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Agents of Reconciliation: Agency-Affirmation Promotes Constructive Tendencies Following Transgressions in Low-Commitment Relationships

Conflicting parties experience threats to both their agency and morality, but the experience of agency-threat exerts more influence on their behavior, leading to relationship-destructive tendencies. Whereas high-commitment relationships facilitate cons…

Not By Success Alone: Role Models Provide Pathways to Communal Opportunities in STEM

Because of stereotypes that science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields do not fulfill communal goals, communally oriented individuals may select out of STEM. One potential route to engaging and promoting communally oriented individ…

Initial Mainstream Cultural Orientations Predict Early Social Participation in the Mainstream Cultural Group

This work adopts a perspective that construes acculturation as a dynamic intergroup process, and social contact with members of the new community as a key mechanism underlying cultural adaptation. We argue that migrants’ initial self-reported mai…

Immediate Rewards Predict Adherence to Long-Term Goals

People primarily pursue long-term goals, such as exercising, to receive delayed rewards (e.g., improved health). However, we find that the presence of immediate rewards is a stronger predictor of persistence in goal-related activities than the presence…

Utopian Hopes or Dystopian Fears? Exploring the Motivational Underpinnings of Moralized Political Engagement

People are more likely to become politically engaged (e.g., vote, engage in activism) when issues are associated with strong moral convictions. The goal of this research was to understand the underlying motivations that lead to this well-replicated eff…

Strangers With Benefits: Attraction to Outgroup Men Increases as Fertility Increases Across the Menstrual Cycle

Research typically reveals that outgroups are regarded with disinterest at best and hatred and enmity at worst. Working from an evolutionary framework, we identify a unique pattern of outgroup attraction. The small-group lifestyle of pre-human ancestor…

Womens Fertility Status Alters Other Womens Jealousy and Mate Guarding

Across three studies, we tested the hypothesis that women exhibit greater jealousy and mate guarding toward women who are in the high (vs. low) fertility phase of their cycle. Women who imagined their partner with a woman pictured at high fertility rep…

Moralization Through Moral Shock: Exploring Emotional Antecedents to Moral Conviction

The current research tested whether exposure to disgusting images increases moral conviction and whether this happens in the presence of incidental disgust cues versus disgust cues relevant to the target of moralization. Across two studies, we exposed …

Propositional Versus Dual-Process Accounts of Evaluative Conditioning: I. The Effects of Co-Occurrence and Relational Information on Implicit and Explicit Evaluations

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is defined as the change in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its pairing with a valenced unconditioned stimulus (US). According to propositional accounts, EC effects should be qualified by the relation b…

I Am Aware of My Inconsistencies but Can Tolerate Them: The Effect of High Quality Listening on Speakers Attitude Ambivalence

We examined how listeners characterized by empathy and a non-judgmental approach affect speakers’ attitude structure. We hypothesized that high quality listening decreases speakers’ social anxiety, which in turn reduces defensive processing…