Search

Exposure therapy has been shown to be useful for the treatment of anxiety disorders. However, there are individual differences in the extent to which this intervention is effective in reducing symptoms, and a substantial number of patients may experience a return of fear (ROF). The factors associated with successful therapy outcomes are an important topic of investigation as these factors might influence the nature of the interventions as well as enhance our understanding of the process associated with the disorder and its treatment. Here, we investigated the effect of resting heart rate variability (HRV) on ROF following exposure therapy in social phobics. In particular, using path modeling, we assessed the hypothesis that resting HRV prospectively predicts inhibitory learning, which, in turn, prospectively predicts ROF at follow-up. Forty adult participants (60% female) diagnosed with Social Anxiety Disorder were assigned to a single massed exposure therapy session. Self-reported behavioral and physiological responses were recorded pre-treatment, immediately following treatment, and at one-month follow-up. The Personalized Implicit Association Task (PIAT) was used as an implicit measure of inhibitory learning, and HF-HRV was taken as a measure of vagal activity. Results revealed that those with high pre-treatment HRV reported less negative implicit attitude towards public speaking after exposure (b = -0.044, p =.047) and showed reduced residual symptoms one month after treatment. (b = 2.247, p =.013). Taken together these results support exposure therapy models that emphasize the importance of inhibitory learning in extinction and are consistent with research linking HRV to inhibition., Competing Interests: Declarations. Ethical Approval: The study was approved by the local Ethics Committee and in line with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki. Consent to Participate: Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study. Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interests., (© 2025. The Author(s).)

While the global pandemic highlighted the importance of adhering to boundaries (e.g., social distancing rules), compliance with these boundary-imposing measures has been politically divided. This research proposes one reason that may underlie the observed ideological asymmetries toward COVID-19 prevention measures and boundaries in general: Conservatives and liberals may fundamentally differ in how they construe boundaries. Supporting this prediction, Studies 1a-1d and two follow-up studies ( n = 3,231; Studies 1a-1c and follow-up studies: Amazon Mechanical Turk and Prolific users, Study 1d: U.S. students) demonstrate that identifying with political conservatism (vs. liberalism) increases the likelihood to construe boundaries as restrictions. We further show that, due to conservatives' greater preference for order, structure-related words carry a more positive connotation among conservatives versus liberals (Study 2: n = 744; MTurk users). Capitalizing on this finding, we demonstrate that linguistic framing that highlights the structure-providing function of a boundary (e.g., a social distancing sign can "structure" customer flow in a restaurant) can reduce the salience of its usual restrictive aspect and hence effectively improve conservatives' attitudes toward the boundaries (Study 3: n = 740; MTurk users). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

The stark divide between the political right and left is rooted in conflicting beliefs, values, and personality-and, recent research suggests, perhaps even lower-level physiological differences between individuals. In this registered report, we investigated a novel domain of ideological differences in physiological processes: interoceptive sensitivity-that is, a person's attunement to their own internal bodily states and signals (e.g., physiological arousal, pain, and respiration). We conducted two studies testing the hypothesis that greater interoceptive sensitivity would be associated with greater conservatism: one laboratory study in the Netherlands using a physiological heartbeat detection task and one large-scale online study in the United States employing an innovative webcam-based measure of interoceptive sensitivity. Contrary to our predictions, we found evidence that interoceptive sensitivity may instead predict greater political liberalism (versus conservatism), although this association was primarily limited to the American sample. We discuss implications for our understanding of the physiological underpinnings of political ideology.

Research has documented robust associations between greater disgust sensitivity and (1) concerns about disease, and (2) political conservatism. However, the COVID-19 disease pandemic raised challenging questions about these associations. In particular, why have conservatives-despite their greater disgust sensitivity-exhibited less concern about the pandemic? Here, we investigate this "conservatism-disgust paradox" and address several outstanding theoretical questions regarding the interrelations among disgust sensitivity, ideology, and pandemic response. In four studies (N = 1,764), we identify several methodological and conceptual factors-in particular, an overreliance on self-report measures-that may have inflated the apparent associations among these constructs. Using non-self-report measures, we find evidence that disgust sensitivity may be a less potent predictor of disease avoidance than is typically assumed, and that ideological differences in disgust sensitivity may be amplified by self-report measures. These findings suggest that the true pattern of interrelations among these factors may be less "paradoxical" than is typically believed., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist., (Copyright: © 2022 Ruisch et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.)

A primary focus of research on conspiracy theories has been understanding the psychological characteristics that predict people's level of conspiracist ideation. However, the dynamics of conspiracist ideation-i.e., how such tendencies change over time-are not well understood. To help fill this gap in the literature, we used data from two longitudinal studies (Study 1 N = 107; Study 2 N = 1,037) conducted during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that greater belief in COVID-19 conspiracy theories at baseline predicts both greater endorsement of a novel real-world conspiracy theory involving voter fraud in the 2020 American Presidential election (Study 1) and increases in generic conspiracist ideation over a period of several months (Studies 1 and 2). Thus, engaging with real-world conspiracy theories appears to act as a gateway, leading to more general increases in conspiracist ideation. Beyond enhancing our knowledge of conspiracist ideation, this work highlights the importance of fighting the spread of conspiracy theories., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Recent work has found that an individual's beliefs and personal characteristics can impact perceptions of and responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Certain individuals-such as those who are politically conservative or who endorse conspiracy theories-are less likely to engage in preventative behaviors like social distancing. The current research aims to address whether these individual differences not only affect people's reactions to the pandemic, but also their actual likelihood of contracting COVID-19. In the early months of the pandemic, U.S. participants responded to a variety of individual difference measures as well as questions specific to the pandemic itself. Four months later, 2120 of these participants responded with whether they had contracted COVID-19. Nearly all of our included individual difference measures significantly predicted whether a person reported testing positive for the virus in this four-month period. Additional analyses revealed that all of these relationships were primarily mediated by whether participants held accurate knowledge about COVID-19. These findings offer useful insights for developing more effective interventions aimed at slowing the spread of both COVID-19 and future diseases. Moreover, some findings offer critical tests of the validity of such theoretical frameworks as those concerning conspiratorial ideation and disgust sensitivity within a real-world context., (© 2021. The Author(s).)

A study involving over 2000 online participants (US residents) tested a general framework regarding compliance with a directive in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The study featured not only a self-report measure of social distancing but also virtual behavior measures-simulations that presented participants with graphical depictions mirroring multiple real-world scenarios and asked them to position themselves in relation to others in the scene. The conceptual framework highlights three essential components of a directive: (1) the source, some entity is advocating for a behavioral change; (2) the surrounding context, the directive is in response to some challenge; and (3) the target, the persons to whom the directive is addressed. Belief systems relevant to each of these three components are predicted, and were found, to relate to compliance with the social distancing directive. The implications of the findings for public service campaigns encouraging people to engage in social distancing are discussed., Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

Past research has established the value of social distancing as a means of deterring the spread of COVID-19 largely by examining aggregate level data. Locales in which efforts were undertaken to encourage distancing experienced reductions in their rate of transmission. However, these aggregate results tell us little about the effectiveness of social distancing at the level of the individual, which is the question addressed by the current research. Four months after participating in a study assessing their social distancing behavior, 2,120 participants indicated whether they had contracted COVID-19. Importantly, the assessment of social distancing involved not only a self-report measure of how strictly participants had followed social distancing recommendations but also a series of virtual behavior measures of social distancing. These simulations presented participants with graphical depictions mirroring specific real-world scenarios, asking them to position themselves in relation to others in the scene. Individuals' social distancing behavior, particularly as assessed by the virtual behavior measure, predicted whether they contracted COVID-19 during the intervening 4 mo. This was true when considering only participants who reported having tested positively for the virus and when considering additional participants who, although untested, believed that they had contracted the virus. The findings offer a unique form of additional evidence as to why individuals should practice social distancing. What the individual does matters, not only for the health of the collective, but also for the specific individual., Competing Interests: The authors declare no competing interest.

Fiagbenu et al. (2019, British Journal of Psychology) questioned the nature and extent of ideological differences in learning and behaviour documented by Shook and Fazio (2009, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 995). We correct a mischaracterization in their depiction of Shook & Fazio's research, and in doing so, we outline why the original findings represent domain-general ideological differences in attitude-formation processes, rather than simple differences in responses to physical threat. We also report new data that suggest a potential mechanism for the authors' findings and further highlight the importance of novel, ideologically neutral stimuli when examining fundamental psychological differences between liberals and conservatives., (© 2020 British Psychological Society.)

Attachment theory assumes that trust in caregivers' support and exploration are closely related. Little research tried to investigate this link, nor focuses on mechanisms that might explain this association. The present studies examined whether trust is related to exploration through a serial indirect effect of openness to negative affect and self-regulation. In Study 1, 212 children, aged 8-13, completed questionnaires assessing trust, openness to negative affect, self-regulation and exploration. The results showed that trust predicted exploration, but only to the extent to which openness to negative affect and self-regulation were involved too. Study 2 refined these findings (n = 59, aged 9-12) using a behavioral measure of openness to negative affect and exploration, and with mother-reported self-regulation. Replicating this serial indirect effect of openness to negative affect and self-regulation with multiple informants and methods, the present studies advance our understanding of how trust might foster exploration in preadolescence., (© 2019 Scandinavian Psychological Associations and John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

People regularly form expectations about their future, and whether those expectations are positive or negative can have important consequences. So, what determines the valence of people's expectations? Research seeking to answer this question by using an individual-differences approach has established that trait biases in optimistic/pessimistic self-beliefs and, more recently, trait biases in behavioral tendencies to weight one's past positive versus negative experiences more heavily each predict the valence of people's typical expectations. However, these two biases do not correlate, suggesting limits on a purely individual-differences approach to predicting people's expectations. We hypothesize that, because these two biases appear to operate via distinct processes (with self-beliefs operating top-down and valence weighting bias operating bottom-up), to predict a person's expectations on a given occasion, it is also critical to consider situational factors influencing processing style. To test this hypothesis, we investigated how an integral part of future thinking that influences processing style-mental imagery-determines each bias's influence. Two experiments measured valence weighting biases and optimistic/pessimistic self-beliefs, then manipulated whether participants formed expectations using their own first-person visual perspective (which facilitates bottom-up processes) or an external third-person visual perspective (which facilitates top-down processes). Expectations corresponded more with valence weighting biases from the first-person (vs. third-person) but more with self-beliefs from the third-person (vs. first-person). Two additional experiments manipulated valence weighting bias, demonstrating its causal role in shaping expectations (and behaviors) with first-person, but not third-person, imagery. These results suggest the two biases operate via distinct processes, holding implications for interventions to increase optimism. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Despite the centrality of both attitude accessibility and attitude basis to the last 30 years of theoretical and empirical work concerning attitudes, little work has systematically investigated their relation. The research that does exist provides conflicting results and is not at all conclusive given the methodology that has been used. The current research uses recent advances in statistical modeling and attitude measurement to provide the most systematic examination of the relation between attitude accessibility and basis to date. Specifically, we use mixed-effects modeling which accounts for variation across individuals and attitude objects in conjunction with the Evaluative Lexicon (EL)-a linguistic approach that allows for the simultaneous measurement of an attitude's valence, extremity, and emotionality. We demonstrate across four studies, over 10,000 attitudes, and nearly 50 attitude objects that attitudes based on emotion tend to be more accessible in memory, particularly if the attitude is positive.

Attitudes serve multiple functions, some related to the self-concept. We call attitudes that help people define who they are "self-defining." Across four studies, we tested a brief self-report measure of the extent to which an attitude is self-defining. Studies 1 and 2 showed that self-defining attitudes tend to be extreme, positive, and unambivalent. Studies 3 and 4 produced two main findings. First, self-definition was related to, but not redundant with, a number of other characteristics of the attitude (e.g., attitude certainty). Second, self-definition predicted participants' intentions to spontaneously advocate and, in Study 4, their reactions to an opportunity to advocate behaviorally (i.e., writing about their attitude in an optional response box) following a self-threat. Overall, the results highlight the utility of this approach and, more broadly, demonstrate the value of considering the role of the self in attitudinal processes, and vice versa.

The more accessible an attitude is, the stronger is its influence on information processing and behavior. Accessibility can be increased through attitude rehearsal, but it remains unknown whether attitude rehearsal also affects the accessibility of related attitudes. To investigate this hypothesis, participants in an experimental condition repeatedly expressed their attitudes towards exemplars of several semantic categories during an evaluative categorization task. Participants in a control condition performed a non-evaluative task with the same exemplars and evaluated unrelated attitude objects. After a 30-minute interval, participants in the experimental condition were faster than controls to evaluate not only the original exemplars but also novel exemplars of the same categories. This finding suggests that the effect of attitude rehearsal on accessibility generalizes to attitudes towards untrained but semantically related attitude objects. © 2016 The Authors. European Journal of Social Psychology published by John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Objective: Evaluative conditioning (EC), the pairing of objects (conditioned stimuli; CS) with positive and negative unconditioned stimuli (US) in order to induce attitude change, has proven to be a viable method of changing attitudes toward foods and corresponding eating behaviors. Positively conditioning healthy foods and negatively conditioning unhealthy foods should result in healthier food choices. Of interest in the current research is the extent to which EC can generalize beyond the conditioned foods to entire dimensions underlying food judgment, such as health and taste., Method: The current research included 2 EC experiments configured in accord with the Implicit Misattribution Model (IMM; Jones, Fazio, & Olson, 2009). Four healthy CS foods were paired with positive US and 4 unhealthy CS foods were paired with negative US. Participants then reported eating intentions for a variety of foods, including non-CS foods., Results: Experiment 1 demonstrated that conditioning a few exemplar food items increased sensitivity to health and decreased sensitivity to taste when judging a variety of additional foods. Experiment 2 replicated the generalization effect with regard to health sensitivity, but only when a task that preceded the EC procedure promoted, rather than interfered with, categorization of the CS foods by health., Conclusions: This research shows that EC can generalize to an entire dimension underlying food judgment and that this effect is facilitated by accessibility of the health dimension at the time of exposure to the EC pairings. (PsycINFO Database Record, ((c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved).)

Many situations in our lives require us to make relatively quick decisions as whether to approach or avoid a person or object, buy or pass on a product, or accept or reject an offer. These decisions are particularly difficult when there are both positive and negative aspects to the object. How do people go about navigating this conflict to come to a summary judgment? Using the Evaluative Lexicon (EL), we demonstrate across three studies, 7,700 attitude expressions, and nearly 50 different attitude objects that when positivity and negativity conflict, the valence that is based more on emotion is more likely to dominate. Furthermore, individuals are also more consistent in the expression of their univalent summary judgments when they involve greater emotionality. In sum, valence that is based on emotion tends to dominate when resolving ambivalence and also helps individuals to remain consistent when offering quick judgments., (© 2015 by the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.)

People with negative self-views may fail to generalize appropriately from success experiences (e.g., Wood, Heimpel, Newby-Clark, & Ross, 2005). We drew on theories regarding self-views (Swann, Griffin, Predmore, & Gaines, 1987) and abstraction (Semin & Fiedler, 1991), as well as past linguistic framing work (e.g., Marigold, Holmes, & Ross, 2007, 2010; Salancik, 1974), to create a new technique to encourage people with negative self-views to generalize broadly from a success experience to the self-concept. We call this technique directed abstraction. In Experiment 1, participants with negative self-views who completed a directed abstraction writing task following success feedback regarding a novel laboratory task generalized more from that success, reporting higher ability levels and greater expectations of future success in the relevant domain. In Experiment 2, directed abstraction produced similar results (including more positive self-related affect, e.g., pride) after participants recalled a past public speaking success. In Experiment 3, participants high in fear of public speaking gave two speeches in a context designed to be challenging yet also to elicit successful performances. Directed abstraction helped these participants generalize from their success to beliefs about their abilities, expectations about the future, and confidence as a speaker. In Experiment 4, directed abstraction following success on a verbal task increased persistence in the face of failure on a subsequent verbal task. We discuss implications for understanding how and when people generalize from a success, compare directed abstraction to existing interventions, and suggest practical applications for this influence technique., ((c) 2015 APA, all rights reserved).)

This study examined effortful cognitive skills and underlying maladaptive beliefs among patients treated with cognitive therapy (CT) for depression. Depressed patients (n=44) completed cognitive measures before and after 16 weeks of CT. Measures included an assessment of CT skills (Ways of Responding Scale; WOR), an implicit test of maladaptive beliefs (Implicit Association Test; IAT), and a self-report questionnaire of maladaptive beliefs (Dysfunctional Attitude Scale; DAS). A matched sample of never-depressed participants (n=44) also completed study measures. Prior to treatment, depressed patients endorsed significantly more undesirable cognitions on the WOR, IAT, and DAS compared with never-depressed participants. Patients displayed improvement on the WOR and DAS over the course of treatment, but showed no change on the IAT. Additionally, improvements on the WOR and DAS were each related to greater reductions in depressive symptoms. Results suggest that the degree of symptom reduction among patients participating in CT is related to changes in patients' acquisition of coping skills requiring deliberate efforts and reflective thought, but not related to reduced endorsement of implicitly assessed maladaptive beliefs., (Copyright © 2014. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

Using a technique known as reverse-correlation image classification, we demonstrated that the face of Mitt Romney as represented in people's minds varies as a function of their attitudes toward Mitt Romney. Our findings provide evidence that attitudes bias how people see something as concrete and well learned as the face of a political candidate during an election. Practically, our findings imply that citizens may not merely interpret political information about a candidate to fit their opinion, but also may construct a political world in which they literally see candidates differently.

Three experiments tested whether disliking of predominately univalently negative attitude objects could be reduced by a procedure pairing approach behaviors with subliminally presented images of the objects. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants who approached images of insects rated insects less negatively than participants who did not approach insect pictures. Experiment 2 extended this effect to spiders and used an implicit measure of spider attitudes. Experiment 3 examined the consequences of an approach induction for affect during actual approach behavior in a sample of individuals with elevated levels of spider fear by using a Behavioral Approach Task. Fearful individuals who approached spider pictures reported less anxiety when encountering live spiders than participants who did not approach spider pictures. As such, the results provided evidence on explicit, implicit, and behavioral measures that negative and predominately univalent attitudes can be influenced by approach behaviors. Implications for attitude change interventions and potential contribution to the efficacy of exposure therapy are discussed.

Objective: The relation between weighting of valence information in attitude generalization and evaluation of novel/hypothetical situations was explored., Method: Undergraduate participants played a computer game requiring them to learn which stimuli (beans) would increase/decrease their points. Later, participants classified the valence of game beans and novel ones varying in resemblance to game beans. The weighting bias in attitude generalization was estimated as the average response to novel beans, controlling for game bean learning. We examined whether this bias related to judgments of hypothetical situations concerning interpersonal relationships (Study 1), threat assessment (Study 2), risk propensities (Study 3), and risk behavior (Study 6). We also assessed whether valence weighting is specifically predictive of novel situations (Studies 4 and 5). Finally, we explored participants' ability to self-report their weighting bias (Study 7)., Results: Valence weighting in attitude generalization was related to judgments of novel situations and risk behavior. The performance-based measure did not correlate with responses to various questionnaires related to valence weighting., Conclusions: There is a fundamental individual difference associated with valence weighting, resulting in the relation between two processes unrelated in content, but sharing the essential characteristic of valence weighting-attitude generalization and evaluation of novel situations., (© 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.)

We sought to advance understanding of the processes underlying the efficacy of exposure therapy and particularly the phenomenon of return of fear (ROF) following treatment by drawing on a social psychological view of phobias as attitudes. Specifically, a dual process theory of attitude-related behavior predicts that a positive response to exposure therapy may reflect change in either the automatic (the attitude representation itself) or controlled (skills and confidence at coping with the fear) responses to the phobic stimulus, or both. However, if the attitude representation remains negative following treatment, ROF should be more likely. We tested this hypothesis in a clinical sample of individuals with public speaking phobia using a single-session exposure therapy protocol previously shown to be efficacious but also associated with some ROF. Consistent with predictions, a post-treatment implicit measure of attitudes toward public speaking (the Personalized Implicit Association Test [PIAT]) predicted ROF at 1-month follow-up. These results suggest that change in the automatically activated attitude toward the phobic stimulus is an important goal of exposure therapy and that an implicit measure like the PIAT can provide a useful measure of such change by which to gauge the adequacy of exposure treatment and predict its long-term efficacy., (Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

We explored dispositional differences in the ability to self-regulate attentional processes in the domain of public speaking. Participants first completed measures of speech anxiety and attentional control. In a second session, participants prepared and performed a short speech. Fear of public speaking negatively impacted performance only for those low in attentional control. Thus, attentional control appears to act as a buffer that facilitates successful self-regulation despite performance anxiety.

The current study tested the association between fear and perception in spider phobic individuals (n=57) within the context of a treatment outcome study. Participants completed 5 post-treatment Behavioral Approach Tasks (BATs) in which they encountered a live spider and were asked to provide spider size estimates. Consistent with predictions, results indicated that high levels of fear were associated with magnified perception of phobic stimuli. Specifically, we found a significant positive correlation between size estimates and self-reported fear while encountering spiders. Together with previous findings, these results further support the notion that fear is involved in the encoding and processing of perceptual information., (Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.)

Prior stereotyping research provides conflicting evidence regarding the importance of person categorization along a particular dimension for the automatic activation of a stereotype corresponding to that dimension. Experiment 1 replicated a racial stereotyping effect on object identification and examined whether it could be attenuated by encouraging categorization by age. Experiment 2 employed socially complex person stimuli and manipulated whether participants categorized spontaneously or by race. In Experiment 3, the distinctiveness of the racial dimension was manipulated by having Black females appear in the context of either Black males or White females. The results indicated that conditions fostering categorization by race consistently produced automatic racial stereotyping and that conditions fostering nonracial categorization can eliminate automatic racial stereotyping. Implications for the relation between automatic stereotype activation and dimension of categorization are discussed.

In the current set of experiments, we establish, and explore the consequences of, the imprecision that characterizes the attribute response labels typically employed in the Implicit Association Test (IAT). In Experiment 1, we demonstrate the malleability of the IAT, as conventionally implemented. IAT scores are shown to be influenced by perspective mindsets induced by an unrelated preceding task. Then, we explore how the malleability of the IAT can lead to the inference that attitude change has occurred even when there is very good reason to believe it has not (Experiment 2), and conversely, how it can obscure the detection of attitude change when such change is indeed likely to have occurred (Experiment 3). We provide conceptual explanations for these discrepancies and suggest methodological improvements to enhance the specificity of IAT measures.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to attitude formation or change toward an object due to that object's mere co-occurrence with another valenced object or objects. This chapter focuses on the "how" question, that is, the question of what cognitive processes intervene between mere co-occurrence and attitude formation or change. Though EC has typically been thought of as occurring through a single, albeit contentious, mechanism, we begin by pointing out that both the heterogeneity of EC methodologies and the abundance of inconsistent results suggest that multiple processes with different characteristics can produce EC. We describe how the earliest posited process of EC, Pavlovian conditioning or signal learning, is a valid mechanism of EC that appears to have operated in some experiments but is unlikely to have operated in others and also cannot account for various EC findings. We describe other mechanisms of EC, when they can be expected to occur, and what characteristics they have. We particularly focus our attention on a process model of EC we have recently introduced, the implicit misattribution model. Finally, we describe the implications of a multi-process view of EC, which we argue can help resolve theoretical controversies and further the application of EC as a practical intervention for influencing attitudes in various domains.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to the formation or change of an attitude toward an object, following that object's pairing with positively or negatively valenced stimuli. The authors provide evidence that EC can occur through an implicit misattribution mechanism in which an evaluative response evoked by a valenced stimulus is incorrectly and implicitly attributed to another stimulus, forming or changing an attitude toward this other stimulus. In 5 studies, the authors measured or manipulated variables related to the potential for the misattribution of an evaluation, or source confusability. Greater EC was observed when participants' eye gaze shifted frequently between a valenced and a neutral stimulus (Studies 1 & 2), when the 2 stimuli appeared in close spatial proximity (Study 3), and when the neutral stimulus was made more perceptually salient than was the valenced stimulus, due to the larger size of the neutral stimulus (Study 4). In other words, conditions conducive to source confusability increased EC. Study 5 provided evidence for multiple mechanisms of EC by comparing the effects of mildly evocative valenced stimuli (those evoking responses that might more easily be misattributed to another object) with more strongly evocative stimuli., (Copyright (c) 2009 APA, all rights reserved.)

It is important to understand the content dimensions that influence the quality of intergroup interactions. The present research organized potential conversation content according to theoretically relevant underlying dimensions and investigated Whites' willingness to discuss topics of varying content with a Black partner. Specifically, it investigated Whites' willingness to engage in intimate self-disclosure and their willingness to discuss controversial and race-related topics with White versus Black interaction partners. Results across two experiments indicated an unwillingness among Whites to discuss both intimate and race-related topics with a Black partner. In addition, this research examined the role played by participants in the interaction (i.e., asking vs. answering) and found that although Whites were unwilling to ask Black relative to White partners about race-related topics, they were more willing to answer Black relative to White partners about such topics.

Connectionist simulation was employed to investigate processes that may underlie the relationships between prior expectancies or prejudices and the acquisition of attitudes, under conditions where learners can only discover the valence of attitude objects through directly experiencing them. We compared contexts analogous to learners holding either false negative expectancies ('prejudices') about a subclass of objects that were actually good or false positive expectancies about objects that were actually bad. We introduced expectancy-related bias either by altering the probability of approach, or by varying the rate of learning following experience with good or bad objects. Where feedback was contingent on approach, the false positive expectancies were corrected by experience, but negative prejudices resisted change, since the network avoided objects deemed to be bad, and so received less corrective feedback. These findings are discussed in relation to the effects of intergroup contact and expectancy-confirmation processes in reducing or sustaining prejudice.

While a wealth of research has found that depressive symptoms are related to current attitudes, new evidence suggests depressive symptoms may be related to a fundamental deficit in forming new attitudes. Researchers investigating individual differences in attitude formation have found that depressive symptoms are strongly correlated with poorer learning of positive stimuli. This study extended these findings to a sample including clinically depressed participants. Results show that, as compared to nondepressed individuals, depressed individuals are characterized by a large deficit in their learning of positive stimuli. Implications of this fundamental deficit are discussed.

This study investigated how automatically activated racial attitudes are affected by relatively long-term interracial relationships. A natural field experiment was conducted in a college dormitory system. Participants were White freshmen who had been randomly assigned to either a White or an African American roommate. Students participated in two sessions during the first 2 and last 2 weeks of their first quarter on campus. During these sessions, they answered questions about their satisfaction and involvement with their roommates and completed an inventory of intergroup anxiety and an implicit measure of racial attitudes. Participants in interracial rooms reported less satisfaction and less involvement with their roommates than did participants in same-race rooms. However, automatically activated racial attitudes and intergroup anxiety improved over time among students in interracial rooms, but not among students in same-race rooms. Thus, the results suggest that interracial roommate relationships, although generally less satisfying and involving than same-race roommate relationships, do produce benefits.

Historical developments regarding the attitude concept are reviewed, and set the stage for consideration of a theoretical perspective that views attitude, not as a hypothetical construct, but as evaluative knowledge. A model of attitudes as object-evaluation associations of varying strength is summarized, along with research supporting the model's contention that at least some attitudes are represented in memory and activated automatically upon the individual's encountering the attitude object. The implications of the theoretical perspective for a number of recent discussions related to the attitude concept are elaborated. Among these issues are the notion of attitudes as "constructions," the presumed malleability of automatically-activated attitudes, correspondence between implicit and explicit measures of attitude, and postulated dual or multiple attitudes.

Previous research suggests that automatic prejudice directly manifests in nonverbal behavior. The authors offer a more complex picture of the relation between automatic processes and nonverbal behavior by suggesting that any discomfort that appears in nonverbal behavior stems not from negative attitudes per se but from discordance between automatically activated attitudes toward Blacks and the specific evaluations being expressed. White participants for whom estimates of automatic prejudice were available provided videotaped evaluations of several individuals, including two matched Black and White males. Discordance between general racial attitudes and evaluations of specific targets manifested in discomfort-related nonverbal behavior. Moreover, naïve Black judges, but not White judges, doubted the sincerity of individuals characterized by discordance. The nature of the nonverbal "leakage" that automatic prejudice produces is discussed.

Negativity biases, i.e., tendencies for negative features and interpretations to predominate over positive, are known to play a role in the etiology and maintenance of emotional disorders. Both depression and anxiety have been associated with such negative cognitive styles. Recently, Fazio, R.H., Eiser, J.R., and Shook, N.J. [(2004). Attitude formation through exploration: Valence asymmetries. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 293-311] have observed similar valence asymmetries in the domain of attitude formation and generalization. The present research examined the possibility that the extent to which individuals display a learning bias in attitude formation is related to negative cognitive style and emotional disorder symptoms. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether novel stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Poorer learning was associated with more negative cognitive style, greater depression, and a tendency toward greater anxiety. Interestingly, these relations were most evident with respect to the learning of the positive stimuli, suggesting that an under-appreciation of positive objects and events may underlie vulnerability to emotional disorders. The potential value of various indices of negativity bias that can be assessed when examining attitude formation and generalization is discussed.

The assumption that implicit measures assess associations that are not accessible to consciousness abounds in current social cognition research. In the present report, we question this assumption, focusing on the construct of implicit self-esteem as a case in point. Although researchers often argue that implicitly measured self-esteem is unconscious, we provide evidence that it is not, and that discrepancies between implicit and explicit measures of self-esteem are the result of reporting tendencies. Study 1 demonstrated that individuals for whom explicitly measured self-esteem is relatively high and implicitly measured self-esteem is relatively low admit to overpresenting themselves. In Study 2, implicit and explicit measures of self-esteem were related when subjects were urged to avoid over- or underpresenting themselves when responding to the explicit measures. We discuss the critical distinction between awareness of one's attitudes and awareness of their influence.

The authors report a set of experiments that use an implicit evaluative conditioning procedure to reduce automatically activated racial prejudice in White participants in a short period and with relatively few trials. Experiment 1 demonstrated that participants were unaware of the repeated conditioned stimulus-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) pairings of Black-good and White-bad. In Experiment 2, the procedure was found to be effective in reducing prejudice as indicated by an evaluative priming measure of automatically activated racial attitudes. In Experiment 3, this reduction in prejudice was found to persist throughout a 2-day separation between the conditioning procedure and the administration of the dependent measure. The implications of the present findings for the persistence of automatically activated racial prejudice are discussed.

The formation of attitudes toward novel objects was examined as a function of exploratory behavior. An initial experiment, in which participants played a computer game that required them to learn which stimuli, when sampled, produced favorable or unfavorable outcomes, demonstrated learning, attitude formation, and generalization to novel objects. The findings also revealed 2 interesting valence asymmetries: a learning asymmetry involving better learning for negatively valenced than positively valenced objects and a generalization asymmetry involving stronger generalization as a function of negative than of positive attitudes. Findings from 4 experiments led to an explanation of the learning asymmetry in terms of information gain being contingent on approach behavior and related the generalization asymmetry to a negativity bias that weighs resemblance to a known negative more heavily than resemblance to a positive., (((c) 2004 APA, all rights reserved))

The authors argue that the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998) can be contaminated by associations that do not contribute to one's evaluation of an attitude object and thus do not become activated when one encounters the object but that are nevertheless available in memory. The authors propose a variant of the IAT that reduces the contamination of these "extrapersonal associations." Consistent with the notion that the traditional version of the IAT is affected by society's negative portrayal of minority groups, the "personalized" IAT revealed relatively less racial prejudice among Whites in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, the personalized IAT correlated more strongly with explicit measures of attitudes and behavioral intentions than did the traditional IAT. The feasibility of disentangling personal and extrapersonal associations is discussed.

Some recent findings suggest that different implicit measures of prejudice assess the same underlying construct, but other work suggests that they may not. In this experiment, White participants completed a version of a priming measure of racial attitudes that either encouraged categorization of the face primes in terms of race or did not encourage such categorization, and then completed the Implicit Association Test. Correspondence between the two measures was found only when categorization by race was required on the priming measure. Moreover, participants appeared more prejudiced when they were led to construe individuals in terms of race than when they were not so encouraged. The discussion focuses on the potential for dissociations between evaluations of a category and evaluations of members of the category.

Connectionist computer simulation was employed to explore the notion that, if attitudes guide approach and avoidance behaviors, false negative beliefs are likely to remain uncorrected for longer than false positive beliefs. In Study 1, the authors trained a three-layer neural network to discriminate "good" and "bad" inputs distributed across a two-dimensional space. "Full feedback" training, whereby connection weights were modified to reduce error after every trial, resulted in perfect discrimination. "Contingent feedback," whereby connection weights were only updated following outputs representing approach behavior, led to several false negative errors (good inputs misclassified as bad). In Study 2, the network was redesigned to distinguish a system for learning evaluations from a mechanism for selecting actions. Biasing action selection toward approach eliminated the asymmetry between learning of good and bad inputs under contingent feedback. Implications for various attitudinal phenomena and biases in social cognition are discussed.

This research explored how White students' automatically activated racial attitudes and motivations to control prejudiced reactions (MCPR) related to their self-reported comfort and willingness to interact with Black partners in a variety of situations. Participants completed the MCPR scale and a priming task that provides an unobtrusive measure of automatically activated racial attitudes. In a later session, participants rated their comfort and willingness to enter eight situations varying in their degree of intimacy and scriptedness and then rerated each situation while imagining different interaction partners, including a Black individual. When the situations were scripted or participants were low on the restraint to avoid dispute factor of the MCPR scale, participants expressed willingness to interact with Black partners. When the situation was unscripted and participants were characterized by higher restraint scores, anticipated comfort varied as a function of automatically activated racial attitudes and the concern with acting prejudiced factor of the MCPR scale., (Copyright 2003 Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Inc.)

Behavioral scientists have long sought measures of important psychological constructs that avoid response biases and other problems associated with direct reports. Recently, a large number of such indirect, or "implicit," measures have emerged. We review research that has utilized these measures across several domains, including attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes, and discuss their predictive validity, their interrelations, and the mechanisms presumably underlying their operation. Special attention is devoted to various priming measures and the Implicit Association Test, largely due to their prevalence in the literature. We also attempt to clarify several unresolved theoretical and empirical issues concerning implicit measures, including the nature of the underlying constructs they purport to measure, the conditions under which they are most likely to relate to explicit measures, the kinds of behavior each measure is likely to predict, their sensitivity to context, and the construct's potential for change.

We sought to demonstrate that attitudes can develop through implicit covariation detection in a new classical conditioning paradigm. In two experiments purportedly about surveillance and vigilance, participants viewed several hundred randomly presented words and images interspersed with critical pairings of valenced unconditioned stimuli (USs) with novel conditioned stimuli (CSs). Attitudes toward the novel objects were influenced by the paired USs: In a surprise evaluation task, the CS paired with positive items was evaluated more positively than the CS paired with negative items. This attitudinal conditioning effect was found using both an explicit measure (Experiments 1 and 2) and an implicit measure (Experiment 2). In a covariation estimation task involving the stimuli presented in the conditioning procedure, participants displayed no explicit memory for the pairings.

The present research examined whether individuals with more accessible attitudes have more difficulty detecting that the attitude object has changed. While being repeatedly exposed to photographs of undergraduates, participants either rehearsed their attitudes toward each photo or performed a control task. They then saw these original photos and computer-generated morphs representing varying degrees of change in an original. Participants in the attitude rehearsal condition required more time to correctly identify morphs that were similar to the original as "different" (Experiment 1) and made more errors in response to such morphs (Experiment 2). Experiment 3 revealed that participants with accessible attitudes perceived relatively less change; they were less likely to view a morph as a photo of a novel person and more likely to view it as a different photo of a person seen before. The costs and benefits of accessible attitudes are discussed.

The authors examined how the presence or absence of specified alternatives influences which alternatives are considered and what choice is made. The accessibility of alternatives as a moderator of the correspondence between attitudes and decisions also was investigated. In Study 1, the accessibility of alternatives was an important determinant of choice when decisions options were unspecified. The results of Studies 2 and 3 suggest that the potential for attitude-decision correspondence is high when (a) the decision context makes the alternatives salient or (b) alternatives are easily accessed from memory.

Every person or object can be categorized in multiple ways. For example, a person can be categorized (and hence stereotyped) by gender, age, race, or occupation. Earlier research demonstrated that objects toward which people have highly accessible attitudes attract attention when they are present in the visual field. On the basis of that work, the authors hypothesized that categories toward which people have highly accessible attitudes are preferentially applied to multiply categorizable objects. Three experiments, with cued recall and categorization response time as dependent variables, support the hypothesis. Categories toward which people's attitudes had been rendered accessible by an earlier task were more readily produced in response to multiply categorizable objects serving as a cue, or could more quickly be verified as fitting the object. These results demonstrate the power and functional value of accessible attitudes in shaping basic categorization and judgmental processes.

The research examines an unobtrusive measure of racial attitudes based on the evaluations that are automatically activated from memory on the presentation of Black versus White faces. Study 1, which concerned the technique's validity, obtained different attitude estimates for Black and White participants and also revealed that the variability among White participants was predictive of other race-related judgments and behavior. Study 2 concerned the lack of correspondence between the unobtrusive estimates and Modern Racism Scale (MRS) scores. The reactivity of the MRS was demonstrated in Study 3. Study 4 observed an interaction between the unobtrusive estimates and an individual difference in motivation to control prejudiced reactions when predicting MRS scores. The theoretical implications of the findings for consideration of automatic and controlled components of racial prejudice are discussed, as is the status of the MRS.

This commentary addresses J. A. Bargh, S. Chaiken, R. Govender, and F. Pratto's (1992) conclusion that automatic attitude activation depends not on the idiosyncratic strength of the association in memory between an attitude object and an individual's evaluation of the object but on normative considerations constant across individuals. A variety of difficulties with the bases for this conclusion are discussed. Moreover, additional analyses of the J.A. Bargh et al. data reveal the superiority of an idiosyncratic measure of associative strength (a given individual's latency of response to an attitudinal inquiry) in predicting automatic attitude activation over the various normative measures (latency, extremity, ambivalence, polarization, and consensus or consistency) that were examined. These results support the theoretical premise that attitude activation varies as a function of position along an idiosyncratically defined attitude-nonattitude continuum.

Attitude functionality was assessed in 2 experiments examining attitude accessibility as a moderator of physiological responses during decision making. In Study 1, experimental Ss but not controls rehearsed attitudes toward novel objects (abstract paintings). Subsequently, all Ss made rapid preference judgments for pairs of the paintings. In Study 2, attitudes were rehearsed by all Ss toward 1 of 2 mutually exclusive sets of abstract paintings. During the subsequent decision-making task, half the Ss made rapid pairwise preference judgments for rehearsed abstract paintings and half for pairs from the unrehearsed set. Autonomic measures were recorded continuously throughout both experiments. As predicted, in both experiments less autonomic reactivity was evident during the criterion pairwise preference task for groups for whom attitude rehearsal was relevant to the criterion task.