Kai J. Jonas

Response to Comment on "Estimating the reproducibility of psychological science"

Gilbert et al. conclude that evidence from the Open Science Collaboration’s Reproducibility Project: Psychology indicates high reproducibility, given the study methodology. Their very optimistic assessment is limited by statistical misconceptions and by causal inferences from selectively interpreted, correlational data. Using the Reproducibility Project: Psychology data, both optimistic and pessimistic conclusions about reproducibility are possible, and neither are yet warranted.

The role of the left inferior frontal gyrus in social perception: an rTMS study.

Perceiving and interpreting social information richness is something that humans do automatically whenever they engage in social interactions. Numerous studies have identified neural substrates, including mirror neurons that may enable such social perception. In this study, we temporarily disrupted activity in the left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) using repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). We investigated whether this cortical region, that is hypothesized to include mirror neurons, plays a central role in social perception. The LIFG was stimulated in the experimental condition (n=18), the vertex was targeted in the control condition (n=19). Disrupting LIFG, but not vertex, increased reaction times during an emotion recognition task, and eliminated the suppression of the 8-12Hz EEG μ rhythm, postulated as an index of mirroring activity. The results of this study provide further evidence for the role of the human mirror neuron system (MNS) in social perception, and indicate that the MNS can be measured with EEG.

Diskriminierung und Toleranz: psychologische Grundlagen und Anwendungsperspektiven

Transl. of title: Discrimination and tolerance: psychological foundations and applied perspectives.

What Day Is Today? A Social–Psychological Investigation Into the Process of Time Orientation

Social–psychological research on time has pointed to the social construct of time rather than a mere physical entity that we reflect cognitively. Using two paradigms (day retrieval process and goal priming), the authors show that the time orientation is strongly prone to social influences and argue that a self-regulatory process underlies these findings. The degree of social comparison orientation in Study 1 and the degree of identification with groups for which the landmark is relevant (Study 2) both moderate the functionality of the landmarks within time orientation. Consistent with these findings, Studies 3 and 4 offer evidence that the activation of a personally relevant goal activates the day of goal attainment, a process that again can be moderated by social comparison orientation and identification. Overall, these results suggest a socially regulated time orientation. The internal clock (if any) is at least partly a “social clock.”

Humiliation as an intense emotional experience: Evidence from the electro-encephalogram

Humiliation, the emotion associated with being lowered in status in the eyes of others, seems to be very intense. As such, humiliation has been implied to play an important role in the escalation of inter-individual and inter-group conflict. Here, we provide the first clear empirical evidence that humiliation is indeed a very intense experience. Based on the electro-encephalogram recorded from people reading scenarios that evoked humiliation, anger, or happiness, electrophysiological measures of cognitive intensity were derived for each of the emotion types. The late positive potential (LPP), a measure of the level of perceived (negative), affect was markedly increased in humiliation scenarios compared to happiness and anger scenarios. In addition, event-related desynchronization (ERD) in the alpha-frequency range, a measure of the overall intensity of cortical activation, was significantly more pronounced for humiliation than for happiness and anger scenarios. Our findings support the idea that humiliation is a particularly intense experience that is likely to have far-reaching consequences.

Out of the group, out of control? The brain responds to social exclusion with changes in cognitive control

The effects of social exclusion are far-reaching, both on an emotional and behavioral level. The present study investigates whether social exclusion also directly influences basic cognitive functions, specifically the ability to exert cognitive control. Participants were either excluded or included while playing an online game. To test whether exclusion altered cognitive control, we measured the electrophysiological responses to a Go/No Go task. In this task participants had to withhold a response (No Go) on a small number of trials while the predominant tendency was to make an overt (Go) response. Compared to Go trials the event-related potential evoked by No Go trials elicited an increased N2, reflecting the detection of the response conflict, followed by an increased P3, reflecting the inhibition of the predominant response. The N2 effect was larger for participants who had experienced exclusion, while the P3 effect was smaller. This indicates that exclusion leads to an increased ability to detect response conflicts, while at the same time exclusion decreases the neural processes that underlie the inhibition of unwanted behavior.

Implicit Attitude Measures

Arguably, one of the most thriving research areas in current psychology is assessing attitudes and related constructs with implicit measures, which we define as those indirect measures that rely on response latencies or other indices of spontaneous trait association, the activation of action semantics, or even real behavior. This research area is united by a shared excitement about the discoveries enabled by these measures, be they related to social attitudes and behavior, clinical disorders, consumer decisions, or self-representations, among others. As this enumeration suggests, in spite of the common excitement about the new research questions implicit measures allow us to investigate, there is much diversity in this research. First of all, these approaches bridge subdisciplines of psychology traditionally characterized by little cross-talk. Furthermore, the variety of implicit measures used is already broad and still growing, given variants and implementations of these implicit measures in different samples and research approaches. Given this diversity, we deemed it appropriate to summarize research that focuses either on the comparison of different implicit measures or on the mechanisms underlying one of the measures. Such knowledge is necessary and helpful to determine which

A Bayesian model-averaged meta-analysis of the power pose effect with informed and default priors : The case of felt power

ABSTRACTEarlier work found that – compared to participants who adopted constrictive body postures – participants who adopted expansive body postures reported feeling more powerful, showed an increase in testosterone and a decrease in cortisol, and displayed an increased tolerance for risk. However, these power pose effects have recently come under considerable scrutiny. Here, we present a Bayesian meta-analysis of six preregistered studies from this special issue, focusing on the effect of power posing on felt power. Our analysis improves on standard classical meta-analyses in several ways. First and foremost, we considered only preregistered studies, eliminating concerns about publication bias. Second, the Bayesian approach enables us to quantify evidence for both the alternative and the null hypothesis. Third, we use Bayesian model-averaging to account for the uncertainty with respect to the choice for a fixed-effect model or a random-effect model. Fourth, based on a literature review, we obtained an em...

How can preregistration contribute to research in our field

Comprehensive Results in Social Psychology (CRSP) is a novel journal for preregistered research (so-called registered reports, RR) in the field of social psychology. It offers RR-only publications, with the possibility of adding exploratory analysis and data as well. After submission of introduction, hypotheses, methods, procedure, and analysis plan, submitted manuscripts are reviewed prior to data collection. If the peer review process results in a positive evaluation of the manuscript, an initial publication agreement (IPA) is issued upon which publication of the manuscript (given adherence to the registered protocol) independent of the obtained results is possible. CRSP seeks to complement the publication options in our field by making transparent confirmatory and exploratory research possible.

Regret and counterfactual thinking in the face of inevitability: The case of HIV-positive men

Regret and counterfactual thoughts have been extensively studied in laboratory settings characterized by unlimited future options. Yet, evidence of counterfactual thought and its effects in real-life situations is scarce. The present study demonstrates the influence of regret and counterfactuals on HIV-seropositive individuals (N = 182). Results show that HIV-specific regrets as well as counterfactuals exert negative influence on well-being. However, counterfactuals also increased the likelihood to behave differently in the future by indicating stronger safe-sex intentions. Retrospectively, participants experienced a relatively high level of responsibility for their infection, which increased the experience of regret. Taken together, our results show that regret and counterfactuals have functional and dysfunctional consequences in this health-related context. We discuss the theoretical implications as well as the practical consequences of our findings.