Leftists explicitly describe themselves as completely separate from Liberals, who they claim cooperate with existing institutions and seek insufficient social change

Alto, Alix, Grace Flores-Robles, Kyle Anderson, Jordan Wylie, Levi Satter, and Ana P. Gantman. 2022. ““I Put Liberal but LOL”: Investigating Psychological Differences Between Political Leftists and Liberals” PsyArXiv. March 10. doi:10.31234/osf.io/3qgep

Abstract: Political ideology in the United States is typically described as a spectrum. This metaphor implies that the people who place themselves along the spectrum differ in degree from each other; an individual who places themselves all the way on the left of the spectrum, is an extreme version of another closer to the middle. Political polarization and elite extremism are on the rise in the United States (e.g., Finkel et al., 2020), and attention to political polarization has fueled efforts to understand the extreme right (e.g, Forscher & Kteily, 2020), and driven attempts to identify whether the extreme left may or may not share authoritarian tendencies with those on the extreme right (Conway et al., 2018; Costello et al., 2021; Badaan et al., 2020; Nilsson & Jost, 2020). The central focus of psychology on the extreme Left has been on Left-wing authoritarianism¬—whether it exists, is appropriately named, or logically possible (Conway et al., 2018; Costello et al., 2021; Badaan & Jost, 2020; Nilsson & Jost, 2020). However, this approach sidesteps a longstanding distinction that exists among politically left-leaning individuals–that between Leftists and Liberals (see Menand, 2021). While Leftists explicitly describe themselves as completely separate from Liberals¬, who they claim cooperate with existing institutions and seek insufficient social change (Ture, 1966), Liberals may more easily see themselves as part of a larger left-leaning political group, such that they express surprise and even anger when Leftists do not support their political agenda (Capeheart, 2020). It is the aim of this paper to investigate the psychological differences between Leftists and Liberals (i.e., in terms of ideology, morality, political preferences, and judgments of group boundaries) to further our understanding of how these two historical groups may differ and interact, and help us understand political ideology, identity, and radicalism, more broadly.

Women were more aware of both their pleasant and unpleasant body odors than men

Croijmans, Ilja, Garmt Dijksterhuis, Natalia Majorov, and Monique A. M. Smeets. 2022. “A Psychological Scale for Body Odour Awareness.” PsyArXiv. March 10. doi:10.31234/osf.io/nf6sd

Abstract: People differ in their awareness for odours surrounding them. Body odours are a special category because they are a medium for social communication. Body odours evoke approach and avoidance behaviours such as withdrawing from social interaction, and personal hygiene behaviours like washing or using fragranced products. So far it has remained unclear what the role of conscious awareness of body odours is in guiding social behaviour. Here, we present a new psychological scale on odour awareness, focusing specifically on body odours: the Body Odour Awareness Scale (BOAS). The scale was validated measuring body odour awareness in two dimensions (valence and source) over four domains: awareness for one’s own body odours, both favourable and unfavourable, and awareness for other persons’ body odours, both favourable and unfavourable. An explorative follow-up study suggested regional differences exist in body odour awareness, but these are not the same for every dimension of body odour awareness. Taken together, these results suggest the new BOAS is a useful tool to assess differences in awareness for body odours, and uncover the application potential for this new and validated scale.

From 2019... The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: an fMRI study of acting

From 2019... The neuroscience of Romeo and Juliet: an fMRI study of acting. Steven Brown, Peter Cockett and Ye Yuan. Royal Society Open Science, March 13 2019. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.181908

Abstract: The current study represents a first attempt at examining the neural basis of dramatic acting. While all people play multiple roles in daily life—for example, ‘spouse' or ‘employee'—these roles are all facets of the ‘self' and thus of the first-person (1P) perspective. Compared to such everyday role playing, actors are required to portray other people and to adopt their gestures, emotions and behaviours. Consequently, actors must think and behave not as themselves but as the characters they are pretending to be. In other words, they have to assume a ‘fictional first-person' (Fic1P) perspective. In this functional MRI study, we sought to identify brain regions preferentially activated when actors adopt a Fic1P perspective during dramatic role playing. In the scanner, university-trained actors responded to a series of hypothetical questions from either their own 1P perspective or from that of Romeo (male participants) or Juliet (female participants) from Shakespeare's drama. Compared to responding as oneself, responding in character produced global reductions in brain activity and, particularly, deactivations in the cortical midline network of the frontal lobe, including the dorsomedial and ventromedial prefrontal cortices. Thus, portraying a character through acting seems to be a deactivation-driven process, perhaps representing a ‘loss of self'.

4. Discussion

Despite the central importance of role playing in both everyday social interactions and the theatrical arts, it has been little studied in either the psychology or neuroscience literatures. We sought to address this neglect by carrying out the first neuroimaging study of dramatic role playing, employing trained actors as participants. Because of the wide diversity of actor-training methods, we opted to work with a uniform population of actors, all of whom had a similar training in the dominant form of acting in North America and who possessed a similar amount of training and performance experience. In addition, because MRI experiments are so restrictive of body movement and facial gesturing, we chose to examine a group of actors specialized in the mentalistic approach to character portrayal most commonly taught in theatre schools.

The imaging results showed that acting led to deactivations in brain areas involved in self processing, with a focus on the dmPFC/SFG and vmPFC. This might suggest that acting, as neurocognitive phenomenon, is a suppression of self processing. The major increase in activation associated with role change was seen in the posterior part of the precuneus. Perhaps the most surprising finding of the study was that the British accent condition—during which the participants were instructed to maintain their self-identity—showed a similar deactivation pattern vis-à-vis the self that acting did, suggesting that gestural mimicry of even a completely unspecified other has an impact on brain areas involved in self processing. This supports the contention of acting theorists that gestural and psychological approaches might be related paths towards achieving the same goal, namely the embodied portrayal of a character [8,51,60]. It also lends support to theories of embodied cognition, which argue that a change in gestural expression can influence the way that people think and the emotions that they feel [61,62].

We are aware of only a single prior study that attempted anything like our Fic1P condition, that of Ames et al. [47], although their task was not intended as an acting condition per se. While our vmPFC deactivations were quite a bit dorsal to theirs, we found a similar increase in deactivation for Fic1P compared to 1P, as well as for 3P compared to 1P. The British accent showed a comparable deactivation in the vmPFC to the 3P condition (when both were compared with 1P), but less than that for acting. However, the most acting-specific deactivation we observed was not in the vmPFC but in the dmPFC/SFG. In addition, we observed an area of activation increase in the precuneus that was specific to acting compared to the other three conditions, although it emerged through the loss of deactivation compared to 1P. We would like to consider these findings in terms of the two processes of perspective change and role change.

4.1. Perspective change

One of the major objectives of the study was to compare the pattern of brain activation for acting with that for the well-studied process of 3P perspective taking, referred to as ToM processing. In several respects, our study was biased towards seeing an overlap between acting and mentalizing. First, the participant population consisted of actors with a mentalistic orientation towards getting into character that emphasizes inferring the thoughts, emotions and motivations of a character in a given situation. Second, our scanner task required participants to engage in the psychological process of formulating responses to hypothetical questions. It is perhaps not surprising that answering questions as Romeo or Juliet would tap not only into role playing but mentalizing as well in order for the participant to determine an appropriate answer from the perspective of the character. In other words, an actor would have to consult some degree of third-person knowledge about Romeo or Juliet—just as with any person other than the self—in order to formulate answers from their perspective. So, neural similarities between Fic1P and 3P may be more of a reflection of our question-answering task than of the nature of acting, since acting theorists believe that mentalizing about a character is far more important during the preparatory phase of studying a role than during the process of character portrayal in performance [7].

With respect to our ToM contrast, the most significant difference between 3P and 1P was a deactivation in the vmPFC and the ventral part of the dmPFC, which became the major marker of perspective change in this study. This same deactivation was seen more intensely in the contrast of acting to 1P. In both cases, the effect resulted from a decrease in the level of activation compared to the self condition. Hence, the presence of the vmPFC deactivation for acting might indicate that actors engage in 3P perspective-taking with their character while undergoing the process of acting, or that acting is a more intense form of perspective taking, since there was a greater reduction in vmPFC and dmPFC-v activities for Fic1P than for 3P. This interpretation is only reasonable if this process occurs in an implicit manner. This would also account for the same, but weaker, deactivation effect seen in the British accent condition. While participants in the 3P condition were told to explicitly assume the perspective of their close other, this was not the case during either the acting or accent conditions. If anything, during the accent condition, participants were clearly instructed not to stray from the self perspective. Hence, if an increasing deactivation in the vmPFC and dmPFC-v is a marker of deviation from the self perspective, then this would have to work during both explicit tasks (like 3P and other types of ToM tasks) and implicit tasks where people psychologically stray from the self perspective, but in which they are not told to assume another person's perspective. Van Overwalle & Vandekerckhove [63] reviewed both electroencephalography and fMRI evidence suggesting that implicit mentalizing employs the same mentalizing network as explicit mentalizing. If anything, the medial PFC has been shown to be more strongly linked with implicit than explicit mentalizing [64]. Similar results were obtained when comparing implicit and explicit forms of trait judgement [65].

4.2. Role change

Acting produced additional effects beyond the ones in the vmPFC and ventral dmPFC that were observed in the 3P condition, suggesting that acting is something more than just mentalizing about a character. One of these effects was a deactivation in the dmPFC/SFG for acting versus self that was also observed in British accent versus self, while the other was an activation increase in the precuneus that was found when acting was contrasted with either self (1P) or other (3P).

dmPFC and SFG. A large dorsoventral extent of the dmPFC was shown to be deactivated during acting when compared to the 1P condition, compatible with the loss of a self-related process during acting and gestural pretence. Denny et al.'s [26] meta-analysis of self/other processing argued for a dorsoventral distinction in the medial PFC such that the vmPFC showed an overlap between self and other processing (when each one was compared against a low-level baseline), while the dmPFC showed a preference for other compared to self processing. Our results seem incompatible with those findings, since we observed the highest level of dmPFC activity in the self condition, and less in each of the other conditions. Therefore, we would like to consider another dimension of self processing that may be tracked in our results.

D'Argembeau et al. [48] carried out a study of trait judgements about the self, but did so across the mental time frames of ‘present self' and ‘past self', as well as ‘present other' and ‘past other'. A peak in the dmPFC at MNI coordinate −2, 56, 26 (compared to Talairach coordinate −6, 50, 28 in Fic1P versus 1P) showed greater activity for the present self than the other three conditions. In addition, another dmPFC peak at MNI coordinate 4, 46, 44 (compared to Talairach coordinate −3, 38, 37 in Fic1P versus 1P) showed an interaction effect such that it was more active for the present self than the other three conditions. D'Argembeau et al. [66] followed up on these findings and showed that the dmPFC's preference for the present self extends beyond the past self to include the future self as well. Van der Cruyssen et al. [67] showed that both of the regions just mentioned were more active when people processed information about social categories of people (e.g. ambulance driver, kindergarten teacher) than simply adjectival trait descriptions (e.g. attentive, picky). Consistent with these studies on trait judgements about the self and others, the activation likelihood estimation (ALE) meta-analysis of Schurz et al. [28] showed that a dmPFC peak at Talairach coordinate 6, 26, 55 (compared to Talairach coordinate −12, 29, 55 in Fic1P versus 1P) is more active when people perform trait judgements than when they do false-belief mentalizing tasks. Likewise, Benoit et al. [68] found that the more ventral parts of the dmPFC have a preference for self over other trait-judgements, and Ma et al. [65] showed that the more dorsal part of the dmPFC is more active during spontaneous compared to intentional trait judgements. Garrison et al. [69] carried out a study in which participants were asked to make judgements about adjectives in terms of the self (Does the word describe you? Yes or no). The results of this task showed strong activations throughout the dorsoventral extent of the dmPFC. By contrast, several parts of the dmPFC were deactivated (when contrasted with rest) during a mindfulness meditation condition in the same participants, perhaps suggesting a reduction in the embodied self through meditation. Therefore, the dmPFC might encode more-enduring and stable features of the self, rather than a person's current mental states, the latter of which are examined in ToM tasks. If so, then the deactivations seen in the dmPFC for acting would represent a loss of self processing related to a trait-based conception of the self.

One possible interpretation of our results is that parts of the dmPFC encode information about not just an awareness of the self (with regard to both traits and states) but perhaps a sense of embodiment of the self. The embodied self can be considered as a zero-sum entity due to resource limitations. A person has only one voice, one face and one body as personal traits. The more that someone portrays another person, the fewer the resources there are to devote to him/herself. One cannot speak with a British accent and Canadian accent at the same time. Therefore, acting might be akin to a deliberate process of possession, i.e. a substitution of the actor's self by the character due to their embodiment of the character. The results of the British accent condition in our experiment suggest that even when a character is not being explicitly portrayed, gestural changes through personal mimicry can be a first step towards the embodiment of a character and the retraction of the self's resources. Certain entertainers, such as ventriloquists, rapidly switch between the self and a character within the time frame of a dialogue. It would be interesting to explore what is occurring in their brains as they make these rapid but seamless transitions between self and character.

Precuneus. The precuneus emerged as the major area of activation increase during role change in this study (along with a weak effect seen in the pSTS/TPJ). Activation was seen here for acting when it was compared against each of the three other conditions, although the activation itself resulted from a loss of deactivation compared to those conditions. The medial parietal cortex has been well established as a component of both the mentalizing network and the default mode network (DMN) [58], and emerges as a consensus region of activation in virtually all of the meta-analyses of the ToM literature that have been published [25–31]. However, before we interpret our acting effect as a mentalizing process, it is important to note that our precuneus activation is 20–30 mm posterior to the standard peaks found for ToM tasks. A typical y coordinate for ToM analyses is in the −50 to −60 range, whereas our peaks were in the −70 to −80 region. Hence, this establishes a distinction between the PCC (anteriorly) and precuneus (posteriorly), where mentalizing activations tend to be overwhelmingly in the PCC. Likewise, in keeping with the role of the PCC in the DMN, the PCC was strongly deactivated in all four of the conditions in this study when contrasted with fixation (see figure 1 for the 1P results). This preferential activation of the PCC during the resting state is the typical pattern for components of the DMN [56]. However, this region did not appear in any of the high-level contrasts, suggesting that the level of deactivation of the PCC was comparable across all of the task conditions and was therefore unaffected by either perspective change or role change. Only the precuneus, but not the PCC, showed a difference when acting was compared against the other three conditions.

Regardless of whether the relative increase in activation for the precuneus for acting was due to an increase in activation or a decrease in deactivation (as was in fact the case), the question we have to address is what processes activate the precuneus. We would like to consider two literatures where the precuneus is implicated. One is attention. The precuneus is a component of the dorsal attentional network of the brain, a network that is involved in functions such as attentional orienting, episodic retrieval and mental imagery [70–72]. It is telling to point out that acting theorists for over a century have talked about the ‘split consciousness' involved in the process of acting [4,8,10]. The actor has to be himself and someone else at the same time, and this could lead to a splitting of attentional resources devoted to the focalization of attention and consciousness. This is not simply the ‘divided attention' of multi-tasking procedures, but a fundamental split of resources devoted to a maintenance of one's identity as a conscious self. According to this interpretation, activation of the precuneus would represent a dispersion of self-related attentional resources, whereas deactivation would represent a focalization or internalization of such resources. If so, then deactivation should occur during situations like mindfulness meditation, where self-related attentional resources are focalized. Garrison et al. [69] conducted a study in which a combined group of experienced meditators and non-meditators performed three types of mindfulness meditation in the MRI scanner (i.e. concentration, loving kindness and choiceless answers). The baseline condition was rest. The results showed that the precuneus (in addition to the PCC) was strongly deactivated during meditation, in the same region as our Fic1P versus 1P contrast. In fact, deactivations in the posterior precuneus have been reported in a number of studies of meditation [73–75]. The question for our purposes is why the precuneus effect was mainly seen for acting and not for the 3P and accent conditions. All we can say is that neither gestural modification in the form of a foreign accent nor other-orientation in the form of 3P mentalizing had an influence on this neural mechanism, whereas the explicit psychological process of role change through character portrayal did, perhaps resulting in the double consciousness that acting theorists talk about. Again, acting was the only condition in which self-identity was explicitly split during the task. Further research will be required to explore these findings.

4.3. Impersonation

In an interesting study of vocal impressions, McGettigan et al. [76] had participants perform the opening lines of familiar nursery rhymes either (i) in their normal voice, (ii) while impersonating other individuals (such as celebrities or family members) or (iii) while putting on a foreign accent. While the study was more oriented towards sensorimotor aspects of vocal performance than towards role playing or acting, the study is one of the few to address the issue of impersonation. Their impersonation versus accent contrast is in some respects quite similar to our acting versus accent contrast, although their use of familiar texts creates a difference from our improvisational question-answering task. In other words, their task is closer to an act of pure mimicry than an attempt to portray a complex character the way our actors did. The contrast of impersonation versus accent revealed activations in the pSTS, anterior STS, superior temporal gyrus and PCC. The only point of commonality with our results is their activation in the left pSTS at MNI coordinate −45, −60, 15, compared to our activation in the right TPJ for Fic1P versus Accent at Talairach coordinate 42, −61, 22 (table 2). The authors argued that activations in the pSTS and temporoparietal region might reflect the fact that ‘the emulation of specific voice identities…requires accessing the semantic knowledge of individuals' [76, p. 1882]. Beyond semantics, the pSTS has a strong connection with the perception and production of emotional expression, including not only vocal prosody but also facial expression and body gesturing [77–80]. Hence, the pSTS activation for impersonation in McGettigan et al. [76] and for acting in our study might reflect something about resources related to expressiveness in prosodic production.

5. Limitations

The present study is the first of its kind, and so it will be important for other studies to replicate the findings reported here, not least given the complex patterns of activation and deactivation that were observed. While we attempted to use a uniform group of trained actors, there are many approaches to getting into character, and so other types of actors—most especially gesture-based actors—should be analysed in future studies. In addition, we used experienced amateurs rather than professionals as our participants. It would be interesting to carry out a follow-up study with professional actors, although this would undoubtedly lead to variability in the training and performance experience of the participants, compared to the more uniform population analysed in the present study. The results with our British accent condition suggest that even small gestural manipulations, such a change in the manner of speaking, can lead to neural differences similar to full-fledged character portrayal. Outside of the domain of professional acting, there has been an explosion of interest in role-playing video games [3,81–83], and neuroimaging studies have begun to look at brain activations in gamers perceiving avatars of themselves and others while in the scanner [84]. Gamers could be yet another type of non-professional population to explore in examining neural processes of role change.

Because of our desire to compare acting with self processing and ToM, we used an improvisational question-answering task during the acting condition, rather than having the actors recite rehearsed monologues. Importantly, improvisational methods are central to the training of actors, not least the actors used in the present study. The hot-seating technique that is commonly used in rehearsal for character development follows a question-and-answer format comparable to ToM studies, with the exception that the actors are expected to answer the questions in the 1P as their characters. The participants were familiar with hot-seating technique, which was used to help them develop an attachment to their characters during the workshop phase of this study (see Methods). They were therefore familiar and comfortable with responding to hypothetical questions while in character as Romeo or Juliet. However, we cannot rule out the possibility that some of the results may be due to the fact that the actors were more personally familiar with their answers in the 1P and 3P conditions, whereas they had to ‘make up' answers in the Fic1P condition. A future study could look at the production of rehearsed dramatic monologues compared with the production of pre-learned passages generated about self-experiences (i.e. rehearsed self-monologues). Overall, future studies need to explore (i) various types of participant populations (professional actors of different training backgrounds, gamers, ventriloquists, etc.) and (ii) different types of acting tasks (rehearsed versus improvised).

Social class and self-protection in romantic relationships

Emery, L. F., & Finkel, E. J. (2022). Connect or protect? Social class and self-protection in romantic relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 122(4), 683–699. Mar 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/pspi0000368

Abstract: Lower SES (socioeconomic status) couples tend to face particular challenges in their relationships. Relative to higher SES couples, they are less likely to marry and more likely to divorce—but they do not value their romantic relationships any less. Drawing on risk regulation theory and theories of social class as culture, we suggest that lower SES individuals adapt to their more chronically precarious environments by prioritizing self-protection more than higher SES individuals do, but that the need to self-protect may undermine relationship satisfaction. We investigate these ideas across 3 studies, using cross-sectional, longitudinal, and daily-diary methods. Lower SES individuals were more self-protective, both in their thoughts about their relationship (Studies 2–3), and in the judgments they made about their partner’s commitment level over 2 years (Study 1) and 2 weeks (Study 3). Self-protection, in turn, was associated with lower relationship satisfaction (Studies 2–3). However, lower SES individuals were only self-protective when feeling vulnerable in their relationships (Study 3). Taken together, these studies identify psychological mechanisms to explain why the structural challenges that lower SES individuals experience can make it more difficult to achieve satisfying relationships.

Parental presence intended to soothe children at bedtime buffers adverse effect of mothers’ parenting stress; findings challenge recommendations of parenting in Western cultures children do not depend on parental presence to fall asleep

Jahng, K. E., & Kim, E. (2022). Effects of parental bedtime involvement during children’s bedtime. Journal of Family Psychology, Mar 2022. https://doi.org/10.1037/fam0000980

Abstract: Abundant research has shown that parents’ parenting stress adversely affects their children’s well-being. However, limited attention has been provided to parental bedtime involvement as a moderating mechanism linking parents’ parenting stress to children’s happiness. This study examined the moderating effect of parent bedtime soothing and parent–child bed-sharing on the relationship between parents’ parenting stress and children’s subjective happiness. Data were extracted from the Panel Study on Korean Children (PSKC). The study participants included 1,360 7-year-old first-graders from South Korea who experienced a transition from preschool to formal schooling. The results demonstrated (a) a negative effect of parents’ parenting stress on children’s happiness and (b) a moderating effect of parental bedtime soothing, which included maternal and paternal bedtime soothing, on the relationship between mothers’ parenting stress and children’s happiness. Conversely, parent–child bed-sharing did not moderate the relationship between mothers’ parenting stress and children’s happiness. In addition, neither parent bedtime soothing nor parent–child bed-sharing moderated the relationship between fathers’ parenting stress and children’s happiness. The findings of the study indicate that parental presence intended to soothe children at bedtime, as a family routine, buffers the adverse effect of mothers’ parenting stress on their children’s subjective happiness, regardless of the parents’ gender. Our findings challenge the recommendations of parenting in Western cultures that children do not depend on a parental presence to fall asleep.

People’s aesthetic tastes are not arbitrarily different from each other in different sensory modalities but vary primarily along only a single dimension across sights and sounds: how similar a person’s taste is to the average taste

“Taste typicality” is a foundational and multi-modal dimension of ordinary aesthetic experience. Yi-Chia Chen et al.  Current Biology, March 01, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cub.2022.02.039

Highlights

• Are individual differences in aesthetic impressions systematic or arbitrary?

• We measured “taste typicality” by comparing individuals’ tastes to the average taste

• We found that visual and auditory taste typicality was systematically correlated

• Taste typicality was also the primary way people’s tastes differed from each other

Summary: Aesthetic experience seems both regular and idiosyncratic. On one hand, there are powerful regularities in what we tend to find attractive versus unattractive (e.g., beaches versus mud puddles).1,  2,  3,  4 On the other hand, our tastes also vary dramatically from person to person:5,  6,  7,  8 what one of us finds beautiful, another might find distasteful. What is the nature of such differences? They may in part be arbitrary—e.g., reflecting specific past judgments (such as liking red towels over blue ones because they were once cheaper). However, they may also in part be systematic—reflecting deeper differences in perception and/or cognition. We assessed the systematicity of aesthetic taste by exploring its typicality for the first time across seeing and hearing. Observers rated the aesthetic appeal of ordinary scenes and objects (e.g., beaches, buildings, and books) and environmental sounds (e.g., doorbells, dripping, and dialtones). We then measured “taste typicality” (separately for each modality) in terms of the similarity between each individual’s aesthetic preferences and the population’s average. The data revealed two primary patterns. First, taste typicality was not arbitrary but rather was correlated to a moderate degree across seeing and hearing: people who have typical taste for images also tend to have typical taste for sounds. Second, taste typicality captured most of the explainable variance in people’s impressions, showing that it is the primary dimension along which aesthetic tastes systematically vary.

Discussion

The stimuli used in many studies of aesthetic appreciation are beautiful—sometimes encompassing ravishing works of art

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,

35

 or arresting musical passages.

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,

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 This is not so for the current study, which instead employed stimuli one might encounter during everyday life. (We suspect that few would find the bench from Figure 1 to be ravishing.) Nevertheless, observers often agreed with each other about how appealing these images and sounds were, and we suspect that this is a hallmark of “everyday aesthetics”—the sort of aesthetic experiences one has, not when listening to a concert, but when walking back to your car afterward. The use of such ordinary stimuli also rules out other potential concerns. When studying taste typicality, in particular, some people may just want to be—or seem—different and so intentionally respond in ways that set them apart from the crowd. Here, in contrast, not a single observer’s aesthetic preferences were anticorrelated with the population mean. This may be because of the nature of our stimuli: you can’t “fight the crowd” if you have no idea what the crowd would think in the first place, and we don’t generally have stereotypes about, for example, the degree to which the noise of two rubbing hands is appealing. In the present study, we used aesthetic judgments of such stimuli in order to address two particular questions.

We first asked whether one’s taste typicality for seeing was fully independent of one’s taste typicality for hearing. The answer was clearly no: these two dimensions were robustly correlated with each other to a moderate degree—such that it is possible to predict taste typicality in one modality from taste typicality in another modality. We next asked how central taste typicality is to individual differences in aesthetic taste: even when robust, it might nevertheless be a peripheral factor in aesthetic taste, which is eclipsed by other factors that are able to explain more variance in aesthetic tastes. Here, the data provided a clear and powerful answer: taste typicality appears to be the primary determinant of individual differences in aesthetic preferences—in both seeing and hearing—with no other factor able to explain even one fourth as much variance.

These results might initially seem to be at odds with past research, which has identified many specific factors that appear to drive aesthetic impressions. For example, past work has shown that people prefer stimuli that are blue,

2

 curvy,

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 symmetrical,

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 inward-facing,

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,

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 moderately complex,

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 balanced,

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 typical

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 (but see Vogel, Ingendahl, and Winkielman

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), and presented in a canonical size.

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,  

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,  

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 One possibility is that such properties are orthogonal to taste typicality, and they instead contribute to other principal components of the variance in aesthetic impressions—although, this would mean that they could collectively explain no more than 7.5% of such variance (Figure 4). A second possibility, however, is that these other factors are central after all, insofar as they all contribute to the dimension of typicality. In this case, however, our data add to previous work by demonstrating indirectly that the individual tastes for these seemingly independent properties (e.g., curviness and complexity) must in fact be related—since for them to collectively constitute taste t<ypicality, they would have to be strongly correlated with each other (since otherwise, they would be split into multiple principal components).

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 This same lesson also applies to other less perceptual factors. Others have attempted to explain individual differences in aesthetic appreciation by appealing to factors such as personality

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 (but see McManus, Cook, and Hunt

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), expertise,

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,

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 life history,

2

,

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 and neuroanatomy.

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,

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 For example, more art education leads to less typical preferences for harmony and symmetry

7

,

51

,

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 (potentially through social learning

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). However, at least for the “ordinary” stimuli explored in here, these other seemingly disparate factors could only play a substantive role if they were also correlated with each other—such that they too contribute to the first principal component of the variability in aesthetic impressions.

Of course, it will come as a surprise to nobody that people vary in how typical their aesthetic tastes are. Most of us know others whose tastes in music or film are either “mainstream” or “alternative.” The present work demonstrates that this form of typicality is fundamental to our aesthetic impressions in two ways: it is a broad factor that operates to some degree across sensory modalities, and it explains more variability in aesthetic impressions than any other single factor does.

These discoveries open the door for a new way to explore aesthetic experiences. For example, in addition to asking what factors give rise to typical aesthetic experiences, we may ask how people come to share many aesthetic responses and how an individual comes to deviate from that. While the former can arise from interactions between the stimulus properties and the evolutionary goals

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 or common experiences

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 of humans, our findings demand a different kind of answer to the latter question. Given the idiosyncratic ways in which people’s tastes differ from what is typical—and the similar degree of such deviations across different modalities within each individual—the responsible mechanisms must operate in a broad and coherent way over multiple domains rather than being reducible to any processes that lead to specific instances of preferences, such as familiarity with specific stimuli. We hope that this work will spur future research on just what constitutes these mechanisms and how they give rise to systematic individual aesthetic tastes.

Selfless individuals were happier and that more selfless moments of an individual were also happier moments

Selflessness Meets Higher and More Stable Happiness: An Experience Sampling Study of the Joint Dynamics of Selflessness and Happiness. Nicolas Pellerin, Michael Dambrun & Eric Raufaste. Journal of Happiness Studies, Mar 8 2022. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10902-022-00503-8

Abstract: Previous studies have demonstrated the existence of a positive relationship between selflessness and happiness. However, none of these studies yet differentiated the between—and within—person levels of analysis. Moreover, the Selflessness/Selfcenteredness Happiness Model (SSHM) suggests that selflessness might stabilize happiness. In this experience sampling study, we explored the relationships between selflessness and happiness—baseline and stability—at both the within and betweenperson levels. During five consecutive days, participants responded seven times a day to short questions about happiness and selflessness. Our results showed that more selfless individuals were happier and that more selfless moments of an individual were also happier moments. Moreover, more selfless individuals were more stable from one day to the other. Finally, people becoming more selfless experienced more happiness stability at the following assessment moment and the next day. This study brings new evidence of the importance of selflessness for happiness.

Roughly one-third of men disliked their nude appearance, compared to approximately half of women

Demographic and sociocultural predictors of sexuality-related body image and sexual frequency: The U.S. Body Project I. David A. Frederick et al. Body Image, Volume 41, June 2022, Pages 109-127. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2022.01.010

Highlights

• We examined sexuality-related body image in a national sample of men and women.

• Women reported higher sexuality-related body image on three of four measures.

• Sexual orientation was tied to sexuality-related body image among men.

• Body mass and ethnicity were linked to sexuality-related body image.

• Appearance surveillance was associated with sexuality-related body image.

Abstract: Body image is a critical component of an individual’s sexual experiences. This makes it critical to identify demographic and sociocultural correlates of sexuality-related body image: the subjective feelings, cognitions, and evaluations related to one’s body in the context of sexual experience. We examined how sexuality-related body image differed by gender, sexual orientation, race, age, and BMI. Four items assessing sexuality-related body image were completed by 11,620 U.S. adults: self-perceived sex appeal of their body, nude appearance satisfaction, and the extent to which they believed that body image positively or negatively affected their sexual enjoyment and feelings of sexual acceptability as a partner. Men reported slightly less nude appearance dissatisfaction and fewer negative effects of body image on sexual enjoyment and sexual acceptability than women, but did not differ in reported sex appeal. Poorer sexuality-related body image was reported by people with higher BMIs, not in relationships, who had sex less frequently, among White compared to Black women and men, and among gay compared to heterosexual men. Data also revealed a subgroup of respondents who reported that their body image had a positive impact on their sex lives. The findings highlight a need for interventions addressing sexuality-related body image.

Keywords: Body ImagePositive Body ImageSexual SatisfactionGenderSexual AttitudesSexual Orientation

Boring People: Stereotype Characteristics, Interpersonal Attributions, and Social Reactions... Being seen as a bore may come with substantial negative consequences

Boring People: Stereotype Characteristics, Interpersonal Attributions, and Social Reactions. Wijnand A. P. van Tilburg, Eric R. Igou, Mehr Panjwani. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, March 8, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1177/01461672221079104

Abstract: Unfortunately, some people are perceived as boring. Despite the potential relevance that these perceptions might have in everyday life, the underlying psychological processes and consequences of perceiving a person as “boring” have been largely unexplored. We examined the stereotypical features of boring others by having people generate (Study 1) and then rate (Study 2) these. We focused on occupations (e.g., data analytics, taxation, and accounting), hobbies (e.g., sleeping, religion, and watching TV), and personal characteristics (e.g., lacking humor and opinions, being negative) that people ascribed to stereotypically boring others. Experiments then showed that those who were ascribed boring characteristics were seen as lacking interpersonal warmth and competence (Study 3), were socially avoided (Study 4), and enduring their company required compensation (Study 5). These results suggest that being stereotyped as a bore may come with substantially negative interpersonal consequences.

Keywords: boredom, warmth, competence, stereotype, person perception

General Discussion

Being a bore is hardly a crime; yet, our studies suggest that those who are stereotypically boring incur negative attributions of warmth and competence, face social disapproval, and test the endurance of people’s company. Study 1 explored the occupations, hobbies, and personal characteristics that people stereotypically associate with boring others. Participants generated these features freely and we grouped this stereotype content into categories. We tested, in Study 2, how well they describe stereotypically boring others. Together, these studies suggested that people with occupations in data analysis, accounting, and taxation seemed particularly boring to our participants. Those whose “hobbies” included sleeping, religion, and watching TV were also considered particularly boring, as were those who lacked humor, expressed no opinions, and came across as negative. Boring people stereotypically congregate in small cities and towns as opposed to villages and large cities.

Studies 3 to 5 examined attributions and reactions that those who possess these features may incur. Participants reacted to persons described in vignettes embedded with features that characterized stereotypically boring others to various degrees. This method allowed us to examine social perceptions of boring others without the need to refer to boredom in their descriptions explicitly, reducing demand effects. Results confirmed that more boredom was attributed to those described using more, versus less, stereotypically boring features. Furthermore, Study 3 showed that possessing stereotypically boring features comes with less perceived interpersonal warmth and less competence. Study 4 further indicated that conforming to the boring person stereotype came with increased social avoidance. Consistently, Study 5 showed that keeping company with a stereotypical bore is psychologically costly, evident from the suggested compensation that participants asked for. Finally, in a supplementary study (S1; Research Supplement), we explored if stereotypically boring people are perceived in a more positive light when they occupy a job that requires a stereotypically boring person relative to the same job performed by a less stereotypically boring person. We did not find evidence for this potential moderation, suggesting that even when a stereotypically boring person is the best fit for a job, people still prefer a stereotypically less boring alternative.

Overall, our results fit well within research on the stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002) and the behavior from intergroup affect and stereotypes map (Cuddy et al., 2008). As with other group stereotypes, the stereotype of boring people could be helpfully described based on warmth and competence dimensions and corresponding responses (avoidance). The stereotype of boring people, different from many other stereotypes, is characterized by both low warmth and low competence.

Contributions

Our research shows that being perceived as boring likely conveys low competence and low warmth, being a social burden, thus causing avoidance by others. Rather than innocuous, such social reactions can lead to social isolation, for example, in the form of loneliness or ostracism (Weiss, 1973; Williams, 2002) with profound psychological consequences (Cacioppo et al., 2003; Williams, 2012). Those perceived as boring may thus be at greater risk of harm. Furthermore, despite the negative stereotype that those who perform jobs in, for example, accounting, taxation, and data analysis may accordingly face, society needs people to perform those roles. Rather than perceiving them as performing a social “crime,” as Cecil Beaton may have joked, perhaps those seen as boring should receive some sympathy and support instead.

The stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002) characterizes groups within a space characterized by low or high warmth and competence. Group stereotypes are most typically located in areas where one quality is relatively low while the other is relatively high. (Fiske et al., 2002). Low attributed competence and warmth rarely occur in conjunction (Kervyn et al., 2009; Swencionis et al., 2017). These perceptions apply to most marginalized and disenfranchised groups in society (e.g., immigrants, the poor, the homeless; Fiske, 2018), including stereotypically boring people. This positioning is theoretically intriguing: groups perceived as low in warmth and competence are often characterized as having relatively low power in society (Fiske & Cuddy, 2006). Yet, various features of the stereotype associated with boring people seem at odds with a low power position (e.g., high education/income occupations, such as banking and finance). While people might, unfortunately, get away with the avoidance or poor treatment of relatively low power groups such as the homeless, the same seems unlikely to apply when dealing with stereotypically boring people in positions of financial or social power. Their potential marginalization offers an intriguing avenue for theoretical refinement of relevant theory. At the same time, the boring people stereotype seems distinct concerning its characteristics and the social consequences it could evoke.

Most models of boredom seem to converge on the important role that the adverse experience plays in guiding cognition and behavior (Elpidorou, 2014, 2018a, 2018b; Moynihan et al., 2020; Struk et al., 2016; Van Tilburg & Igou, 2012, 2019; Velasco, 2019). For example, Eastwood and Gorelik’s (2019) unused cognitive potential model (see also Eastwood et al., 2012) proposes that boredom can be understood as “the feeling associated with a failure to engage our cognitive capacity (desire bind) such that cognitive capacity remains under-utilized (unoccupied mind)” (p. 57). Van Tilburg and Igou’s (2011, 2019) pragmatic meaning-regulation approach characterized boredom as an emotion that signals a lack of meaning in the task at hand and encourages an active search for more meaningful alternatives or a withdrawal from the situations (see also Moynihan et al., 2021). Combining these ideas, Westgate and Wilson’s (2018) MAC model proposed that boredom is characterized by low attention or a lack of meaning and that these two factors contribute to boredom independently. Further integrating these models, Tam and colleagues (2021) suggest that a range of cognitive appraisals—meaning, control, and challenge—help to understand attentional engagement. What all these approaches share, however, is the notion that boredom is key to understanding cognition and behavior: It casts boredom in the reactionary role of causing aversion to, disengagement from, or avoidance of, the cause of boredom, consistent with the social reactions that stereotypically boring persons seem to incur.

Our research portrays boredom as a protagonist in person perceptions and interactions. This treatment is consistent with work on boredom in other disciplines, such as sociology. For example, Brissett and Snow (1993) argue that boredom is an interactional phenomenon characterized by people feeling “being out of synch with the ongoing rhythms of social life” (p. 239). Boredom marks the perception that one’s contribution to the future is insignificant, casting one’s life as a rather meaningless part of society at large. In this sense, boredom may be the product of a consumer-oriented and affluent society. Brissett and Snow further highlight that expressions of boredom can serve dedicated communication purposes. For example, stating that one is bored, as opposed to depressed, may portray the self as more superior or to save face.

Ohlmeier and colleagues (2020) likewise emphasize the socially constructed side of this emotion. They highlight that, historically, scholars have suggested that modernity has caused failures to find meaning in life, work, or other activities, which in turn renders people bored. Schopenhauer (1851) even suggested that achieving all we aspire to in life merely renders us bored. In a similar vein, Ohlmeier and colleagues propose that “The easier and more predictable modern life becomes, the more boring it seems.” (p. 212). The notion that boredom is an indicator of an “easy” life might, at the surface, seem to suggest that expressing boredom ought to signal one’s success or status in life. However, Ohlmeier and colleagues (2020) note that the construct of boredom may be associated with marginalized groups as well; they propose that social inequalities within a particular society can play an important role in how people understand boredom.

Consistently, Ohlmeier and colleagues note that social norms currently discourage expressing boredom (Hochschild, 1983) in interactional settings and that the term is considered a sign of social disapproval (see also Conrad, 1997). Boredom, in this sense, signals a disjunction from one’s social role (Goffman, 1956, 1982), such as talking excessively in a context that requires one to be a careful listener (e.g., Leary et al., 1986). In work settings, expressions of boredom may be suppressed or discouraged if cultural norms emphasize achievement-orientation, where boredom may be taken as an indication of poor person-situation fit.

Limitations and Future Directions

We examined the stereotypical features of boring people in United States (Studies 1–3 and 5) and United Kingdom (Study 4) samples recruited online. Readers may legitimately question whether these stereotype content features generalize to other populations. We suspect that there are cultural variations in these stereotype features (see also Henrich et al., 2010). For example, societies likely differ in the degree to which religious activities—in our current samples typically siding with being perceived as “boring”—are seen like that elsewhere, given the substantial variation in religious beliefs and practices worldwide and the links that religiosity has with boredom (Van Tilburg et al., 2019). Furthermore, it is possible that some stereotype features have limited temporal generalizability, with technological and broader societal developments likely altering the content of hobbies and occupations. As a case in point, perceptions of jobs in computing and IT—currently ranked mid-boring among our occupations—may change over time, with activities such as coding and gaming perhaps gradually becoming more mainstream (see Kowert & Oldmeadow, 2012).

Thus, the specific stereotype content will likely apply increasingly less as the degree of deviations from these specific settings increases. We assure the reader, however, that this is not necessarily a limiting factor. While the content of the boring person stereotype likely varies somewhat across societies and time, it might well be that the (negative) social perceptions generalize much better. For example, we replicated the lack of perceived warmth that Leary and colleagues’ (1986) study found, conducted more than 30 years ago. While generalizability across societies, not to mention time, requires further empirical verification, we are cautiously optimistic that the negative social implications of being perceived as a bore are found in other settings.

By examining the content of the boring people stereotype, we focused on the stereotype content model (Fiske et al., 2002). Yet, our research also has implications for models that highlight the importance of agency and communion (e.g., Abele & Wojciszke, 2014; Koch et al., 2016). We reason that boring people are unlikely to be seen as agentic given the centrality of the laziness trait within the stereotype. Furthermore, given the perceived lack of social skills and not being liked, boring people are unlikely to be perceived as communal. Research would benefit from examining the fit of the boring people across the content models that highlight alternative dimensions (e.g., agency/communion; e.g., Abele & Wojciszke, 2014; Koch et al., 2016). We assume that the boring people stereotype will occupy a salient and distinct place across the various stereotype content dimensions.

We examined boredom using vignettes that described people with features that were rated differently in how stereotypically boring they were. There was considerable variation in the level of boredom that these features signaled, and we could hence examine responses to people who appeared as highly, intermediately, or a little boring. However, we did not have a truly “nonboring” control, and results should hence be interpreted as reflecting reactions to others who differ in degree of boredom rather than presence versus absence of boring features. Furthermore, we did not assess whether or to what degree features ascribed to stereotypically boring people overlap with those of other stereotyped groups, or if, perhaps, other labels (e.g., stereotypically unfriendly people, stereotypically unsociable people) fit as well. These are limitations that could be addressed in future research.

Studies 4 and 5 examined the tentative avoidance of stereotypically boring persons. Is this avoidance primarily associated with a corresponding lack of warmth or competence attributed to stereotypically boring individuals? Perhaps the relative roles of warmth versus competence in interpersonal avoidance may be context-dependent. In a context where people prioritize affiliation with others (e.g., a party), it might well be that avoidance is primarily predicted by (lack of) perceived warmth. In a context where, on the other hand, people seek out others with competency skills (e.g., expert advice and tech support), avoidance may be predicted primarily by (lack of) perceived competence instead. Future research should examine the roles that warmth and competence may independently, or perhaps interactively, play in avoidance.

Our research confirms that the boring people stereotype exists, and it creates clarity about the typical features of the stereotype and the social consequences of being perceived as boring. We assume that this stereotype is more likely to affect impression formation under conditions of low capacity and low accuracy motivation (e.g., Fiske & Neuberg, 1990; Petty & Cacioppo, 1986). That said, given the negativity of its content across features of competence and interpersonal warmth, we speculate that the stereotype is especially likely to be applied when people are negatively biased toward targets, whether they be individuals or groups, for example, in situations of psychological threat and conflict (e.g., Brown, 2000; Eagly & Chaiken, 1993). Work on stereotypes and motivated reasoning shows that the activation and use of stereotypes when forming impressions of others is in part shaped by the goals that people have (Kundra & Sinclair, 1999). A particularly interesting case emerges in situations where the use or inhibition of a particular stereotype may serve to boost some aspect of the self. For example, research shows that the application of negative out-group stereotypes helps improve one’s own self-worth (e.g., Greenberg et al., 1990). Perhaps the application of the boring people stereotype offers people an opportunity to flatter their self-perceived, or socially communicated, creativity or uniqueness. Interestingly, if such strategic use of stereotyping others occurs especially under self-threat, it is possible that precisely those individuals who are suspect of being bores themselves will stereotype others. If true, such compensatory stereotyping gives new meaning to the popular belief that “only boring people get bored”: only (or especially) boring people get bored with others. Relatedly, it is plausible that in some contexts the boring people stereotype is more relevant than in others, especially when being boring is highly inconsistent with the contextual demands (e.g., book clubs, dating, and entertainment). Future research should examine more closely the conditions under which the boring people stereotype comes into play.