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It has been shown that the presence of conspecifics modulates human's vigilance strategies as is the case with animal species. Mere presence has been found to reduce vigilance. However, animal research has also shown that chemosignals (e.g., sweat) produced during fear-inducing situations modulates individuals' threat detection strategies. In the case of humans, little is known about how exposure to conspecifics' fear chemosignals modulates vigilance and threat detection effectiveness. The present study (N= 59) examined how human fear chemosignals affect vigilance strategies and threat avoidance in its receivers. We relied on a paradigm that simulates a "foraging under threat" situation in the lab, integrated with an eye-tracker to examine the attention allocation. Our results showed that the exposure to fear chemosignals (vs. rest chemosignals and a no-sweat condition) while not changing vigilance behavior leads to faster answers to threatening events. In conclusion, fear chemosignals seem to constitute an important warning signal for human beings, possibly leading its receiver to a readiness state that allows faster reactions to threat-related events. Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - FCT info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

Movement is generally conceived of as unfolding laterally in the writing direction that one is socialized into. In 'Western' languages, this is a left-to-right bias contributing to an imbalance in how attention is distributed across space. We propose that the rightward attentional bias exercises an additional unidirectional influence on discrimination performance thus shaping the congruency effect typically observed in Posner-inspired cueing tasks. In two studies, we test whether faces averted laterally serve as attention orienting cues and generate differences in both target discrimination latencies and gaze movements across left and right hemifields. Results systematically show that right-facing faces (i.e. aligned with the script direction) give rise to an advantage for cue-target pairs pertaining to the right (versus left) side of space. We report an asymmetry between congruent conditions in the form of right-sided facilitation for: (a) response time in discrimination decisions (experiment 1-2) and (b) eye-gaze movements, namely earlier onset to first fixation in the respective region of interest (experiment 2). Left and front facing cues generated virtually equal exploration patterns, confirming that the latter did not prime any directionality. These findings demonstrate that visuospatial attention and consequent discrimination are highly dependent on the asymmetric practices of reading and writing. Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - FCT info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

A considerable volume of animal research on detecting threat and foraging reveals that the co-presence of conspecifics reduces vigilance and enhances foraging. Monitoring threat is an adaptive process and is of considerable relevance to humans. It is therefore important to understand how the presence of others influences threat monitoring - namely vigilance - and consequently the capacity to detect threats. We examine this with a novel paradigm, that simulates a “foraging under threat” situation, with an eye-tracker (allowing the examination of the allocation of attention). Our results show, as predicted, that participants in the individual condition (versus co-presence) allocated more attentional resources to scanning the environment and thereby sacrificing foraging, which increased their likelihood of detecting threatening events. Thus, the presence or absence of others modulates vigilance strategies in humans. These findings highlight the heuristic value of animal vigilance models to understand humans threat monitoring with considerable applied relevance. Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia - FCT info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

Exposure to body odors (chemosignals) collected under different emotional states (i.e., emotional chemosignals) can modulate our visual system, biasing visual perception. Recent research has suggested that exposure to fear body odors, results in a generalized faster access to visual awareness of different emotional facial expressions (i.e., fear, happy, and neutral). In the present study, we aimed at replicating and extending these findings by exploring if these effects are limited to fear odor, by introducing a second negative body odor—that is, disgust. We compared the time that 3 different emotional facial expressions (i.e., fear, disgust, and neutral) took to reach visual awareness, during a breaking continuous flash suppression paradigm, across 3 body odor conditions (i.e., fear, disgust, and neutral). We found that fear body odors do not trigger an overall faster access to visual awareness, but instead sped-up access to awareness specifically for facial expressions of fear. Disgust odor, on the other hand, had no effects on awareness thresholds of facial expressions. These findings contrast with prior results, suggesting that the potential of fear body odors to induce visual processing adjustments is specific to fear cues. Furthermore, our results support a unique ability of fear body odors in inducing such visual processing changes, compared with other negative emotional chemosignals (i.e., disgust). These conclusions raise interesting questions as to how fear odor might interact with the visual processing stream, whilst simultaneously giving rise to future avenues of research.

In 3 experiments, we examine how the abstract category of gender, grounded by the lightness-darkness dimension, derived from the universal sexual dimorphism of skin color, is represented and how such representations lead to visual accentuation processes, i.e. polarization of differences between male and female faces. In the first two experiments, we show that irrespective of whether grayscale male and female faces are presented sequentially or jointly, female faces are judged to be lighter than male faces when participants are asked to indicate the level of lightness of the faces. This pattern was found for the majority of participants who explicitly stated that men and women do not differ in skin color. The third experiment was designed to examine the cognitive consequences of what people implicitly 'know' with a perceptual accentuation study. Participants were provided with male and female faces of equal skin color. Subsequently, in a memory recall task, they were asked to select, from a row of several faces varying in skin color, the original face. They chose, as predicted, lighter versions of faces for females compared to the male faces. This research reveals that the evolutionarily based sexual dimorphism in skin color implicitly grounds gender categories and shapes implicit visual accentuation processes. Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia - FCT info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

In two experiments, we examined the impact of color on cognitive performance by asking participants to categorize stimuli presented in three different colors: red, green, and gray (baseline). Participants were either asked to categorize the meaning of words as related to the concepts of “go” or “stop” (Experiment 1) or to indicate if a neutral verbal stimulus was a word or not (lexical decision task, Experiment 2). Overall, we observed performance facilitation in response to go stimuli presented in green (vs. red or gray) and performance inhibition in response to go stimuli presented in red. The opposite pattern was observed for stop-related stimuli. Importantly, results also indicated that color might also be used to categorize neutral stimuli. Overall, these findings provide support to the green-go and red-stop color associations and test the potential functional autonomy acquired by these colors and the boundary conditions to their effects on stimuli categorization. info:eu-repo/semantics/submittedVersion

In a double-blind experiment, participants were exposed to facial images of anger, disgust, fear, and neutral expressions under 2 body odor conditions: fear and neutral sweat. They had to indicate the valence of the gradually emerging facial image. Two alternative hypotheses were tested, namely a “general negative evaluative state” hypothesis and a “discrete emotion” hypothesis. These hypotheses suggest 2 distinctive data patterns for muscle activation and classification speed of facial expressions. The pattern of results that would support a “discrete emotions perspective” would be expected to reveal significantly increased activity in the medial frontalis (eyebrow raiser) and corrugator supercilii (frown) muscles associated with fear, and significantly decreased reaction times (RTs) to “only” fear faces in the fear odor condition. Conversely, a pattern of results characterized by only a significantly increased corrugator supercilii activity together with decreased RTs for fear, disgust, and anger faces in the fear odor condition would support an interpretation in line with a general negative evaluative state perspective. The data support the discrete emotion account for facial affect perception primed with fear odor. This study provides a first demonstration of perception of discrete negative facial expressions using olfactory priming.

Three experiments were designed to test whether experimentally created ad hoc associative networks evoke false memories. We used the DRM (Deese, Roediger, McDermott) paradigm with lists of ad hoc categories composed of exemplars aggregated toward specific goals (e.g., going for a picnic) that do not share any consistent set of features. Experiment 1 revealed considerable levels of false recognitions of critical words from ad hoc categories. False recognitions occurred even when the lists were presented without an organizing theme (i.e., the category's label). Experiments 1 and 2 tested whether (a) the ease of identifying the categories' themes, and (b) the lists' backward associative strength could be driving the effect. List identifiability did not correlate with false recognition, and the effect remained even when backward associative strength was controlled for. Experiment 3 manipulated the distractor items in the recognition task to address the hypothesis that the salience of unrelated items could be facilitating the occurrence of the phenomenon. The effect remained when controlling for this source of facilitation. These results have implications for assumptions made by theories of false memories, namely the preexistence of associations in the activation-monitoring framework and the central role of gist extraction in fuzzy-trace theory, while providing evidence of the occurrence of false memories for more dynamic and context-dependent knowledge structures. (PsycINFO Database Record SFRH/BD/81238/2011 info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersion

In 2004, we (Smith & Semin, 2004) described a conceptual framework of “socially situated cognition,” encompassing four major themes. Cognition is for adaptive action, involves the body and sensori-motor systems, is situated in immediate intercourse with the environment, and is distributed across other minds and tools. Here, we introduce two broader themes: social cognition is special because other people's movements and other characteristics can be mapped onto our own bodies; and social cognition is emergent, influencing the parts and subsystems that generate it rather than the reverse causal direction. We then review the current state of theory and research in the four topic areas that we laid out in 2004. We conclude by noting that much research on these themes has occurred outside of social psychology, and stressing the benefits for the future of an integrative, interdisciplinary approach to these core issues of social psychology.

Recent work suggests that people evaluate target stimuli within short and flexible time periods called evaluation windows. Stimuli that briefly precede a target (forward primes) or briefly succeed a target (backward primes) are often included in the target's evaluation. In this article, the authors propose that predictable forward primes act as ""go"" signals that prepare target processing, such that earlier forward primes pull the evaluation windows forward in time. Earlier forward primes may thus reduce the impact of backward primes. This shifting evaluation windows hypothesis was tested in two experiments using an evaluative decision task with predictable (vs. unpredictable) forward and backward primes. As expected, a longer time interval between a predictable forward prime and a target eliminated backward priming. In contrast, the time interval between an unpredictable forward primes and a target had no effects on backward priming. These findings suggest that predictable features of dynamic stimuli can shape target extraction by determining which information is included (or excluded) in rapid evaluation processes., Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) Academy Professorship grant; European Research Council

In two experiments, the role played by stimulus response compatibility in driving the spatial grounding of abstract concepts is examined. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to classify politics-related words appearing to the left or the right side of a computer monitor as socialist or conservative. Responses were given by pressing vertically aligned keys and thus orthogonal to the spatial information that may have been implied by the words. Responses given by left or right index finger were counterbalanced. In Experiment 2, a lexical decision task, participants categorized political words or non-words presented to the left or the right auditory channels, by pressing the top/bottom button of a response box. The response category labels (word or non-word) were also orthogonal to the spatial information that may have been implied by the stimulus words. In both experiments, responses were faster when socialism-related words were presented on the left and conservatism-related words were presented on the right, irrespective of the reference of the response keys or labels. Overall, our findings suggest that the spatial grounding of abstract concepts (or at least politics-related ones) is independent of experimentally driven stimulus-response compatibility effects. European Commission; Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia (FCT)

Motor resonance processes are involved both in language comprehension and in affect perception. Therefore we predict that listeners understand spoken affective words slower, if the phonetic form of a word is incongruent with its affective meaning. A language comprehension study involving an interference paradigm confirmed this prediction. This interference suggests that affective phonetic cues contribute to language comprehension. A perceived smile or frown affects the listener, and hearing an incongruent smile or frown impedes our comprehension of spoken words.

Flashbulb memories (FBMs) are vivid and detailed memories of the reception context of a public emotional event. Brown and Kulik (1977) introduced the label FBM to suggest the idea that individuals are able to preserve knowledge of an event in an indiscriminate way, in analogy with a photograph that preserves all details of a scene. Research work on FBMs has primarily been conducted using a naturalistic approach in order to explore the role of the emotional and reconstructive factors on FBM formation and maintenance. Nevertheless, these studies lack a sufficient control on the factors that might intervene in the process of FBM formation. The contribution of the present studies is addressed to experimentally investigating the role of emotional and reconstructive factors on emotionally charged memories, specifically on FBMs. Paralleling FBM findings, the two studies revealed that simply being in an emotional state allows people to remember all available information, such as irrelevant and unrelated details. Furthermore, the resulting memories are affected by reconstructive processes so that they are not as accurate as their richness of details would suggest.

Observing and producing a smile activate the very same facial muscles. In Experiment 1, we predicted and found that verbal stimuli (action verbs) that refer to emotional expressions elicit the same facial muscle activity (facial electromyography) as visual stimuli do. These results are evidence that language referring to facial muscular activity is not amodal, as traditionally assumed, but is instead bodily grounded. These findings were extended in Experiment 2, in which subliminally presented verbal stimuli were shown to drive muscle activation and to shape judgments, but not when muscle activation was blocked. These experiments provide an important bridge between research on the neurobiological basis of language and related behavioral research. The implications of these findings for theories of language and other domains of cognitive psychology (e.g., priming) are discussed. © 2009 Association for Psychological Science.

How does conversational context shape the construal level of future events? According to construal-level theory, temporally distant events are construed more abstractly than close events due to an association between distance and construal level. The authors have argued that situated conversational relevancies determine construal level and therefore that construal level is flexible and determined in situ. Building on research that examined construal level in a language-production paradigm, this research examined the recipient's expectations for abstract versus concrete messages. Results supported the hypotheses that although temporal distance information should direct construal expectancies when shared knowledge information is not salient, social rules dictate that when salient, shared knowledge information determines construal level, overriding temporal distance. These findings support the reciprocal nature of conversational relevance and the symmetry between language production and reception.

In the New Look literature of the 1950s, it has been suggested that size judgments are dependent on the affective content of stimuli. This suggestion, however, has been 'discredited' due to contradictory findings and methodological problems. In the present study, we revisited this forgotten issue in two experiments. The first experiment investigated the influence of affective content on size perception by examining judgments of the size of target circles with and without affectively loaded (i.e., positive, neutral, and negative) pictures. Circles with a picture were estimated to be smaller than circles without a picture, and circles with a negative picture were estimated to be larger than circles with a positive or a neutral picture confirming the suggestion from the 1950s that size perception is influenced by affective content, an effect notably confined to negatively loaded stimuli. In a second experiment, we examined whether affective content influenced the Ebbinghaus illusion. Participants judged the size of a target circle whereby target and flanker circles differed in affective loading. The results replicated the first experiment. Additionally, the Ebbinghaus illusion was shown to be weakest for a negatively loaded target with positively loaded and blank flankers. A plausible explanation for both sets of experimental findings is that negatively loaded stimuli are more attention demanding than positively loaded or neutral stimuli. © 2007 Springer-Verlag.

Social cognition refers to the mental representations and processes that underlie social judgments and behavior - for example, the application of stereotypes to members of social groups. Theories of social cognition have generally assumed that mental representations are abstract and stable and that they are activated and applied by relatively automatic, context-independent processes. Recent evidence is inconsistent with these expectations, however. Social-cognitive processes have been shown to be adaptive to the perceiver's current social goals, communicative contexts, and bodily states. Although these findings can often be given ad hoc explanations within current conceptual frameworks, they invite a fuller integration with the broad intellectual movement emphasizing situated cognition. Such an approach has already been influential in many areas within psychology and beyond, and theories in the field of social cognition would benefit by taking advantage of its insights. Copyright © 2007 Association for Psychological Science.

Implicit measures are often preferred to overt questioning in many areas of psychology. Their covert nature allows them to circumvent conscious expectations and biases, theoretically providing more objective indicators of people's true attitudes and bel iefs. However, we argue that implicit and explicit measures tap into different memory systems, so that the interpretation of implicit measures is not as straightforward as the interpretation of explicit measures. We conducted an experiment investigating the relation between implicit and explicit measures of person impressions. The results demonstrate that a single stimulus can have opposite effects on implicit and explicit measures, supporting the theory that the measures reflect the contents of different memory systems. We suggest that implicit measures reflect simple associations stored in a "slow-learning" memory system, while explicit measures reflect a combination of these associations with contextually dependent memories stored in a "fast-binding" memory system.

Decades of research on the concreteness effect, namely better memory for concrete as compared with abstract words, suggest it is a fairly robust phenomenon. Nevertheless, little attention has been given to limiting retrieval contexts. Two experiments evaluated intentional memory for concrete and abstract word lists in three retrieval contexts: free recall, explicit word-stem completion, and implicit word-stem completion. Concreteness effects were observed in free recall and in explicit word-stem completion, but not in implicit word-stem completion. These findings are consistent with both a bidirectional version of the relational-distinctiveness processing framework (Ruiz-Vargas, Cuevas, & Marschark, 1996) and a second framework combining insights from dual coding theory (Paivio, 1971, 1986) and the transfer appropriate processing framework (Roediger, Weldon, & Challis, 1989). Also, consistent with the relational-distinctiveness framework, the second experiment suggested that concreteness effects might depend on relational processing at encoding: Concreteness effects were observed in explicit memory for related word lists but not for unrelated word lists. © 2005 Psychology Press Ltd.

This article considers the role of linguistic context in social memory and social judgment. Two experiments compared perceivers’ responses to person descriptions formulated at a high level of linguistic abstraction (adjectives/traits) versus a low level of linguistic abstraction (action verbs/behaviors). Based on the linguistic category model, together with prior empirical findings in psychology and linguistics, traits as compared with behavioral descriptions of a social target were hypothesized to elicit lower attention, poorer recall, and more expectancy-consistent impressions. Support for these hypotheses was obtained for a social target consisting of an individual as well as a nonentitative group. These results suggest a moderating role of linguistic context in inconsistency processing. Whereas concrete (behavioral) person descriptions elicited relatively deep, systematic processing, abstract (trait) person descriptions elicited more cursory, heuristic processing guided by the perceiver’s expectancies regarding the target person. It is concluded that the methodological and substantive implications of linguistic context deserve greater attention in social psychological research.

The recent rise of interest in situated and embodied cognition has a strong interdisciplinary flavor, with contributions from robotics, cognitive anthropology, cognitive psychology, and developmental psychology, among other disciplines. However, social psychology has been almost completely unrepresented. Social psychologists investigate the ways people perceive, interact with, and influence each other, and this field therefore offers an ideal standpoint for the investigation of many of the most central aspects and themes of the situated cognition approach-because the relevant 'situation' in which cognition takes place is, almost always, a social situation defined by an individual's group memberships, personal relationships, and social and communicative goals. This paper briefly reviews social psychological research and theory related to five major themes of situated and embodied cognition. The themes are: cognition is for action; cognition is situated (radically affected by situations, and makes use of situations as resources); artifacts and situations effectively extend cognitive processes out beyond the individual; cognition is embodied; and situated cognition affects and interacts with symbolically based thought. © 2002 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.

The two studies we report here examine spontaneous trait inferences from a linguistic perspective using an uncued recall paradigm. From earlier studies (Semin & Marsman, 1994), we know that the degree to which dispositional inferences are made varies as a function of the verb type used to describe an event. For all types of verbs (e.g., “John helps Peter”), people make stronger dispositional inferences about the sentence subject (John) than about the sentence object (Peter). This pattern is found to be stronger for action verbs (e.g., hit) than for state verbs (e.g., hate). From this pattern of results we predicted that if the verb type influences strength of dispositional inference, and if spontaneous trait inferences are a function of the strength of dispositional inferences drawn from a verb, then verb type should influence such inferences differentially. We found that sentence subject recall is stronger for action verbs than for state verbs. These results suggest that the degree to which spontaneous t...

Previous research suggests that action language is comprehended by activating the motor system. We report a study, investigating a critical question in this research field: do negative sentences activate the motor system? Participants were exposed to sentences in the affirmation and negation forms while the zygomatic muscle activity on the left side of the face was continuously measured (Electromyography technique: EMG). Sentences were descriptions of emotional expressions that mapped either directly upon the zygomatic muscle (e.g., ""I am smiling"") or did not (e.g., ""I am frowning""). Reading sentences involving the negation of the activity of a specific muscle (zygomatic major-""I am not smiling"") si shown to lead to the inhibition of this muscle. Reading sentences involving the affirmative form instead (""I am smiling"") leads to the activation of zygomatic mucle. In contrast, sentences describing an activity that is irrelevant to the zygomatic muscle (e.g., ""I am frowning"" or ""I am not frowning"") produce no muscle activity. These results extend the range of simulation models to negation and by implication to an abstract domain. We discuss how this research contributes to the grounding of abstract and concrete concepts., Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences; Regione Lombardia (Italy)

In three studies, we examined construal level in a social context: how an event is construed by both the sender and the receiver in a conversation. We tested the influence of two critical cues on construal level: temporal distance to the event date and the receiver’s existing knowledge about the event. Results showed that while construal level shifted as a function of both cues, shared knowledge influenced construal over and above temporal distance when the cues were co-present. Specifically, construal level was more abstract when the event was temporally distant and more concrete when the event was temporally close. However, construal was more

We examine and find support for the hypothesis that time-referent hand-arm movements influence temporal judgments. In line with the concept of ""left is associated with earlier times, and right is associated with later times,"" we show that performing left (right) hand-arm movements while thinking about a past event increases (decreases) the perceived temporal distance to the event. These findings show for the first time that hand-arm movements can influence the perceived temporal distance to events., NA

Light and dark are used pervasively to represent positive and negative concepts. Recent studies suggest that black and white stimuli are automatically associated with negativity and positivity. However, structural factors in experimental designs, such as the shared opposition in the valence (good vs. bad) and brightness (light vs. dark) dimensions might play an important role in the valence– brightness association. In 6 experiments, we show that while black ideographs are consistently judged to represent negative words, white ideographs represent positivity only when the negativity of black is coactivated. The positivity of white emerged only when brightness and valence were manipulated within participants (but not between participants) or when the negativity of black was perceptually activated by presenting positive and white stimuli against a black (vs. gray) background. These findings add to an emerging literature on how structural overlap between dimensions creates associations and highlight the inherently contextualized construction of meaning structures., NA

In two experiments we show that the experience of processing fluency can be grounded in the motor system. We manipulated whether responses in a stimulus-response paradigm were congruent or incongruent with the orientation of graspable objects. Besides the typical affordance effect (Tucker & Ellis, 1998), namely a reaction time advantage for responses made with the hand for which it would be easier to grasp the object, our results reveal that such a visuo-motor congruence elicits positive affect when preceded by incongruent trials (Experiment 1). Experiment 2 demonstrates that individuals are aware of this fluency experience and can consciously report on it. Moreover, by manipulating the task contingencies, we show that the affordance effect itself can be modulated by the experience of processing fluency. Our results are in line with theories assuming a direct coupling between perception and action (Hommel, Müsseler, Aschersleben, & Prinz, 2001; Prinz, 1997; Smith & Semin, 2004).

We investigated the effect of subliminally presented happy or angry faces on evaluative judgments when the facial muscles of participants were free to mimic or blocked. We hypothesized and showed that subliminally presented happy expressions lead to more positive judgments of cartoons compared to angry expressions only when facial muscles were not blocked. These results reveal the influence of socially driven embodied processes on affective judgments and have also potential implications for phenomena such as emotional contagion. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved).

WOS:000290549600041 (Nº de Acesso Web of Science) “Prémio Científico ISCTE-IUL 2012” In a new integration, we show that the visual-spatial structuring of time converges with auditory-spatial left right judgments for time-related words. In Experiment 1, participants placed past and future-related words respectively to the left and right of the midpoint on a horizontal line, reproducing earlier findings. In Experiment 2, neutral and time-related words were presented over headphones. Participants were asked to indicate whether words were louder on the left or right channel. On critical experimental trials, words were presented equally loud binaurally. As predicted, participants judged future words to be louder on the right channel more often than past-related words. Furthermore, there was a significant cross-modal overlap between the visual-spatial ordering (Experiment 1) and the auditory judgments (Experiment 2), which were continuously related. These findings provide support for the assumption that space and time have certain invariant properties that share a common structure across modalities

In recent years there has been an increasing awareness that a comprehensive understanding of language, cognitive and affective processes, and social and interpersonal phenomena cannot be achieved without understanding the ways these processes are grounded in bodily states. The term 'embodiment' captures the common denominator of these developments, which come from several disciplinary perspectives ranging from neuroscience, cognitive science, social psychology, and affective sciences. For the first time, this volume brings together these varied developments under one umbrella and furnishes a comprehensive overview of this intellectual movement in the cognitive-behavioral sciences. The chapters review current work on relations of the body to thought, language use, emotion and social relationships as presented by internationally recognized experts in these areas.

Publisher Summary This chapter proposes a new integration of social psychology and situated cognition—that is, socially situated cognition (SSC). This new approach rests directly on recent developments in psychology and cognitive science captured by the label situated cognition. It highlights four core assumptions that are common to social psychology and the situated cognition perspective: Cognition is for the adaptive regulation of action, and mental representations are action oriented; cognition is embodied, drawing on our sensorimotor abilities and environments as well as human brains; cognition and action are the emergent outcome of dynamic processes of interaction between an agent and an environment; and cognition is distributed across brains and the environment and across social agents. With regard to each of these themes, the chapter reviews and integrates relevant social psychological research and suggests ways in which the theme can be advanced by rethinking current assumptions. The overall goals are to make social psychology part of the interdisciplinary integration emerging around the concept of situated cognition, and to advance these four themes as high-level conceptual principles that can organize seemingly disparate areas of research and theory within social psychology itself.

The language used to represent the interpersonal domain has been shown to lead to a number of social inferences. The article examines this issue from a production and reception perspective in a communication context. The two points that are then presented are the psychological processes that drive the systematic use of interpersonal language and those processes that are elicited by such language.

It is argued that an interface between language and social cognition can take place only if one addresses language with the same methodological commitment that social cognition has hitherto received. Such a methodological commitment means treating language as a tool, with distinct cognitive properties in its own right. An overview of a research programme is provided that treats interpersonal language as consisting of tools and is concerned with an empirical examination of the cognitive properties of these tools. It is then shown how a better understanding of social cognitive processes can be achieved by showing how different linguistic categories trigger qualitatively different cognitive processes. In conclusion, it is argued that without a clear understanding of the medium by which communication is achieved-namely, language-it is difficult if not impossible to understand social cognition.

The main points raised by Borkenau against our challenge of the 'intuitive psychometrics' view of personality judgements are discussed, in particular his example of the link between school grades and intelligence. It is argued that the semantic similarity interpretation advanced in our paper is more adequate and more parsimonious than explanations in terms of psychometric reasoning.

The study reported here addresses the issue of why two different verb categories in sentences regularly elicit causal attributions to either the subject or the object of the sentence. State verbs (e.g., “hate,” “love”) predominantly evoke object attributions, whereas interpretive action verbs (e.g., “cheat,” “help”) evoke subject attributions. Different attempts to explain the phenomenon of implicit causality are critically discussed, and an argument is advanced for an alternative approach that focuses on the differential information these verb categories provide about the antecedent and consequent conditions of a sentence. An empirical study examining the inferences subjects draw concerning sentence contexts provides support for this contention. In the context of sentences with state verbs, inferences about the objects of the sentences appeared as antecedent conditions, while inferences about the subjects appeared as consequences, thus implying object causation. The reverse pattern was observed for sente...

In research the general practice is for experimental studies to be derived from real-life observations, and particularly those from field research. The study here reverses this practice. A real-life situation has been discovered, the conditions of which correspond to those generally employed in risky-shift studies. The quantitative nature of the decisions made in the established group studied enables the data to be treated in comparable fashion to data derived from risk-taking and polarization studies. In the case studied here no shift in any direction was found. An examination of the possible factors accounting for this finding indicated that the two most important ones were the amount of information at the disposal of the group, and the reference system within which decisions were made, which was common to all the group members. These variables are put forward as worthy of further experimental analysis. Discussion focuses on the implications of research such as this for the external validity of experimental studies.