Sounds of sickness: can people identify infectious disease using sounds of coughs and sneezes?

Cough, cough. Is that person sick, or do they just have a throat tickle? A growing body of research suggests pathogen threats shape key aspects of human sociality. However, less research has investigated specific processes involved in pathogen threat detection. Here, we examine whether perceivers can accurately detect pathogen threats using an understudied sensory modality-sound. Participants in four studies judged whether cough and sneeze sounds were produced by people infected with a communicable disease or not. We found no evidence that participants could accurately identify the origins of these sounds. Instead, the more disgusting they perceived a sound to be, the more likely they were to judge that it came from an infected person (regardless of whether it did). Thus, unlike research indicating perceivers can accurately diagnose infection using other sensory modalities (e.g. sight, smell), we find people overperceive pathogen threat in subjectively disgusting sounds.

When God is your only friend: Religious beliefs compensate for purpose in life in the socially disconnected.

OBJECTIVE: Social relationships supply purpose to life. How can socially disconnected people, who show lower levels of purpose, compensate for purpose in life? We propose that religious beliefs can compensate for the purpose in life that social relationships would otherwise provide, through providing (a) greater purpose to turn to and (b) divine figures that can substitute for social relationships. METHOD: In three studies, we analyze three nationally representative and longitudinal data sets (N = 19,775) using moderated regression and cross-lagged panel analyses. RESULTS: Consistent with our hypotheses, religious beliefs were of minimal influence on purpose in life for socially connected individuals, who already held higher levels of purpose than socially disconnected individuals. However, for socially disconnected individuals, being highly religious predicted higher levels of purpose in life. CONCLUSIONS: Results suggest that although people primarily derive purpose from social relationships, socially disconnected individuals may leverage their religious beliefs for purpose and social comfort until they can reconnect.

A multimethod approach to measuring mental representations of threatening others.

How do people mentally represent distinct interpersonal threats? Across human history, interpersonal threats such as infectious disease and violence have posed powerful selection pressures. Such pressures selected for psychological systems that help identify and reduce threats posed by other people. In the case of infectious disease, psychology researchers have found that such systems respond to a variety of infection cues (e.g., rashes, swelling) as well as cues that merely resemble infection cues (e.g., birthmarks, obesity). Are such cues part of people's mental representations, and if so, are those cues unique to infection representations or are they included in representations of other threats? Using a multimethod approach, we find that when participants listed traits or drew mental representations of threat, they perceived infected and violent others to differ along threat-specific features. However, when using a data-driven, reverse correlation method that restricted participants from deliberating on and editing their representations, participants generated mental images that were similar on many of the features that both researchers and laypeople expect to distinguish infection and violence threats. These findings suggest that our understanding of threat processing may suffer from a potential disconnect between the threat cues derived from the expectations of researchers and those revealed when expectations are constrained. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).