Knowledge that Transforms

The ability to regulate emotions is central to well-being, but healthy emotion regulation may not merely be about using the "right" strategies. According to the strategy-situation-fit hypothesis, emotion-regulation strategies are conducive to well-being only when used in appropriate contexts. This study is the first to test the strategy-situation-fit hypothesis using ecological momentary assessment of cognitive reappraisal-a putatively adaptive strategy. We expected people who used reappraisal more in uncontrollable situations and less in controllable situations to have greater well-being than people with the opposite pattern of reappraisal use. Healthy participants ( n = 74) completed measures of well-being in the lab and used a smartphone app to report their use of reappraisal and perceived controllability of their environment 10 times a day for 1 week. Results supported the strategy-situation-fit hypothesis. Participants with relatively high well-being used reappraisal more in situations they perceived as lower in controllability and less in situations they perceived as higher in controllability. In contrast, we found little evidence for an association between greater well-being and greater mean use of reappraisal across situations.

Current neurocognitive research suggests that the efficiency of visual word recognition rests on abstract memory representations of written letters and words stored in the visual word form area (VWFA) in the left ventral occipitotemporal cortex. These representations are assumed to be invariant to visual characteristics such as font and case. In the present functional MRI study, we tested this assumption by presenting written words and varying the case format of the initial letter of German nouns (which are always capitalized) as well as German adjectives and adverbs (both usually in lowercase). As evident from a Word Type × Case Format interaction, activation in the VWFA was greater to words presented in unfamiliar case formats relative to familiar case formats. Our results suggest that neural representations of written words in the VWFA are not fully abstract and still contain information about the visual format in which words are most frequently perceived.

It is a fundamental human need to secure and sustain a sense of social belonging. Previous research has shown that individuals who are lonely are more likely than people who are not lonely to attribute humanlike traits (e.g., free will) to nonhuman agents (e.g., an alarm clock that makes people get up by moving away from the sleeper), presumably in an attempt to fulfill unmet needs for belongingness. We directly replicated the association between loneliness and anthropomorphism in a larger sample ( N = 178); furthermore, we showed that reminding people of a close, supportive relationship reduces their tendency to anthropomorphize. This finding provides support for the idea that the need for belonging has causal effects on anthropomorphism. Last, we showed that attachment anxiety-characterized by intense desire for and preoccupation with closeness, fear of abandonment, and hypervigilance to social cues-was a stronger predictor of anthropomorphism than loneliness was. This finding helps clarify the mechanisms underlying anthropomorphism and supports the idea that anthropomorphism is a motivated process reflecting the active search for potential sources of connection.

Can attention alter the impression of a face? Previous studies showed that attention modulates the appearance of lower-level visual features. For instance, attention can make a simple stimulus appear to have higher contrast than it actually does. We tested whether attention can also alter the perception of a higher-order property-namely, facial attractiveness. We asked participants to judge the relative attractiveness of two faces after summoning their attention to one of the faces using a briefly presented visual cue. Across trials, participants judged the attended face to be more attractive than the same face when it was unattended. This effect was not due to decision or response biases, but rather was due to changes in perceptual processing of the faces. These results show that attention alters perceived facial attractiveness, and broadly demonstrate that attention can influence higher-level perception and may affect people's initial impressions of one another.

We theorize that people's social class affects their appraisals of others' motivational relevance-the degree to which others are seen as potentially rewarding, threatening, or otherwise worth attending to. Supporting this account, three studies indicate that social classes differ in the amount of attention their members direct toward other human beings. In Study 1, wearable technology was used to film the visual fields of pedestrians on city streets; higher-class participants looked less at other people than did lower-class participants. In Studies 2a and 2b, participants' eye movements were tracked while they viewed street scenes; higher class was associated with reduced attention to people in the images. In Study 3, a change-detection procedure assessed the degree to which human faces spontaneously attract visual attention; faces proved less effective at drawing the attention of high-class than low-class participants, which implies that class affects spontaneous relevance appraisals. The measurement and conceptualization of social class are discussed.

We investigated a unique way in which adolescent peer influence occurs on social media. We developed a novel functional MRI (fMRI) paradigm to simulate Instagram, a popular social photo-sharing tool, and measured adolescents' behavioral and neural responses to likes, a quantifiable form of social endorsement and potential source of peer influence. Adolescents underwent fMRI while viewing photos ostensibly submitted to Instagram. They were more likely to like photos depicted with many likes than photos with few likes; this finding showed the influence of virtual peer endorsement and held for both neutral photos and photos of risky behaviors (e.g., drinking, smoking). Viewing photos with many (compared with few) likes was associated with greater activity in neural regions implicated in reward processing, social cognition, imitation, and attention. Furthermore, when adolescents viewed risky photos (as opposed to neutral photos), activation in the cognitive-control network decreased. These findings highlight possible mechanisms underlying peer influence during adolescence.

A core hypothesis in developmental theory predicts that genetic influences on intelligence and academic achievement are suppressed under conditions of socioeconomic privation and more fully realized under conditions of socioeconomic advantage: a Gene × Childhood Socioeconomic Status (SES) interaction. Tests of this hypothesis have produced apparently inconsistent results. We performed a meta-analysis of tests of Gene × SES interaction on intelligence and academic-achievement test scores, allowing for stratification by nation (United States vs. non-United States), and we conducted rigorous tests for publication bias and between-studies heterogeneity. In U.S. studies, we found clear support for moderately sized Gene × SES effects. In studies from Western Europe and Australia, where social policies ensure more uniform access to high-quality education and health care, Gene × SES effects were zero or reversed.

The experiment reported here was designed to examine the effect of contingent interaction with touch-screen devices on toddlers' use of symbolic media (video) during an object-retrieval task. Toddlers (24-36 months old; N = 75) were randomly assigned to watch an animated character hiding on screen either in a no-contingency video (requiring no action), a general-contingency video (accepting touch input anywhere on screen), or a specific-contingency video (requiring touch input on a particular area of interest). After the hiding event, toddlers searched for the character on a corresponding felt board. Across all trials, younger toddlers were more likely to search correctly after a specific-contingency video than after a no-contingency video, which suggests that contingent interaction designed to emphasize specific information on screen may promote learning. However, this effect was reversed for older toddlers. We interpret our findings with respect to the selective encoding of target features during hiding events and the relative strength of memory traces during search.

We used functional MRI (fMRI) to assess neural representations of physics concepts (momentum, energy, etc.) in juniors, seniors, and graduate students majoring in physics or engineering. Our goal was to identify the underlying neural dimensions of these representations. Using factor analysis to reduce the number of dimensions of activation, we obtained four physics-related factors that were mapped to sets of voxels. The four factors were interpretable as causal motion visualization, periodicity, algebraic form, and energy flow. The individual concepts were identifiable from their fMRI signatures with a mean rank accuracy of .75 using a machine-learning (multivoxel) classifier. Furthermore, there was commonality in participants' neural representation of physics; a classifier trained on data from all but one participant identified the concepts in the left-out participant (mean accuracy = .71 across all nine participant samples). The findings indicate that abstract scientific concepts acquired in an educational setting evoke activation patterns that are identifiable and common, indicating that science education builds abstract knowledge using inherent, repurposed brain systems.