New Research in Psychological Science

Aging Impairs Inhibitory Control Over Incidental Cues: A Construal-Level Perspective
Liat Hadar, Yaacov Trope, and Boaz M. Ben-David

Older adults’ purchasing decisions appear to be more influenced by peripheral product features than by central and goal-relevant features, this research indicates. Compared with older adults, younger adults were more willing to pay more for a product with superior central, desirable attributes (e.g., a coffee maker able to brew a variety of coffee types) than a product with superior peripheral, feasible attributes (e.g., a coffee maker that is easy to use and reliable). Younger adults were also more satisfied after completing a high-desirability/low-feasibility task than a low-desirability/high-feasibility task and after experiencing a goal-relevant product than a goal-irrelevant product.

Mind-Body Practices and Self-Enhancement: Direct Replications of Gebauer et al.’s (2018) Experiments 1 and 2
Thomas I. Vaughan-Johnston, Jill A. Jacobson, Alex Prosserman, and Emily Sanders

Gebauer and colleagues (2018) reported that mind-body practices such as yoga and meditation increase self-enhancement by boosting self-esteem and narcissism. Using the same procedures as Gebauer and colleagues (2018), Vaughan-Johnston and colleagues conducted a field study with yoga students and a meditation intervention with college students. Although the effect was not clearly obtained in the replication study, an integrative data analysis of the original and replication data suggested that mind-body practices indeed increase self-enhancement (self-esteem and narcissism) rather than quieting the ego.

Disproportionate School Punishment and Significant Life Outcomes: A Prospective Analysis of Black Youths
Edith Chen et al.

Black individuals with higher self-control who attend schools that disproportionately punish Black students may be more academically oriented in late adolescence and have better adult life outcomes at the cost of physical health, this study suggests. In an 18-year longitudinal study, Chen and colleagues tracked Black youths from age 11 to age 29. They found that individuals with higher self-control and, consequently, higher academic orientation who attended schools that disproportionately punished Black students completed more schooling, had higher incomes, and exhibited better mental health in adulthood than their counterparts with lower self-control. However, these same individuals were also more likely to develop adult insulin resistance, which is related to cardiometabolic disease.

Revisiting the Integration Hypothesis: Correlational and Longitudinal Meta-Analyses Demonstrate the Limited Role of Acculturation for Cross-Cultural Adaptation
Kinga Bierwiaczonek and Jonas R. Kunst

Bierwiaczonek and Kunst tested the acculturation theory, which posits that when people move to a new country, acculturation influences how well they adapt to that country’s culture. Integration (or biculturalism), which involves engagement in both one’s heritage culture and the host culture, is considered the best acculturation strategy. However, the present work, consisting of both a reanalysis of a previous meta-analysis of correlational studies and a new meta-analysis of longitudinal studies, indicates that the correlation between acculturation and adaptation appears to be weak, at best. Thus, focusing on immigrants’ individual cultural styles might not foster integration as well as focusing on contextual factors such as discrimination.

Face-Based Judgments: Accuracy, Validity, and a Potential Underlying Mechanism
Seungbeom Hong, Hye Won Suk, Yoonseok Choi, and Jinkyung Na

American and Korean participants judged the trustworthiness of Korean and American politicians’ faces, respectively, and reported their confidence in such judgments. Although the facial inferences overall were somewhat accurate, participants were not able to say whether individual inferences were more accurate or more inaccurate. This indicates that people may not know when to trust their face-based inferences. In another experiment, the researchers also showed that the accuracy of face-based inferences appears to be driven by self-fulfilling effects of the perceivers’ beliefs (e.g., individuals who look corruptible end up accepting more bribes than their counterparts because they are bribed more frequently).

Predictive Uncertainty Underlies Auditory Boundary Perception
Niels Chr. Hansen, Haley E. Kragness, Peter Vuust, Laurel Trainor, and Marcus T. Pearce

Hansen and colleagues investigated how uncertainty about upcoming events informs people’s attentional behaviors and perceptions of musical-phrase boundaries. Participants heard sequences of musical tones that conveyed different levels of uncertainty about which tones came next. In a self-paced listening task, participants spent more time listening to tones that conveyed high uncertainty, indicating more implicit attention and the perception of a boundary, than to tones conveying less uncertainty. Participants also indicated that sequences that ended on tones conveying more uncertainty appeared to be more complete, thus implicating a boundary. These results suggest that focusing attention on points of uncertainty may facilitate perceptual grouping and prospectively contribute to segmentation in auditory perception.

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Memory Fidelity Reveals Qualitative Changes in Interactions Between Items in Visual Working Memory
Zachary Lively, Maria M. Robinson, and Aaron S. Benjamin

Memory fidelity might explain why people sometimes remember objects in a visual display as more similar to one another (i.e., attraction) and other times as more different from one another (i.e., repulsion) than they actually were. In three experiments, participants saw colored squares and later reported on the colors they remembered by clicking on a continuous color wheel. Results indicated that attraction and repulsion arose as a function of memory fidelity—weaker memories resulted in attraction, whereas stronger memories resulted in repulsion. These findings suggest that changes in memory fidelity affect the interactions among items in visual working memory.

Ideological Extremism Among Syrian Refugees Is Negatively Related to Intentions to Migrate to the West
Katarzyna Jasko, David Webber, Erica Molinario, Arie W. Kruglanski, and Katherine Touchton-Leonard

The fear that refugees trying to emigrate to the West might endorse ideologically extreme views or harbor negative sentiment toward the West might be unfounded, this research suggests. Jasko and colleagues surveyed 1,000 Syrian refugees residing in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and Iraq. They found that most refugees did not intend to emigrate to Western countries, but those most interested in moving to the West were the least likely to endorse Islamist extremism or have negative sentiment toward the West. The more ideologically extreme refugees said they would rather move back to their home country than move to the West.