain why people might exhibit biases in the categorization of multiracial individuals. As theorized, racial essentialism, both dispositional (Study 1) and experimentally induced (Study 2), led to the categorization of Black-White multiracial individuals as Black, but only among individuals evaluating Black people more negatively than White people. These findings demonstrate how fundamental cognitive and motivational biases interact to influence the categorization of multiracial individuals.
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Psychological science · Aug 2015
When Knowledge Knows No Bounds: Self-Perceived Expertise Predicts Claims of Impossible Knowledge.
People overestimate their knowledge, at times claiming knowledge of concepts, events, and people that do not exist and cannot be known, a phenomenon called overclaiming. What underlies assertions of such impossible knowledge? We found that people overclaim to the extent that they perceive their personal expertise favorably. ⋯ In Study 3, warning participants that some of the concepts they saw were fictitious did not reduce the relationship between self-perceived knowledge and overclaiming, which suggests that this relationship is not driven by impression management. In Study 4, boosting self-perceived expertise in geography prompted assertions of familiarity with nonexistent places, which supports a causal role for self-perceived expertise in claiming impossible knowledge.
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Psychological science · Jun 2015
Historical ArticleCumulative exposure to prior collective trauma and acute stress responses to the Boston marathon bombings.
The role of repeated exposure to collective trauma in explaining response to subsequent community-wide trauma is poorly understood. We examined the relationship between acute stress response to the 2013 Boston Marathon bombings and prior direct and indirect media-based exposure to three collective traumatic events: the September 11, 2001 (9/11) terrorist attacks, Superstorm Sandy, and the Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Representative samples of residents of metropolitan Boston (n = 846) and New York City (n = 941) completed Internet-based surveys shortly after the Boston Marathon bombings. ⋯ Acute stress levels did not differ between Boston and New York metropolitan residents. Cumulative direct and indirect, live-media-based exposure to 9/11, Superstorm Sandy, and the Sandy Hook shooting were positively associated with acute stress responses in the covariate-adjusted model. People who experience multiple community-based traumas may be sensitized to the negative impact of subsequent events, especially in communities previously exposed to similar disasters.
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Observers experience biases in visual processing for objects within easy reach of their hands; these biases may assist them in evaluating items that are candidates for action. I investigated the hypothesis that hand postures that afford different types of actions differentially bias vision. ⋯ Although the power-grasp posture facilitated performance on the motion-detection task, the precision-grasp posture instead facilitated performance on the form-perception task. These results suggest that the visual system weights processing on the basis of an observer's current affordances for specific actions: Fast and forceful power grasps enhance temporal sensitivity, whereas detail-oriented precision grasps enhance spatial sensitivity.