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People pursue goals. They seek to build friendships, find romantic partners, maintain close relationships, gain social status and resources, and stay healthy and safe. But pursuing goals requires assessing who, among the people around them, will help or hurt their ability to reach those goals-that is, who poses goal-relevant affordances. This article overviews recent advances and new predictions from an affordance management approach to social cognition and behavior. The central tenet of this work is that judgments of who helps or hurts goals are independent (rather than opposite ends of a single judgment): Who helps my goal, and who hurts my goal? For any goal, people judge others in one of four ways: as helping the goal, hurting the goal, both helping and hurting the goal, or as irrelevant to the goal. These perceived affordances change across goals: people who help one goal may hurt, both help and hurt, or be irrelevant to another goal. This simple, novel division of helping and hurting across goals has numerous implications for psychological phenomena. It provides a framework for understanding when and how two forms of devaluation will emerge-being seen to pose a threat and being seen as irrelevant-with implications for prejudice, stigmatization, and discrimination. It also provides a lens for understanding how and when others' appraisals of us may affect our own goal pursuit. The article concludes by discussing necessary next steps and promising new directions for applying this approach to understand social cognition and behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics in a two-part examination. We first used longitudinal, daily diary methods to track two samples of U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across 2 weeks (Study 1: N = 198, observations = 2,167) and 3 weeks (Study 2: N = 811, observations = 12,790) to explore how these events permeated people's lives and how people coped with that influence. In both diary studies, daily political events consistently not only evoked negative emotions, which corresponded to worse psychological and physical well-being, but also greater motivation to take political action (e.g., volunteer, protest) aimed at changing the political system that evoked these emotions in the first place. Understandably, people frequently tried to regulate their politics-induced emotions, and regulating these emotions using effective cognitive strategies (reappraisal and distraction) predicted greater well-being, but also weaker motivation to take action. Although people protected themselves from the emotional impact of politics, frequently used regulation strategies came with a trade-off between well-being and action. Second, we conducted experimental studies where we manipulated exposure to day-to-day politics (Study 3, N = 922), and the use of various emotion regulation strategies in response (Study 4, N = 1,277), and found causal support for the central findings of Studies 1-2. Overall, this research highlights how politics can be a chronic stressor in people's daily lives, underscoring the far-reaching influence politicians have beyond the formal powers endowed unto them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Transient affect can be tightly linked with people's global life satisfaction (i.e., affect globalizing ). This volatile judgment style leaves life satisfaction vulnerable to the inevitable highs and lows of everyday life, and has been associated with lower psychological health. The present study examines a potentially fundamental but untested regulatory role of sleep: insulating people's global life satisfaction from the affective highs and lows of daily life. We tested this hypothesis in two daily diary samples ( N 1  = 3,011 daily diary observations of 274 participants and N 2  = 12,740 daily diary observations of 811 participants). Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, following nights of reported high-quality sleep, the link between current affect and global life satisfaction was attenuated (i.e., lower affect globalizing). Sleep-based interventions are broadly useful for improving psychological health and the current findings suggest another avenue by which such interventions may improve well-being: by providing crucial protection against the risks associated with affect globalizing., Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00092-4., Competing Interests: Conflicts of InterestThe authors declare no competing interests., (© The Society for Affective Science 2021.)

Intergroup competitions such as democratic elections can intensify intergroup polarization and conflict. Partisan attitudes toward the elected leader can also shift from before to after an election, but the biology underlying these attitudinal shifts remains largely unknown. An important factor could be the hormone testosterone, which is theorized to fluctuate during competition and to influence status seeking. In a naturalistic study of 113 registered voters, we measured changes in testosterone levels and attitudes toward the winner of the 2012 US Presidential Election. We found that supporters of the losing candidate (Mitt Romney) showed acute increases in testosterone levels compared to supporters of the winner (Barack Obama) on the evening of Election Day. Supporters of the losing candidate also demonstrated flatter diurnal testosterone slopes on Election Day that persisted up to two days after the election. Furthermore, greater increases in acute testosterone levels and flatter diurnal slopes among supporters of the losing candidate were associated with less positive evaluations of the winning candidate. These testosterone-moderated attitudinal shifts observed in the days after the election showed a directionally similar pattern with a weaker effect size six months later. Finally, we confirmed that the main results were robust to alternative data analytic choices using multiverse specification curve analysis. The findings from this paper suggest that hormonal responses to large-scale intergroup competitions may shape how we perceive our elected leaders, shedding light on the biology of intergroup relations., (Copyright © 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically relevant depending on perceiver goals? We test two hypotheses. First, we propose that opportunity and threat are appraised independently, rather than as endpoints of a single dimension. If so, then others can be evaluated as (a) facilitating a goal, (b) impeding a goal, (c) both facilitating and impeding a goal, or (d) neither facilitating nor impeding a goal. Second, we hypothesize that relevance appraisals shift dynamically with perceiver goals. For example, a single person may be appraised as facilitating one's mate-seeking goal, but as neither facilitating nor impeding one's self-protection goal. In two studies, participants rated the extent to which a variety of targets (e.g., a doctor, a 5-year-old child) pose threats and opportunities to different goals. Confirmatory factor analyses support both hypotheses. We also explore relationships between the Relevance Appraisal Matrix and the stereotype content (Fiske et al., 2002) and ABC (Koch et al., 2016) models of stereotypes, finding evidence that relevance appraisals are distinct from stereotypes of group attributes. In sum, we provide a framework for understanding the structure of relevance appraisals: A central and consequential, yet dynamic and relatively understudied, aspect of social cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Stereotypes linking Black Americans with guns can have life-altering outcomes, making it important to identify factors that shape such weapon identification biases and how they do so. We report 6 experiments that provide a mechanistic account of how category salience affects weapon identification bias elicited by male faces varying in race (Black, White) and age (men, boys). Behavioral analyses of error rates and response latencies revealed that, when race was salient, faces of Black versus White males (regardless of age) facilitated the classification of objects as guns versus tools. When a category other than race was salient, racial bias in behavior was reduced, though not eliminated. In Experiments 1-4, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to a social category besides race (i.e., age). In Experiments 5 and 6, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to an applicable, yet nonsubstantive category (i.e., the color of a dot on the face). Across experiments, process analyses using diffusion models revealed that, when race was salient, seeing Black versus White male faces led to an initial bias to favor the "gun" response. When a category besides race (i.e., age, dot color) was salient, racial bias in the relative start point was reduced, though not eliminated. These results suggest that the magnitude of racial bias in weapon identification may differ depending on what social category is salient. The collective findings also highlight the utility of diffusion modeling for elucidating how category salience shapes processes underlying racial biases in behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Although some studies reveal that saliva handling and storage practices may influence salivary testosterone concentrations measured with immunoassays, the effect of these method factors on the validity of testosterone immunoassays remains unknown. The validity of immunoassays can be assessed by comparing hormone concentrations measured with immunoassays to a standard reference method: liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (MS). We previously reported the correspondence between salivary testosterone measured with enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) and with MS when there was less variance in (or more control over) method factors related to saliva handling and storage across measurement methods (Welker et al., 2016). In the present study, we expanded the original dataset and compared the correspondence between Salimetrics EIAs and MS when there was greater variance in (or less control over) method factors across EIAs and MS (high method variance), to when there was less variance in these factors (low method variance). If variance in these method factors impacts the validity of testosterone measurement, then the EIA-MS correspondence should be stronger when method variance is low compared to when it is high. Our results contradicted this hypothesis: Salimetrics EIA-MS correspondence was stronger when variance in method factors was high compared to when it was low. The composite average correlation across both method variance comparisons provides an updated estimate of Salimetrics EIA-MS correspondence, but the instability in this correspondence may pose challenges to the reproducibility of psychoneuroendocrinology research. We discuss possible explanations for the surprising pattern of results and provide recommendations for future research., (Copyright © 2019 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported in Vol 126(5) of Psychological Review (see record 2019-58645-001). In the article, the following citation was omitted: Goff, P. A., Thomas, M. A., & Jackson, M. C. (2008), "Ain't I a Woman?": Towards an intersectional approach to person perception and group-based harms. Sex Roles, 59, 392-403. All versions of this article have been corrected.] A growing body of research shows that older adults, Black women, and other groups often encounter stigmatization that manifests not as negative prejudice, but as indifference and inattention-that is, interpersonal invisibility. We propose an affordance-management theory to explain who is interpersonally invisible, to whom, and with what consequences. A social affordance-management perspective suggests that people seek to detect and strategically engage with those who facilitate or obstruct achievement of important goals. We argue that invisibility emerges from the perception that another person neither helps nor hurts one's ability to achieve chronically or acutely active goals. We thus distinguish among phenomena commonly subsumed under the term stigmatization: invisibility-based stigmatization of those perceived to be irrelevant, and threat-based stigmatization of those perceived to obstruct one's goals. Invisibility and threat-based stigmatization are theorized to differ in origin, manifestation, and impact. Furthermore, rather than being a static property of particular target groups, interpersonal invisibility dynamically emerges from perceiver goals, target cues, and situational features. Nonetheless, some perceivers, targets, situations, and goals are more likely to lead to invisibility than others. This affordance-based theory of invisibility helps to organize the heterogeneous field of stigma research; unifies a diverse array of social, cognitive, motivational, and affective phenomena; and suggests numerous novel directions for future stigma research from both perceiver and target perspectives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Across two experiments, we examined whether implicit stereotypes linking younger (~28-year-old) Black versus White men with violence and criminality extend to older (~68-year-old) Black versus White men. In Experiment 1, participants completed a sequential priming task wherein they categorized objects as guns or tools after seeing briefly-presented facial images of men who varied in age (younger versus older) and race (Black versus White). In Experiment 2, we used different face primes of younger and older Black and White men, and participants categorized words as 'threatening' or 'safe.' Results consistently revealed robust racial biases in object and word identification: Dangerous objects and words were identified more easily (faster response times, lower error rates), and non-dangerous objects and words were identified less easily, after seeing Black face primes than after seeing White face primes. Process dissociation procedure analyses, which aim to isolate the unique contributions of automatic and controlled processes to task performance, further indicated that these effects were driven entirely by racial biases in automatic processing. In neither experiment did prime age moderate racial bias, suggesting that the implicit danger associations commonly evoked by younger Black versus White men appear to generalize to older Black versus White men., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) are widely used to measure salivary testosterone. However, little is known about how accurately different EIAs assess testosterone, partially because estimates across various EIAs differ considerably. We compared testosterone concentrations across EIAs of three commonly used manufacturers (DRG International, Salimetrics, and IBL International) to liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Relative to EIAs from Salimetrics and IBL International, EIAs supplied by DRG International provided the closest approximation to LC-MS/MS testosterone concentrations, followed closely by EIAs from Salimetrics, and then IBL. Additionally, EIAs tended to inflate estimates of lower testosterone concentrations in women. Examining our results and comparing them to existing data revealed that testosterone EIAs had decreased linear correspondence with LC-MS/MS in comparison to cortisol EIAs. Overall, this paper provides researchers with information to better measure testosterone in their research and more accurately compare testosterone measurements across different methods., (Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Beliefs about whether people can change ("lay theories" of malleability) are known to have wide-ranging effects on social motivation, cognition, and judgment. Yet rather than holding an overarching belief that people can or cannot change, perceivers may hold independent beliefs about whether different people are malleable-that is, lay theories may be target-specific. Seven studies demonstrate that lay theories are target-specific with respect to age: Perceivers hold distinct, uncorrelated lay theories of people at different ages, and younger targets are considered to be more malleable than older targets. Both forms of target-specificity are consequential, as target age-specific lay theories predict policy support for learning-based senior services and the rehabilitation of old and young drug users. The implications of target age-specific lay theories for a number of psychological processes, the social psychology of aging, and theoretical frameworks of malleability beliefs are discussed., (© 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.)

Divalent nickel (Ni(2+)), Cu(II)EDTA, methyl orange, and dichromate were used to investigate diffusion from hydrated silica sol-gel monoliths. The objective was to examine diffusion of compounds on a size regime relevant to supporting biological components encapsulated within silica gel prepared in a biologically compatible process space with no post-gelation treatments. With an initial sample set, gels prepared from tetraethoxysilane were explored in a factorial design with Ni(2+) as the tracer, varying water content during hydrolysis, acid catalyst present during hydrolysis, and the final concentration of silica. A second sample set explored diffusion of all four tracers in gels prepared with aqueous silica precursors and a variety of organically modified siloxanes. Excluding six outliers which displayed significant syneresis, the mean diffusion constant (D(gel)) across the entire process space of sample set 1 was 2.42×10(-10) m(2) s(-1); approximately 24% of the diffusion coefficient of Ni(2+) in unconfined aqueous solution. In sample set 2, the tracer size and not gel hydrophobicity was the primary determinant of changes in diffusion rates. A strong linear inverse correlation was found between tracer size and the magnitude of D(gel). Based on correlation with the tracers used in this investigation, the characteristic 1-h diffusion distance for carbonate species relevant to supporting active phototrophic organisms was approximately 1.5mm. These results support the notion that silica sol-gel formulations may be optimized for a given biological entity of interest with manageable impact to the diffusion of small ions and molecules., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.)