Influence of indirect information on interpersonal trust despite direct information.

Trust is integral to successful relationships. The development of trust stems from how one person treats others, and there are multiple ways to learn about someone's trust-relevant behavior. The present research captures the development of trust to examine if trust-relevant impressions and behavior are influenced by indirect behavioral information (i.e., descriptions of how a person treated another individual)-even in the presence of substantial direct behavioral information (i.e., self-relevant, first-hand experience with a person). Participants had repeated interpersonal exchanges with a partner who was trustworthy or untrustworthy with participants' money. The present studies vary the frequency with which (Studies 1 & 2), the order in which (Study 3) and the number of people for whom (Study 4) indirect information (i.e., brief vignettes describing trustworthy or untrustworthy behavior) were presented. As predicted, across 4 studies, we observed a robust effect of indirect-information despite the presence of substantial direct information. Even after dozens of interactions in which a partner betrayed (or not), a brief behavioral description of a partner influenced participants' willingness to actually trust the partner with money, memory-based estimates of partner-behavior, and impressions of the partner. These effects were observed even though participants were also sensitive to partners' actual trust behavior, and even when indirect behavioral descriptions were only presented a single time. Impressions were identified as a strong candidate mechanism for the effect of indirect-information on behavior. We discuss implications of the persistence of indirect information for impression formation, relationship development, and future studies of trust. (PsycINFO Database Record

Change the things you can: Emotion regulation is more beneficial for people from lower than from higher socioeconomic status.

Emotion regulation is central to psychological health, and several emotion-regulation strategies have been identified as beneficial. However, new theorizing suggests the benefits of emotion regulation should depend on its context. One important contextual moderator might be socioeconomic status (SES), because SES powerfully shapes people's ecology: lower SES affords less control over one's environment and thus, the ability to self-regulate should be particularly important. Accordingly, effectively regulating one's emotions (e.g., using cognitive reappraisal) could be more beneficial in lower (vs. higher) SES contexts. Three studies (N = 429) tested whether SES moderates the link between cognitive reappraisal ability (CRA; measured with surveys and in the laboratory) and depression. Each study and a meta-analysis of the 3 studies revealed that CRA was associated with less depression for lower SES but not higher SES individuals. Thus, CRA may be uniquely beneficial in lower SES contexts. More broadly, the effects of emotion regulation depend upon the ecology within which it is used. (PsycINFO Database Record

Emotion regulation changes the duration of the BOLD response to emotional stimuli.

Emotion regulation theories posit that strategies like reappraisal should impact both the intensity and duration of emotional responses. However, research on reappraisal to date has examined almost exclusively its effect on the intensity of responses while failing to examine its effect on the duration of responses. To address this, we used inverse logit functions to estimate the height and duration of hemodynamic responses to negative pictures when individuals with recent life stress were instructed to use reappraisal either to decrease their negative emotion or to increase their positive emotion (relative to unregulated viewing of negative pictures). Several emotion-generative regions such as the amygdala, thalamus and midbrain exhibited decreases in duration of activation, even when controlling for differences in height of activation. In addition, whereas the amygdala exhibited both decreased activation height and duration when participants reappraised to decrease their negative emotion, it only exhibited decreased duration when participants reappraised to increase their positive emotion. These results indicate that emotion regulation alters the temporal dynamics of emotional responding and that models of reappraisal should accommodate whether reappraisal influences the height of activation, duration of activation or both, which may change based on the goal of the reappraisal strategy being used.

Involuntary symbol manipulation (Pig Latin) from external control: Implications for thought suppression.

In ironic processing, one is more likely to think about something (e.g., white bears) when instructed to not think about that thing. Entry into consciousness of such content may be automatic, reflecting the 'encapsulated' nature of the generation of conscious contents. Based on this research, the Reflexive Imagery Task (RIT) reveals that, following the activation of action sets, conscious contents can arise involuntarily and systematically in response to external stimuli. In the most basic version of this paradigm, participants are presented with visual objects and instructed to not think of the names of the objects, which is challenging. Here, we addressed one criticism of the RIT-that the effect arises only for automatic processes (e.g., forms of cued-memory retrieval) and not for more complex processes (e.g., symbol manipulation). Participants were first trained to perform a word-manipulation task similar to the game of Pig Latin (e.g., "CAR" becomes "AR-CAY"). Such a task involves complex symbol manipulations that are associated with processes in frontal cortex. After training, participants were instructed to not transform stimulus words in this way. The RIT effect still arose under these conditions. This striking finding is relevant to theories of cognitive control, psychopathology, and conscious/unconscious processing.