Keeping secrets can have negative consequences for well-being, yet most research relies on artificially prompting participants to reflect on their secrets prior to assessing key outcomes. The current research addresses this methodological limitation by having participants (N = 114) report on significant social interactions with five people for 10 days of experience sampling, with the extent of secrecy

The human mind automatically divides continuous experience into meaningful events (event segmentation). Despite abundant evidence that some kinds of situation changes (e.g., action, goal, or location changes) contribute to event segmentation, a component of experience that is critical for understanding and predicting others' behavior, emotion, is rarely investigated. In two experiments, we sought to

Victims of wrongdoing sometimes forgive to repair relationships with the wrongdoer. But how does forgiveness do this? Some have argued that forgiveness changes the way the wrongdoing is remembered. We empirically adjudicate two competing accounts of how forgiveness is related to memory. The episodic fading account states that forgiveness alters both the episodic and the affective characteristics of

words challenge embodied cognition theories due to their lack of direct connections to the sensory and bodily world. To address this, some theories propose that abstract words are represented through emotional and social information. We tested these theories across seven experiments using semantic categorization and lexical decision tasks in two languages. In Experiment 1, we investigated the effects

Understanding the neurocognitive basis of cognitive control and its relationship with general cognitive ability is a key challenge in individual differences research. This study investigates midfrontal theta connectivity as a neurocognitive marker for individual differences in cognitive control. Using electroencephalography, we examined midfrontal global theta connectivity across three distinct cognitive

Cue-Approach Training (CAT) is a paradigm that enhances preferences without external reinforcements, suggesting a potential role for internal learning processes. Here, we developed a novel Bayesian computational model to quantify anticipatory response patterns during the training phase of CAT. This phase includes individual items, and thus, this marker potentially reflects internal learning signals

Lay people routinely appeal to "beliefs" in explaining behavior; psychologists do so as well (for instance, in explaining belief polarization and learning). Across three studies (N = 1,843, U.S.-based adults), we challenge the assumption that "belief" picks out a single construct in people's theory of mind. Instead, laypeople attribute different kinds of beliefs depending on whether the beliefs play

Boredom is a common and unpleasant experience associated with a range of problematic correlates and consequences. We examine a catalyst and its putative remedy all but neglected in the psychological science of emotion, and boredom in particular: the living environment. Specifically, we proposed and tested that "artificial" (e.g., urban) environments elicit boredom and that natural environments may

Implicit measures often show dissociations from explicit measures, including low correlations, distinct antecedents, and distinct behavioral correlates. Interpretations of these dissociations referring to measurement types presuppose that the distinction between implicit and explicit measures is not confounded with other stimulus-related differences. However, in research on racial bias, explicit measures

Maternal odor has recently emerged as an important but ill-understood factor in sociocognitive learning in early human development. We propose that social odor plays its unique role in the first year of life through dissociable affective and perceptual mechanisms. These mechanisms yield distinct predictions for future studies of social odor.

People vary drastically in their intellectual humility (i.e., their ability to recognize gaps in their knowledge). Little is known about how intellectual humility develops or why some children might demonstrate more intellectual humility than others. The present study examines the possibility of parent-to-child transmission of intellectual humility. Parents (N = 108; 88% college graduates; 56% with

People tend to align their policy attitudes with the stereotypical attitudes of their political group (e.g., conservatives supporting gun rights, liberals supporting abortion rights). However, ingroups sometimes adopt positions that contradict such stereotypes (e.g., some liberals endorse gun rights, some conservatives endorse abortion rights). How does learning about these counter-stereotypical endorsements

Often the only source of information for learning a new word is its surrounding language context. For example, even if one has never seen a rambutan, it is possible to learn that "rambutan" is a kind of fruit just from hearing "I like sweet, juicy rambutans." What processes unfold at the moment upon encountering a new word in context that lead to successful word learning? We conducted three experiments

Working memory is a short-term storage space for cognitive information with a highly limited capacity. Due to this limited capacity, many theories address the issue of how items compete in working memory. The present study assesses whether the relative salience of items is automatically important or whether the deployment of working memory is more flexible than that. Some recent studies have suggested

People are regularly conceptualized at varying levels of resolution, sometimes characterized by their idiosyncratic features while at other times seen as mere tokens of their social groups. Decades of research have sought to understand when perceivers will draw upon each of these types of representations, detailing the perceiver- and target-related features that may decrease reliance on stereotypes

Core to kindness, compassion, or consideration of others is the ability to move beyond one's own perspective to imagine how someone else would think or feel. We reasoned that subtle shifts in language may facilitate this process, hypothesizing that speakers who adopted a generalized perspective (generic you, we) versus an individual (me) or specific (another's name) perspective would be viewed by children

In thirteen studies (eleven preregistered) we examine the associations in people's minds between stimulus temperature (cold vs. warm) and both its psychological distance (distant vs. close) and construal level (high vs. low) within the framework of construal level theory (Liberman & Trope, 1998; Trope & Liberman, 2010). Study Set I examined the association between psychological distance and temperature

Maintaining attention to a task is essential for accomplishing it. However, attentional state fluctuates from moment to moment, and task-irrelevant information may compete for processing. What are the consequences of attentional fluctuations for what we remember? Do fluctuations in sustained attention vary the spotlight of selective attention, prioritizing task-relevant at the expense of task-irrelevant

Groups frequently encounter situations where someone must "take one for the team"-that is, one member must undertake a task for the benefit of the group. When such tasks recur, how should the burdens be shared? This question becomes particularly complex when the cost of performing the task varies among members, creating a trade-off between efficiency and equity. For instance, always assigning the task

Pertaining to goal orientation and achievement, agency is a fundamental aspect of human cognition and behavior. Accordingly, detecting and quantifying linguistic encoding of agency are critical for the analysis of human actions, interactions, and social dynamics. Available agency-quantifying computational tools rely on word-counting methods, which typically are insensitive to the semantic context in

People around the world both engage in both interpersonal punishment and expect supernatural punishment of wrongdoers. That is, people will impose costs and withhold benefits from transgressors, and they expect bad things to happen to transgressors more often than to good people. Evolutionary theories have proposed that both interpersonal and supernatural justice beliefs result from similar motivations

People often underutilize the numerical minority group when determining category membership of individuals into perceptually ambiguous social categories (i.e., groups whose members are relatively difficult to accurately identify based on visual information). We find that perceived population base rates can underlie this bias and influence social categorization even when stimulus set base rates are

Can readers process multiple words simultaneously, and are there cultural differences in attentional bottleneck in lexical processing? To answer these questions, we asked participants to view two words and categorize only one (single-task) or both words (dual-task), using Korean word pairs that frequently co-occur and are semantically related. We hypothesized that the coactivation of related words

Vivid visual mental imagery is thought to influence perceptual processing, but much of the current knowledge on this comes from one highly cited, though underpowered (N = 8) study from 2007, which found that more vivid imagery increases interference between imagined and perceptual content. However, that study has not been repeated since. We therefore conducted a conceptual (Experiment 1) and direct

Mental speed theories of intelligence suggest that people are smarter because they are faster. We argue that attention control plays an important and fundamental role in mediating the relationship between basic sensory processes and more complex cognitive processes such as fluid intelligence. One of the most successful paradigms for establishing a mental speed theory of intelligence is the inspection

Transgressive leaders enjoy growing popularity. Synthesizing recent evidence, I propose that (i) such leaders are appealing not despite their transgressive behavior, but because of it, and (ii) this appeal hinges on perceived benefits emanating from their transgressions. This analysis points to new strategies for curtailing transgressive leaders.

Psychosis is characterized by salient conflicts between reality and one's experience of it. Many people in the general population experience similar conflicts, albeit to a lesser extent-including during déjà vu, in which one is struck by the feeling that they have lived through the present moment before, despite not being able to pinpoint why or knowing that this cannot be true. The cognitive processes

Theoretical debates have raged around whether conscious perception is necessary for responsibility. It is still unclear, however, what lay people think, and lay views can be important to legal and sociopolitical decision-making. To explore this issue, the current work conducted three online, vignette-based studies to test how lay third-party responsibility judgments varied with what agents unconsciously

Facial attractiveness is one of the most immediate and universal sources of social information. However, current theories cannot fully explain its computational mechanisms, especially with regard to facial attractiveness in a group context. Recent studies have found that faces appear more attractive when presented in a group compared to individually (the cheerleader/friend effect). Does the presentation

Classical serial models view the process of producing a text as a chain of discrete pauses during which the next span of text is planned and bursts of activity during which this text is output onto the page or computer screen. In contrast, parallel models assume that by default planning of the next text unit is performed in parallel with previous execution. We instantiated these two views as Bayesian

Collective action is a powerful force driving social change but often sparks contention about what actions are acceptable means to effect social change. We investigated double standards in judging collective action-that is, whether observers judge the same protest actions to be more acceptable depending on who the protesters are and what they are protesting. In two studies, we used item response theory

According to previous research, people more readily question the competence of, and express greater discrimination against, women (vs. men) who are described as parents in the workplace. In the present manuscript, we sought to examine whether the magnitude of this bias, which is referred to as the motherhood penalty, would be moderated by whether the women and men in question are Black rather than

Terrorism represents one of the most commonly studied types of threat in the social and political psychology literature. Of particular note, many studies (along with national polls) have shown that the threat of Islamist fundamentalism increases the appeal of conservativism. However, there are some important-and unresolved-questions regarding these threat-driven "shifts to the right." Our primary focus

Past research has focused on emotion regulation (ER) as an intrapersonal endeavor (managing one's own emotions), leaving many questions unanswered about interpersonal emotion regulation (IER; receiving support from another person to regulate one's emotions). This study sought to understand the effects of two common IER strategies (corumination, codistraction) by comparing them with each other and their

Immanent justice thinking refers to the tendency to perceive causal connections between an agent's bad (good) deeds and subsequent bad (good) outcomes, even when such connections are rationally implausible. We asked bilinguals to read scenarios written either in their native language or in a foreign language and examined how language influences immanent justice endorsements. In five pre-registered

Mere instructions about a supposedly upcoming approach/avoidance training (i.e., “you will approach stimulus A and avoid stimulus B”) can influence stimuli evaluation (e.g., stimulus A is evaluated more positively). In this work, we argue that because approach/avoidance instructions are typically future-oriented (e.g., “you will approach stimulus A”), they are less powerful than past-oriented information

People frequently participate in interdependent tasks (i.e., tasks in which the outcome of one person is reliant on the other person's actions), in which people can behave in ways that benefit others (i.e., cooperate) to achieve mutually beneficial outcomes in daily life. The ability to select appropriate cooperative partners for these tasks is essential to achieve successful outcomes. Yet, little

Concepts of exact number are often thought to originate from counting and the successor function, or from a refinement of the approximate number system (ANS). We argue here for a third origin: a shared language-of-thought (LoT) for geometry and arithmetic that involves primitives of repetition, concatenation, and recursive embedding. Applied to sets, those primitives engender concepts of exact integers

The classical view of visual cortex organization as a collection of specialized modules processing distinct features like color and motion has profoundly influenced neuroscience for decades. This framework, rooted in historical philosophical distinctions between qualities, gave rise to the ‘binding problem’: how the brain integrates these separately processed features into coherent percepts. We present

While trying to complete arduous tasks (e.g., emails, grading), our attention is often mired by the desire to disengage. Opportunity cost theories of mental effort argue that rather than our "sense of effort" being a cognitive limitation, it is an adaptive signal which repels us from unrewarding tasks toward worthwhile alternatives; in short, this signal ensures our cognitive resources are not spent

While the influence of scene-object semantic congruency on object perception is well established, the direction of the influence remains controversial. We address this issue by presenting an innovative approach that uses a vector-space semantic model to quantify scene-object congruency as a continuous variable. By exploring a wide range of congruency values and using multiple experimental tasks, we

Recent statistical learning views of reading posit that writing systems present to their readers a wide range of statistical regularities which are leveraged to process printed texts. While substantial research has focused on the "vertical" correlations between orthographic, phonological, and semantic units in a given writing system, here we employ information-theoretic measures to further consider

The ethical frontier of artificial intelligence (AI) is expanding as humans form romantic relationships with AIs. Addressing ethical issues of AIs as invasive suitors, malicious advisers, and tools of exploitation requires new psychological research on why and how humans love machines.

Although social interactions are ubiquitous, people often choose not to interact with others—for example, people may choose to not greet a stranger, to not talk to a colleague at work, or to ignore a text message from a friend. Here, we systematically investigate how people's actions, inactions, and their consequences (rewards and punishments) affect impressions. In four preregistered experiments (N = 240)

The central tendency effect emphasizes the use of priors by the brain for perceptual optimization within a Bayesian framework. This study explores the impact of blindness on central tendency and prior utilization in a distance estimation auditory task by testing a group of early blinds, late blinds, and sighted participants. The results showed that early blind individuals exhibit a general impairment

Leaders' behavior can powerfully alter group outcomes. In a programmatic series of preregistered studies, we provide the first rigorous test of whether and why leaders behave differently toward groups of men versus women. In a within-subjects pilot study (N = 336) and in between-subjects Study 1 (N = 368), American adults said they would lead groups of men (vs. women) in a more dominant (e.g., intimidating

Effective linguistic communication depends upon many different cognitive processes working together in concert. Yet, our computational models of these processes are often developed in isolation, without considering how these processes fit together. In this work, we study a simplified variant of the popular board game Codenames, which highlights the integration of two important processes: (1) lexical

Managing the trade-off between stability (robustness to interference) and flexibility (readiness to adapt to change) places considerable demands on human attention, cognitive control, and meta-control processes. However, little is known about the cognitive mechanisms driving stability-flexibility adaptation in multitasking contexts, and such mechanisms have implications for effective task completion

Motor planning forms a critical bridge between psycholinguistic and motoric models of word production. While syllables are often considered the core speech motor planning unit, growing evidence hints at suprasyllabic planning that may correspond to words, but firm experimental support is still lacking. We use differential adaptation to altered auditory feedback to provide novel, straightforward evidence

Continuous flow and evidence accumulation models have recently been combined to provide an integrated account of decision and motor mechanisms engaged in choice reaction time tasks. According to this account, muscle activation is essentially determined by the evidence accumulation decision variable through a continuous decision-to-motor transmission of information. However, it remains unclear whether

Whether it's choosing a tennis serve or escaping a predator, the ability to behave randomly provides a range of adaptive benefits. Decades of work explore how people both produce and detect randomness, revealing profound nonrandom biases and heuristics in our mental representations of randomness. But how is randomness realized in the mind? Do individuals have a "one-size-fits-all" conception of randomness

In post-conflict societies, peace and safety often depend on political and economic support from international organizations. But what happens when this support is withdrawn? To investigate this question, we conducted two cross-sectional (N = 832) and one two-wave longitudinal experiment (with waves two weeks apart, Wave 1: N = 416; Wave 2: N = 400) in the post-conflict context of Kosovo, exposing

Gender stereotypes take many forms. One relatively under-studied stereotype concerns gender and food. While prior work finds certain foods are viewed as more masculine or feminine, there is limited research on how the same food becomes gendered depending on portion size. Four studies (N = 2178) found that 1) participants held implicit and explicit associations between men with large portions and women

Policies, the mappings from states to actions, require memory. The amount of memory is dictated by the mutual information between states and actions or the policy complexity. High-complexity policies preserve state information and generally lead to greater rewards compared to low-complexity policies, which require less memory by discarding state information and exploiting environmental regularities

There is increasing evidence that moral and emotional rhetoric spreads widely on social media and is associated with intergroup conflict, polarization, and the spread of misinformation. However, this literature is largely correlational, making it unclear why moral and emotional content drives sharing and conflict. In this research, we examine the causal impact of moral-emotional content on sharing

How does the mind represent the structure of human relationships? In a recent article, Cheng et al. address this with an interdisciplinary approach combining principal component analysis (PCA), large-scale data collection of human ratings from diverse cultures, and Large Language Model (LLM)-based analyses of historical texts. They reveal a robust 5D framework and three core categories of relationships

Punishment can serve as a form of communication: People use punishment to express information to its recipients and interpret punishment between third parties as having communicative content. Prior work on the expressive function of punishment has primarily investigated the capacity of punishment in general to communicate a single type of message – e.g., that the punished behavior violated an important

Children often have to choose between two or more probabilistically rewarded options. How early in life do they learn to choose adaptively? Connecting research on ecologically rational probability matching in adulthood with research on the benefits of cognitive immaturity in childhood, we compared children's (3-11 years; N = 362) and adults' (N = 121) repeated choice behavior in a child-friendly probability

Whether and when explicit (self-reported) and implicit (automatically revealed) social group attitudes can change has been a central topic of psychological inquiry over the past decades. Here, we take a novel approach to answering these longstanding questions by leveraging data collected via the Project Implicit International websites from 1.4 million participants across 33 countries, five social group

What makes a word memorable? An important claim from past work is that words are encoded by their meanings and not their forms. If true, then, following rational analysis, memorable words should uniquely pick out a particular meaning, which means they should have few or no synonyms, and they should be unambiguous. Across two large-scale recognition-memory experiments (2,222 target words and > 600 participants