Meaning in life and resilience to stressors

Background and Objectives: This research examined whether life meaning promotes resilience to stressor-related psychological distress and repetitive negative thinking. Design and Methods: Three studies (total N= 273) used cross-sectional (Study 1) and prospective (Studies 2 and 3) designs to assess the relation between life meaning and response to various stressors. Results: Results showed that in Study 1, greater life meaning was inversely related with repetitive negative thinking and psychological distress. Further, distress partially mediated the life meaning-repetitive negative thinking relation. In Study 2, baseline life meaning predicted less repetitive negative thinking about a subsequent city-wide flood. In Study 3, baseline life meaning was inversely related to distress and repetitive negative thinking after writing about an aversive memory. Mediation analyses showed an indirect effect for the life meaning-repetitive negative thinking relation through distress. Conclusions: In all studies, life meaning predicted outcomes when controlling for other positive well-being variables. Overall, the findings suggest that individuals with greater trait life meaning experience less stressor-related distress and repetitive negative thinking and that the life meaning-repetitive negative thinking relation may be mediated by distress

The expectancy bias: Expectancy-violating faces evoke earlier pupillary dilation than neutral or negative faces

Humans maintain a negativity bias, whereby they perceive threatening stimuli to be more salient than rewarding or neutral stimuli. Across 6 within-subject experimental comparisons, we tested the hypothesis that humans maintain an even stronger expectancy bias, preferentially processing stimuli that violate mental representations of expected associations. To assess this bias, we measured variations in pupillary dilation as a means of determin- ing attentional arousal in response to neutral, negative and expectancy-violating versions of the same social stimuli: human faces. We conducted three baseline manipulation checks that directly compared neutral faces with threatening (angry) and expectancy-violating (upside-down and Thatcherized) faces, and three bias comparisons that directly compared threatening and expectancy-violating faces with one another. Across these experiments, we found evidence for a dominant expectancy bias in pupillary arousal for social stimuli, whereby expectancy-violating faces produced pupillary dilation earlier than neutral and threatening faces, with Thatcherized faces producing the greatest magnitude of dilation

Beyond statistical ritual: theory in psychological science

More than 40 years ago, Paul Meehl (1978) published a seminal critique of the state of theorizing in psychological science. According to Meehl, the quality of theories had diminished in the preceding decades, resulting in statistical methods standing in for theoretical rigor. In this introduction to the special issue Theory in Psychological Science, we apply Meehl’s account to contemporary psychological science. We suggest that by the time of Meehl’s writing, psychology found itself in the midst of a crisis that is typical of maturing sciences, in which the theories that had been guiding research were gradually cast into doubt. Psychologists were faced with the same general choice when worldviews fail: Face reality and pursue knowledge in the absence of certainty, or shift emphasis toward sources of synthetic certainty. We suggest that psychologists have too often chosen the latter option, substituting synthetic certainties for theory-guided research, in much the same manner as Scholastic scholars did centuries ago. Drawing from our contributors, we go on to make recommendations for how psychological science may fully reengage with theory-based science

Powerful men on top: Stereotypes interact with metaphors in social categorizations

We examined whether people can simultaneously apply 2 cognitive strategies in social categorizations. Specifically, we tested whether stereotypes concerning social power of gender categories interact with metaphoric power-space links. Based on the conceptual blending perspective suggesting that semantically consistent concepts acquire each other's properties, we predicted the following: Given that stereotypes create expectations linking gender with power, and metaphorically power is linked with vertical space, the conceptual blend of gender-power-space would invoke representations of male targets at the top vertical position when categorizing them as powerful, while female targets at the bottom when categorizing them as powerless. Across 6 studies, we show that the concept of gender is simulated spatially when people attribute power to male, but not female, targets. The predicted power-gender blending involved simulations of men judged as powerful when presented in upper location as opposed to women judged as powerful in upper location and men judged as powerful in lower location. Our hypothesis was further corroborated using pupillometry to assess preconscious processing, whereby stereotypically inconsistent orientations of gender and power evoked pupillary markers indicative of surprise. Our studies suggest that gender-power stereotypic expectations interact with the power-space metaphor in social categorization

Confirmation bias and misconceptions: Pupillometric evidence for a confirmation bias in misconceptions feedback

It has long been supposed that the confirmation bias plays a role in the prevalence and maintenance of misconceptions. However, this has been supported more by argument than by empirical evidence. In the present paper, we show how different types of belief-feedback evoke physiological responses consistent with the presence of a confirmation bias. Participants were presented with misconceptions and indicated whether they believed each misconception to be true or false, as well as how committed they were to the misconception. Each response was followed by feedback that was either clear (i.e., “correct” or “incorrect”) or ambiguous (i.e., “partly correct” or “partly incorrect”). Pupillary response to each feedback condition was assessed. The results show an interaction between feedback accuracy and feedback clarity on pupil size. The largest pupil size was found in response to clear disconfirmatory feedback. The smallest pupil size was found in response to both clear and ambiguous confirmatory feedback. Crucially, the pupil responded to ambiguous confirmatory feedback as though it were wholly confirmatory. Moreover, pupil size in response to ambiguous disconfirmatory feedback was significantly smaller than response to clear disconfirmatory feedback, showing an overall trend towards confirmatory processing in the absence of clear disconfirmation. Additionally, we show a moderation by commitment towards the misconception. The greater the commitment, the larger the effect of belief-violating feedback on pupil size. These findings support recent theorizing in the field of misconceptions and, more generally, the field of inconsistency-compensation

Beyond statistics: accepting the null hypothesis in mature sciences

Scientific theories explain phenomena using simplifying assumptions—for instance, that the speed of light does not depend on the direction in which the light is moving, or that the shape of a pea plant’s seeds depends on a small number of alleles randomly obtained from its parents. These simplifying assumptions often take the form of statistical null hypotheses; hence, supporting these simplifying assumptions with statistical evidence is crucial to scientific progress, though it might involve “accepting” a null hypothesis. We review two historical examples in which statistical evidence was used to accept a simplifying assumption (that there is no luminiferous ether and that genetic traits are passed on in discrete forms) and one in which the null hypothesis was not accepted despite repeated failures (gravitational waves), drawing lessons from each. We emphasize the role of the scientific context in acceptance of the null: Accepting a null hypothesis is never a purely statistical affair

Lay belief in biopolitics and political prejudice

Building on psychological research linking essentialist beliefs about human differences with prejudice, we test whether lay belief in the biological basis of political ideology is associated with political intolerance and social avoidance. In two studies of American adults (Study 1: N 1⁄4 288, Study 2: N 1⁄4 164), we find that belief in the biological basis of political views is associated with greater intolerance and social avoidance of ideologically dissimilar others. The association is substantively large and robust to demographic, religious, and political control variables. These findings stand in contrast to some theoretical expectations that biological attributions for political ideology are associated with tolerance. We conclude that biological lay theories are especially likely to be correlated with prejudice in the political arena, where social identities tend to be salient and linked to intergroup competition and animosity

Strength of socio-political attitudes moderates electrophysiological responses to perceptual anomalies

People with strong (vs. moderate) political attitudes have been shown to exhibit less phasic reactivity to perceptual anomalies, presumably to prevent their committed meaning systems from being challenged by novel experiences. Several researchers have proposed that (but not tested whether) firmly committed individuals also engage in more attentional suppression of anomalies, likely mediated by prestimulus alpha power. We expected participants with strong (vs. moderate) political attitudes to display increased pre-stimulus alpha power when processing perceptual anomalies. We recorded electrophysiological activity during the presentation of normal cards (control group) or both normal and anomalous playing cards (experimental group; total N = 191). In line with our predictions, the presence of anomalous playing cards in the stimulus set increased prestimulus alpha power only among individuals with strong but not moderate political attitudes. As potential markers of phasic reactivity, we also analyzed the late positive potential (LPP) and earlier components of the event-related potential, namely P1, N1, and P300. The moderating effect of extreme attitudes on ERP amplitudes remained inconclusive. Altogether, our findings support the idea that ideological conviction is related to increased tonic responses to perceptual anomalies

The Progressive Values Scale: assessing the ideological schism on the Left

Progressivism has increasingly challenged traditional liberalism as the dominant influence within left-wing ideology. Across four studies, we developed a measure – the Progressive Values Scale (PVS) – that characterizes distinctly progressive values within the left-wing. In Study 1, left-wing participants evaluated divisive issues, with four scale factors emerging. In Study 2, we confirmed this factor structure and included a battery of personality and values measures to explore individual differences among those who maintain a progressive worldview. In Study 3, we achieved final confirmation of the factor structure and validated the ability of the PVS to assess a distinctly progressive perspective, insofar as progressives generated prototypical faces for Liberals and Conservatives that were markedly distinct from those generated by traditional liberals. In Study 4, we distinguished the PVS from measures of left-wing authoritarianism and demonstrated that it is a better predictor of progressive political preferences and social judgements