Intergroup contact is a central feature of intergroup relations, yet research has largely examined its quantity and quality as separate, static predictors of intergroup attitudes, leaving relatively little known about how these dimensions themselves develop over time. We examine this question in four longitudinal studies across contexts and age groups, each including both majority and minority group members. Study 1 followed White British and Asian British adolescents undergoing a school merger in the United Kingdom (N = 660, three waves). Study 2 involved Catholic and Protestant youths participating in a peacebuilding program in Northern Ireland (N = 592, three waves). Study 3 tracked British and international students transitioning to university (N = 527, four waves), and Study 4 followed Catholic and Protestant children in Northern Ireland from the start of their secondary education (N = 3,057, three waves). Using latent growth modeling, we tracked how contact quantity and quality changed over time and how these trajectories were linked. Across all studies, we observed significant cogrowth with steeper increases in contact frequency corresponding with greater improvements in interaction quality. When positive and negative valence were measured separately (Studies 3 and 4), growth in contact quantity was associated with increased interaction positivity, while changes in negativity remained minimal and nonsignificantly related to contact frequency. These findings suggest that intergroup contact is itself a dynamic experience: Changes in how frequently people engage in contact are systematically related to changes in how positively they experience that contact. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
People use drawings to convey how they feel, yet we know little about how culture shapes such representations and how viewers from different cultures perceive them. We examined whether emotion recognition from drawings was better explained by the emotion-dialect account, which predicts an ingroup recognition advantage, or by the historical-heterogeneity account, which predicts a general recognizability advantage for drawings from historically heterogeneous societies. Across two production studies, Canadian and Chinese expressers produced drawings depicting seven emotion categories. Canadian expressers used a more focal graphic style than Chinese expressers: Their drawings contained fewer objects, covered more of the page, and relied more on bodily cues. Across four recognition studies, Canadian, Chinese, and Indian perceivers judged these drawings, with Indian perceivers providing a third-culture test of overall recognizability. Among Canadian and Chinese perceivers, recognition was generally more accurate when expressers and perceivers shared a cultural background than when they did not. Across studies, however, Canadian drawings showed no reliable overall recognition advantage over Chinese drawings. These findings were consistent with the emotion-dialect account but provided little support for the historical-heterogeneity account. Exploratory analyses further showed that some drawing features were associated with overall recognition accuracy, but none was reliably associated with the ingroup advantage. Together, these findings extend previous research on faces and voices by showing that emotion communication through drawings is alsoculturally patterned. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
Consensus information can change people's minds, especially in ambiguous situations. But can it also change people's hearts by influencing their deeply held convictions? The literature asserts not because sacralized values are assumed to be immune to social influence. Five studies (N = 1,651) demonstrate important limits to this assumption-when facing decisions involve edge cases in which sacred boundaries are ambiguous, sacralizers are responsive to consensus information. Halal-observant Muslims ignored consensus information when it challenged their sacred value in a core case (i.e., eating pork) but aligned with the consensus in an edge case (i.e., eating food that had touched pork; Study 1). Pro-choice sacralizers resisted consensus information in a core case (i.e., deciding to vote against elective abortions at 5 weeks of pregnancy) but aligned with consensus in an edge case (i.e., deciding to vote against elective abortions at 25 weeks of pregnancy; Study 2). We identified decision-making ambiguity as an underlying mechanism, such that people experienced more ambiguity in edge cases, which increased their reliance on consensus (Study 3). The degree of sacralization moderated consensus effects: In an edge case (i.e., using vaccines derived from fetal cells), the more strongly participants sacralized pro-life abortion values, the more they were influenced by the consensus (Study 4). The effect of consensus extended to behavior: when faced with an edge-case decision (i.e., donating to fetal-cell research), pro-life sacralizers were more likely to donate when consensus supported donation (Study 5). Edge cases reveal that consensus can move both minds and hearts by shifting judgments and behavior at the boundaries of convictions long assumed to be nonnegotiable. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).
