Search

In a test of their global-/local-processing-style model, Förster, Liberman, and Kuschel (2008) found that people assimilate a primed concept (e.g., “aggressive”) into their social judgments after a global prime (e.g., they rate a person as being more aggressive than do people in a no-prime condition) but contrast their judgment away from the primed concept after a local prime (e.g., they rate the person as being less aggressive than do people in a no prime-condition). This effect was not replicated by Reinhard (2015) in the Reproducibility Project: Psychology. However, the authors of the original study noted that the replication could not provide a test of the moderation effect because priming did not occur. They suggested that the primes might have been insufficiently applicable and the scenarios insufficiently ambiguous to produce priming. In the current replication project, we used both Reinhard’s protocol and a revised protocol that was designed to increase the likelihood of priming, to test the original authors’ suggested explanation for why Reinhard did not observe the moderation effect. Teams from nine universities contributed to this project. We first conducted a pilot study ( N = 530) and successfully selected ambiguous scenarios for each site. We then pilot-tested the aggression prime at five different sites ( N = 363) and found that it did not successfully produce priming. In agreement with the first author of the original report, we replaced the prime with a task that successfully primed aggression (hostility) in a pilot study by McCarthy et al. (2018). In the final replication study ( N = 1,460), we did not find moderation by protocol type, and judgment patterns in both protocols were inconsistent with the effects observed in the original study. We discuss these findings and possible explanations.

Additional co-authors: Ivan Ropovik, Balazs Aczel, Lena F. Aeschbach, Luca Andrighetto, Jack D. Arnal, Holly Arrow, Peter Babincak, Bence E. Bakos, Gabriel Banik, Ernest Baskin, Radomir Belopavlovic, Michael H. Bernstein, Michal Bialek, Nicholas G. Bloxsom, Bojana Bodroža, Diane B. V. Bonfiglio, Leanne Boucher, Florian Bruhlmann, Claudia C. Brumbaugh, Erica Casini, Yiling Chen, Carlo Chiorri, William J. Chopik, Oliver Christ, Antonia M. Ciunci, Heather M. Claypool, Sean Coary, Marija V. Cˇolic, W. Matthew Collins, Paul G. Curran, Chris R. Day, Anna Dreber, John E. Edlund, Filipe Falcao, Anna Fedor, Lily Feinberg, Ian R. Ferguson, Maire Ford, Michael C. Frank, Emily Fryberger, Alexander Garinther, Katarzyna Gawryluk, Kayla Ashbaugh, Mauro Giacomantonio, Steffen R. Giessner, Jon E. Grahe, Rosanna E. Guadagno, Ewa Halasa, Rias A. Hilliard, Joachim Huffmeier, Sean Hughes, Katarzyna Idzikowska, Michael Inzlicht, Alan Jern, William Jimenez-Leal, Magnus Johannesson, Jennifer A. Joy-Gaba, Mathias Kauff, Danielle J. Kellier, Grecia Kessinger, Mallory C. Kidwell, Amanda M. Kimbrough, Josiah P. J. King, Vanessa S. Kolb, Sabina Kolodziej, Marton Kovacs, Karolina Krasuska, Sue Kraus, Lacy E. Krueger, Katarzyna Kuchno, Caio Ambrosio Lage, Eleanor V. Langford, Carmel A. Levitan, Tiago Jesse Souza de Lima, Hause Lin, Samuel Lins, Jia E. Loy, Dylan Manfredi, Łukasz Markiewicz, Madhavi Menon, Brett Mercier, Mitchell Metzger, Venus Meyet, Jeremy K. Miller, Andres Montealegre, Don A. Moore, Rafal Muda, Gideon Nave, Austin Lee Nichols, Sarah A. Novak, Christian Nunnally, Ana Orlic, Anna Palinkas, Angelo Panno, Kimberly P. Parks, Ivana Pedovic, Emilian Pekala, Matthew R. Penner, Sebastiaan Pessers, Boban Petrovic, Thomas Pfeiffer, Damian Pienkosz, Emanuele Preti, Danka Puric, Tiago Ramos, Jonathan Ravid, Timothy S. Razza, Katrin Rentzsch, Juliette Richetin, Sean C. Rife, Anna Dalla Rosa, Kaylis Hase Rudy, Janos Salamon, Blair Saunders, Przemyslaw Sawicki, Kathleen Schmidt, Kurt Schuepfer, Thomas Schultze, Stefan Schulz-Hardt, Astrid Schutz, Ani N. Shabazian, Rachel L. Shubella, Adam Siegel, Ruben Silva, Barbara Sioma, Lauren Skorb, Luana Elayne Cunha de Souza, Sara Steegen, L. A. R. Stein, R. Weylin Sternglanz, Darko Stojilovic, Daniel Storage, Gavin Brent Sullivan, Barnabas Szaszi, Peter Szecsi, Orsolya Szoke, Attila Szuts, Manuela Thomae, Natasha D. Tidwell, Carly Tocco, Ann-Kathrin Torka, Francis Tuerlinckx, Wolf Vanpaemel, Leigh Ann Vaughn, Michelangelo Vianello, Domenico Viganola, Maria Vlachou, Ryan J. Walker, Sophia C. Weissgerber, Aaron L. Wichman, Bradford J. Wiggins, Daniel Wolf, Michael J. Wood, David Zealley, Iris Žeželj, Mark Zrubka, and Brian A. Nosek

Replications in psychological science sometimes fail to reproduce prior findings. If replications use methods that are unfaithful to the original study or ineffective in eliciting the phenomenon of interest, then a failure to replicate may be a failure of the protocol rather than a challenge to the original finding. Formal pre-data collection peer review by experts may address shortcomings and increase replicability rates. We selected 10 replications from the Reproducibility Project: Psychology (RP:P; Open Science Collaboration, 2015) in which the original authors had expressed concerns about the replication designs before data collection and only one of which was “statistically significant” (p < .05). Commenters suggested that lack of adherence to expert review and low-powered tests were the reasons that most of these RP:P studies failed to replicate (Gilbert et al., 2016). We revised the replication protocols and received formal peer review prior to conducting new replications. We administered the RP:P and Revised protocols in multiple laboratories (Median number of laboratories per original study = 6.5; Range 3 to 9; Median total sample = 1279.5; Range 276 to 3512) for high-powered tests of each original finding with both protocols. Overall, Revised protocols produced similar effect sizes as RP:P protocols following the preregistered analysis plan (Δr = .002 or .014, depending on analytic approach). The median effect size for Revised protocols (r = .05) was similar to RP:P protocols (r = .04) and the original RP:P replications (r = .11), and smaller than the original studies (r = .37). The cumulative evidence of original study and three replication attempts suggests that effect sizes for all 10 (median r = .07; range .00 to .15) are 78% smaller on average than original findings (median r = .37; range .19 to .50), with very precisely estimated effects.

This study compared changes in psychology and philosophy classes in two distinct components of critical thinking (CT): general skills and personal beliefs. Participants were 128 undergraduates enrolled in CT in psychology, other psychology courses, or philosophy courses. CT and philosophy students significantly reduced beliefs in paranormal phenomena at the end of the semester compared to other psychology students. Only philosophy students improved on the Watson–Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal. The Watson–Glaser may not fully measure CT emphasized in psychology, but psychology instructors can still effectively teach students to examine their own beliefs and think differently in their daily lives. Differentiated assessment of CT is important as instructors evaluate student learning against specific goals.

We examined perceived benefits and doubts of participants in a meditation intervention study. We conducted a content analysis of weekly written reports from 65 college students practicing meditation over the course of an academic semester. As anticipated, the majority of participants reported at least one benefit of meditation, and most of these individuals also reported at least one doubt. Benefits fell broadly into cognitive, emotional, and spiritual categories. Types of benefits reported extend beyond many existing quantitative measures focusing on awareness and attention. These results affirm the need for additional measures and multiple methods to capture the depth and breadth of mindfulness experience. Doubts fell broadly into cognitive and physical challenges during meditation sessions, difficulty finding the time and motivation to meditate outside class sessions, and questions about the efficacy of meditation and self-efficacy to engage in it. Descriptions of doubts may inform how mindfulness leaders provide instruction in research and practice settings, and might mitigate attrition.

This study examined cognitive distortions and coping styles as potential mediators for the effects of mindfulness meditation on anxiety, negative affect, positive affect, and hope in college students. Our pre- and postintervention design had four conditions: control, brief meditation focused on attention, brief meditation focused on loving kindness, and longer meditation combining both attentional and loving kindness aspects of mindfulness. Each group met weekly over the course of a semester. Longer combined meditation significantly reduced anxiety and negative affect and increased hope. Changes in cognitive distortions mediated intervention effects for anxiety, negative affect, and hope. Further research is needed to determine differential effects of types of meditation.

Multiple measures exist that examine the attentional aspects of meditation practice, but measurement of the compassion component is relatively understudied. This paper describes the development and initial validation of a scale designed to measure application of the four immeasurable qualities at the heart of Buddhist teachings: loving kindness, compassion, joy and acceptance toward both self and others. Our analyses suggest four distinct subscales: positive qualities toward self, positive qualities toward others, negative qualities toward self and negative qualities toward others. Initial examination of reliability and validity showed high internal consistency for the subscales as well as strong concurrent, discriminant, and construct validity. We believe the Self-Other Four Immeasurables (SOFI) scale has broad utility for research on mindfulness, positive psychology, and social psychology.

Summary This article describes an interactive way to help students learn to evaluate central tendency measures using a fictional story. The use of humour and fictional dire consequences may increase student understanding and engagement while reducing anxiety.

We propose an alternative model of social category representation that suggests people use mental frequency distributions to remember and organize instances along an attribute dimension. We then explore the implications of this model for explaining differences in perceived group variability, including the out-group homogeneity effect. In Experiment 1, we demonstrate that using a greater number of categories to represent a dimension results in greater perceived variability of a group along that dimension. Experiment 2 shows that subjects spontaneously generate more subgroups (that is, a greater number of categories) along an attribute dimension when judging the in-group as compared to the out-group. Taken together, these experiments demonstrate how the use of a frequency distribution model might account for out-group homogeneity. If subjects use a frequency distribution to represent group members along a dimension, and they divide out-groups into a fewer number of categories than in-groups, then out-groups...

The 72-kDa gelatinase/type IV collagenase, a metalloproteinase thought to play a role in metastasis and in angiogenesis, forms a noncovalent stoichiometric complex with the tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinase-2 (TIMP-2), a potent inhibitor of enzyme activity. To define the regions of the 72-kDa gelatinase responsible for TIMP-2 binding, a series of NH2- and COOH-terminal deletions of the enzyme were constructed using the polymerase chain reaction technique. The full-length and the truncated enzymes were expressed in a recombinant vaccinia virus mammalian cell expression system (Vac/T7). Two truncated enzymes ending at residues 425 (delta 426-631) and 454 (delta 455-631) were purified. Like the full-length recombinant 72-kDa gelatinase, both COOH-terminally truncated enzymes were activated with organomercurial and digested gelatin and native collagen type IV. In contrast to the full-length enzyme, delta 426-631 and delta 455-631 enzymes were less sensitive to TIMP-2 inhibition requiring 10 mol of TIMP-2/mol of enzyme to achieve maximal inhibition of enzymatic activity. The activated but not the latent forms of the delta 426-631 and delta 455-631 proteins formed a complex with TIMP-2 only when excess molar concentrations of inhibitor were used. We also expressed the 205-amino acid COOH-terminal fragment, delta 1-426, and found that it binds TIMP-2. In addition, a truncated version of the 72-kDa gelatinase lacking the NH2-terminal 78 amino acids (delta 1-78) of the proenzyme retained the ability to bind TIMP-2. These studies demonstrate that 72-kDa gelatinases lacking the COOH-terminal domain retain full enzymatic activity but acquire a reduced sensitivity to TIMP-2 inhibition. These data suggest that both the active site and the COOH-terminal tail of the 72-kDa gelatinase independently and cooperatively participate in TIMP-2 binding.

Past research has found higher levels of agreement in personality ratings of others on traits related to extroversion than on other traits such as intelligence, honesty, or conscientiousness, particularly at low levels of acquaintance. One explanation for this effect is that verbal information relevant to these latter traits is less likely to be elicited in initial get-acquainted interactions. Providing such information should increase agreement. The present data suggest this is not the case. Agreement was equally low on these difficult-to-judge dimensions whether more or less relevant information was provided. The authors argue that because these traits are highly socially desirable, nonverbal information about the negative pole of the trait dimension is needed to make a confident judgment. Because such information is not available during initial encounters, simply increasing the quantity of relevant verbal information does not improve consensus.

Objective Planning and providing emergency and primary care for a large transient population of visitors and employees in a national park can be problematic. Furthermore, planning for emergency and primary health care needs of visitors and itinerant workers in a wilderness area national park has not been well documented. A study was performed to analyze emergency and primary health care utilization in a national park. Methods Data was gathered from all patients presenting to Lake Hospital Emergency Department in Yellowstone in 1995, and a retrospective chart review was performed. Results Two distinct populations with different health care needs were identified. Conclusion Utilization analysis revealed differences between conventional mass gatherings and the mass gatherings in Yellowstone. Because of the unique conditions and populations found in a wilderness area, conventional mass gathering emergency medical service models may not be an appropriate model for planning health care in a national park. Analysis of utilization data can help plan resources for emergency and primary health care for a park population.

By using a round-robin design, groups of freshmen reported their impressions of dormmates at 4 different times during the year. Consensus on W. T. Norman's Big Five (1963) did not increase over the year, even though reported acquaintance did increase. Agreement in liking predicted agreement in the trait ratings, such that groups that agreed in their evaluations of one another were more likely to agree in their trait impressions of one another, and vice versa. These patterns, obtained by using trait ratings, were replicated with open-ended descriptions of the targets. Correlations with self-judgments did not increase with acquaintance. The data suggest that increased acquaintance does not produce increased consensus. Instead, the role of agreement in evaluations is explored as a determining factor in the level of obtained consensus.

Much recent work on stereotyping has dealt with groups that are either artificially created or that do not have an extensive history of conflict. The authors attempted to overcome this limitation by examining issues of perceived variability and ethnocentrism among samples of White American and African American youth. The goals were both to examine theoretical issues in stereotyping and to describe the current state of ethnic interrelations among young people. Four studies are reported. Throughout, the samples of African Americans demonstrate interethnic judgments that are consistent with existing work on stereotyping and ethnocentrism. White American students, however, reported judgements that replicate neither the out-group homogeneity effect nor ethnocentrism. Alternative explanations for this difference are considered, and the discussion focuses on differing views concerning the role of ethnic identity and diversity in our society.

Two experiments explored the role of perceivers (judges) in aggregating social behavior into impressions. In Experiment 1, it was predicted and found that judges influence impressions (i.e., eye-of-the-beholder effects) not only because they disagree on how to interpret single acts but because they aggregate multiple acts in unique ways to arrive at idiosyncratic impressions. Using D. A. Kenny's (1991) general model of accuracy and consensus, it was found that judges perceived much greater consistency in the behavior of targets across situations when they were asked to aggregate the behavior than when they were not. Differential interpretation of single acts did not change as a function of aggregating behavior. This aggregation process was characterized as the construction of models of persons. In Experiment 2, the concept of person models was explored further, and it was argued that perceivers develop these models on the basis of what is viewed as the central concept of a target. For any given target, a limited number of models can be identified, and different perceivers develop different models. The particular model formed has implications for the perceiver's underlying memory representation and the perceived personality profile of the target.