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

Emily Impett, in collaboration with Matthew Pearson, Tatyana Kholodkov, and James M. Henson of Old Dominion University, has published a paper in the January issue of The Journal of Sex Research titled "Pathways to Early Coital Debut for Adolescent Girls: A Recursive Partitioning Analysis." This paper applied a novel statistical technique called Recursive Partioning (RP) to identify the factors that predicted engaging in first intercourse by the 10th grade among adolescent girls who had not yet engaged in sexual intercourse by the 8th grade. RP analyses identified subsamples of girls who had low, medium, and high likelihoods of engaging in early coital debut based on six variables (i.e., school aspirations, early physical intimacy experiences, depression, body objectification, body image, and relationship inauthenticity). The implications of these analyses for the development of female adolescent sexuality as well as for advances in quantitative methods are discussed.

Click here to view a PDF of the article.

Posted on Dec 15, 2011 by admin