Aesthetic and moral evaluations engage appetitive and defensive emotions. While the role played by pleasure in positive aesthetic and moral judgements has been extensively researched, little is known ...about how defensive emotions influence negative aesthetic and moral judgements. Specifically, it is unknown which defensive emotions such judgements tap into, and whether both kinds of judgement share a common emotional root. Here, we investigated how participants' individual sensitivity to disgust, fear, anger and sadness predicted subjective judgements of aesthetic and moral stimuli. Bayesian modelling revealed that participants who were more sensitive to anger and fear found conventional and moral transgressions more wrong. In contrast, participants who were more sensitive to disgust disliked asymmetrical geometric patterns and untidy rooms more. These findings suggest that aesthetic and moral evaluations engage multiple defensive emotions, not just disgust, and that they may rely on different defensive emotions as part of their computational mechanism.
White Americans tend to perceive greater progress toward racial equality than do ethnic minorities. Correlational evidence (Study 1) and two experimental manipulations of framing (Studies 2 and 3) ...supported the hypothesis that this perception gap is associated with different reference points the two groups spontaneously use to assess progress, with Whites anchoring on comparisons with the past and ethnic minorities anchoring on ideal standards. Consistent with the hypothesis that the groups anchor on different reference points, the gap in perceptions of progress was affected by the time participants spent deliberating about the topic (Study 4). Implications for survey methods and political conflict are discussed.
Individuals with schizophrenia show aberrant processing of social cues. In the current study, we (1) compared trustworthiness ratings of faces between patients with schizophrenia and healthy ...controls, (2) compared pupillary reactivity between patients and controls (3) examined whether trustworthiness judgments in schizophrenia are related to pupil reactivity, (4) and examined associations between trustworthiness judgements and symptom severity, specifically paranoia. Patients with schizophrenia spectrum disorders (N = 48) and healthy controls (N = 33) completed a Trustworthiness Task, during which their pupil size was measured via an eye-tracking device. The mean baseline-corrected pupil size was calculated from 24 pictures of real neutral faces, each presented for 2500 ms. Self-reported psychotic experiences were measured by Community Assessment of Psychic Functioning (CAPE–42), and symptom severity was rated by Brief Psychiatric Rating Scale (BPRS). No group differences were found in trustworthiness ratings or pupil reactivity parameters during trustworthiness judgments. Separately, among patients, absolute difference in pupil-size change and dilation after reaching minimum size were related to more severe positive symptoms and self-reported paranoia. Our results did not show social cognitive biases in the stable outpatients with schizophrenia, or the role of pupil reactivity in trustworthiness judgments. Future studies should use longer stimuli for pupillary reactivity and control the type and dosage of utilized antipsychotic medication. Further studies are required to explore relationships in larger and more symptomatic groups of patients.
•Individuals with schizophrenia have deficits in processing social information from faces.•We measured trustworthiness judgements in patients with schizophrenia and controls.•Pupil size parameters and relationships to trustworthiness judgements were explored.•Groups did not differ in trustworthiness judgements and pupil size parameters.•In patients, pupil size parameters were related to positive symptoms, more specifically paranoia.
Research on diagnostic competencies of teachers nowadays raises the question which person or situational characteristics moderate judgement accuracy. Beside this correlational approach, a stronger ...interest in understanding the cognitive processes involved in the genesis of diagnostic judgements has emerged. To address the theoretical gap regarding cognitive processes underlying diagnostic judgements, we propose a framework, called DiaCoM (Explaining Teachers’ Diagnostic Judgements by Cognitive Modeling). It aims at supporting (existing or envisioned) research that strives to test cognitively oriented explanations for processes and products of diagnostic judgements of teachers.
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•The DiaCoM framework models diagnostic judgements as information processing.•It systematizes the role of teacher and situation characteristics in diagnostic thinking.•The DiaCoM framework allows deriving and testing cognitive oriented hypotheses.•It supports coherent interpretation across studies and inspires further research.
While individual differences in the willingness and ability to engage analytic processing have long informed research in reasoning and decision making, the implications of such differences have not ...yet had a strong influence in other domains of psychological research. We claim that analytic thinking is not limited to problems that have a normative basis and, as an extension of this, predict that individual differences in analytic thinking will be influential in determining beliefs and values. Along with assessments of cognitive ability and style, religious beliefs, and moral values, participants judged the wrongness of acts considered disgusting and conventionally immoral, but that do not violate care- or fairness-based moral principles. Differences in willingness to engage analytic thinking predicted reduced judgements of wrongness, independent of demographics, political ideology, religiosity, and moral values. Further, we show that those who were higher in cognitive ability were less likely to indicate that purity, patriotism, and respect for traditions and authority are important to their moral thinking. These findings are consistent with a "Reflectionist" view that assumes a role for analytic thought in determining substantive, deeply-held human beliefs and values.
This article explores the role of magical thinking in the subjective probabilities of future chance events. In five experiments, we show that individuals tend to predict a more lucky future ...(reflected in probability judgements of lucky and unfortunate chance events) for someone who happened to purchase a product associated with a highly moral person than for someone who unknowingly purchased a product associated with a highly immoral person. In the former case, positive events were considered more likely than negative events, whereas in the latter case, the difference in the likelihood judgement of positive and negative events disappeared or even reversed. Our results indicate that this effect is unlikely to be driven by participants’ immanent justice beliefs, the availability heuristic, or experimenter demand. Finally, we show that individuals rely more heavily on magical thinking when their need for control is threatened, thus suggesting that lack of control represents a factor in driving magical thinking in making predictions about the future.
There are conflicting findings regarding the accuracy of metamemory for scene pictures. Judgements of stimulus memorability in general (
MJs) have been reported to be unpredictive of actual image ...memorability. However, other studies have found that
(JOLs)-predictions of one's own later memory performance for recently studied items-are moderately predictive of people's own actual recognition memory for pictures. The current study directly compared the relative accuracy and cue basis of JOLs and MJs for scene pictures. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants completed an MJ task and a JOL task in counterbalanced order. In the MJ task, they judged the general memorability of each picture. In the JOL task, they studied pictures and made JOLs during a learning phase, followed by a recognition memory test. Results showed that MJs were predictive of general scene memorability and relied on the same cues as JOLs, but MJ accuracy considerably improved after the JOL task. Experiment 3 demonstrated that prior learning experiences drove this increase in MJ accuracy. This work demonstrates that people can predict not only their own future memory performance for scene pictures with moderate accuracy but also the general memorability of scene pictures. In addition, experiences with one's own learning and memory support the ability to assess scene memorability in general. This research contributes to our understanding of the basis and accuracy of different metamemory judgements.
Forecasts, or subjective probability assessments of uncertain events, are characterized by two qualities: coherence, the degree to which the judgments are internally consistent, and correspondence, ...the extent to which judgments are accurate. Recent evidence suggests that more coherent forecasts tend to be more accurate. However, currently, there is no good stand-alone measure of probabilistic coherence. We developed and validated the Coherence Forecasting Scale (CFS). This questionnaire assesses how well people understand and apply probabilistic reasoning rules such as relations between joint and disjoint probabilities, probability complementarity, stochastic dominance, and monotonicity. In three incentivized forecasting tournaments, including one from an online public forecasting platform, judges who scored higher on the CFS were also more accurate. Notably, across all tournaments, the CFS dominates all administered individual difference and demographic measures in explanatory power predicting judgment accuracy, providing empirical evidence that coherence and accuracy are strongly linked.
People base judgements about their own memory processes on probabilistic cues such as the characteristics of study materials and study conditions. While research has largely focused on how single ...cues affect metamemory judgements, a recent study by Undorf, Söllner, and Bröder found that multiple cues affected people’s predictions of their future memory performance (judgements of learning, JOLs). The present research tested whether this finding was indeed due to strategic integration of multiple cues in JOLs or, alternatively, resulted from people’s reliance on a single unified feeling of ease. In Experiments 1 and 2, we simultaneously varied concreteness and emotionality of word pairs and solicited (a) pre-study JOLs that could be based only on the manipulated cues and (b) immediate JOLs that could be based both on the manipulated cues and on a feeling of ease. The results revealed similar amounts of cue integration in pre-study JOLs and immediate JOLs, regardless of whether cues varied in two easily distinguishable levels (Experiment 1) or on a continuum (Experiment 2). This suggested that people strategically integrated multiple cues in their immediate JOLs. Experiment 3 provided further evidence for this conclusion by showing that false explicit information about cue values affected immediate JOLs over and above actual cue values. Hence, we conclude that cue integration in JOLs involves strategic processes.
•Absolute and relative judgments tap order information of different nature.•Relative judgments measure purer order information than absolute judgments.•Local distinctiveness is evidenced in absolute ...judgments.•Global distinctiveness is evidenced in relative judgments.•Each type of distinctiveness is judgment-task specific.
This study examined the differential effects of an absolute versus a relative judgment task on the retrieval of the border-position items after the combining of two separate serial lists. Under the absolute judgment condition (Experiment 1), the border-position items showed a local distinctiveness effect (faster judgment on these items than on the neighboring items), consistent with the prediction of the local distinctiveness theory of order memory, but not under the relative judgment condition (Experiment 2). The absence of the local distinctiveness effect under the relative judgment condition was consistent with the prediction of the global distinctiveness theory that a midseries item cannot be remembered better than its neighbors. The causes of the differential effects of the two judgment tasks were discussed.
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