Communicating Extremity: Fitness Efficacy and Standards Relate to Using Extreme Imagery and Messaging to Create Fitness-Related Media.

Health-related social media increasingly competes with other forms of health communication for public attention. To advance understanding of the genesis of health-related social media communicating extreme fitness standards, we investigated women's creation of fitspiration, social-media content combining fitness images with effortful messages. In a pre-registered study, we hypothesized that creating extreme fitspiration content would relate positively to fitness fantasizing and to exercise self-efficacy, fitness perfectionism, physical activity, thin- and muscular-ideal internalizations, and self-objectification. Undergraduate women (N = 277) created their own fitspiration content by selecting from fitness images and messages that varied in extremity. Fitness fantasizing related positively to creating more extreme fitspiration. When controlling statistically for all other individual-difference variables, exercise self-efficacy and perfectionistic strivings emerged as key variables associated with creating extreme fitspiration content. Results suggest that women who are confident and strive toward challenging goals may create fitspiration content that communicates extreme standards. This work has implications for understanding a potential disconnect between fitspiration creators and consumers, which may illuminate ways to promote healthy fitness communications online.

The generality of effects of emotional experience on emotion-regulation choice.

To understand how emotional experiences affect general strategic preferences, we assessed participants' preferred strategies of regulating emotional responses to previewed and not-yet-encountered stimuli. For previewed stimuli, participants selected distraction more often than reappraisal for high- (vs. low-) intensity negative-valence visual images (replicating Sheppes, Scheibe, Suri, & Gross, 2011), and the same intensity/choice pattern emerged for previewed auditory sounds. Most notably, participants' recent emotional experiences also influenced their choices for regulating emotional responses to not-yet-encountered stimuli. Exposure to high- (vs. low-) intensity negative-valence visual images increased selection of distraction (vs. reappraisal) for regulating responses to upcoming (not-yet-encountered) visual images (Experiment 1), and the same intensity/choice pattern emerged whereby stimuli encountered in one modality (visual) impacted choices for regulating responses to stimuli of a different modality (auditory; Experiment 2). These results suggest that emotional experiences directly impact people's strategic inclinations. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Distinct neural responses to social and semantic violations: An N400 study.

We investigated event-related brain potential correlates of encountering context-incongruent social information. Building on evidence that information semantically incongruent with its context elicits an N400 response (a prominent negative-going deflection in the ongoing electroencephalogram; EEG), we hypothesized that statements incongruent (relative to congruent) with basic standards of amicable treatment by others (e.g., "Your friend breaks your computer and then laughs [apologizes]") would elicit larger-amplitude N400 responses. EEG was recorded from N = 20 undergraduates while they viewed 106 semantic-dimension and 106 social-dimension sentences. We obtained the classic N400 effect to semantic violations, but we did not observe greater N400 amplitudes to incongruent than to congruent social-dimension sentences. Our findings of N400 modulation by semantic violations but not social norm violations help clarify potential boundary conditions for eliciting the N400.

Subjective Importance as a Cue for Self-Reference.

We investigated whether people's judgments of self-reference could be influenced by cues of importance. Our investigation builds on evidence that information related to the self is processed in specialized ways and that implicit attributions affect how stimuli are interpreted. We hypothesized that the more important a trait descriptor was, the more likely participants would be to misremember it as having been presented in a self-referential manner. This hypothesis was tested using a source-memory task; subjective ratings of importance served as predictors of accuracy. In two experiments, logistic multilevel analyses supported our predictions, indicating that people use cues of importance when deciding if stimuli are self-referential. The results show that people do not rely solely on valence when making self-referential judgments; importance also can bias self-referential attributions. These findings have implications for social and autobiographical memory, including how people may assign responsibility for jointly produced actions.

An Investigation of the Reliability and Self-Regulatory Correlates of Conflict Adaptation.

The study of the conflict-adaptation effect, in which encountering information-processing conflict attenuates the disruptive influence of information-processing conflicts encountered subsequently, is a burgeoning area of research. The present study investigated associations among performance measures on a Stroop-trajectory task (measuring Stroop interference and conflict adaptation), on a Wisconsin Card Sorting Task (WCST; measuring cognitive flexibility), and on self-reported measures of self-regulation (including impulsivity and tenacity). We found significant reliability of the conflict-adaptation effects across a two-week period, for response-time and accuracy. Variability in conflict adaptation was not associated significantly with any indicators of performance on the WCST or with most of the self-reported self-regulation measures. There was substantial covariance between Stroop interference for accuracy and conflict adaptation for accuracy. The lack of evidence of covariance across distinct aspects of cognitive control (conflict adaptation, WCST performance, self-reported self-control) may reflect the operation of relatively independent component processes.

Conflict adaptation within but not across NoGo decision criteria: Event-related-potential evidence of specificity in the contextual modulation of cognitive control.

From the standpoint of conflict-monitoring theory (Botvinick et al., 2001), detecting an incident of information-processing conflict should attenuate the disruptive influence of information-processing conflicts encountered subsequently, by which time cognitive-control operations will have been engaged. To examine the generality of this conflict-adaptation process across task dimensions, the present research analyzed event-related potentials in a Go/NoGo task that randomly varied the NoGo decision criterion applied across trials. Sequential analyses revealed reduced-amplitude fronto-central N2 and NoGo P3 responses on the second of two consecutive NoGo trials. Importantly, both of these conflict-adaptation effects were present only when the same NoGo decision criterion was applied across trials n and n-1. These findings support the theory that encountering information-processing conflict focuses attention on specific stimulus-response contingencies (Verguts & Notebaert, 2009) rather than engages general cognitive-control mechanisms (Freitas & Clark, 2015). Further implications for the generality of cognitive control are discussed.

Generality and specificity in cognitive control: conflict adaptation within and across selective-attention tasks but not across selective-attention and Simon tasks.

To explain how cognitive control is modulated contextually, Botvinick, Braver, Barch, Carter, and Cohen (Psychol Rev 108:624-652, 2001) proposed that detecting information-processing conflict attenuates the disruptive influence of information-processing conflicts encountered subsequently, by which time appropriate cognitive-control mechanisms already will have been engaged. This conflict-adaptation hypothesis has motivated extensive programs of research while also attracting vigorous methodological critiques that highlight alternative accounts of trial n × trial n - 1 sequential effects in cognitive-control tasks. Addressing those alternatives through precluding analyzing stimulus repetitions without creating any sort of confounds among any stimulus or trial characteristics, the present research observed significant conflict-adaptation effects within and across several selective-attention tasks. Moreover, across-task conflict-adaptation effects were largest when spanning tasks (i.e., a newly developed Stroop-trajectory task and a flanker task, which both require resolving conflict among stimulus elements) that presumably depend on the same mechanism of cognitive control (selective attention) than when spanning tasks that do not (i.e., the Stroop-trajectory task and a Simon task, the latter-but not former-of which requires resolving conflict between stimulus and response elements). These findings contribute to advancing beyond examining whether or not conflict adaptation exists to clarifying the conditions under which it is and is not observed.

When cognitive control is calibrated: event-related potential correlates of adapting to information-processing conflict despite erroneous response preparation.

To examine when in the perception-action cycle resolving information-processing conflict modulates signals of the current need for cognitive control, the present work examined event-related potential correlates of response preparation (lateralized readiness potentials; LRPs) and of information-processing conflict (fronto-central N2 responses) on trial n flanker trials, as a function of whether trial n-1 entailed a congruent flanker, an incongruent flanker, or a NoGo cue. Although LRP-indexed erroneous response preparation was substantial on incongruent trials across all levels of trial n-1, N2 amplitudes and behavioral interference effects were attenuated on incongruent trials following NoGo and incongruent (relative to congruent) trials. Even after initial attentional and motor-preparation processes have transpired, then, relatively later control mechanisms appear sufficient to signal a reduced need to engage cognitive control anew.

Varieties of action control: event-related brain potentials of responding to symbolically congruent and incongruent cues.

Performing infrequently enacted responses requires overcoming a competing tendency to perform prepotent, frequently enacted responses. Similarly, responding to symbolically incompatible cues requires overcoming a competing tendency to perform prepotent, cue-compatible responses. To examine neural correlates of these aspects of human self-regulation, event-related brain potentials were acquired in two separate modified oddball experiments in which participants responded to all stimuli. Stimuli varied in frequency and in compatibility with the participants' intended actions. Irrespective of stimulus-response-compatibility, low-frequency responses were associated with P3 event-related potentials (ERPs) of maximal amplitude at posterior electrode sites. In contrast, irrespective of stimulus-response frequency, stimulus-incompatible responses were associated with enhanced P3 mean amplitude at frontal electrode sites. This prefrontal positivity was not affected by whether participants' actions were predetermined (always responding in single direction) or rule determined. Taken together, the findings indicate that response-compatibility effects are distributed in brain regions that overlap and extend beyond response frequency neural networks.

Contextual adjustments in cognitive control across tasks.

Does encountering information-processing conflict recruit general mechanisms of cognitive control or change only the representations of specific cues and responses? In the present experiments, a flanker task elicited responses to symbolic information (arrow meaning), whereas Stroop-like tasks elicited responses to nonsymbolic information (color of a letter or location of a target box). Despite these differences, when participants performed the flanker and Stroop tasks intermittently in randomized orders, the extent of information-processing conflict encountered on a particular trial modulated performance on the following trial. On across-task trial pairs, increases in response time to incongruent relative to congruent stimulus arrays were smaller immediately following incongruent trials than immediately following congruent trials. The degree of cognitive control exerted on a particular task thus appears to reflect not only the quality, but also the quantity, of recent experiences of information-processing conflict.

Resisting recently acted-on cues: compatibility of Go/NoGo responses to response history modulates (frontal P3) event-related potentials.

Using event-related potentials to investigate compatibility between past and present cue-response interactions, an experiment combined elements of selective-attention and Go/NoGo tasks. In the selective-attention part of each trial, participants responded to one of two visible numerical digits. Immediately afterward, in the Go/NoGo part of each trial, one of the same two digits appeared, with participants required to press the corresponding key on Go trials and to withhold responding on NoGo trials. Higher-amplitude anterior P3 responses on NoGo than on Go trials emerged when participants withheld responding to a recently selected cue but were greatly diminished when participants withheld responding to a recently ignored cue. The findings suggest that episodic traces of past Go/NoGo responses guide future action decisions, such that increased response control is needed to overcome bias to respond to recently acted-on NoGo cues.

Beware misleading cues: perceptual similarity modulates the N2/P3 complex.

Event-related potentials were used to investigate neural processes relating perceptual similarity to action control. To assess whether perceptual overlap among targets and nontargets would modulate the N2/P3 complex, the present study used multiple nontarget categories varying in their targetlike characteristics. Participants made one (relatively rare) response to a low-probability stimulus (target), and they made a different (relatively common) response to all other stimuli (nontargets). The critical nontarget categories had equivalent probability (.10) but varied in their targetlike characteristics. Supporting the N2 component as sensitive to the strength of conflicting action imperatives, perceptual overlap among targets and nontargets elicited a prominent N2. In contrast, amplitude of the P3 component appeared most sensitive to the extent of cognitive processing needed for categorization.

Transfer of value from fit.

People experience regulatory fit when they pursue a goal in a manner that sustains their regulatory orientation (E. T. Higgins, 2000). Five studies tested whether the value experienced from regulatory fit can transfer to a subsequent evaluation of an object. In Studies 1 and 2, participants gave the same coffee mug a higher price if they had chosen it with a strategy that fit their orientation (eager strategy/promotion; vigilant strategy/prevention) than a strategy that did not fit. Studies 3-5 investigated possible mechanisms underlying this effect. Value transfer was independent of positive mood, perceived effectiveness (instrumentality), and perceived efficiency (ease), and occurred for an object that w as independent of the fit process itself. The findings supported a value confusion account of transfer.

Construing action abstractly and blurring social distinctions: implications for perceiving homogeneity among, but also empathizing with and helping, others.

Most people's actions serve goals that, defined abstractly enough, are quite similar to one another. The authors thus proposed, and found, that construing action in abstract (vs. concrete) terms relates to perceiving greater similarity among persons both within and across different social groups (Studies 1-3). By fostering perspective taking, viewing action abstractly also related to empathizing with and expressing willingness to help nonstigmatized and stigmatized others (e.g., AIDS patients; Studies 3-5) and to donating money to help those in need (Study 6). These findings held when controlling for ideological, motivational, and broad personality variables. Abstract action construals, then, appear to blur social distinctions, fostering perspective taking and empathy on the one hand but also perceptions of group homogeneity on the other.

Enjoying goal-directed action: the role of regulatory fit.

We propose that the fit between an action's strategic orientation and the actor's regulatory state can influence the amount of enjoyment the action provides. In two studies using different methods of manipulating regulatory states and of gauging action evaluations, high regulatory fit increased participants' anticipations of action enjoyability. In a third study, high regulatory fit increased participants' enjoyment of perceived success at, and willingness to repeat a novel laboratory task, and these effects were independent of participants' actual success on the task. Across the three studies, participants in a regulatory state oriented toward accomplishment experienced eagerness-related actions more favorably than vigilance-related actions, whereas participants in a regulatory state oriented toward responsibility experienced vigilance-related actions more favorably than eagerness-related actions. These findings' implications for understanding task interest and motivation are discussed.