The bright side of secrecy: The energizing effect of positive secrets.

Existing wisdom holds that secrecy is burdensome and fatiguing. However, past research has conflated secrecy with the kinds of adverse events that are often kept secret. As a result, it is unclear whether secrecy is inherently depleting, or whether these consequences vary based on the underlying meaning of the secret. We resolve this confound by examining the consequences of positive secrets. In contrast to the prior research, five experiments (N = 2,800) find that positive secrets increase feelings of energy, relative to (a) content-matched positive non-secrets, (b) other pieces of unknown positive information, and (c) other kinds of secrets. Importantly, these energizing effects of positive secrets were independent of positive affect. We further found that positive secrets are energizing because, compared to other kinds of secrets, people keep them for more intrinsically than extrinsically motivated reasons. That is, these secrets are more freely chosen, more consistent with personal values, and more motivated by internal desires (than by external pressures). Using both measures and manipulations of these motivations, we found that a motivational mechanism helps explain the energizing effect of positive secrets. The present results offer new insights into secrecy, how people respond to positive life events, and the subjective experiences of vitality and energy. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Escalated police stops of Black men are linguistically and psychologically distinct in their earliest moments.

Across the United States, police chiefs, city officials, and community leaders alike have highlighted the need to de-escalate police encounters with the public. This concern about escalation extends from encounters involving use of force to routine car stops, where Black drivers are disproportionately pulled over. Yet, despite the calls for action, we know little about the trajectory of police stops or how escalation unfolds. In study 1, we use methods from computational linguistics to analyze police body-worn camera footage from 577 stops of Black drivers. We find that stops with escalated outcomes (those ending in arrest, handcuffing, or a search) diverge from stops without these outcomes in their earliest moments-even in the first 45 words spoken by the officer. In stops that result in escalation, officers are more likely to issue commands as their opening words to the driver and less likely to tell drivers the reason why they are being stopped. In study 2, we expose Black males to audio clips of the same stops and find differences in how escalated stops are perceived: Participants report more negative emotion, appraise officers more negatively, worry about force being used, and predict worse outcomes after hearing only the officer's initial words in escalated versus non-escalated stops. Our findings show that car stops that end in escalated outcomes sometimes begin in an escalated fashion, with adverse effects for Black male drivers and, in turn, police-community relations.

Does "Jamal" receive a harsher sentence than "James"? First-name bias in the criminal sentencing of Black men.

OBJECTIVE: Using archival and experimental methods, we tested the role that racial associations of first names play in criminal sentencing. HYPOTHESES: We hypothesized that Black defendants with more stereotypically Black names (e.g., Jamal) would receive more punitive sentences than Black defendants with more stereotypically White names (e.g., James). METHOD: In an archival study, we obtained a random sample of 296 real-world records of Black male prison inmates in Florida and asked participants to rate the extent to which each inmate's first name was stereotypically Black or stereotypically White. We then tested the extent to which racial stereotypicality was associated with sentence length, controlling for relevant legal features of each case (e.g., criminal record, severity of convicted offenses). In a follow-up experiment, participant judges assigned sentences in cases in which the Black male defendant was randomly assigned a more stereotypically Black or White name from our archival study. RESULTS: Controlling for a wide array of factors-including criminal record-we found that inmates with more stereotypically Black versus White first names received longer sentences ß = 0.09, 95% confidence interval (95% CI) [0.01, 0.16]: 409 days longer for names 1 standard deviation above versus below the mean on racial stereotypicality. In our experiment, participant judges recommended significantly longer sentences to Black inmates with more stereotypically Black names above and beyond the severity of the charges or their criminal history, ß = 0.07, 95% CI [0.02, 0.13]. CONCLUSIONS: Our results identify how racial associations with first names can bias consequential sentencing decisions despite the impartial aims of the legal system. More broadly, our findings illustrate how racial biases manifest in distinctions made among members of historically marginalized groups, not just between members of different groups. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Uncertain threat is associated with greater impulsive actions and neural dissimilarity to Black versus White faces.

Race is a social construct that contributes to group membership and heightens emotional arousal in intergroup contexts. Little is known about how emotional arousal, specifically uncertain threat, influences behavior and brain processes in response to race information. We investigated the effects of experimentally manipulated uncertain threat on impulsive actions to Black versus White faces in a community sample (n = 106) of Black and White adults. While undergoing fMRI, participants performed an emotional go/no-go task under three conditions of uncertainty: 1) anticipation of an uncertain threat (i.e., unpredictable loud aversive sound); 2) anticipation of an uncertain reward (i.e., unpredictable receipt of money); and 3) no anticipation of an uncertain event. Representational similarity analysis was used to examine the neural representations of race information across functional brain networks between conditions of uncertainty. Participants-regardless of their own race-showed greater impulsivity and neural dissimilarity in response to Black versus White faces across all functional brain networks in conditions of uncertain threat relative to other conditions. This pattern of greater neural dissimilarity under threat was enhanced in individuals with high implicit racial bias. Our results illustrate the distinct and important influence of uncertain threat on global differentiation in how race information is represented in the brain, which may contribute to racially biased behavior.

Transition-Metal-Mediated Chemo- and Stereoselective Total Synthesis of (-)-Galanthamine.

An asymmetric synthetic route to (-)-galanthamine (1), a pharmacologically active Amaryllidaceae alkaloid used for the symptomatic treatment of early onset Alzheimer's disease, was successfully established with very high levels of stereocontrol. The key to achieving high chemo- and stereo-selectivity in this approach was the use of transition-metal-mediated reactions, namely, enyne ring-closing metathesis, Heck coupling, and titanium-based asymmetric allylation.

The thin blue waveform: Racial disparities in officer prosody undermine institutional trust in the police.

How do routine police encounters build or undermine community trust, and how might they contribute to racial gaps in citizen perceptions of the police? Procedural justice theory posits that officers' interpersonal communication toward the public plays a formative role, but experimental tests of this hypothesis have been constrained by the difficulties of measuring and manipulating this dimension of officer-citizen interactions. Officer-worn body camera recordings provide a novel means to overcome both of these challenges. Across five studies with laboratory and community samples, we use footage from traffic stops to examine how officers communicate to drivers and whether racial disparities in officers' communication erode institutional trust in the police. Specifically, we consider the cumulative effects of one subtle interpersonal cue: an officer's tone of voice. In Studies 1A, 1B, and 1C, participants rated thin slices of officer speech. Participants were blind to the content of the officer's words and the race of their interlocutor, yet they evaluated officers' tone toward White (vs. Black) men more positively. By manipulating participants' exposure to repeated interactions, we demonstrate that even these paraverbal aspects of police interactions shape how citizens construe the police generally (Study 2), and that racial disparities in prosodic cues undermine trust in institutions such as police departments (Study 3). Participants' trust in the police, and personal experiences of fairness, in turn, correlated with their perceptions of officer prosody across studies. Taken together, these data illustrate a cycle through which interpersonal aspects of police encounters erode institutional trust across race. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Processing of Task-Irrelevant Race Information is Associated with Diminished Cognitive Control in Black and White Individuals.

The race of an individual is a salient physical feature that is rapidly processed by the brain and can bias our perceptions of others. How the race of others explicitly impacts our actions toward them during intergroup contexts is not well understood. In the current study, we examined how task-irrelevant race information influences cognitive control in a go/no-go task in a community sample of Black (n = 54) and White (n = 51) participants. We examined the neural correlates of behavioral effects using functional magnetic resonance imaging and explored the influence of implicit racial attitudes on brain-behavior associations. Both Black and White participants showed more cognitive control failures, as indexed by dprime, to Black versus White faces, despite the irrelevance of race to the task demands. This behavioral pattern was paralleled by greater activity to Black faces in the fusiform face area, implicated in processing face and in-group information, and lateral orbitofrontal cortex, associated with resolving stimulus-response conflict. Exploratory brain-behavior associations suggest different patterns in Black and White individuals. Black participants exhibited a negative association between fusiform activity and response time during impulsive errors to Black faces, whereas White participants showed a positive association between lateral OFC activity and cognitive control performance to Black faces when accounting for implicit racial associations. Together our findings propose that attention to race information is associated with diminished cognitive control that may be driven by different mechanisms for Black and White individuals.

God as a White man: A psychological barrier to conceptualizing Black people and women as leadership worthy.

[Correction Notice: An Erratum for this article was reported online in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology on May 21 2020 (see record 2020-36018-001). In the article, the phrase Mixed Effects in the table title for Tables 1-3 and Tables 6-8 is incorrect. The corrected phrase should appear instead as Fixed Effects. All versions of this article have been corrected.] In the United States, God is commonly conceptualized as the omnipotent and omniscient entity that created the universe, and as a White man. We questioned whether the extent to which God is conceptualized as a White man predicts the extent to which White men are perceived as particularly fit for leadership. We found support for this across 7 studies. In Study 1, we created 2 measures to examine the extent to which U.S. Christians conceptualized God as a White man, and in Study 2 we found that, controlling for multiple covariates (e.g., racist and sexist attitudes, religiosity, political attitudes), responses on these measures predicted perceiving White male job candidates as particularly fit for leadership, among both Black and White, male and female, Christians. In Study 3, we found that U.S. Christian children, both White and racial minority, conceptualized God as more White than Black (and more male than female), which predicted perceiving White people as particularly boss-like. We next found evidence to suggest that this phenomenon is rooted in broader intuitions that extend beyond Christianity. That is, in a novel context with novel groups and a novel god, U.S. Christian adults (Studies 4 and 6), atheist adults (Study 5), and agnostic preschoolers (Study 7), used a god's identity to infer which groups were best fit for leadership. Collectively, our data reveal a clear and consistent pattern: Attributing a social identity to God predicts perceiving individuals who share that identity as more fit for leadership. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Neural adaptation to faces reveals racial outgroup homogeneity effects in early perception.

A hallmark of intergroup biases is the tendency to individuate members of one's own group but process members of other groups categorically. While the consequences of these biases for stereotyping and discrimination are well-documented, their early perceptual underpinnings remain less understood. Here, we investigated the neural mechanisms of this effect by testing whether high-level visual cortex is differentially tuned in its sensitivity to variation in own-race versus other-race faces. Using a functional MRI adaptation paradigm, we measured White participants' habituation to blocks of White and Black faces that parametrically varied in their groupwise similarity. Participants showed a greater tendency to individuate own-race faces in perception, showing both greater release from adaptation to unique identities and increased sensitivity in the adaptation response to physical difference among faces. These group differences emerge in the tuning of early face-selective cortex and mirror behavioral differences in the memory and perception of own- versus other-race faces. Our results suggest that biases for other-race faces emerge at some of the earliest stages of sensory perception.

Language from police body camera footage shows racial disparities in officer respect.

Using footage from body-worn cameras, we analyze the respectfulness of police officer language toward white and black community members during routine traffic stops. We develop computational linguistic methods that extract levels of respect automatically from transcripts, informed by a thin-slicing study of participant ratings of officer utterances. We find that officers speak with consistently less respect toward black versus white community members, even after controlling for the race of the officer, the severity of the infraction, the location of the stop, and the outcome of the stop. Such disparities in common, everyday interactions between police and the communities they serve have important implications for procedural justice and the building of police-community trust.

Exploring the secrecy burden: secrets, preoccupation, and perceptual judgments.

Recent work suggests that secrecy is perceived as burdensome. A secrecy-burden relationship would have a number of consequences for cognitive, perceptual, social, and health psychology, but the reliability of these influences, and potential mechanisms that support such influences are unknown. Across 4 studies, the current work examines both the reliability of, and mechanisms that support, the influence of secrecy processes upon a judgment that varies with diminished resources (i.e., judgments of hill slant). The current work finds that a manipulation of secret "size" fails to reliably predict judged hill slant, whereas measurement and manipulation of preoccupation with a secret does reliably predict judged hill slant. Moreover, these effects are found to be mediated by judged effort to keep the secret, consistent with a resource-based mechanism of the burdens of secrecy.

trans-2-Tritylcyclohexanol as a chiral auxiliary in permanganate-mediated oxidative cyclization of 2-methylenehept-5-enoates: application to the synthesis of trans-(+)-linalool oxide.

The permanganate-mediated oxidative cyclization of a series of 2-methylenehept-5-eneoates bearing different chiral auxiliaries was investigated, leading to the discovery of trans-2-tritylcyclohexanol (TTC) as a highly effective chiral controller for the formation of the 2,5-substituted THF diol product with high diastereoselectivity (dr ∼97:3). Chiral resolution of (±)-TTC, prepared in one step from cyclohexene oxide, afforded (-)-(1S,2R)-TTC (er >99:1), which was applied to the synthesis of (+)-trans-(2S,5S)-linalool oxide.

Total synthesis of the tetracyclic lupin alkaloid (+)-allomatrine.

(+)-Allomatrine (1) has been synthesized using an imino-aldol reaction and N-acyliminium cyclization as key steps. Strategically, use of the tert-butylsulfinimine derivative of (E)-4-(trimethylsilyl)but-2-enal enabled the staged formation of three C-C bonds, a C-N bond, and the four stereogenic centers within the target.

Internalizing the closet: concealment heightens the cognitive distinction between public and private selves.

The present studies are the first in which social psychological methods were used to test the popular claim that the experience of concealing a stigmatized social identity leads to a "divided self." For people with concealable stigmas, concealment in public settings makes the public-private dimension of self-expression particularly salient, leading them to organize self-relevant information along this dimension. The result is a strengthened cognitive distinction between public and private aspects of the self, what we have termed public-private schematization. We developed and tested a measure of the cognitive accessibility of the distinction between public and private self-schemas by measuring how quickly participants sorted trait attributes into self-in-public (e.g., self-at-work) and self-in-private (e.g., self-at-home). People with more accessible distinct public and private self-schemas should be faster at categorizing trait attributes into public- and private-self aspects than those with more integrated public and private self-schemas. Relative to people without such identities, people with concealable stigmas (Study 1a, sexual orientation; Study 1b, religiosity at a secular college), show greater public-private schematization. This schematization is linked to concealment (Study 2) and to the experimental activation of concealable versus conspicuous stigmatized identities (Study 3). Implications of distinct public and private self-schemas for psychological well-being are explored in Studies 4 and 5. Two different measures of distress-perceived social stress (Study 4) and depressive symptoms (Study 5)-provided evidence showing that the accessibility of the distinction between public and private self-schemas accounted for the association of concealment on heightened distress. Implications for research on concealment and self-structure are discussed.

Total synthesis of cis-sylvaticin.

An asymmetric total synthesis of (+)-cis-sylvaticin is described. Key steps include the use of permanganate-mediated oxidative cyclization of 1,5-dienes to synthesize the two major fragments 2 and 3 and a catalytically efficient tethered RCM to unite these THF-containing fragments. In addition, t-BuP 4 base was found to reliably promote rapid alkylation of the butenolide precursor fragment 4.

Stereocontrolled synthesis of (-)-galanthamine.

An enantioselective synthesis of (-)-galanthamine has been realized in 11 linear steps starting from isovanillin. A Mitsunobu aryl ether forming reaction was used to assemble the galanthamine backbone, which was stitched together using enyne ring-closing metathesis, Heck, and N-alkylation reactions affording the tetracyclic ring system. Control of relative and absolute stereochemistry was derived from an easily accessible enantiomerically enriched propargylic alcohol 13.

1-Aryl-3,4-dihydro-1H-quinolin-2-one derivatives, novel and selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors.

A novel series of 1-aryl-3,4-dihydro-1H-quinolin-2-ones have been discovered as potent and selective norepinephrine reuptake inhibitors. Efficient synthetic routes have been developed which allow for the multi-gram preparation of both final targets and advanced intermediates for SAR expansion.