Group membership moderates the process of making trust judgments based on facial cues.

Trust is a foundation of interpersonal communication. Faces have a significant impact on trust judgments, and separate research demonstrates that group membership also influences trust judgments. However, it remains unclear whether and how group membership moderates the effect of face trustworthiness on trust judgments and investment decisions. In the present research, two experiments were conducted to explore the moderating effect of group membership (i.e., in-group vs. out-group) on perceptions of facial trustworthiness and trust judgments. Results showed that participants invested significantly more money on trials with trustworthy faces than trials with untrustworthy faces. Additionally, there was a significant interaction between group membership and facial trustworthiness; the investment difference between trustworthy faces and untrustworthy faces was greater for trials with in-group member faces than out-group member faces. These findings indicate that top-down and bottom-up cues jointly influence behavioral decisions.

Chronic disease and where you live: Built and natural environment relationships with physical activity, obesity, and diabetes.

BACKGROUND: Diabetes is among the most prevalent non-communicable diseases causing significant morbidity and mortality globally. The aetiology and disease development of diabetes are influenced by genetic, lifestyle, and environmental factors. Due to an increasing number of cases each year, it is imperative to improve the understanding of modifiable environmental risk and protective factors. In this study we aimed to analyse associations between built and natural environment features and diabetes prevalence; and two major risk factors: physical activity and obesity and their mediation effects. METHODS: We analysed relationships between walkability and park availability with physical activity, obesity, and diabetes, using self-reported data from a large cross-sectional survey in British Columbia, Canada (n = 22,418). We validated results with an independent cohort (n = 11,972) in a subset of the analyses. The outcome measures included walking, moderate to vigorous physical activity (MVPA), body mass index (BMI), and diabetes. Built and natural environment features within a 1 km road network buffer around residential postal code centroids were assessed using validated indicators of walkability and park availability. We used general linear multivariable models (GLM) to examine the direct relationship between environmental features, physical activity, obesity, and diabetes respectively. Path models were developed to analyse mediation effects of physical activity and obesity on the association between environmental indicators and diabetes. The relative contribution of direct versus indirect effects was assessed. All models were adjusted for age, gender, income. ethnicity, years lived in neighbourhood and regional accessibility. RESULTS: Walkable neighbourhoods and areas with greater park availability were associated with lower rates of diabetes. There was a direct association of walkability and park availability on physical activity (highest vs. lowest quintile OR = 1.15; 95% CI: 1.00, 1.33 and OR = 1.28, 95% CI: 1.13, 1.45 respectively), obesity (highest vs. lowest quintile OR = 0.58, 95% CI: 0.49, 0.70 and OR = 0.57, 95% CI: 0.48, 0.68 respectively) and diabetes (highest vs. lowest quintile OR = 0.62, 95% CI: 0.45, 0.85, and OR = 0.63, 95% CI: 0.47, 0.84 respectively). Results were similar in the independent cohort. The associations between diabetes and walkability and park availability respectively were partly mediated by obesity (41% of total association for walkability and 53% of total association for park availability). The mediating effect of physical activity was negligible. CONCLUSION: Results support investments in walkability through active transportation and transit infrastructure. Changes in zoning and subdivision regulations governing land use actions are required to enable compact mixed-use environments with access to parks and high quality transit service. Future studies including cost-benefit analyses of health-related economic impacts of such investments can contribute to evidence-based decisions for healthier cities.

Enabling exercise prescription for survivors of cancer.

Although exercise is widely recommended for survivors of cancer, readily implementable approaches for evaluating exercise tolerance enabling exercise prescriptions at appropriate levels of cardiovascular exertion are not always available. We evaluated the utility of modified Harvard Step tests within the context of a standard physical examination for fitness evaluation and exercise prescription for survivors of cancer across a range of age, BMI and exercise history. While 52% of presenting individuals with a past cancer diagnosis were able to complete a 3-min test at pace with a reduced 9-in. step, adoption of self-determined pacing, test duration and completion on a flat surface enabled relative fitness rating and appropriate exercise prescription for the remaining survivors. Younger age and more vigorous exercise histories correlated with completion of the standard 3-min test at pace, but all 9-in. formats led to exercise prescriptions more vigorous than current activity. The physical examination setting expedited inclusion of core and specific muscle group strength testing. The approach is adaptable to a range of health care settings, providers, and patients, providing a shared opportunity for providers and patients to evaluate exercise tolerance. It can be used to further expand incorporation of exercise testing and prescription into routine care.

Differences in Explicit Stereotype Activation among Social Groups Based on the Stereotype Content Model: Behavioral and Electrophysiological Evidence in Chinese Sample.

The stereotype content model (SCM; Fiske, Cuddy, Glick and Xu, 2002) identifies four basic categories of stereotyped social groups: high warmth-high competence (HW-HC), high warmth-low competence (HW-LC), low warmth-high competence (LW-HC), and low warmth-low competence (LW-LC). However, many of these groups have not been directly examined in stereotype activation research. The purpose of the present research was to extend stereotype activation research to groups that more fully represent those identified under the SCM. Employing explicit sequential priming task, participants responded to prime-target stimulus pairs that were either congruent or incongruent with stereotypes of social groups from all four SCM quadrants in two studies in the current investigation. Study 1 was to determine the behavioral pattern of explicit stereotype activation among four quadrants (the sample included 60 Chinese undergraduate students, 51%-female). Study 2 further employed event-related brain potentials (ERPs) technique to track the time course and electrophysiological underpinnings of explicit stereotype activation (the sample included 22 right-handed Chinese undergraduate students, 76%-female). In Study 1, participants responded more quickly and accurately on stereotype congruent trials than incongruent trials for all social groups except LW-LC groups. This reverse priming effect on LW-LC social groups in RTs was also replicated in Study 2. ERPs findings further showed that incongruent targets elicited larger N400 amplitudes than congruent targets for all four SCM quadrants. Moreover, congruent targets elicited larger P2 than incongruent targets, but only found for the LW-LC social groups. In addition, congruent targets elicited larger amplitudes of late positive component than incongruent targets for the low warmth (LW-LC and LW-HC) groups. Together, these results highlight the unique processing that LW-LC groups receive throughout the cognitive stream, ultimately manifesting in distinctive behavioral responses. Unconscious activation of egalitarian goals, disgust, and distrust accounts are discussed.

The Resistance to Change-Beliefs Scale: Validation of a New Measure of Conservative Ideology.

The motivated social cognition (MSC) model of conservative ideology posits there are two core facets of conservative political ideology-endorsement of hierarchies and resistance to change. The present research tested the validity and reliability of a scale developed to measure resistance to change. Five studies support the validity, reliability, and factor structure of the Resistance to Change-Beliefs (RC-B) scale. Scores on the RC-B scale correlated with social and cognitive motivations as well as self-identified conservatism. RC-B also predicted more conservative stances on political issues and factor analyses supported the predicted internal structure of the RC-B scale. This provides the field with a validated instrument that avoids problems inherent in previous measures, can be used to test predictions from the MSC model, and has potential applications beyond political psychology.

Sequential Stereotype Priming: A Meta-Analysis.

Psychological interest in stereotype measurement has spanned nearly a century, with researchers adopting implicit measures in the 1980s to complement explicit measures. One of the most frequently used implicit measures of stereotypes is the sequential priming paradigm. The current meta-analysis examines stereotype priming, focusing specifically on this paradigm. To contribute to ongoing discussions regarding methodological rigor in social psychology, one primary goal was to identify methodological moderators of the stereotype priming effect-whether priming is due to a relation between the prime and target stimuli, the prime and target response, participant task, stereotype dimension, stimulus onset asynchrony (SOA), and stimuli type. Data from 39 studies yielded 87 individual effect sizes from 5,497 participants. Analyses revealed that stereotype priming is significantly moderated by the presence of prime-response relations, participant task, stereotype dimension, target stimulus type, SOA, and prime repetition. These results carry both practical and theoretical implications for future research on stereotype priming.

On the automatic activation of attitudes: a quarter century of evaluative priming research.

Evaluation is a fundamental concept in psychological science. Limitations of self-report measures of evaluation led to an explosion of research on implicit measures of evaluation. One of the oldest and most frequently used implicit measurement paradigms is the evaluative priming paradigm developed by Fazio, Sanbonmatsu, Powell, and Kardes (1986). This paradigm has received extensive attention in psychology and is used to investigate numerous phenomena ranging from prejudice to depression. The current review provides a meta-analysis of a quarter century of evaluative priming research: 73 studies yielding 125 independent effect sizes from 5,367 participants. Because judgments people make in evaluative priming paradigms can be used to tease apart underlying processes, this meta-analysis examined the impact of different judgments to test the classic encoding and response perspectives of evaluative priming. As expected, evidence for automatic evaluation was found, but the results did not exclusively support either of the classic perspectives. Results suggest that both encoding and response processes likely contribute to evaluative priming but are more nuanced than initially conceptualized by the classic perspectives. Additionally, there were a number of unexpected findings that influenced evaluative priming such as segmenting trials into discrete blocks. We argue that many of the findings of this meta-analysis can be explained with 2 recent evaluative priming perspectives: the attentional sensitization/feature-specific attention allocation and evaluation window perspectives.

Electrophysiological responses to evaluative priming: the LPP is sensitive to incongruity.

Previous studies examining event-related potentials and evaluative priming have been mixed; some find evidence that evaluative priming influences the N400, whereas others find evidence that it affects the late positive potential (LPP). Three experiments were conducted using either affective pictures (Experiments 1 and 2) or words (Experiment 3) in a sequential evaluative priming paradigm. In line with previous behavioral findings, participants responded slower to targets that were evaluatively incongruent with the preceding prime (e.g., negative preceded by positive) compared to evaluatively congruent targets (e.g., negative preceded by negative). In all three studies, the LPP was larger to evaluatively incongruent targets compared to evaluatively congruent ones, and there was no evidence that evaluative incongruity influenced the N400 component. Thus, the present results provide additional support for the notion that evaluative priming influences the LPP and not the N400. We discuss possible reasons for the inconsistent findings in prior research and the theoretical implications of the findings for both evaluative and semantic priming.

Wait, what? Assessing stereotype incongruities using the N400 ERP component.

Numerous discoveries regarding stereotypes have been uncovered by utilizing techniques and methods developed by cognitive psychologists. The present study continues this tradition by borrowing psychophysiological techniques used for the study of memory and language, and applying them to the study of stereotypes. In this study, participants were primed with either the gender category 'Women' or 'Men', followed by a word which was either consistent with gender stereotypes (e.g. Women: Nurturing) or inconsistent (e.g. Women: Aggressive). Their task was to indicate whether the words matched or did not match, according to gender stereotypes. Both response times and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded during performance of the task. As predicted, stereotype incongruent word pairs were associated with larger N400 ERP amplitudes and slower response times, relative to congruent word pairs. The potential utility of this approach as an independent measure of stereotypes is discussed.