Infectious Disease and Imperfections of Self-Image.

Infectious disease is an ever-present threat in daily life. Recent literature indicates that people manage this threat with a suite of antipathogenic psychological and behavioral defense mechanisms, which motivate the avoidance of people and objects bearing cues to pathogen risk. Here, we demonstrate that self-image is also impacted by these mechanisms. In seven studies, pathogen cues led individuals chronically averse to germs to express greater concern about their own physical appearance. Correspondingly, these people exhibited behavioral intentions and decisions intended to conceal or improve their appearance, such as purchasing facial products, taking pharmaceuticals, and undergoing cosmetic surgery. This work opens a new area of investigation for infectious-disease psychology research and highlights the central role played by physical appearance in pathogen-related cognition.

Out of sight but not out of mind: memory scanning is attuned to threatening faces.

Working memory (WM) theoretically affords the ability to privilege social threats and opportunities over other more mundane information, but few experiments have sought support for this contention. Using a functional logic, we predicted that threatening faces are likely to elicit encoding benefits in WM. Critically, however, threat depends on both the capacities and inclinations of the potential aggressor and the possible responses available to the perceiver. Two experiments demonstrate that participants more efficiently scan memory for angry facial expressions, but only when the faces also bear other cues that are heuristically associated with threat: masculinity in Study 1 and outgroup status in Study 2. Moreover, male participants showed robust speed and accuracy benefits, whereas female participants showed somewhat weaker effects, and only when threat was clearly expressed. Overall results indicate that working memory for faces depends on the accessibility of self-protective goals and on the functional relevance of other social attributes of the face.

When nasty breeds nice: threats of violence amplify agreeableness at national, individual, and situational levels.

Humans have perennially faced threats of violence from other humans and have developed functional strategies for surviving those threats. Five studies examined the relation between threats of violence and agreeableness at the level of nations, individuals, and situations. People living in countries with higher military spending (Study 1) and those who chronically perceive threats from others (Study 2) were more agreeable. However, this threat-linked agreeableness was selective (Studies 3-5). Participants primed with threat were more agreeable and willing to help familiar others but were less agreeable and willing to help unfamiliar others. Additionally, people from large families, for whom affiliation may be a salient response to threat, were more likely than people from small families to shift in agreeableness. Returning to the national level, military spending was associated with increased trust in ingroup members but decreased trust in outgroups. Together, these findings demonstrate that agreeableness is selectively modulated by threats of violence.

Signal detection on the battlefield: priming self-protection vs. revenge-mindedness differentially modulates the detection of enemies and allies.

Detecting signs that someone is a member of a hostile outgroup can depend on very subtle cues. How do ecology-relevant motivational states affect such detections? This research investigated the detection of briefly-presented enemy (versus friend) insignias after participants were primed to be self-protective or revenge-minded. Despite being told to ignore the objectively nondiagnostic cues of ethnicity (Arab vs. Western/European), gender, and facial expressions of the targets, both priming manipulations enhanced biases to see Arab males as enemies. They also reduced the ability to detect ingroup enemies, even when these faces displayed angry expressions. These motivations had very different effects on accuracy, however, with self-protection enhancing overall accuracy and revenge-mindedness reducing it. These methods demonstrate the importance of considering how signal detection tasks that occur in motivationally-charged environments depart from results obtained in conventionally motivationally-inert laboratory settings.

The face in the crowd effect unconfounded: happy faces, not angry faces, are more efficiently detected in single- and multiple-target visual search tasks.

Is it easier to detect angry or happy facial expressions in crowds of faces? The present studies used several variations of the visual search task to assess whether people selectively attend to expressive faces. Contrary to widely cited studies (e.g., Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) that suggest angry faces "pop out" of crowds, our review of the literature found inconsistent evidence for the effect and suggested that low-level visual confounds could not be ruled out as the driving force behind the anger superiority effect. We then conducted 7 experiments, carefully designed to eliminate many of the confounding variables present in past demonstrations. These experiments showed no evidence that angry faces popped out of crowds or even that they were efficiently detected. These experiments instead revealed a search asymmetry favoring happy faces. Moreover, in contrast to most previous studies, the happiness superiority effect was shown to be robust even when obvious perceptual confounds--like the contrast of white exposed teeth that are typically displayed in smiling faces--were eliminated in the happy targets. Rather than attribute this effect to the existence of innate happiness detectors, we speculate that the human expression of happiness has evolved to be more visually discriminable because its communicative intent is less ambiguous than other facial expressions.

Bodies obliged and unbound: differentiated response tendencies for injunctive and descriptive social norms.

The authors suggest that injunctive and descriptive social norms engage different psychological response tendencies when made selectively salient. On the basis of suggestions derived from the focus theory of normative conduct and from consideration of the norms' functions in social life, the authors hypothesized that the 2 norms would be cognitively associated with different goals, would lead individuals to focus on different aspects of self, and would stimulate different levels of conflict over conformity decisions. Additionally, a unique role for effortful self-regulation was hypothesized for each type of norm-used as a means to resist conformity to descriptive norms but as a means to facilitate conformity for injunctive norms. Four experiments supported these hypotheses. Experiment 1 demonstrated differences in the norms' associations to the goals of making accurate/efficient decisions and gaining/maintaining social approval. Experiment 2 provided evidence that injunctive norms lead to a more interpersonally oriented form of self-awareness and to a greater feeling of conflict about conformity decisions than descriptive norms. In the final 2 experiments, conducted in the lab (Experiment 3) and in a naturalistic environment (Experiment 4), self-regulatory depletion decreased conformity to an injunctive norm (Experiments 3 and 4) and increased conformity to a descriptive norm (Experiment 4)-even though the norms advocated identical behaviors. By illustrating differentiated response tendencies for each type of social norm, this research provides new and converging support for the focus theory of normative conduct.

Infection breeds reticence: the effects of disease salience on self-perceptions of personality and behavioral avoidance tendencies.

Social living brings humans great rewards, but also associated dangers, such as increased risk of infection from others. Although the body's immune system is integral to combating disease, it is physiologically costly. Less costly are evolved mechanisms for promoting avoidance of people who are potentially infectious, such as perceiving oneself as less social and increasing the tendency to make avoidant movements. In Experiment 1, exposure to a disease prime led participants to rate themselves as less extraverted than did exposure to a control prime, and led participants high in perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) to rate themselves as less agreeable and less open to experience than did exposure to a control prime. In Experiment 2, a disease prime facilitated avoidant tendencies in arm movements when participants viewed photographs of faces, especially for participants high in PVD. Together, these findings reveal functional changes in perception and behavior that would serve to promote avoidance of potentially infectious individuals.

Fear and Loving in Las Vegas: Evolution, Emotion, and Persuasion.

How do arousal-inducing contexts, such as frightening or romantic television programs, influence the effectiveness of basic persuasion heuristics? Different predictions are made by three theoretical models: A general arousal model predicts that arousal should increase effectiveness of heuristics; an affective valence model predicts that effectiveness should depend on whether the context elicits positive or negative affect; an evolutionary model predicts that persuasiveness should depend on both the specific emotion that is elicited and the content of the particular heuristic. Three experiments examined how fear-inducing versus romantic contexts influenced the effectiveness of two widely used heuristics-social proof (e.g., "most popular") and scarcity (e.g., "limited edition"). Results supported predictions from an evolutionary model, showing that fear can lead scarcity appeals to be counter-persuasive, and that romantic desire can lead social proof appeals to be counter-persuasive. The findings highlight how an evolutionary theoretical approach can lead to novel theoretical and practical marketing insights.

A pox on the mind: Disjunction of attention and memory in the processing of physical disfigurement.

The unfavorable treatment of people with physical disfigurements is well-documented, yet little is known about basic perceptual and cognitive responses to disfigurement. Here, we identify a specialized pattern of cognitive processing consistent with the hypothesis that disfigurements act as heuristic cues to contagious disease. Disfigurements are often invariant across time and difficult to conceal, and thus observers can detect the presence of such cues without necessarily remembering the particular individuals bearing these cues. Indeed, despite the fact that disfigured faces were especially likely to hold disease-sensitive perceivers' attention (Study 1), disfigured individuals were often confused with one another and thus not well remembered later (Study 2), revealing a disjunction of the typical relationship between elevated attention and elevated memory. We discuss the implications of our results for stigmatization of people with and without physical abnormalities and suggest the possibility that cognitive mechanisms for processing social information may be functionally tuned to the variant nature of important cues.

Going along versus going alone: when fundamental motives facilitate strategic (non)conformity.

Three experiments examined how 2 fundamental social motives--self-protection and mate attraction--influenced conformity. A self-protective goal increased conformity for both men and women. In contrast, the effects of a romantic goal depended on sex, causing women to conform more to others' preferences while engendering nonconformity in men. Men motivated to attract a mate were particularly likely to nonconform when (a) nonconformity made them unique (but not merely a member of a small minority) and when (b) the topic was subjective versus objective, meaning that nonconformists could not be revealed to be incorrect. These findings fit with a functional evolutionary model of motivation and behavior, and they indicate that fundamental motives such as self-protection and mate attraction can stimulate specific forms of conformity or nonconformity for strategic self-presentation.