Geoff MacDonald and Terry Borsook in November issue of JESP

Geoff MacDonald and Ph.D. student Terry Borsook have co-authored an article in the November issue of Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. The paper, titled "Attachment Avoidance and Feelings of Connection in Social Interaction," provides evidence that individuals high in attachment avoidance respond strongly to social experiences despite their claims to the contrary. Those high in attachment avoidance base their identities on self-reliance and downplay the need for others, claiming not to care what others think. But theoretical perspectives (e.g., Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007) suggest that this simply starves those high in avoidance of the belonging they need. In the published study, the authors randomly assigned participants to interact with a research confederate who behaved in either an aloof and stand-offish or a warm and validating manner manner. Unlike someone who doesn't care about others, attachment avoidance was associated with particularly weak feelings of connection to a stand-offish confederate and particularly strong feelings of connection to a warm confederate. If anything, avoidant participants were hyper-sensitive to social conditions. These findings support the universality of belongingness needs, even (and especially) among those who deny such needs.

Jason Plaks in September issue of Psychological Science

Jason Plaks appears in this month's issue of Psychological Science. The paper titled, "The Ecology of Automaticity: How Situational Contingencies Shape Action Semantics and Social Behavior" presents the first evidence that people's responses to racial category primes depend on the physical surroundings. Specifically, when participants were seated in an enclosed booth during priming, they showed increased accessibility of fight-related concepts; however, when seated in an open field, they showed increased accessibility of flight-related concepts. These findings suggest that an understanding of automatic priming processes must consider its situated nature.

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Elizabeth Page-Gould receives Honourable Mention for Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize

Elizabeth Page-Gould has received the Honourable Mention for the Gordon Allport Intergroup Relations Prize for her paper entitled, "Understanding the impact of cross-group friendship on interactions with novel outgroup members" that appeared in the June issue of the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. The paper was coauthored by Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton (University of California Berkeley), Jan Marie Alegre (Princeton University), and John Oliver Siy (University of Washington). The Gordon Allport Prize is awarded to the best paper published in the field of intergroup relations each year, with an honourable mention awarded to the second best paper in the field.

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Elizabeth Page-Gould in September issue of JESP

Elizabeth Page-Gould, along with collaborators Wendy Berry Mendes (Harvard University) and Brenda Major (University of California Santa Barbara), has published an article entitled "Intergroup contact facilitates physiological recovery following stressful intergroup interactions" in the September issue of the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. This experiment was the first to examine the regulation of physiological stress responses following a stressful intergroup interaction. A community sample of adults underwent a social stressor in a same-race or cross-race context while stress reactivity and recovery were measured from both the autonomic nervous system and the neuroendocrine system. Participants in the same-race condition exhibited successful post-stressor recovery, as did participants in the cross-race condition who had relatively more previous contact with people of other races. However, participants with little previous contact were unable to recover either cardiovascularly or hormonally following a stressful intergroup interaction. As post-stress recovery is a fundamental aspect of physiological health and resilience, these findings represent an important next step for physiological research on intergroup interactions.

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Jennifer Tackett wins Early Researcher Award

Jennifer Tackett has been awarded the prestigious Early Researcher Award from the Ontario government's Ministry of Research and Innovation. This award, which comprises $150,000 of research funds to attract top-level graduate and post-doctoral students, will allow Jennifer to continue her research on ways that youth with maladaptive personalities can flourish as adults. Congratulations Jennifer!