Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Number of citations and the h-index are popular metrics for indexing scientific impact. These, and other existing metrics, are strongly related to scientists’ seniority. This article introduces complementary indicators that are unrelated to the number of years since PhD. To illustrate cumulative and career-stage approaches for assessing the scientific impact across a discipline, citations for 611 scientists from 97 U.S. and Canadian social psychology programs are amassed and analyzed. Results provide benchmarks for evaluating impact across the career span in psychology and other disciplines with similar citation patterns. Career-stage indicators provide a very different perspective on individual and program impact than cumulative impact, and may predict emerging scientists and programs. Comparing social groups, Whites and men had higher impact than non-Whites and women, respectively. However, average differences in career stage accounted for most of the difference for both groups.

The intentionality bias is the tendency for people to view the behavior of others as intentional. This study tests the hypothesis that alcohol magnifies the intentionality bias by disrupting effortful cognitive abilities. Using a 2 × 2 balanced placebo design in a natural field experiment disguised as a food-tasting session, participants received either a high dose of alcohol (target BAC = .10%) or no alcohol, with half of each group believing they had or had not consumed alcohol. Participants then read a series of sentences describing simple actions (e.g., “She cut him off in traffic”) and indicated whether the actions were done intentionally or accidentally. As expected, intoxicated people interpreted more acts as intentional than did sober people. This finding helps explain why alcohol increases aggression. For example, intoxicated people may interpret a harmless bump in a crowded bar as a provocation.

Four studies examined social relatedness and positive affect (PA) as alternate sources of information for judgments of meaning in life (MIL). In Studies 1 through 3 (total N = 282), priming loneliness increased reliance on PA and decreased reliance on social functioning in MIL judgments. In Study 4 (N = 138), daily assessments of PA, relatedness needs satisfaction (RNS), and MIL were obtained every 5 days over 20 days. Multilevel modeling showed that on days when RNS was low, PA was strongly related to MIL. Results suggest the dynamic ways that social relationships and PA inform judgments of MIL. Informational and motivational accounts of these results are discussed.

Perceivers can accurately judge a face’s sexual orientation, but the perceptual mechanisms mediating this remain obscure. The authors hypothesized that stereotypes casting gays and lesbians as gender “inverts,” in cultural circulation for a century and a half, lead perceivers to use gendered facial cues to infer sexual orientation. Using computer-generated faces, Study 1 showed that as two facial dimensions (shape and texture) became more gender inverted, targets were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Study 2 showed that real faces appearing more gender inverted were more likely to be judged as gay or lesbian. Furthermore, the stereotypic use of gendered cues influenced the accurate judgment of sexual orientation. Although using gendered cues increased the accuracy of sexual orientation judgments overall, Study 3 showed that judgments were reliably mistaken for targets that countered stereotypes. Together, the findings demonstrate that perceivers utilize gendered facial cues to glean another’s sexual orientation, and this influences the accuracy or error of judgments.

Three studies tested whether implicit prototypes about who is authentically American predict discriminatory behavior and judgments against Americans of non-European descent. These studies identified specific contexts in which discrimination is more versus less likely to occur, the underlying mechanism driving it, and moderators of such discrimination. Studies 1 and 2 demonstrated that the more participants held implicit beliefs that the prototypical American is White, the less willing they were to hire qualified Asian Americans in national security jobs; however, this relation did not hold in identical corporate jobs where national security was irrelevant. The implicit belief—behavior link was mediated by doubts about Asian Americans’ national loyalty. Study 3 demonstrated a similar effect in a different domain: The more participants harbored race-based national prototypes, the more negatively they evaluated an immigration policy proposed by an Asian American but not a White policy writer. Political conservatism magnified this effect because of greater concerns about the national loyalty of Asian Americans.

Lonely individuals typically fear negative evaluation and engage in overly cautious social behaviors that perpetuate their social isolation. Recent research has found analogous security-oriented (i.e., prevention-focused) responses following experiences highlighting concerns with social loss but differing growth-oriented (i.e., promotion-focused ) responses, such as attempts at social engagement, following experiences highlighting concerns with social gain. The present studies thus investigated whether fostering a promotion focus among lonely individuals through subtle primes of acceptance could reduce their self-protective social avoidance. This hypothesis was supported across four studies in which the links between primed acceptance and promotion-focused motivations were first established, and the impact of such primes on lonely individuals’ social thoughts, intentions, and behaviors were then tested. Implications of observed differences between effects of acceptance primes on lonely versus nonlonely individuals are discussed in terms of deficits versus satiation with feelings of belonging.

Four studies show that mood systematically affects attributions of observed behavior by altering relative attention to actor and context. When the actor is more salient, sad people are more inclined to perceive an actor in stable trait terms and favor dispositional over situational explanations, whereas the opposite is true for happy people (Studies 1-3). However, when the context is made more salient, this pattern reverses, such that those in a negative mood make more situational attributions than those in a positive mood (Study 4). Taken together, these findings provide strong support for our hypothesis that mood and salience interact to affect attributions.

Research has found that a substantial portion of human cognition occurs beyond conscious awareness to satisfy the superordinate goal of maintaining meaning. Three experiments used a newly developed method to examine the features of meaning and how individuals automatically defend against threats to meaning. In Experiment 1, individuals who subliminally processed meaninglessness-related words, relative to those in a control group, reported being more religious and having more meaningful lives. Experiment 2 extended these results, as individuals whose meaning was threatened bolstered alternative domains of meaning (termed fluid compensation) by reporting higher self-esteem, need for closure, symbolic immortality, and a reduced need to belong. Experiment 3 ruled out an alternative explanation and clarified the effects of threatened meaning on one’s need to belong. These findings elucidate the processes of meaning maintenance in sustaining psychological equanimity. Implications for the automatic defense of meaning are discussed.

Rebound of thoughts after thought suppression is widely documented. Much less is known about the effects of suppression on rebound of behavior. The current studies show that suppressing thoughts (Experiment 1 and 2) and suppressing behavior (Experiment 3) may cause rebound of behavior. In Experiment 1 suppressing thoughts of thirst rebounded in enhanced drinking, in Experiment 2 suppressing aggressive thoughts rebounded in subsequent aggression, and in Experiment 3 suppressing laughter rebounded in enhanced subsequent laughing. Supporting the Motivational Inference Model of postsuppressional rebound, the studies show that behavioral rebound is reduced if participants are led to believe that suppression is difficult for everybody (Experiments 1 and 2). Also consistent with this model is the finding that motivation to do the suppressed behavior mediated rebound (Experiment 3). The implications for rebound of unwanted behaviors are discussed.

People often misattribute the causes of their thoughts and feelings. The authors propose a multinomial process model of affect misattributions, which separates three component processes. The first is an affective response to the true cause of affect. The second is an affective response to the apparent cause. The third process is when the apparent source is confused for the real source. The model is validated using the affect misattribution procedure (AMP), which uses misattributions as a means to implicitly measure attitudes. The model illuminates not only the AMP but also other phenomena in which researchers wish to model the processes underlying misattributions using subjective judgments.

Navigating social life requires accurately calibrated sensitivity to external feedback, thus extreme sensitivity to external feedback may be maladaptive. Using a daily diary design, the authors investigated whether the relationship between social hypersensitivity and daily events predicted level, lability, and reactivity of both self-esteem and affect. Relative to their less sensitive peers, socially hypersensitive people exhibited lower levels of self-esteem and greater negative affect and experienced greater fluctuations in self-esteem and negative affect. Although most people were negatively reactive to the presence of negative feedback, socially hypersensitive people were negatively reactive to the absence of positive feedback as well. The authors argue that reactivity to the absence of positive feedback is a fundamental, heretofore untested aspect of what makes social hypersensitivity a pernicious orientation.

In intergroup comparisons one group usually becomes the implicit norm that other groups are compared to. Three studies address the consequences that the direction of the comparison has for perceptions of the compared groups. For real groups (Experiment 1) and fictitious groups (Experiments 2 and 3) participants perceived a group as more powerful and higher in status when it had been the norm rather than the effect to be explained in a text comparing two groups. Moreover, norm groups and their “typical” members were perceived as more agentic and less communal than comparison groups, and these attributions were mediated by the ascription of power. The authors conclude that systematic ways of explaining one group rather than another could serve as a subtle tool to perpetuate the status quo of intergroup power relations.