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Self-expansion without regard for others’ well-being may represent the dark side of an otherwise healthy motive. Guided by Amoebic Self-Theory (AST), we developed the Engulfing Self Scale (ESS) to measure acquisitive tendencies across AST’s…

Past research showed that East Asians’ belief in holism was expressed as their tendencies to include background facial emotions into the evaluation of target faces more than North Americans. However, this pattern can be interpreted as North Ameri…

Are depressive symptoms associated with more biased or more accurate interpersonal perceptions? Both members of committed heterosexual couples (N = 78) reported on their perceptions of their partner’s commitment and behavior daily across a 3-week…

To date, little research has examined the impact of attitudinal ambivalence on attitude-congruent selective exposure. Past research would suggest that strong/univalent rather than weak/ambivalent attitudes should be more predictive of proattitudinal in…

Three studies examined the production of political messages and their persuasive impact on recipients as a function of speaker–audience similarity. The first two studies found support for the hypothesis that political leaders (Study 1) and party …

We used an achievement goal framework to enhance identity-threatened individuals’ motivation and performance by way of an understudied mechanism, namely, challenge appraisals. In three experiments, women were given a mastery goal (focus on buildi…

Two experiments examined for the first time whether the specific content of participant-generated affirmation essays—in particular, writing about social belonging—facilitated an affirmation intervention’s ability to reduce identity th…

How stable are individual differences in self-esteem? We examined the time-dependent decay of rank-order stability of self-esteem and tested whether stability asymptotically approaches zero or a nonzero value across long test–retest intervals. An…

The generalization of attitudes toward individual outgroup members into attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole can affect intergroup relations. However, little is known about the relative strengths of the generalization of negative and positive inter…

Two studies tested the idea that the situations that people encounter frequently and the situations that they associate most strongly with an emotion differ across cultures in ways that can be understood from what a culture condones or condemns. In a q…