The U.S. is experiencing high levels of political animosity. Whereas much of the intergroup contact literature has focused on improving intergroup relations by reducing anxieties associated with interacting with other groups, some of the motivation literature suggests a different approach: focusing on immediate rewards, such as fun in the moment. The present study investigated the effectiveness of instructing pairs of participants to focus on immediate rewards, relative to focusing on immediate (anxiety) prevention or a no-goal control condition, for increasing participants’ willingness to interact with members of the opposite political party and making those interactions less aversive. Given prior work suggesting differences between conservatives and liberals in terms of threat aversion and openness, it also investigated whether these results differed for Republicans and Democrats. Ninety-two same-sex Democrat-Republican dyads were recruited from the Sona pool at Arizona State University and randomly assigned to one of three instruction conditions. Before engaging in a 15-minute interaction, participants responded to questions about how well they expected the interactions to go, and after the conversation, they evaluated how they felt during the conversation, their perceptions of their partner’s behaviors, and how willing they would be to interact with the outparty again. It was predicted that participants in the immediate rewards condition would report more positive expectancies of the interactions, more positive impressions of their partners, and greater willingness to interact with the outparty again. It was also expected that Democrats in the immediate rewards condition, and Republicans in the immediate prevention condition, would report more positive expectancies of the interactions, more positive impressions of their partners, and greater willingness to interact with the outparty again relative to Republicans, and to Democrats, in the same conditions. Results of 3 Between-Dyad Condition X 2 Within-Dyad Political Party mixed analyses of variance (ANOVAs) suggested that whereas the immediate rewards condition was associated with marginally more positive expectancies relative to the no-goal control condition, the immediate prevention condition was associated with more enjoyable interactions relative to the no-goal control condition. Although condition effects did not differ significantly by political party, Republicans exhibited some more positive outcomes relative to Democrats.

People generally struggle with making good decisions for their well-being (Hershfield, 2019; Hershfield & Bartels, 2018). One reason for this might be that people struggle with connecting to their future selves. Prior research suggests that future self-connectedness predicts better decisions. This study examined if feeling more positive or negative helps people connect more to their future self and if this, in turn, helps people make better decisions. Participants read a scenario in which they are presented with two decisions, one having a short-term benefit/long-term cost and the other having a short-term cost/long-term benefit. Either neutral affect framing, positive affect framing, or negative affect framing was emphasized in the scenario depending on the condition. Our study did not find that positive affect framing and negative affect framing enhanced future self-connectedness. Neither did we find that positive affect framing and negative affect framing influenced decision-making.

In most of the work using event-related potentials (ERPs), researchers presume the function of specific components based on the careful manipulation of experimental factors, but rarely report direct evidence supporting a relationship between the neural signal and other outcomes. Perhaps most troubling is the lack of evidence that ERPs correlate with related behavioral outcomes which should result, at least in part, from the neural processes that ERPs capture. One such example is the NoGo-N2 component, an ERP component elicited in Go/NoGo paradigms. There are two primary theories regarding the functional significance of this component in this context: that the signal represents response inhibition and that the component reflects conflict. In this paper, a trial-level method of analysis for the relationship between ERP component potentials and downstream behavioral outcomes (in this case, response accuracy) using a multi-level modeling framework is proposed to provide discriminatory evidence for one of these theories. Following a description of the research on the NoGo-N2, preliminary data supporting the conflict monitoring theory are presented, noting important limitations. Next, an EEG simulation study is presented in which NoGo-N2 data are generated with a known relationship to fabricated reaction time data, showing that, with added levels of complexity and noise within the data, the MLM approach is consistently successful at extracting the known relationships that occur in real NoGo-N2 data. Next, using independent components analysis (ICA) to extract spatiotemporal components that best represent the signal of interest, a well-powered analysis of the relationship between the NoGo-N2 and response accuracy is used to provide strong discriminatory evidence for the conflict monitoring theory of the NoGo-N2. Finally, implications for the NoGo-N2, as well as all ERP components, are discussed with a focus on how this approach can and should be used. the paper concludes with potential expansions of this approach to areas beyond identifying the function of ERP components.

The present research expands on prior research that demonstrated a prototypical facial expression in response to cute, baby-like Kindchenschema targets. This expression, referred to as the tenderness expression, is recognizable to onlookers as a response to such stimuli. Across two studies, the current research examined if there were differences in perceptions of trustworthiness (Studies 1 and 2) and willingness to trust (Study 2) toward individuals displaying the tenderness expression as compared to a Duchenne smile or a neutral expression. Results indicate the tenderness expression is associated with lower ratings of trustworthiness relative to a smile, but no differences among the expressions on willingness to trust. Exploratory analyses demonstrate a replicated pattern of differences on the Big Five Personality Inventory among these three expressions. While these findings were not consistent with a priori hypotheses, this research provides further insight into the social implications associated with this tenderness expression.

Although recent research has suggested that motivations such as disease avoidance and self-protection are associated with increased social conservatism, less is known about the impact of other fundamental motivations on political attitudes. This is particularly important given that the currently studied motivations do not consistently push around economic attitudes, which are an important determinant of voting. The current study investigated the impact of a different motivation, status desire, on both economic and social attitudes in a sample of undergraduate students at a large southwestern university. Participants first reported their overall, economic, and social ideology one month before participating in a lab study. Then, in the lab, they were presented either with a vignette designed to elicit status desire, or a closely matched control, before responding to a series of items about economic and social political attitudes. It was predicted that economic conservatives and liberals in the status desire condition would report more economically conservative attitudes relative to their counterparts in the control condition. By contrast, it was predicted that social conservatives in the status desire condition would report more socially conservative attitudes, whereas social liberals in the status desire condition would report more socially liberal attitudes, relative to their counterparts in the control condition. However, the use of hierarchical linear regressions showed no significant effects of motive activation condition, or interactions of motive activation condition with relevant pre-screen political ideology, in predicting either economic or social political attitudes. Implications of these results for future research are discussed.

Past research has focused on the important role humor plays in interpersonal relationships; however, researchers have also identified intrapersonal applications of humor, showing that people often use humor to alleviate negative affect, and that humor has generally been found to beneficially influence mental health. The purpose of this study is to examine whether humor-based coping can be utilized as an intrapersonal tool to aid or facilitate creative thinking and problem solving when faced with a distressing situation. The current study posits reduced rumination as the mechanism by which humor facilitates creativity. To measure creativity, a task was devised that had individuals brainstorm under some distress; participants were asked to recall and describe an ongoing, unresolved problem they were facing, followed by a rumination induction, as rumination is characterized by perseverative thoughts that hinder constructive action. After the rumination induction, participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or either of two emotion regulation conditions: positive reappraisal or humor-based reappraisal. Following this, participants were asked to complete an “alternate solutions” task, based on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Task, generating solutions for their own unresolved problem. Results of the study showed that the use of humor was indeed related to a decrease in rumination, but that the humor condition did not outperform either control condition on any measure of creativity (performing worse in some cases). Limits of this study and future directions are discussed.

Research on attachment in adults began by assuming parallels from attachment as a behavioral system for using relationships to balance the tradeoff between safety and exploration in infants, to the same tradeoff function in adults. Perhaps more pressing, for adults, are the novel social tradeoffs adults face when deciding how to invest resources between themselves and their close relationship partners. The current study investigated the role of the attachment system in navigating two such tradeoffs, in a sample of ASU undergraduates. In one tradeoff condition, participants had the option of working on puzzles to earn either themselves or their closest friend a monetary reward. In the second tradeoff condition, participants worked to earn monetary rewards for a close or new friend. Analyses showed no evidence of attachment avoidance predicting prioritizing redistributing money to a close friend in either condition. While there was no effect of anxiety on prioritizing one’s close friend over one’s self, there was a marginal effect in both prioritizing one’s close friend over a new friend when redistributing money and starting on the close friend’s word search first. Although attachment style largely did not predict earning or redistributing monetary rewards in these two relationship tradeoffs, implications for how these results fit within the broader theoretical perspective are discussed.

Numerous published studies and a meta-analysis suggest that priming religion causes an increase in prosocial behaviors. However, mediating mechanisms of this purported causal relationship have not yet been formally tested. In line with cultural evolutionary theories and their supporting evidence, I test the proposition that public self-awareness mediates the effect of priming religion on prosociality. However, other theories of religion suggest that persons may feel small when perceiving God, and these feelings have predicted prosociality in published research. In line with this, I also test whether a sense of small self and, relatedly, self-transcendent connection, are possible mediators of the religion priming effect on prosociality. In this study, I implicitly prime religion and test whether the above constructs mediate a potential effect on prosocial intentions. Although self-transcendent connection predicted prosocial intentions, the implicit prime affected neither the mediating variables nor prosocial intentions, nor were any significant indirect effects evident. Thus, no causal evidence of mediation was found. In addition, I examined whether God representations moderate the path from implicit religion priming to each proposed mediator. The results suggest that a benevolent God representation moderates the effect of religion priming on self-transcendent connection and that an ineffable God representation moderates the effect of religion priming on sense of small self. Lastly, I tested for mediation with a cross-sectional path model containing religiosity and belief in God as predictors. The results suggest that religiosity, controlling for belief in God, predicts prosociality through self-transcendent connection but belief in God, controlling for religiosity, does not predict prosociality. Implications for the religion priming literature and, more generally, the psychology of religion, are discussed.

Limited research has analyzed how culture might influence the utilization of social support. To address this deficiency, the present study investigated preferences for social support among East-Asian, Hispanic, and White participants. In this set of studies, a comprehensive social support taxonomy was constructed in order to better identify and conceptualize the various support subtypes found in the literature. Based on the taxonomy, a questionnaire measure for preferences of different types of social support was developed. Participants were asked to rate how helpful they would find each supportive action made by a friend or family member on a seven-point Likert scale. Based on the responses of 516 Amazon Mechanical Turk workers, a five-factor solution for an 18-item scale emerged from a factor analysis. The social support subscales supported by the factor analysis were emotional, tangible, self-referencing, reappraisal, and distraction. The questionnaire was used to assess similarities and differences among East-Asian, Hispanic, and White participants in terms of preferences for providing and receiving social support. Based on the results of 299 college-age students, an analysis of variance on individually standardized ("ipsatized") responses was conducted in order to eliminate the positioning effect of culture. A main effect of ethnicity (p=.05) and an interaction between ethnicity and sex (p=.02) were significant for the preference of tangible social support. A main effect of ethnicity (p=.04) and an interaction between ethnicity and sex (p=.05) were significant for the preference of reappraisal social support. Clinical implications of our research findings are discussed.

Psychological theories often reduce descriptions of people’s emotional experiences to a small number of underlying dimensions that capture most of the variation in their responses. These underlying dimensions are typically uncovered by comparing the self-reported emotions of many individuals at one specific time point, to infer a single underlying structure of emotion for all people. However, theoretical work suggests that underlying dimensions uncovered in this way may not hold when modeling how people change over time. Individuals may differ not just in their typical score on a given dimension of emotion, but in what dimensions best characterize their patterns of emotional experience over time. In this study, participants described two emotional events per day for 35 days, and analyses compared individualized structures of emotion to those generated from many people at one point in time. Analyses using R-technique factor analysis, which compares many people at one time point, most often uncovered a two-factor solution corresponding to positivity and negativity dimensions - a solution well-established in the literature. However, analyses using P-technique factor analysis, which compares many emotional events for one person, uncovered a broader diversity of underlying dimensions. Individuals needed anywhere from one to five factors to best capture their self-reported emotions. Further, dimensions specifically related to romantic relationships were much more common when examining the experiences of individuals over time. This suggests that external factors, such as pursuing or being in a romantic relationship, might lead to a qualitative shift in how emotions are experienced. Research attempting to characterize emotion dynamics, including those attempting to help people shift or regulate their emotions, cannot assume that typical two dimensional structures of emotional experience apply to all people. Instead we must account for how individuals describe their own emotional experiences.