Some of our latest work concerns how people perceive their bodily sensations, and how they are relevant to a wide variety of judgments. Here we found that people who are easily disgusted, because they are highly attuned to their bodily cues, are also highly sensitive to risks. They judge all kinds of risks to be … More New Paper: Bodily Sensitivity Associated with Risk Perception
Previous research has shown that people try to ‘make up’ for their moral failures by engaging in positive behaviours, in an attempt to re-establish their positive self-image. We tested whether similar compensation strategies are at play when people violate normative eating practices. Across three experiments we found that participants who recalled an overeating (vs. neutral) … More New Paper: Making Up for Moral Failures
A growing body of work has documented oxytocin’s role in social functioning, to test whether this hormone facilitates spontaneous mimicry of others’ emotional expressions. In a double-blind, randomized trial, adult Caucasian males (n = 145) received a nasal spray of either oxytocin or placebo before completing a facial mimicry task. Facial expressions were coded using automated face … More New Paper: Role of Oxytocin in Mimicry Depends on Emotion
September 2018. Moral elevation is the feeling that results when observing another person engaging in exceptionally moral (e.g., selfless) behaviour. People usually report feeling inspired and uplifted, and we previously showed that these feelings lead to increased helping (Schnall, Fessler & Roper, 2010; Schnall & Roper, 2012). Our latest paper investigated the complex interplay of … More New Paper: Neural Underpinnings of Inspiration Elicited by Exceptional Role Models
August 2018. In a new paper we show that seemingly conflicting results on motivated distance perception can be explained by taking into account the role of affect. More specifically, there have been two sets of findings on distance perception to rewards. On the one hand, Balcetis & Dunning (2010) found that approaching positive objects makes … More New Paper: Affect Explains Conflicting Findings on Motivated Perception
July 2018. The latest paper with Konrad Bocian, Wieslaw Baryla, Wojciech Kulseza and Bogdan Wojciszke just came out at the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology. We found that beliefs of self-other similarity, mere exposure, and facial mimicry influenced judgments of moral character measured in various ways. These effects were mediated by changes in liking of … More New Paper: Attitudes Influence Moral Character Evaluations
June 2018. A new paper with Philippe Gilchrist is now in press at the Journal of Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry. We found that rather than alleviating feelings of contamination, physical self-cleansing led to more contamination concerns and guilt when in the context of activated obsessive-type cognitions, possibly because it paradoxically makes cleanliness goals salient. … More New Paper: Physical Cleansing Increases Contamination Concerns
