Francis (2013) tested for and found evidence of publication bias in 1 of the 3 focal relations examined in Elliot et al. (2010), that between red and attractiveness. He then called into question the research as a whole and the field of experimental psychology more generally. Our reply has 3 foci. First, we attend to the bottom line regarding the…

There is a large body of accumulated evidence from behavioral and neuroimaging studies regarding how and where in the brain we represent basic numerical information. A number of these studies have considered how numerical representations may differ between individuals according to their age or level of mathematical ability, but one issue rarely…

Bayesian estimation for 2 groups provides complete distributions of credible values for the effect size, group means and their difference, standard deviations and their difference, and the normality of the data. The method handles outliers. The decision rule can accept the null value (unlike traditional "t" tests) when certainty in the estimate is…

Sexual cues influence decisions not only about sex, but also about unrelated outcomes such as money. In the presence of sexual cues, individuals are more "impatient" when making intertemporal monetary tradeoffs, choosing smaller immediate amounts over larger delayed amounts. Previous research has emphasized the power of sexual cues to induce a…

Is optimism real, or are optimistic forecasts just cheap talk? To help answer this question, we investigated whether optimistic predictions persist in the face of large incentives to be accurate. We asked National Football League football fans to predict the winner of a single game. Roughly half (the partisans) predicted a game involving their…

Recent research in adults has made great use of the gaze cuing paradigm to understand the behavior of the follower in joint attention episodes. We implemented a gaze leading task to investigate the initiator--the other person in these triadic interactions. In a series of gaze-contingent eye-tracking studies, we show that fixation dwell time upon…

People often displace their aggression against innocent targets. Notwithstanding the merits of previous research on displaced aggression, critical gaps remain. First, it is unclear whether and how situational and dispositional factors interact to influence displaced aggression. Moreover, it is unclear whether engaging in direct aggression…

The current research challenges the common view that positive affect and negative affect generate a broadened or narrowed attentional focus, respectively. Contrary to this view, two studies found that the link between affect and attentional focus as measured by a traditional flanker task (Study 1) and a modified flanker task (Study 2) reflects…

The present work examined whether secrets are experienced as physical burdens, thereby influencing perception and action. Four studies examined the behavior of people who harbored important secrets, such as secrets concerning infidelity and sexual orientation. People who recalled, were preoccupied with, or suppressed an important secret estimated…

Mood affects the way people think. But can the way people think affect their mood? In the present investigation, we examined this promising link by testing whether mood is influenced by the presence or absence of associative progression by manipulating the scope of participants' information processing and measuring their subsequent mood. In…

Most theories of semantic memory characterize knowledge of a given object as comprising a set of semantic features. But how does conceptual activation of these features proceed during object identification? We present the results of a pair of experiments that demonstrate that object recognition is a dynamically unfolding process in which function…

It has been proposed that two major axes, dominance and trustworthiness, characterize the social dimensions of face evaluation. Whether evaluation of faces on these social dimensions is restricted to conscious appraisal or happens at a preconscious level is unknown. Here we provide behavioral evidence that such preconscious evaluations exist and…

Cognitive scientists describe creativity as fluid thought. Drawing from findings on gesture and embodied cognition, we hypothesized that the physical experience of fluidity, relative to nonfluidity, would lead to more fluid, creative thought. Across 3 experiments, fluid arm movement led to enhanced creativity in 3 domains: creative generation,…

Elucidating how inequity aversion (a tendency to dislike and correct unequal outcomes) functions as one develops is important to understanding more complex fairness considerations in adulthood. Although previous research has demonstrated that adults and children reduce inequity, it is unclear if people are actually responding negatively to…

Two questions about subjective confidence in perceptual judgments are examined: the bases for these judgments and the reasons for their accuracy. Confidence in perceptual judgments has been claimed to rest on qualitatively different processes than confidence in memory tasks. However, predictions from a self-consistency model (SCM), which had been…