The 10 most-cited articles in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2018

We show that faces contain much more information about sexual orientation than can be perceived or interpreted by the human brain. We used deep neural networks to extract features from 35,326 facial images. These features were entered into a logistic regression aimed at classifying sexual orientation. Given a single facial image, a classifier could correctly distinguish between gay and heterosexual men in 81% of cases, and in 71% of cases for women. Human judges achieved much lower accuracy: 61% for men and 54% for women. The accuracy of the algorithm increased to 91% and 83%, respectively, given five facial images per person. Facial features employed by the classifier included both fixed (e.g., nose shape) and transient facial features (e.g., grooming style). Consistent with the prenatal hormone theory of sexual orientation, gay men and women tended to have gender-atypical facial morphology, expression, and grooming styles. Prediction models aimed at gender alone allowed for detecting gay males with 57% accuracy and gay females with 58% accuracy. Those findings advance our…

We introduce and investigate the philosophical concept of 'speciesism' -the assignment of different moral worth based on species membership -as a psychological construct. In five studies, using both general population samples online and student samples, we show that speciesism is a measurable, stable construct with high interpersonal differences, that goes along with a cluster of other forms of prejudice, and is able to predict real-world decision-making and behavior. In Study 1 we present the development and empirical validation of a theoretically driven Speciesism Scale, which captures individual differences in speciesist attitudes. In Study 2, we show high test-retest reliability of the scale over a period of four weeks, suggesting that speciesism is stable over time. In Study 3, we present positive correlations between speciesism and prejudicial attitudes such as racism, sexism, homophobia, along with ideological constructs associated with prejudice such as social dominance orientation, system justification, and right-wing authoritarianism. These results suggest that similar…

In light of current concerns with replicability and reporting false-positive effects in psychology, we examine Type I errors and power associated with 2 distinct approaches for the assessment of mediation, namely the component approach (testing individual parameter estimates in the model) and the index approach (testing a single mediational index). We conduct simulations that examine both approaches and show that the most commonly used tests under the index approach risk inflated Type I errors compared with the joint-significance test inspired by the component approach. We argue that the tendency to report only a single mediational index is worrisome for this reason and also because it is often accompanied by a failure to critically examine the individual causal paths underlying the mediational model. We recommend testing individual components of the indirect effect to argue for the presence of an indirect effect and then using other recommended procedures to calculate the size of that effect. Beyond simple mediation, we show that our conclusions also apply in cases of…

People often recruit social resources to manage their emotions, a phenomenon known as interpersonal emotion regulation (IER). Despite its importance, IER's psychological structure remains poorly understood. We propose that two key dimensions describe IER: (a) individuals' tendency to pursue IER in response to emotional events, and (b) the efficacy with which they perceive IER improves their emotional lives. To probe these dimensions, we developed the Interpersonal Regulation Questionnaire (IRQ), a valid and reliable measure of individual differences in IER. Factor analyses of participants' responses confirmed tendency and efficacy as independent dimensions of IER (Study 1; N = 285), and demonstrated independence between how individuals engage with IER in response to negative, versus positive, emotion. In Study 2 (N = 347), we found that individuals high in IER tendency and efficacy are more emotionally expressive, empathetic, and socially connected. Two subsequent studies highlighted behavioral consequences of IER dimensions: people high in IER tendency sought out others more often…

= 38, respectively), to validate the personality scales and estimate measurement error. This was the first study to test personality stability/change over a 50-year time span in which the same data source was tapped (i.e., self-report). This allowed us to use 4 different methods (rank-order stability, mean-level change, individual-level change, and profile stability) answering different developmental questions. We also systematically tested gender differences. We found that the average rank-order stability was .31 (corrected for measurement error) and .23 (uncorrected). The average mean-level change was half of a standard deviation across personality traits, and the pattern of change showed maturation. Individual-level change also supported maturation, with 20% to 60% of the people showing reliable change within each trait. We tested 3 aspects of personality profile stability, and found that overall personality profile stability was .37, distinctive profile stability was .17, and profile normativeness was .51 at baseline and .62 at the follow-up. Gender played little role in…

Life events refer to status changes in important demographic variables, such as employment or marital status. Life events offer an interesting opportunity for studying transactions between environmental changes and personality traits, which are of relevance for diverging theories about the role of environmental factors in life span personality development. Yet in spite of the potential importance of life events for personality development, nuanced and sufficiently powered longitudinal designs with frequent assessments of life events and personality traits are lacking. The current study aims to address this gap by examining the associations between different life events and personality trait change, using data from a large, nationally representative, and prospective longitudinal study. Results demonstrated a number of selection effects, indicating that personality traits affect the likelihood that individuals experience certain types of life events. Less frequently, results indicated average effects of life events on personality trait development, both in anticipation of a life event…

Taking another person's perspective is widely presumed to increase interpersonal understanding. Very few experiments, however, have actually tested whether perspective taking increases accuracy when predicting another person's thoughts, feelings, attitudes, or other mental states. Those that do yield inconsistent results, or they confound accuracy with egocentrism. Here we report 25 experiments testing whether being instructed to adopt another person's perspective increases interpersonal insight. These experiments include a wide range of accuracy tests that disentangle egocentrism and accuracy, such as predicting another person's emotions from facial expressions and body postures, predicting fake versus genuine smiles, predicting when a person is lying or telling the truth, and predicting a spouse's activity preferences and consumer attitudes. Although a large majority of pretest participants believed that perspective taking would systematically increase accuracy on these tasks, we failed to find any consistent evidence that it actually did so. If anything, perspective taking…

Mindfulness meditation interventions-which train skills in monitoring present-moment experiences with a lens of acceptance-have shown promise for increasing positive emotions. Using a theory-based approach, we hypothesized that learning acceptance skills in mindfulness interventions helps people notice more positive experiences in daily life, and tested whether removing acceptance training from mindfulness interventions would eliminate intervention-related boosts in positive affect. In 2 randomized controlled trials (RCTs) of stressed community adults, mindfulness skills were dismantled into 2 structurally equivalent interventions: (a) training in both monitoring and acceptance (Monitor + Accept) and (b) training in monitoring only (Monitor Only) without acceptance training. Study 1 tested 8-week group-based Monitor + Accept and Monitor Only interventions compared with a no treatment control group. Study 2 tested 2-week smartphone-based Monitor + Accept and Monitor Only interventions compared with an active control training. In both studies, end-of-day and momentary positive affect…

Despite envy's importance as a driver of social behavior, scholars disagree on its conceptualization. We review the literature and distinguish three incongruent theories: (a) Malicious Envy Theory (i.e., envy as uniform and malicious), (b) Dual Envy Theory (i.e., envy as taking on 2 forms, benign and malicious), and (c) Pain Theory of Envy (i.e., envy as uniform and driven by pain). Moreover, within and across theories, operationalizations of envy have included various different components. We integrate these conceptualizations using a data-driven approach, deriving a comprehensive theory of envy in 5 studies (total N = 1,237)-the Pain-driven Dual Envy (PaDE) Theory. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses of an exhaustive set of envy components (Studies 1-4) suggest that envy consists of 3 factors: Pain (i.e., preoccupation with the envy-eliciting situation, inferiority), predicts both benign envy (i.e., desire for the envy object, improvement motivation, emulation of the other), and malicious envy (i.e., communication about the other, directed aggression, nondirected…

Depressive symptomatology is manifested in greater first-person singular pronoun use (i.e., I-talk), but when and for whom this effect is most apparent, and the extent to which it is specific to depression or part of a broader association between negative emotionality and I-talk, remains unclear. Using pooled data from N = 4,754 participants from 6 labs across 2 countries, we examined, in a preregistered analysis, how the depression-I-talk effect varied by (a) first-person singular pronoun type (i.e., subjective, objective, and possessive), (b) the communication context in which language was generated (i.e., personal, momentary thought, identity-related, and impersonal), and (c) gender. Overall, there was a small but reliable positive correlation between depression and I-talk (r = .10, 95% CI [.07, .13]). The effect was present for all first-person singular pronouns except the possessive type, in all communication contexts except the impersonal one, and for both females and males with little evidence of gender differences. Importantly, a similar pattern of results emerged for…