Major political events that happen suddenly and are beyond the scope of day-to-day politics-political shocks-capture the attention of millions, but little is known about how they affect people. We examine political shocks from an affective science lens, considering people's emotions, how they regulate those emotions, and the motivations those emotions drive. We apply this lens to two political shocks in the United States: the Supreme Court confirmation of Justice Brett Kavanaugh (Study 1; initial N = 430; September-October 2018) and the impeachments and acquittals of President Donald Trump (Study 2; initial N = 979; November 2019-February 2021). We documented how affective processes changed as the events unfolded. As expected, Democrats and Republicans experienced divergent emotional peaks and valleys across time that tracked party "wins" and "losses." Then, we examined how people regulated these emotions and the collective implications of that regulation. Both Republicans' and Democrats' use of the emotion regulation strategy cognitive reappraisal predicted greater positive emotion about these political shocks, which in turn was associated with greater motivation for political action. Compared to Republicans, however, Democrats' use of reappraisal more strongly predicted lower negative emotion about these events, with lower negative emotion in turn predicting lower motivation for action. This party difference suggests that regulating emotion during these shocks may have more strongly impaired Democrats' (vs. Republicans') motivations to act. By examining the consequences of political shocks through an affective science lens, we highlight powerful processes that may shape people's psychologies as well as political landscapes at the national level. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Adults often endorse empirical claims along partisan lines, sometimes agreeing with their ingroup even when the evidence suggests otherwise. A developmental approach can clarify the motives underlying this phenomenon by examining it early, before political identities are entrenched. We tested two possible motives underlying children’s partisan endorsement: Do children endorse their ingroup’s empirical claims because they believe the ingroup is a reliable guide to truth (an epistemic motive), or because public agreement signals loyalty and strengthens group bonds (an affiliative motive)? Study 1 (N = 98; ages 5–7) replicated the basic partisanship phenomenon in childhood: Children assigned to a minimal group endorsed their ingroup’s claims more often than children in a no-group control condition, establishing that group membership provides a partisan “boost” beyond what perceptual evidence alone would warrant. Studies 2 and 3 then probed motives in complementary ways: Study 2 (N = 208; ages 6–9) removed the social-audience benefits of endorsing the ingroup by having children respond privately, whereas Study 3 (N = 172; ages 6–9) increased the value of accuracy by incentivizing correct judgments. Partisan endorsement was absent under private responding and significantly reduced by accuracy incentives. Overall, the pattern across studies was more consistent with an affiliative motive than an epistemic one: Children’s partisan endorsement appears to function as public signaling of group support rather than solely as a reflection of epistemic trust in the ingroup. These findings speak to the developmental origins of partisan cognition and potential levers for encouraging evidence-based reasoning.

Emotion dysregulation is a core component of bipolar disorder (BD). However, there is a critical gap concerning the measurement of emotion-relevant neuroendocrine processes in this population. The present investigation examined neuroendocrine profiles (i.e., cortisol and testosterone) alongside emotional experiences across three consecutive days in naturalistic settings among adults with bipolar I disorder (n = 28) compared to a clinical comparison group of adults with a history of major depressive disorder (MDD; n = 28) and healthy non-psychiatric controls (n = 27). Across four diurnal cortisol measures, the BD group exhibited decreased cortisol concentrations throughout the day, lower overall hormone output, and smaller awakening responses when compared to MDD, and flatter slopes compared to both MDD and control groups. The BD group did not differ from either group in any diurnal testosterone measures. These findings contribute to a growing literature on neuroendocrine processes involved in bipolar and depressive mood disturbances. Future work is needed to unpack the implications of decreased cortisol profiles in mood disorders.

Racially biased weapon identification, wherein guns are identified more easily after seeing Black (vs. White) face primes, is a robust and replicable phenomenon. Mounting evidence suggests that introducing additional facial information (e.g., varying age cues) does not meaningfully alter this racial bias. Only when augmenting its relative salience does the additional, nonrace information appear to mitigate racially biased weapon identification. Even when reducing racial bias by enhancing nonrace facial cues, social information is typically communicated via the face, a context in which race may be particularly salient. Two experiments (Ntotal = 590 participants) using a sequential priming task tested whether broadening the contextual information in primes to include both faces and bodies moderates racially biased weapon identification (gun vs. tool) decisions. Replicating past findings, racial bias was evident when primes cued age and race via facial information only. However, this behavioral effect disappeared when primes included both faces and bodies, providing richer social context. Diffusion decision modeling revealed that race cues shifted the starting point of the decision-making process toward stereotype-consistent responses (e.g., “gun” after Black primes) with face-only primes, but this processing bias disappeared with face-and-body primes. Multinomial processing tree modeling further revealed attenuated attention to race in face-and-body (vs. face-only) primes, whereas attention to age remained intact across conditions. These findings advance theory on the operation of racially biased decision making in richer social contexts.

People are vigilant to how the groups around them facilitate or inhibit their goals, but we know little about how they appraise the relevance of a particularly important type of group: their ingroups. We test whether the Relevance Appraisal Matrix-a model of person perception structured around goal-contingent threat and opportunity appraisals-captures the structure of people's ingroup perceptions. We find it does (Study 1, n = 463; Study 2, n = 285), meaning that appraisals of the threats and opportunities people's ingroups pose to their goal pursuit are orthogona and goal-specific. We also characterize ingroup relevance appraisals and explore the relationships between them and people's ingroup attitudes and identification (Study 2), finding that people generally rate their ingroups as relatively high-opportunity and low-threat across goals and that relevance appraisals of ingroups are variably and modestly associated with attitudes towards, and identification with, people's ingroups.

Adults hold a broad range of beliefs about intellectual ability. Key examples include beliefs about its malleability, its distribution in the population, whether high levels of it ("brilliance") are necessary for success, its origins, and its responsiveness to intervention. Here, we examined the structure and motivational significance of this network of consequential beliefs in a sample of elementary school-age children (5- to 11-year-olds, N = 231; 116 girls, 112 boys, three gender nonbinary children; predominantly White and Asian children from relatively high-income backgrounds). We assessed five beliefs: (a) growth mindsets (malleability), (b) universal mindsets (distribution), (c) brilliance beliefs (necessity for success), and beliefs about ability's (d) innateness and (e) responsiveness to intervention. Even among the youngest children, these beliefs were empirically distinguishable and also largely coherent, in that they related to each other in expected ways. Moreover, the five beliefs assessed here were differentially related to children's learning (vs. performance) goals, preference for challenging tasks, and evaluative concern (i.e., concern that mistakes will lead others to evaluate the self negatively). Even when adjusting for age, children with growth mindsets were oriented toward learning goals and preferred challenging tasks; children who believed ability has innate origins preferred performance goals; and younger (but not older) children who thought success required brilliance expressed more concern over being evaluated. These findings speak to the multifaceted nature of children's concepts of ability and highlight their significance for children's achievement-related attitudes and behavior in the early school years. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Politics and its controversies have permeated everyday life, but the daily impact of politics on the general public is largely unknown. Here, we apply an affective science framework to understand how the public experiences daily politics in a two-part examination. We first used longitudinal, daily diary methods to track two samples of U.S. participants as they experienced daily political events across 2 weeks (Study 1: N = 198, observations = 2,167) and 3 weeks (Study 2: N = 811, observations = 12,790) to explore how these events permeated people's lives and how people coped with that influence. In both diary studies, daily political events consistently not only evoked negative emotions, which corresponded to worse psychological and physical well-being, but also greater motivation to take political action (e.g., volunteer, protest) aimed at changing the political system that evoked these emotions in the first place. Understandably, people frequently tried to regulate their politics-induced emotions, and regulating these emotions using effective cognitive strategies (reappraisal and distraction) predicted greater well-being, but also weaker motivation to take action. Although people protected themselves from the emotional impact of politics, frequently used regulation strategies came with a trade-off between well-being and action. Second, we conducted experimental studies where we manipulated exposure to day-to-day politics (Study 3, N = 922), and the use of various emotion regulation strategies in response (Study 4, N = 1,277), and found causal support for the central findings of Studies 1-2. Overall, this research highlights how politics can be a chronic stressor in people's daily lives, underscoring the far-reaching influence politicians have beyond the formal powers endowed unto them. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

People pursue goals. They seek to build friendships, find romantic partners, maintain close relationships, gain social status and resources, and stay healthy and safe. But pursuing goals requires assessing who, among the people around them, will help or hurt their ability to reach those goals-that is, who poses goal-relevant affordances. This article overviews recent advances and new predictions from an affordance management approach to social cognition and behavior. The central tenet of this work is that judgments of who helps or hurts goals are independent (rather than opposite ends of a single judgment): Who helps my goal, and who hurts my goal? For any goal, people judge others in one of four ways: as helping the goal, hurting the goal, both helping and hurting the goal, or as irrelevant to the goal. These perceived affordances change across goals: people who help one goal may hurt, both help and hurt, or be irrelevant to another goal. This simple, novel division of helping and hurting across goals has numerous implications for psychological phenomena. It provides a framework for understanding when and how two forms of devaluation will emerge-being seen to pose a threat and being seen as irrelevant-with implications for prejudice, stigmatization, and discrimination. It also provides a lens for understanding how and when others' appraisals of us may affect our own goal pursuit. The article concludes by discussing necessary next steps and promising new directions for applying this approach to understand social cognition and behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Transient affect can be tightly linked with people’s global life satisfaction (i.e., affect globalizing). This volatile judgment style leaves life satisfaction vulnerable to the inevitable highs and lows of everyday life, and has been associated with lower psychological health. The present study examines a potentially fundamental but untested regulatory role of sleep: insulating people’s global life satisfaction from the affective highs and lows of daily life. We tested this hypothesis in two daily diary samples (N1=3,011 daily diary observations of 274 participants and N2=12,740 daily diary observations of 811 participants). Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, following nights of reported high-quality sleep, the link between current affect and global life satisfaction was attenuated (i.e., lower affect globalizing). Sleep-based interventions are broadly useful for improv-ing psychological health and the current findings suggest another avenue by which such interventions may improve well-being: by providing a crucial protection against the risks associated with affect globalizing.

Intergroup competitions such as democratic elections can intensify intergroup polarization and conflict. Partisan attitudes toward the elected leader can also shift from before to after an election, but the biology underlying these attitudinal shifts remains largely unknown. An important factor could be the hormone testosterone, which is theorized to fluctuate during competition and to influence status seeking. In a naturalistic study of 113 registered voters, we measured changes in testosterone levels and attitudes toward the winner of the 2012 US Presidential Election. We found that supporters of the losing candidate (Mitt Romney) showed acute increases in testosterone levels compared to supporters of the winner (Barack Obama) on the evening of Election Day. Supporters of the losing candidate also demonstrated flatter diurnal testosterone slopes on Election Day that persisted up to two days after the election. Furthermore, greater increases in acute testosterone levels and flatter diurnal slopes among supporters of the losing candidate were associated with less positive evaluations of the winning candidate. These testosterone-moderated attitudinal shifts observed in the days after the election showed a directionally similar pattern with a weaker effect size six months later. Finally, we confirmed that the main results were robust to alternative data analytic choices using multiverse specification curve analysis. The findings from this paper suggest that hormonal responses to large-scale intergroup competitions may shape how we perceive our elected leaders, shedding light on the biology of intergroup relations.

How do we evaluate people who provide false information? The current studies uncover a context in which people who intentionally lie are perceived as more credible than those who unintentionally mix up information. Across three studies (total N=1196), participants read about an incident witnessed by targets who, when queried, either lied about or mixed up information. Participants then evaluated those targets. In Study 1, we demonstrate that in a courtroom, targets who lie (versus mix up information) are judged as more credible. We next test two boundary conditions, showing that the effect may be constrained by particular contextual characteristics of a courtroom (Study 2) and that the misinformation needs to be unrelated to the information on which the target’s advice or testimony is sought (Study 3). The current research suggests that under specific circumstances, perceivers may evaluate targets who lie as more credible than those who mix up information.

People seek to detect who facilitates and who impedes their goal pursuit. The resulting relevance appraisals of opportunity and threat, respectively, can strongly shape subsequent social judgment and behavior. However, important questions about the nature of relevance appraisals remain unanswered: Are relevance appraisals unidimensional or multidimensional? Are people evaluated as generally posing opportunities and/or threats, or as dynamically relevant depending on perceiver goals? We test two hypotheses. First, we propose that opportunity and threat are appraised independently, rather than as endpoints of a single dimension. If so, then others can be evaluated as (a) facilitating a goal, (b) impeding a goal, (c) both facilitating and impeding a goal, or (d) neither facilitating nor impeding a goal. Second, we hypothesize that relevance appraisals shift dynamically with perceiver goals. For example, a single person may be appraised as facilitating one's mate-seeking goal, but as neither facilitating nor impeding one's self-protection goal. In two studies, participants rated the extent to which a variety of targets (e.g., a doctor, a 5-year-old child) pose threats and opportunities to different goals. Confirmatory factor analyses support both hypotheses. We also explore relationships between the Relevance Appraisal Matrix and the stereotype content (Fiske et al., 2002) and ABC (Koch et al., 2016) models of stereotypes, finding evidence that relevance appraisals are distinct from stereotypes of group attributes. In sum, we provide a framework for understanding the structure of relevance appraisals: A central and consequential, yet dynamic and relatively understudied, aspect of social cognition. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Intergroup competitions such as democratic elections can intensify intergroup polarization and conflict. Partisan attitudes toward the elected leader can also shift from before to after an election, but the biology underlying these attitudinal shifts remains largely unknown. An important factor could be the hormone testosterone, which is theorized to fluctuate during competition and to influence status seeking. In a naturalistic study of 113 registered voters, we measured changes in testosterone levels and attitudes toward the winner of the 2012 US Presidential Election. We found that supporters of the losing candidate (Mitt Romney) showed acute increases in testosterone levels compared to supporters of the winner (Barack Obama) on the evening of Election Day. Supporters of the losing candidate also demonstrated flatter diurnal testosterone slopes on Election Day that persisted up to two days after the election. Furthermore, greater increases in acute testosterone levels and flatter diurnal slopes among supporters of the losing candidate were associated with less positive evaluations of the winning candidate. These testosterone-moderated attitudinal shifts observed in the days after the election showed a directionally similar pattern with a weaker effect size six months later. Finally, we confirmed that the main results were robust to alternative data analytic choices using multiverse specification curve analysis. The findings from this paper suggest that hormonal responses to large-scale intergroup competitions may shape how we perceive our elected leaders, shedding light on the biology of intergroup relations.

Stereotypes linking Black Americans with guns can have life-altering outcomes, making it important to identify factors that shape such weapon identification biases and how they do so. We report 6 experiments that provide a mechanistic account of how category salience affects weapon identification bias elicited by male faces varying in race (Black, White) and age (men, boys). Behavioral analyses of error rates and response latencies revealed that, when race was salient, faces of Black versus White males (regardless of age) facilitated the classification of objects as guns versus tools. When a category other than race was salient, racial bias in behavior was reduced, though not eliminated. In Experiments 1-4, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to a social category besides race (i.e., age). In Experiments 5 and 6, racial bias was weaker when participants attended to an applicable, yet nonsubstantive category (i.e., the color of a dot on the face). Across experiments, process analyses using diffusion models revealed that, when race was salient, seeing Black versus White male faces led to an initial bias to favor the "gun" response. When a category besides race (i.e., age, dot color) was salient, racial bias in the relative start point was reduced, though not eliminated. These results suggest that the magnitude of racial bias in weapon identification may differ depending on what social category is salient. The collective findings also highlight the utility of diffusion modeling for elucidating how category salience shapes processes underlying racial biases in behavior. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

A growing body of research shows that older adults, Black women, and other groups often encounter stigmatization that manifests not as negative prejudice, but as indifference and inattention-that is, interpersonal invisibility. We propose an affordance-management theory to explain who is interpersonally invisible, to whom, and with what consequences. A social affordance-management perspective suggests that people seek to detect and strategically engage with those who facilitate or obstruct achievement of important goals. We argue that invisibility emerges from the perception that another person neither helps nor hurts one's ability to achieve chronically or acutely active goals. We thus distinguish among phenomena commonly subsumed under the term stigmatization: invisibility-based stigmatization of those perceived to be irrelevant, and threat-based stigmatization of those perceived to obstruct one's goals. Invisibility and threat-based stigmatization are theorized to differ in origin. manifestation, and impact. Furthermore, rather than being a static property of particular target groups, interpersonal invisibility dynamically emerges from perceiver goals, target cues, and situational features. Nonetheless, some perceivers, targets, situations, and goals are more likely to lead to invisibility than others. This affordance-based theory of invisibility helps to organize the heterogeneous field of stigma research; unifies a diverse array of social, cognitive, motivational, and affective phenomena; and suggests numerous novel directions for future stigma research from both perceiver and target perspectives.

Although some studies reveal that saliva handling and storage practices may influence salivary testosterone concentrations measured with immunoassays, the effect of these method factors on the validity of testosterone immunoassays remains unknown. The validity of immunoassays can be assessed by comparing hormone concentrations measured with immunoassays to a standard reference method: liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (MS). We previously reported the correspondence between salivary testosterone measured with enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) and with MS when there was less variance in (or more control over) method factors related to saliva handling and storage across measurement methods (Welker et al., 2016). In the present study, we expanded the original dataset and compared the correspondence between Salimetrics EIAs and MS when there was greater variance in (or less control over) method factors across EIAs and MS (high method variance), to when there was less variance in these factors (low method variance). If variance in these method factors impacts the validity of testosterone measurement, then the EIA-MS correspondence should be stronger when method variance is low compared to when it is high. Our results contradicted this hypothesis: Salimetrics EIA-MS correspondence was stronger when variance in method factors was high compared to when it was low. The composite average correlation across both method variance comparisons provides an updated estimate of Salimetrics EIA-MS correspondence, but the instability in this correspondence may pose challenges to the reproducibility of psychoneuroendocrinology research. We discuss possible explanations for the surprising pattern of results and provide recommendations for future research.

The belief that others can or cannot change powerfully guides social judgment and behavior. Recent research suggests that perceivers hold target-specific malleability beliefs that certain people, but not others, can change. Six experiments and an internal meta-analysis demonstrate that political orientation operates as a target-specific cue to malleability, with liberals judged as slightly more malleable than conservatives. We test whether target age, gender, and political ideological extremity account for the effect, and find that target ideological extremity independently predicts greater perceived fixedness. A final experiment finds that political prejudice influences malleability beliefs: political outgroup members are judged less favorably than political ingroup members and as a result, are judged to be more fixed. This research contributes to a growing body of work illustrating that some people are believed to be more malleable than others.

Across two experiments, we examined whether implicit stereotypes linking younger (~28-year-old) Black versus White men with violence and criminality extend to older (~68-year-old) Black versus White men. In Experiment 1, participants completed a sequential priming task wherein they categorized objects as guns or tools after seeing briefly-presented facial images of men who varied in age (younger versus older) and race (Black versus White). In Experiment 2, we used different face primes of younger and older Black and White men, and participants categorized words as ‘threatening’ or ‘safe.’ Results consistently revealed robust racial biases in object and word identification: Dangerous objects and words were identified more easily (faster response times, lower error rates), and non-dangerous objects and words were identified less easily, after seeing Black face primes than after seeing White face primes. Process dissociation procedure analyses, which aim to isolate the unique contributions of automatic and controlled processes to task performance, further indicated that these effects were driven entirely by racial biases in automatic processing. In neither experiment did prime age moderate racial bias, suggesting that the implicit danger associations commonly evoked by younger Black versus White men appear to generalize to older Black versus White men.

Enzyme immunoassays (EIAs) are widely used to measure salivary testosterone. However, little is known about how accurately different EIAs assess testosterone, partially because estimates across various EIAs differ considerably. We compared testosterone concentrations across EIAs of three commonly used manufacturers (DRG International, Salimetrics, and IBL International) to liquid chromatography tandem mass spectrometry (LC-MS/MS). Relative to EIAs from Salimetrics and IBL International, EIAs supplied by DRG International provided the closest approximation to LC-MS/MS testosterone concentrations, followed closely by EIAs from Salimetrics, and then IBL. Additionally, EIAs tended to inflate estimates of lower testosterone concentrations in women. Examining our results and comparing them to existing data revealed that testosterone EIAs had decreased linear correspondence with LC-MS/MS in comparison to cortisol EIAs. Overall, this paper provides researchers with information to better measure testosterone in their research and more accurately compare testosterone measurements across different methods.