Developing a Comprehensive Social Psychology with Shared Explanations of Primate Social Behavior

Two primate social psychologies have developed in recent decades-one that focuses on the social behaviors of humans and the other on nonhuman primates. Despite the gains in knowledge in each field of social psychology, the two research traditions seem to be largely unaware of the other's existence. Our common evolutionary ancestry makes this ignorance about the "other" social psychology especially troublesome for both fields. This article explores possible points of mutual interest that might lead to shared explanations of social behavior. In particular, I discuss how the topics of sexual behavior, cooperation and conflict resolution, and culture could benefit both social psychologies with respect to theory and methodology. One control group of neonatal monkeys was raised on a single wire mother, and a second control group was raised on a single cloth mother. There were no differences between these two groups in amount of milk ingested or in weight gain. The only difference between the two groups lay in the composition of the feces, the softer stools of the wire-mother infants suggesting psychosomatic involvement. The wire mother is biologically adequate but psychologically inept...A charming lady once heard me describe these experiments and, when I subsequently talked to her, her face brightened with sudden insight: "Now I know what's wrong with me," she said, "I'm just a wire mother." Perhaps she was lucky. She might have been a wire wife

Comunità, emigrazione e flussi: note su alcuni recenti studi

The debate about migration in the XXIst Centur

Disgust, contempt, and anger and the stereotypes of obese people

Purpose: Emotions form an important part of stereotyping and prejudice, but little is known about how intergroup emotions are associated with anti-fat prejudice. This study examined the relation between negative intergroup emotions (disgust, contempt, and anger) and the stereotypes of obese people. Method: A community sample (n = 380) and an undergraduate sample (n = 96) rated obese people on common obesity stereotypes (e.g., lazy, sloppy), and also indicated the extent to which they felt disgust, contempt, and anger toward obese people. Results: In both samples, participants reported feeling more disgust and contempt than anger toward obese people. Furthermore, regression analyses indicated that disgust was a significant positive predictor of obesity stereotypes, but contempt and anger were not. Conclusion: Overall, these findings provide further evidence that disgust plays an important role in prejudice toward obese people

Probing prejudice with startle eyeblink modification: A marker of attention, emotion, or both?

In social neuroscience research, startle eyeblink modification can serve as a marker of emotion, but it is less clear whether it can also serve as a marker of prejudice. In Experiment 1, 30 White students viewed photographs of White and Black targets while the startle eyeblink reflex and facial EMG from the brow and cheek regions were recorded. Prejudice was related to facial EMG activity, but not to startle modification, which instead appeared to index attention to race. To test further whether racial categorizations are associated with differential attention, a dual-task paradigm was used in Experiment 2. Fifty-four White and fifty-five Black participants responded more slowly to a tone presented when viewing a racial outgroup member or a negative stimulus, indicating that both draw more attention than ingroup members or positive stimuli. We conclude that startle modification is useful to index differential attention to groups when intergroup threat is low

Assessing the affective Simon paradigm as a measure of individual differences in implicit social cognition about death

The authors describe the use of the affective Simon paradigm as a measure of individual differences in implicit social cognition about death. Participants made verbal responses of "good" or "bad" to death and neutral stimuli based on whether the word was a person or a thing. Participants also completed the Revised Death Attitude Profile, a Stroop task, and a version of the Implicit Association Test using death-related words. Although the affective Simon paradigm has some theoretical advantages over the IAT and Stroop procedures, we found no evidence for its validity in the present study

Age Deficits in Facial Affect Recognition : The Influence of Dynamic Cues

Funding This work was supported by the Australian Research Council, Australia (DP150100302) and the Leverhulme Trust, U.K. (F/00152/W).Peer reviewedPostprin

A functionalist approach to online trolling

Online trolling is often linked to sadism and psychopathy. Yet, little research has assessed why people high in these traits seek online environments to achieve their nefarious goals. We employ a functionalist approach to examine whether people high in sadism and psychopathy are motivated to seek the affordances of online environments (e.g., anonymity) to reveal their malevolent self-aspects by engaging in trolling behavior. A sample of 515 university undergraduates (Mage = 20.47) read vignettes depicting trolling incidents and rated the acceptability of the perpetrators’ actions and whether they had ever written similar comments. Participants then completed measures of psychopathy, sadism, and toxic anonymous motivations. We find that toxic anonymous motivations partially mediate the relationship between psychopathy and sadism, and online trolling. Whereas trolling is often understood through its underlying personality traits, toxic motivations to seek anonymity may be a more proximal predictor of who is likely to troll online

The role of Gray’s revised RST in the P–psychopathy continuum: the relationships of Psychoticism with a lack of fear and anxiety, and increased impulsivity

Gray's revised Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory (rRST; Gray & McNaughton, 2000) may play a role in explaining deficits in Psychoticism (P) and psychopathy (Corr, 2010). In this paper, we examine the relationships of P with anxiety, fear, impulsivity and reward reactivity in normal populations to assess whether these associations mirror the hypothesized role of RST motivations in psychopathy. Two hundred and twelve participants completed measures of Psychoticism, impulsivity and rRST motivations (BIS-anxiety, FFFS-fear and BAS). BIS-anxiety mediated the association of P with FFFS-fear and BAS-fun seeking. An exploratory factor analysis distinguished between trait impulsivity (P, impulsivity and BIS) and reward reactivity (BAS-reward responsiveness and BAS-drive). Subsequent moderation analyses showed that whilst neither BIS nor BAS moderated the P-impulsivity link, the association between P and impulsivity was more pronounced in individuals with raised levels of FFFS-fear. Findings are discussed in terms of the roles of fear versus anxiety and impulsivity versus reward reactivity in the P-psychopathy continuum

The relationship of gender roles and beliefs to crying in an international sample

This study aimed to (1) investigate the variation in self ascription to gender roles and attitudes toward gender roles across countries and its associations with crying behaviors, emotion change, and beliefs about crying and (2) understand how the presence of others affects our evaluations of emotion following crying. This was a large international survey design study ( = 893) conducted in Australia, Croatia, the Netherlands, Thailand, and the United Kingdom. Analyses revealed that, across countries, gender, self-ascribed gender roles, and gender role attitudes (GRA) were related to behavioral crying responses, but not related to emotion change following crying. How a person evaluates crying, instead, appeared to be highly related to one's beliefs about the helpfulness of crying, irrespective of gender. Results regarding crying when others were present showed that people are more likely both to cry and to feel that they received help around a person that they know, compared to a stranger. Furthermore, closeness to persons present during crying did not affect whether help was provided. When a crier reported that they were helped, they also tended to report feeling better following crying than those who cried around others but did not receive help. Few cross-country differences emerged, suggesting that a person's responses to crying are quite consistent among the countries investigated here, with regard to its relationship with a person's gender role, crying beliefs, and reactions to the presence of others

Seeing is believing: Neural mechanisms of action-perception are biased by team membership

Group identification can lead to a biased view of the world in favor of “in-group” members. Studying the brain processes that underlie such in-group biases is important for a wider understanding of the potential influence of social factors on basic perceptual processes. In this study, we used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to investigate how people perceive the actions of in-group and out-group members, and how their biased view in favor of own team members manifests itself in the brain. We divided participants into two teams and had them judge the relative speeds of hand actions performed by an in-group and an out-group member in a competitive situation. Participants judged hand actions performed by in-group members as being faster than those of out-group members, even when the two actions were performed at physically identical speeds. In an additional fMRI experiment, we showed that, contrary to common belief, such skewed impressions arise from a subtle bias in perception and associated brain activity rather than decision-making processes, and that this bias develops rapidly and involuntarily as a consequence of group affiliation. Our findings suggest that the neural mechanisms that underlie human perception are shaped by social context