Knowledge that Transforms

There is a positivity bias in autobiographical memory such that people are more likely to remember positive events from their past than they are to remember negative ones. Inhibition may promote this positivity bias by deterring negative memories from being retrieved. In our first experiment, we measured individual differences in retrieval-induced forgetting, a phenomenon believed to be the consequence of retrieval inhibition, and correlated that measure with individual differences in the recall of positive and negative autobiographical memories. Participants who exhibited lower levels of retrieval-induced forgetting recalled significantly more negative memories despite recalling fewer positive memories. In our second experiment, participants attempted to recall negative memories from childhood and from the previous month. Participants who exhibited lower levels of retrieval-induced forgetting recalled significantly more negative memories in both conditions. These results suggest that inhibition plays a key role in preventing the retrieval of negative autobiographical memories.

One of the most heavily debated questions in implicit social cognition is the extent to which implicit measures can be voluntarily controlled. The experiment reported here is the first to employ a novel strategy for intentionally controlling performance in the autobiographical Implicit Association Test (aIAT). Specifically, when explicitly instructed to do so, participants were able to speed up their responses in the incongruent blocks of the aIAT and thus influence the outcome of the test. This effect was larger when the experimental instruction was followed by practice in speeding responses than when the instruction was given alone. A process-dissociation analysis suggested that the effect was due to reductions in the ability of participants' automatic associations to influence responses when instructions to speed up were provided. This experiment provides new insight into the potential for strategic control in the performance of implicit measures and into the interplay between automatic and controlled processes underlying performance on implicit measures.

Selective attention plays a fundamental role in emotion regulation. To date, research has examined individuals' use of selective attention to regulate emotional responses during stimulus presentation. In the present study, we examined whether selective attention can be used to regulate emotional responses during a poststimulus period when representations are active within working memory (WM). On each trial, participants viewed either a negative or a neutral image. After the offset of the image, they maintained a representation of it in WM and were cued to focus their attention on either neutral or arousing aspects of that representation. Results showed that, relative to focusing on an arousing portion of a negative-image representation within WM, focusing on a neutral portion of the representation reduced both self-reported negative emotion and the late positive potential, a robust neural measure of emotional reactivity. These data suggest that selective attention can alter emotional responses arising from affective representations active within WM.

In Western dualistic culture, it is assumed that thoughts cannot be treated as material objects; however, language is replete with metaphorical analogies suggesting otherwise. In the research reported here, we examined whether objectifying thoughts can influence whether the thoughts are used in subsequent evaluations. In Experiment 1, participants wrote about what they either liked or disliked about their bodies. Then, the paper on which they wrote their thoughts was either ripped up and tossed in the trash or kept and checked for errors. When participants physically discarded a representation of their thoughts, they mentally discarded them as well, using them less in forming judgments than did participants who retained a representation of their thoughts. Experiment 2 replicated this finding and also showed that people relied on their thoughts more when they physically kept them in a safe place-putting their thoughts in their pockets-than when they discarded them. A final study revealed that these effects were stronger when the action was performed physically rather than merely imagined.

In the research reported here, we investigated how suspicious nonverbal cues from other people can trigger feelings of physical coldness. There exist implicit standards for how much nonverbal behavioral mimicry is appropriate in various types of social interactions, and individuals may react negatively when interaction partners violate these standards. One such reaction may be feelings of physical coldness. Participants in three studies either were or were not mimicked by an experimenter in various social contexts. In Study 1, participants who interacted with an affiliative experimenter reported feeling colder if they were not mimicked than if they were, and participants who interacted with a task-oriented experimenter reported feeling colder if they were mimicked than if they were not. Studies 2 and 3 demonstrated that it was not the amount of mimicry per se that moderated felt coldness; rather, felt coldness was moderated by the inappropriateness of the mimicry given implicit standards set by individual differences (Study 2) and racial differences (Study 3). Implications for everyday subjective experience are discussed.

The present study investigated whether associations between individuals' personality traits and whether they have children have been modified by birth-cohort effects in the 20th-century United States. Participants were from the Midlife Development in the United States study (n = 6,259) and the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (n = 3,994) and were born between 1914 and 1974. Data on personality traits of the Five Factor model and fertility history were collected in adulthood. Higher levels of openness to experience in both sexes and higher levels of conscientiousness in women were associated with lower fertility, and these associations strengthened linearly as birth cohorts became younger. In the total sample, high extraversion, low neuroticism, and women's high agreeableness were associated with high fertility rate, but there were no systematic cohort effects. The fertility decisions of people with certain personality traits may be influenced by prevailing societal and cultural circumstances.

In youths, watching T.V. coverage of a disaster is associated with traumatic-stress symptoms. However, the role of predisaster symptoms in this link has not been addressed. In this study, urban-school youths who had experienced both Hurricanes Katrina and Gustav (N = 141; grades 4-8) were assessed 12 months and 6 months before Gustav and then 1 month after Gustav. The amount of T.V. viewing was associated with post-Gustav stress symptoms, controlling for pre-Gustav symptoms. However, pre-Gustav stress symptoms interacted with T.V. viewing in predicting post-Gustav symptoms such that for youths with higher preexisting symptoms, there was a stronger association between T.V. viewing and level of post-Gustav symptoms. The results advance the literature on the role of media coverage in stress reactions by showing that preexisting symptoms can be an important component of identifying which children are likely to be most negatively affected by TV coverage.

Visual attention functions to select relevant information from a vast amount of visual input that is available for further processing. Information from the two eyes is processed separately in early stages before converging and giving rise to a coherent percept. Observers normally cannot access eye-of-origin information. In the research reported here, we demonstrated that voluntary attention can be eye-specific, modulating visual processing within a specific monocular channel. Using a modified binocular-rivalry paradigm, we found that attending to a monocular cue while remaining oblivious to its eye of origin significantly enhanced the competition strength of a stimulus presented to the cued eye, even when the stimulus was suppressed from consciousness. Furthermore, this eye-specific attentional effect was insensitive to low-level properties of the cue (e.g., size and contrast) but sensitive to the attentional load. Together, these findings suggest that top-down attention can have a significant modulation effect at the eye-specific stage of visual information processing.

Intuition suggests that a distanced or abstract thinker should be immune to social influence, and on its surface, the current literature could seem to support this view. The present research builds on recent theorizing to suggest a different possibility. Drawing on the notion that psychological distance regulates the extent to which evaluations incorporate context-specific or context-independent information, we suggest that psychological distance should actually increase susceptibility to sources of social influence that tend to be consistently encountered across contexts, such as group norms. Consistent with this hypothesis, two studies showed that psychological distance and abstraction increased conformity to group opinion and that this effect persisted in a novel voting-booth paradigm in which participants believed their voting behavior was both anonymous and consequential. We discuss implications of these findings for understanding the social side of abstraction as well as the conditions under which different types of social influence are likely to be most influential.

Women negotiate less often and less well than men according to recent research. However, these conclusions are based predominantly on experiments using prototypically masculine negotiation issues. ...