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Description
This project uses a functional approach to understand how members of stigmatized groups perceive emotional expressions on others' faces. The project starts from the premise that different groups are seen to pose different threats to others, and thus different groups face prejudices colored by different, specific negative emotions. For example,

This project uses a functional approach to understand how members of stigmatized groups perceive emotional expressions on others' faces. The project starts from the premise that different groups are seen to pose different threats to others, and thus different groups face prejudices colored by different, specific negative emotions. For example, prejudice toward Black men is driven largely by fear, whereas prejudice toward obese people is driven largely by disgust. Members of these groups may thus come to be "expert" in perceiving fear or disgust in others' faces, depending on the specific emotional prejudices others feel toward their group. Alternatively, members of these groups may be biased to over- or under-perceive these emotional expressions on others' faces. I used a functional approach to predict that, if a Black man believes that seeing others' fear expressions will be useful to him, he will tend to overperceive fear on others' faces, whereas if an obese man believes that seeing others' disgust expressions will be useful to him, he will tend to overperceive disgust on others' faces. If, however, it is not considered useful to perceive these prejudicial emotions on others' faces, Black men and obese people will tend to underperceive these emotional expressions. This study recruited Black men, overweight men, and a group of comparison men. All participants completed an emotion detection task in which they rated faces on whether they expressed fear, disgust, or no emotion. Participants were randomly assigned to complete this emotion detection task either before or after a questionnaire designed to make salient, as well as to measure, participants' beliefs about others' prejudices and stereotypes of their group. Finally, participants completed a set of measures tapping predicted moderator variables. Results suggested that a) Black men tend to be less sensitive perceivers of both fear and disgust on others' faces than are other groups, unless prejudice is salient, and b) variables that would guide the functionality of perceiving others' prejudicial emotional expressions (e.g., belief that prejudice toward one's group is justified, belief that group status differences are legitimate, belief that one can manage stigmatizing interactions, stigma consciousness, and emotion-specific metastereotypes of one's group) do predict differences among Black men in perceiving these emotions on others' faces. Most results for overweight participants were null findings. The results' implications for the psychology of detecting prejudice, and emotional expressions more broadly, are discussed.
ContributorsNeel, Rebecca (Author) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Thesis advisor) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Becker, D. Vaughn (Committee member) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2013
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Description
An offender's expression of remorse plays an important role following relational transgressions, yet it is not well understood how the experience and expression of remorse relate to both victim responses to hurt and forgiveness in close relationships. This study uses a social functionalist framework to investigate the role of remorse

An offender's expression of remorse plays an important role following relational transgressions, yet it is not well understood how the experience and expression of remorse relate to both victim responses to hurt and forgiveness in close relationships. This study uses a social functionalist framework to investigate the role of remorse in the forgiveness process and tests whether offender remorse experiences mediate the associations between victim responses to hurt and remorse expressions. Undergraduate participants (N=671) completed questionnaires about a time when they hurt a close relational partner and reported their partners' responses to hurt, their own experiences and expressions of remorse, and their perceptions of forgiveness. Results indicated that victims' sad communication positively predicted offenders' other-oriented and affiliation remorse experiences; victims' threatening communication positively predicted offenders' self-focused remorse experience; and victims' conciliatory communication and withdrawal positively predicted offenders' affiliation and self-focused remorse experiences. Results of the mediation analyses revealed that self-focused remorse fully mediated the relationship between victim threatening communication and low status behaviors; other-oriented remorse partially mediated the association between victim sad communication and apology/concern behaviors; and affiliation partially mediated the relationship between victim conciliatory communication and connection behaviors. Victims' withdrawal behaviors and offenders' use of compensation were not related. Finally, offenders' apology/concern and connection behaviors associated positively with perceptions of forgiveness, whereas low status behaviors negatively predicted forgiveness. Use of compensation following a hurtful event was not significantly related to forgiveness. Results are interpreted within the framework of evolutionary psychology and further validate the functional approach to studying emotion.
ContributorsGracyalny, Monica (Author) / Mongeau, Paul A. (Thesis advisor) / Guerrero, Laura K. (Committee member) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
Pro-environmental goals often pit immediate self-interest against future communal interest. Consequently, the motivation to behave in pro-environmental ways can be particularly difficult to maintain over time. By framing environmental ills as threats to one's chronic concerns, I suggest that chronic motivations, such as disease avoidance, can be leveraged to engender

Pro-environmental goals often pit immediate self-interest against future communal interest. Consequently, the motivation to behave in pro-environmental ways can be particularly difficult to maintain over time. By framing environmental ills as threats to one's chronic concerns, I suggest that chronic motivations, such as disease avoidance, can be leveraged to engender longer-lasting pro-environmental motivation. Specifically, I suggest that three distinct categories of environmental ills should be associated with distinct chronic concerns, and that the mechanisms that regulate these concerns should also regulate reactions to related environmental ills: pollution should engage a pathogenic disgust mechanism, wastefulness a moral disgust mechanism, and framing environmental outcomes as posing safety concerns should be linked to fear and anger mechanisms. Results of four experiments did not lend consistent support to the hypotheses. Neither situationally primed concerns nor motivation-relevant individual differences produced consistent results suggesting an association between the proposed motivations and the relevant environmental outcomes.
ContributorsBerlin, Joy (Author) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Thesis advisor) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Ledlow, Susan E (Committee member) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Traditional perspectives on sexual prejudice typically focus on the distinction between heterosexual ingroup and homosexual outgroup. In contrast, I focus on an affordance-management paradigm which views prejudices as resulting not from ingroup/outgroup relations, but instead from perceptions of the threats and opportunities posed by members of different groups. Past research

Traditional perspectives on sexual prejudice typically focus on the distinction between heterosexual ingroup and homosexual outgroup. In contrast, I focus on an affordance-management paradigm which views prejudices as resulting not from ingroup/outgroup relations, but instead from perceptions of the threats and opportunities posed by members of different groups. Past research has demonstrated that non-heterosexual target groups are perceived to pose a variety of threats, including threats to the socialization of young children, of child molestation, of disease, and to values. My research, however, suggests sexual prejudices arise for college students from beliefs that certain sexual orientation groups pose threats of unwanted sexual interest. For young adults, mating concerns are salient and should define relevant threats and opportunities--including those that might drive prejudices. For individuals with different active motivations, however, different threats and opportunities and threats are salient, and so the threats driving sexual prejudices may also differ. I extend my past research to consider how activating different fundamental goals (e.g., disease avoidance, parenting) alters patterns of sexual prejudice. I posit that activating disease concerns will increase prejudice specifically toward non-heterosexuals associated with disease (gay and bisexual me)--but not other non-heterosexuals (lesbians and bisexual women)--whereas activating offspring care will increase prejudice toward all non-heterosexual target groups, as all are perceived to pose socialization threats. To test this, heterosexual participants were randomly assigned to a parenting or disease-avoidance goal activation, or control condition, and then rated their general negativity towards heterosexual, bisexual, and homosexual male and female targets. They also rated their perceptions of the extent to which each target posed unwanted sexual interest, socialization, and disease threats. Contrary to predictions, activating parenting and disease avoidance systems failed to affect sexual prejudices. Furthermore, although the pattern of observed data was largely consistent with previously observed patterns, women's attitudes towards gay men in the control condition were more negative than that found in previous studies, as were men's attitudes towards bisexual and lesbian women. Multiple mechanisms underlie sexual prejudices, and research is needed to better understand the circumstances under which alternative mechanisms are engaged and have their effects.
ContributorsPirlott, Angela (Author) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Thesis advisor) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Mackinnon, David P. (Committee member) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
An emerging body of literature suggests that humans likely have multiple threat avoidance systems that enable us to detect and avoid threats in our environment, such as disease threats and physical safety threats. These systems are presumed to be domain-specific, each handling one class of potential threats, and previous research

An emerging body of literature suggests that humans likely have multiple threat avoidance systems that enable us to detect and avoid threats in our environment, such as disease threats and physical safety threats. These systems are presumed to be domain-specific, each handling one class of potential threats, and previous research generally supports this assumption. Previous research has not, however, directly tested the domain-specificity of disease avoidance and self-protection by showing that activating one threat management system does not lead to responses consistent only with a different threat management system. Here, the domain- specificity of the disease avoidance and self-protection systems is directly tested using the lexical decision task, a measure of stereotype accessibility, and the implicit association test. Results, although inconclusive, more strongly support a series of domain-specific threat management systems than a single, domain- general system
ContributorsAnderson, Uriah Steven (Author) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Thesis advisor) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Neuberg, Steven L. (Committee member) / Becker, David V (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2011
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Description
As the world's resources face increasing pressure from a growing population, it is critical that psychologists understand the motivational processes that lead to cooperation or defection in the context of social dilemmas. Research has uncovered several key strategies for encouraging maintenance of these resources, however, one area that remains understudied

As the world's resources face increasing pressure from a growing population, it is critical that psychologists understand the motivational processes that lead to cooperation or defection in the context of social dilemmas. Research has uncovered several key strategies for encouraging maintenance of these resources, however, one area that remains understudied is the effect various emotions may have on cooperation. Furthermore, it is important to consider the specific type of desired behavior: reduction of consumption of a shared resource, or increased contribution to a shared resource. The current study takes a step in this direction, examining the effects of two self-conscious emotions, guilt and pride, on behavior in two different kinds of social dilemmas. Guilt, a prosocial emotion that has been described as a "behavioral interrupt mechanism," is predicted to increase cooperation in both a social trap game and a public goods dilemma game. However, its effects should be strongest in the social trap game, in which the desired behavior is reduced consumption. Pride, an emotion that is conceptually related to the constructs of status and power, is predicted to motivate action in both domains, by increasing both consumption in the social trap game and contribution in the public goods dilemma game. Results partially support these predictions: Whereas guilt and pride both had the predicted effects on consumption in the social trap game, neither had a significant effect on contribution in the public goods dilemma game. Individual differences are examined, as are the results of a Game Feedback Sheet, which yielded insight as to how participants understood the rules of the games, and why they chose the strategies they did. Results support the idea that emotions represent a potentially fruitful avenue of research in social dilemma cooperation, and possible future directions for this research are discussed.
ContributorsNeufeld, Samantha L (Author) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Thesis advisor) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Ledlow, Susan E (Committee member) / Saks, Michael J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2012
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Description
Research on attachment in adults began by assuming parallels from attachment as a behavioral system for using relationships to balance the tradeoff between safety and exploration in infants, to the same tradeoff function in adults. Perhaps more pressing, for adults, are the novel social tradeoffs adults face when deciding how

Research on attachment in adults began by assuming parallels from attachment as a behavioral system for using relationships to balance the tradeoff between safety and exploration in infants, to the same tradeoff function in adults. Perhaps more pressing, for adults, are the novel social tradeoffs adults face when deciding how to invest resources between themselves and their close relationship partners. The current study investigated the role of the attachment system in navigating two such tradeoffs, in a sample of ASU undergraduates. In one tradeoff condition, participants had the option of working on puzzles to earn either themselves or their closest friend a monetary reward. In the second tradeoff condition, participants worked to earn monetary rewards for a close or new friend. Analyses showed no evidence of attachment avoidance predicting prioritizing redistributing money to a close friend in either condition. While there was no effect of anxiety on prioritizing one’s close friend over one’s self, there was a marginal effect in both prioritizing one’s close friend over a new friend when redistributing money and starting on the close friend’s word search first. Although attachment style largely did not predict earning or redistributing monetary rewards in these two relationship tradeoffs, implications for how these results fit within the broader theoretical perspective are discussed.
ContributorsYee, Claire (Author) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Thesis advisor) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Lemery-Chalfant, Kathryn (Committee member) / Luecken, Linda J. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2018
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Description
In most of the work using event-related potentials (ERPs), researchers presume the function of specific components based on the careful manipulation of experimental factors, but rarely report direct evidence supporting a relationship between the neural signal and other outcomes. Perhaps most troubling is the lack of evidence that ERPs correlate

In most of the work using event-related potentials (ERPs), researchers presume the function of specific components based on the careful manipulation of experimental factors, but rarely report direct evidence supporting a relationship between the neural signal and other outcomes. Perhaps most troubling is the lack of evidence that ERPs correlate with related behavioral outcomes which should result, at least in part, from the neural processes that ERPs capture. One such example is the NoGo-N2 component, an ERP component elicited in Go/NoGo paradigms. There are two primary theories regarding the functional significance of this component in this context: that the signal represents response inhibition and that the component reflects conflict. In this paper, a trial-level method of analysis for the relationship between ERP component potentials and downstream behavioral outcomes (in this case, response accuracy) using a multi-level modeling framework is proposed to provide discriminatory evidence for one of these theories. Following a description of the research on the NoGo-N2, preliminary data supporting the conflict monitoring theory are presented, noting important limitations. Next, an EEG simulation study is presented in which NoGo-N2 data are generated with a known relationship to fabricated reaction time data, showing that, with added levels of complexity and noise within the data, the MLM approach is consistently successful at extracting the known relationships that occur in real NoGo-N2 data. Next, using independent components analysis (ICA) to extract spatiotemporal components that best represent the signal of interest, a well-powered analysis of the relationship between the NoGo-N2 and response accuracy is used to provide strong discriminatory evidence for the conflict monitoring theory of the NoGo-N2. Finally, implications for the NoGo-N2, as well as all ERP components, are discussed with a focus on how this approach can and should be used. the paper concludes with potential expansions of this approach to areas beyond identifying the function of ERP components.
ContributorsHampton, Ryan Scott (Author) / Varnum, Michael E.W. (Thesis advisor) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Committee member) / Brewer, Gene A. (Committee member) / Blais, Chris (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
The present research expands on prior research that demonstrated a prototypical facial expression in response to cute, baby-like Kindchenschema targets. This expression, referred to as the tenderness expression, is recognizable to onlookers as a response to such stimuli. Across two studies, the current research examined if there were differences in

The present research expands on prior research that demonstrated a prototypical facial expression in response to cute, baby-like Kindchenschema targets. This expression, referred to as the tenderness expression, is recognizable to onlookers as a response to such stimuli. Across two studies, the current research examined if there were differences in perceptions of trustworthiness (Studies 1 and 2) and willingness to trust (Study 2) toward individuals displaying the tenderness expression as compared to a Duchenne smile or a neutral expression. Results indicate the tenderness expression is associated with lower ratings of trustworthiness relative to a smile, but no differences among the expressions on willingness to trust. Exploratory analyses demonstrate a replicated pattern of differences on the Big Five Personality Inventory among these three expressions. While these findings were not consistent with a priori hypotheses, this research provides further insight into the social implications associated with this tenderness expression.
ContributorsO'Neil, Makenzie J (Author) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Thesis advisor) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Wynne, Clive D.L. (Committee member) / Bradley, Robert H. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019
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Description
Past research has focused on the important role humor plays in interpersonal relationships; however, researchers have also identified intrapersonal applications of humor, showing that people often use humor to alleviate negative affect, and that humor has generally been found to beneficially influence mental health. The purpose of this study is

Past research has focused on the important role humor plays in interpersonal relationships; however, researchers have also identified intrapersonal applications of humor, showing that people often use humor to alleviate negative affect, and that humor has generally been found to beneficially influence mental health. The purpose of this study is to examine whether humor-based coping can be utilized as an intrapersonal tool to aid or facilitate creative thinking and problem solving when faced with a distressing situation. The current study posits reduced rumination as the mechanism by which humor facilitates creativity. To measure creativity, a task was devised that had individuals brainstorm under some distress; participants were asked to recall and describe an ongoing, unresolved problem they were facing, followed by a rumination induction, as rumination is characterized by perseverative thoughts that hinder constructive action. After the rumination induction, participants were randomly assigned to a control condition or either of two emotion regulation conditions: positive reappraisal or humor-based reappraisal. Following this, participants were asked to complete an “alternate solutions” task, based on Guilford’s Alternate Uses Task, generating solutions for their own unresolved problem. Results of the study showed that the use of humor was indeed related to a decrease in rumination, but that the humor condition did not outperform either control condition on any measure of creativity (performing worse in some cases). Limits of this study and future directions are discussed.
ContributorsPages, Erika (Author) / Shiota, Michelle N. (Thesis advisor) / Kenrick, Douglas T. (Committee member) / Varnum, Michael E.W. (Committee member) / Arizona State University (Publisher)
Created2019