Kaitlin Toner

Looking While Unhappy Mood-Congruent Gaze in Young Adults, Positive Gaze in Older Adults

Recent findings that older adults gaze toward positively valenced stimuli and away from negatively valenced stimuli have been interpreted as part of their attempts to achieve the goal of feeling good. However, the idea that older adults use gaze to regulate mood, and that their gaze does not simply reflect mood, stands in contrast to evidence of mood-congruent processing in young adults. No previous study has directly linked age-related positive gaze preferences to mood regulation. In this eye-tracking study, older and younger adults in a range of moods viewed synthetic face pairs varying in valence. Younger adults demonstrated mood-congruent gaze, looking more at positive faces when in a good mood and at negative faces when in a bad mood. Older adults displayed mood-incongruent positive gaze, looking toward positive and away from negative faces when in a bad mood. This finding suggests that in older adults, gaze does not reflect mood, but rather is used to regulate it.

Use of gaze for real-time mood regulation: effects of age and attentional functioning.

Older adults show positive preferences in their gaze toward emotional faces, and such preferences appear to be activated when older adults are in bad moods. This suggests that age-related gaze preferences serve a mood regulatory role, but whether they actually function to improve mood over time has yet to be tested. We investigated links between fixation and mood change in younger and older adults, as well as the moderating role of attentional functioning. AgexFixationxAttentional Functioning interactions emerged such that older adults with better executive functioning were able to resist mood declines by showing positive gaze preferences. Implications for the function of age-related positive gaze preferences are discussed.

Feeling Superior Is a Bipartisan Issue Extremity (Not Direction) of Political Views Predicts Perceived Belief Superiority

Accusations of entrenched political partisanship have been launched against both conservatives and liberals. But is feeling superior about one’s beliefs a partisan issue? Two competing hypotheses exist: the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis (i.e., conservatives are dogmatic) and the ideological-extremism hypothesis (i.e., extreme views on both sides predict dogmatism). We measured 527 Americans’ attitudes about nine contentious political issues, the degree to which they thought their beliefs were superior to other people’s, and their level of dogmatism. Dogmatism was higher for people endorsing conservative views than for people endorsing liberal views, which replicates the rigidity-of-the-right hypothesis. However, curvilinear effects of ideological attitude on belief superiority (i.e., belief that one’s position is more correct than another’s) supported the ideological-extremism hypothesis. Furthermore, responses reflecting the greatest belief superiority were obtained on conservative attitudes for three issues and liberal attitudes for another three issues. These findings capture nuances in the relationship between political beliefs and attitude entrenchment that have not been revealed previously.

Intellectual Humility and Reactions to Opinions about Religious Beliefs

Intellectual humility, a recognition of the fallibility of ones own views and an openness to changing those views when warranted, is a construct with roots in philosophy that is only now beginning to receive attention from psychological scientists. We focus on intellectual humility in the domain of religious belief and conduct an initial test of the hypothesis that the influence of religious beliefs on evaluations of written opinions about religious matters is moderated by intellectual humility. We find that our ad hoc measure of intellectual humility in the religious domain is best characterized in terms of four correlated dimensions, allowing for focused tests of our hypothesis. We find some support for the hypothesis. Individuals with strong religious beliefs who are low in intellectual humility in the religion domain, regardless of dimension, react more strongly than their high humility counterparts to written opinions regarding religious beliefs—both opinions that support and contradict their own beliefs. Ancillary analyses show a moderate curvilinear relation between strength of religious beliefs and intellectual humility in the religion domain, with lower humility accompanying stronger views in favor of and against religious beliefs.

The Impact of Individual and Group Feedback on Environmental Intentions and Self-Beliefs

The present study examined how feedback regarding one’s personal impact on the environment, along with feedback regarding one’s group’s impact, influences environmental attitudes, intentions, and self-beliefs. Using a bogus carbon footprint calculator, participants received either moderately or highly negative feedback about their own environmental impact as well as feedback about the average impact of students at their university. Participants expressed the greatest intentions to behave proenvironmentally, especially with behaviors that require a high level of commitment, when their personal feedback was worse than that of their group. Impact of feedback on intentions was not mediated by attitudes, emotions, or self-evaluations, suggesting that participants were not motivated to improve their behaviors because they felt badly about themselves. Instead, people were motivated to change their behaviors when they believed their current behavior differed from that of an important reference group.