The inherence bias in preschoolers' explanations for achievement differences: replication and extension.

Two studies examined how preschoolers (N = 610; French) explain differences in achievement. Replicating and extending previous research, the results revealed that children invoke more inherent factors (e.g., intelligence) than extrinsic factors (e.g., access to educational resources) when explaining why some children do better in school than others. This inherence bias in explanation can contribute to inequalities in education (e.g., the early-emerging disparities based on social class) by portraying them as fair and legitimate even when they are not.

From Diversity Ideologies to the Expression of Stereotypes: Insights Into the Cognitive Regulation of Prejudice Within the Cultural-Ecological Context of French Laïcité.

This theoretical paper examines the context-sensitivity of the impact of cultural norms on prejudice regulation. Granting the importance of understanding intergroup dynamics in cultural-ecological contexts, we focus on the peculiarities of the French diversity approach. Indeed, the major cultural norm, the Laïcité (i.e., French secularism) is declined today in two main variants: The Historic Laïcité, a longstanding egalitarian norm coexisting with its amended form: The New Laïcité, an assimilationist norm. In fact, these co-encapsulated Laïcité variants constitute a fruitful ground to cast light on the processes underlying prejudice regulation. Indeed, it is documented that the assimilationist New Laïcité is linked to higher levels of prejudice as compared to the egalitarian Historic Laïcité. To this day, research mainly explored interindividual determinants of Laïcité endorsements and specified how these endorsements shape prejudice. Crucially, this "indirect-endorsement path" does not account for the more straightforward causal relationship between Laïcité and prejudice. Moreover, recent experimental evidence suggests that the normative salience of both Laïcité norms shape intergroup attitudes beyond personal endorsement. Therefore, in this contribution, we complement previous work by investigating the possible socio-cognitive processes driving this "direct-contextual path." In doing so, we seek to bridge the gap of causality by investigating how the Laïcité norms can set the stage for specific regulatory strategies. Our reasoning derives from an application of the Justification-Suppression Model bolstered by classical work on mental control, modern racism and diversity ideology. From this, we sketch out the operative functioning of two distinct regulation processes: (a) one that prevents prejudicial attitudes but which can have unexpected consequences on stereotyping within the Historic Laïcité context (i.e., suppression) and (b) one that helps realize prejudice within the New Laïcité context (i.e., justification). From this analysis, we discuss the consequences for intergroup relations within and beyond the French context. In particular, we outline the importance of an adequate framing of egalitarian ideologies so that they achieve their goal to foster harmonious intergroup relations.

"Science Manipulates the Things and Lives in Them": Reconsidering Approach-Avoidance Operationalization Through a Grounded Cognition Perspective.

Approach and avoidance orientations are key elements of adaptive regulation at the evaluation-behavior interface. On the one hand, continuous evaluations of the world fuel approach-avoidance reactions as a function of the individual's immediate environment. On the other hand, in turn these individual-environment adjustments influence evaluations. A grounded perspective of social cognition, placing the sensorimotor aspects of individual-environment interactions at the core of cognition, has much to offer for the understanding of evaluative processes. Despite the growing enthusiasm for a grounded view of cognition and action in the approach-avoidance literature, its core principles are seldom reflected at the operationalization level. In this paper, we relied on the insights of a grounded perspective to propose more encompassing operationalizations of approach-avoidance orientations and investigate their influence on evaluations. Across six studies, we varied the approach-avoidance operationalizations (upper-body incline, upper-body posture and walking steps) and incrementally considered the grounded assumptions. We failed to obtain the theorized positive effect of approach (as compared to avoidance) on evaluations. Interestingly, further exploratory analyses on two studies conducted in Virtual Reality suggested that the more participants felt being present in the situation, the more the approach-avoidance ecological actions activated the corresponding neuropsychological systems. We discuss these emergent findings in light of grounded cognition and the notion of feeling of presence.

The modulation of the evaluative priming effect by phasic affect.

Previous research suggests that affect modulates the sequential priming effect such that positive affect yields robust sequential priming effects, whereas negative affect inhibits them. Although this observation has received substantial empirical support for semantic priming effects (i.e., faster responding to a target word following the earlier presentation of a meaningfully related prime), the evidence is rather scant concerning evaluative priming effects (i.e., faster and/or more accurate evaluative responding to a target word when it is preceded by an evaluatively consistent rather than an evaluatively inconsistent prime). The present research aimed at filling this gap, demonstrating the impact of phasic (temporally short-lived) affect on evaluative priming effects. In doing so, we addressed the shortcomings of previous research as we implemented affective contexts that changed from trial to trial in a within-participants design. In Experiments 1 and 2, brief positive music excerpts yielded a reliable evaluative priming effect, whereas brief negative excerpts inhibited it. In Experiment 3, we replicated and generalized these findings using a proprioceptive facial feedback procedure. Our results corroborate and extend previous research by showing that brief negative affect inhibits priming effects as compared to brief positive affect or a control condition. These findings attest to the flexibility of the evaluative priming effect and suggest it is permeable to subtle affective contexts that influence its magnitude.

Of guns and snakes: testing a modern threat superiority effect.

Previous studies suggest that ancient (i.e. evolutionary-based) threats capture attention because human beings possess an inborn module shaped by evolution and dedicated to their detection. An alternative account proposes that a key feature predicting whether a stimulus will capture attention is its relevance rather than its ontology (i.e. phylogenetic or ontogenetic threat). Within this framework, the present research deals with the attentional capture by threats commonly encountered in our urban environment. In two experiments, we investigate the attentional capture by modern threats (i.e. weapons). In Experiment 1, participants responded to a target preceded by a cue, which was a weapon or a non-threatening stimulus. We found a larger cuing effect (faster reaction times to valid vs. invalid trials) with weapons as compared with non-threatening cues. In Experiment 2, modern (e.g. weapons) and ancient threats (e.g. snakes) were pitted against one another as cues to determine which ones preferentially capture attention. Crucially, participants were faster to detect a target preceded by a modern as opposed to an ancient threat, providing initial evidence for a superiority of modern threat. Overall, the present findings appear more consistent with a relevance-based explanation rather than an evolutionary-based explanation of threat detection.

The out-of-my-league effect.

When taking into account the chances of success, strategic mating motivations do imply a bias not toward the most attractive individuals, but toward average or mildly attractive individuals, undermining the explanation of Maestripieri et al. at a fundamental level. This leaves open the possibility of alternative explanations and calls for a full-fledged explicit model of courtship behavior.

Higher order influences on evaluative priming: Processing styles moderate congruity effects.

A growing body of research challenges the automaticity of evaluative priming (EP). The present research adds to this literature by suggesting that EP is sensitive to processing styles. We relied on previous research showing that EP is determined by the extent to which the prime and the target events on a given trial are processed as a unified compound. Here, we further hypothesised that processing styles encouraging the inclusion of the prime to the target episode support congruity effects, whereas processing styles that enhance the exclusion of the prime from the target episode interrupt (or reverse) these effects. In Experiment 1, a preceding similarity search task produced a congruity effect, whereas a dissimilarity search task eliminated and (non-significantly) reversed this effect. In Experiments 2 and 3, we replicated and extended these findings using a global/local processing manipulation. Overall, these findings confirm that EP is flexible, open to top-down influences and strategic regulation.

Relational integrativity of prime-target pairs moderates congruity effects in evaluative priming.

In evaluative priming, positive or negative primes facilitate reactions to targets that share the same valence. While this effect is commonly explained as reflecting invariant structures in semantic long-term memory or in the sensorimotor system, the present research highlights the role of integrativity in evaluative priming. Integrativity refers to the ease of integrating two concepts into a new meaningful compound representation. In extended material tests using paired comparisons from two pools of positive and negative words, we show that evaluative congruity is highly correlated with integrativity. Therefore, in most priming studies, congruity and integrativity are strongly confounded. When both aspects are disentangled by manipulating congruity and integrativity orthogonally, three priming experiments show that evaluative-priming effects were confined to integrative prime-target pairs. No facilitation of prime-congruent targets was obtained for non-integrative stimuli. These findings are discussed from a broader perspective on priming conceived as flexible, context-dependent, and serving a generative adaptation function.

Emotional norms for 524 French personality trait words.

Newly measured rating norms provide a database of emotion-related dimensions for 524 French trait words. Measures include valence, approach/avoidance tendencies associated with the trait, possessor- and other-relevance of the trait, and discrete emotions conveyed by the trait (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). The normative data were obtained from 328 participants and were revealed to be stable across samples and gender. These data go beyond a dimensional structure and consider more fine-grained descriptions such as the categorical emotions, as well as the perspective of the evaluator conveyed by the traits. They should thus be particularly useful for researchers interested in emotion or in the emotional dimension of cognition, action, or personality. The database is available as supplementary material.

The impact of open and closed mindsets on evaluative priming.

In the present research, we argue that open versus closed mindsets, accompanying ongoing versus completed mental jobs on the prime, determine the size of congruity effects in the evaluative priming paradigm. More specifically, we hypothesised that disfluent primes that resist an easily completed encoding process should induce an open mindset and thereby result in stronger congruity effects than fluent primes that induce closed mindsets. Across two experiments, we applied two different manipulations of prime fluency: gradual demasking (experiment 1) and colour contrast (experiment 2). As expected, in both experiments we found robust congruity effects, but only on trials with disfluent (vs. fluent) primes. Results of a follow-up experiment suggest that these effects are not due to attentional processes. We conclude that the mindsets resulting from individuals' activities during encoding are crucial in determining the outcome of evaluative priming effects.

'Help me! I'm old!' How negative aging stereotypes create dependency among older adults.

OBJECTIVES: This study examined the effects of negative aging stereotypes on self-reported loneliness, risk-taking, subjective health, and help-seeking behavior in a French sample of older adults. The aim of this study was to show the detrimental effects of negative aging stereotypes on older adults' self-evaluations and behaviors, therefore contributing to the explanations of the iatrogenic effect of social environments that increase dependency (e.g., health care institutions). METHOD: In the first experiment conducted on 57 older adults, we explored the effects of positive, neutral, or negative stereotype activation on the feeling of loneliness and risk taking decision. The second experiment (n = 60) examined the impact of stereotype activation on subjective health, self-reported extraversion as well as on a genuine help-seeking behavior, by allowing participants to ask for the experimenter's help while completing a task. RESULTS: As predicted, negative stereotype activation resulted in lower levels of risk taking, subjective health and extraversion, and in higher feelings of loneliness and a more frequent help-seeking behavior. CONCLUSION: These findings suggest that the mere activation of negative stereotypes can have broad and deleterious effects on older individuals' self-evaluation and functioning, which in turn may contribute to the often observed dependency among older people.