Psychological science
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Psychological science · Apr 2014
Randomized Controlled Trial"Obesity is a disease": examining the self-regulatory impact of this public-health message.
In the current work, we examined the impact of the American Medical Association's recent classification of obesity as a disease on weight-management processes. Across three experimental studies, we highlighted the potential hidden costs associated with labeling obesity as a disease, showing that this message, presented in an actual New York Times article, undermined beneficial weight-loss self-regulatory processes. ⋯ In addition, the disease message, relative to a message that obesity is not a disease, lowered body-image dissatisfaction, but this too predicted higher-calorie food choices. Thus, although defining obesity as a disease may be beneficial for body image, results from the current work emphasize the negative implications of this message for self-regulation.
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Psychological science · Feb 2014
Intercommunication between prefrontal and posterior brain regions for protecting visual working memory from distractor interference.
Because visual working memory has a very restricted capacity, good filtering mechanisms are essential for its successful functioning. A neuronal signal emitted by the prefrontal cortex is considered to be an important contributor to filtering. ⋯ From human electroencephalograms, we extracted several event-related components that reflect the different subprocesses of filtering. On the basis of their timing and a clear pattern of correlations, we reason that filtering might consist of a causal chain of events that involve prefrontal and posterior cortex regions: After distractors are detected in posterior regions, a prefrontal mechanism is activated, which in turn prevents subsequent unnecessary parietal storage of distractor information.
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Psychological science · Feb 2014
Nothing to declare: mandatory and voluntary disclosure leads advisors to avoid conflicts of interest.
Professionals face conflicts of interest when they have a personal interest in giving biased advice. Mandatory disclosure--informing consumers of the conflict--is a widely adopted strategy in numerous professions, such as medicine, finance, and accounting. Prior research has shown, however, that such disclosures have little impact on consumer behavior, and can backfire by leading advisors to give even more biased advice. ⋯ These results show that, although disclosure has generally been found to be ineffective for dealing with unavoidable conflicts of interest, it can be beneficial when providers have the ability to avoid conflicts. Mandatory and voluntary disclosure can deter advisors from accepting conflicts of interest so that they have nothing to disclose except the absence of conflicts. We propose that people are averse to being viewed as biased, and that policies designed to activate reputational and ethical concerns will motivate advisors to avoid conflicts of interest.
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Psychological science · Jan 2014
Randomized Controlled TrialEmbodied terror management: interpersonal touch alleviates existential concerns among individuals with low self-esteem.
Individuals with low (rather than high) self-esteem often struggle with existential concerns. In the present research, we examined whether these existential concerns may be alleviated by seemingly trivial experiences of both real and simulated interpersonal touch. A brief touch on the shoulder by a female experimenter led individuals with low self-esteem to experience less death anxiety (Study 1) and more social connectedness after a death reminder (Study 2). ⋯ Finally, holding a teddy bear (vs. a cardboard box) led individuals with low self-esteem to respond to a death reminder with less defensive ethnocentrism (Study 4). Individuals with high self-esteem were unaffected by touch (Studies 1-4). These findings highlight the existential significance of embodied touch experiences, particularly for individuals with low self-esteem.
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Psychological science · Dec 2013
Turning body and self inside out: visualized heartbeats alter bodily self-consciousness and tactile perception.
Prominent theories highlight the importance of bodily perception for self-consciousness, but it is currently not known whether bodily perception is based on interoceptive or exteroceptive signals or on integrated signals from these anatomically distinct systems. In the research reported here, we combined both types of signals by surreptitiously providing participants with visual exteroceptive information about their heartbeat: A real-time video image of a periodically illuminated silhouette outlined participants' (projected, "virtual") bodies and flashed in synchrony with their heartbeats. ⋯ First, synchronous cardio-visual signals increased self-identification with and self-location toward the virtual body, and second, they altered the perception of tactile stimuli applied to participants' backs so that touch was mislocalized toward the virtual body. We argue that the integration of signals from the inside and the outside of the human body is a fundamental neurobiological process underlying self-consciousness.