Ideology is a potent motivational force; human beings are capable of committing atrocities (as well as acts of generosity and courage) and sacrificing even their own lives for the sake of abstract belief systems. In this article, we summarize the major tenets of a model of political ideology as motivated social cognition (Jost et al. in Psychol Bull 129:339–375, 2003a, Psychol Bull 129:389–393,...

....................................................................................................... 4 Introduction ................................................................................................... 5 Studying Primates ........................................................................................... 7 Pongo: Species Profile ............................................

W develop a dynamic cognitive model of network activation and show that people at different status levels spontaneously activate, or call to mind, different subsections of their networks when faced with job threat. Using a multimethod approach (General Social Survey data and a laboratory experiment), we find that, under conditions of job threat, people with low status exhibit a winnowing respon...

Social contact promotes enhanced health and well-being, likely as a function of the social regulation of emotional responding in the face of various life stressors. For this functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, 16 married women were subjected to the threat of electric shock while holding their husband's hand, the hand of an anonymous male experimenter, or no hand at all. Results ...

This study examined the moderating roles of threat-salience and physical health on the relationship between age and threat interpretations. During an online study, participants (N=1352, ages 18-91) rated the likelihood of neutral and negative explanations of ambiguous physical (older adult-relevant), social (younger adult-relevant) and general (age-neutral) scenarios. Results were consistent wi...

“Two randomized field experiments tested a social-psychological intervention designed to improve minority student performance and increase our understanding of how psychological threat mediates performance in chronically evaluative real-world environments. We expected that the risk of confirming a negative stereotype aimed at one’s group could undermine academic performance in minority students...

One troubling aspect of membership in a stigmatized group is that negative stereotypes about the group's performance affect one's personal performance (i.e., stereotype threat). Women who are made aware of the negative stereotype that "women are bad at math" perform worse than women who are not made aware of this stereotype. However, women can use an "escape hatch" to avoid stereotype threat by...

Many fearful expectations are shaped by observation of aversive outcomes to others. Yet, the neurochemistry regulating social learning is unknown. Previous research has shown that during direct (Pavlovian) threat learning, information about personally experienced outcomes is regulated by the release of endogenous opioids, and activity within the amygdala and periaqueductal gray (PAG). Here we r...

BACKGROUND Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) diagnosis often depends on a retrospective, self-report of exposure to a life-threatening event. AIMS To examine the stability of recalled perceived life threat in a community sample exposed to a distinct stressful event. METHOD Five hundred and thirty-two Norwegian citizens who experienced the 2004 South-East Asia tsunami completed a self-re...

People vary greatly in their dispositions to anxiously expect, readily perceive, and strongly react to social rejection (rejection sensitivity [RS]) with implications for social functioning and health. Here, we examined how RS influences learning about social threat. Using a classical fear conditioning task, we established that high compared to low individuals displayed a resistance to extincti...