Your Psychology Psychology articles and news

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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 …

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…

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…