Emily Impett, in collaboration with Shelly Gable from the University of California Santa Barbara, published a paper in the January edition of the Social and Personality Psychology Compass titled "Approach and avoidance motives and close relationships." In a review of the literature on motivation and close relationships, they suggest that any model of close relationships must simultaneously account for people's tendencies to both approach incentives and avoid threats in close relationships.

Click here to view a PDF of the article.

Posted on Jan 09, 2012 by admin

Nadia Bashir has received a Diversity Travel Award from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology. Award recipients are selected based on the strength of their scholarly record and their research statement. In addition to receiving a travel stipend to attend the 2012 SPSP annual conference, Nadia will be featured in the conference program and have the opportunity to meet admired scholars at a reception for award recipients.

Posted on Dec 18, 2011 by admin

Lisa Legault, Jennifer Gutsell, and Mickey Inzlicht of have recently published a paper entitled: "Ironic Effects of Anti-Prejudice Messages: How Motivational Interventions Can Reduce (but Also Increase) Prejudice" in the current issue of Psychological Science.

The authors examined the impact of motivation-based prejudice reduction interventions, and assessed whether certain practices might in fact increase prejudice. In two experiments, participants received detailed information on, or were primed with, the goal of prejudice reduction, and this was done by either encouraging autonomous motivation to regulate prejudice or by stressing the societal requirement to control prejudice. Results demonstrated that, ironically, motivating people to reduce prejudice by stressing external control produced more explicit and implicit prejudice than not intervening at all. On the other hand, inducing autonomous motivation to regulate prejudice reduced prejudice. The paper highlights the detrimental consequences of enforcing anti-prejudice standards and policies and outlines strategies for effectively reducing prejudice.

Posted on Dec 15, 2011 by admin

Geoff MacDonald has been appointed to a 3-year term as Associate Editor at Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, a journal of the International Association for Relationship Research.  The journal publishes research on relationships from fields including psychology, sociology, and communications and is currently under the direction of Editor Mario Mikulincer.  Geoff's term begins on January 1, 2012.

Posted on Dec 15, 2011 by admin

Jason Plaks, in collaboration with colleagues at the University of Washington, published an article in the January issue of Social Psychological and Personality Science titled "Folk Beliefs About Human Genetic Variation Predict Discrete Versus Continuous Racial Categorization and Evaluative Bias".  Here is the abstract:
What role do folk beliefs about human genetic variation play in racial categorization and evaluation? In two studies, the authors assessed or manipulated participants' estimates of the percentage of genetic material that human beings have in common and examined whether this variable would predict categorization (Study 1) and evaluation (Study 2) of faces that varied monotonically in Black & White racial composition. In both studies, participants with low (vs. high) genetic overlap beliefs implicitly perceived the boundary between races to be more discrete. These results remained significant even when controlling for such variables as Need for Cognition, political ideology, essentialist beliefs, and "entity" beliefs. These findings suggest that believing that all people possess similar (vs. different) genetic makeup may serve as a key assumption that shapes racial categorization.

Click here to view a PDF of the article.

Posted on Dec 15, 2011 by admin