Ahra Ko

Arizona State University | ASU · Department of Psychology

Overweight and obese (“heavyweight”) people devalue themselves because, it has been proposed, they are socially devalued. However, for women, social valuation depends not only on how much weight they carry but also on where on their bodies they carry it. Here, we investigated whether weight-based self-valuation and perceived social valuation simila...

If life satisfaction has functional significance for goal achievement, it should be calibrated to cues of potential success on active and fundamentally important goals. Within the context of mating motivation, we tested this hypothesis with self-perceived mate value—an assessment of one’s potential mating success. As hypothesized, because most indi...

People with overweight and obesity devalue themselves, partially because they are socially devalued. However, for women, social valuation depends not only on how much weight they carry but where on their bodies they carry it. Here, we investigate whether weight-based self-valuation and perceived social valuation also depend on body shape. Study 1,...

How have people’s fundamental social motives changed during the COVID-19 pandemic? In data collected from 32 countries before the onset of the pandemic, we saw that a) people prioritized family-related motives (romantic relationship maintenance and kin care) over mate-acquisition motives (mate-seeking and breakup concern), and b) family-related mot...

(Accepted at Psychological Science) Although casual sex is increasingly socially acceptable, negative stereotypes toward women pursuing casual sex appear to remain pervasive. Specifically, a common trope in media (e.g., television, film) is that such women have low self-esteem. Despite robust work on prejudice against women who engage in casual sex...

Although casual sex is increasingly socially acceptable, negative stereotypes toward women pursuing casual sex appear to remain pervasive. Specifically, a common trope in media (e.g., television, film) is that such women have low self-esteem. Despite robust work on prejudice against women who engage in casual sex, little empirical work investigates...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

Implicit association research has suggested that conflicts evoked by counter-stereotypical associations might be moderated by executive function (Amodio et al., 2004). Paralleling the implicit association research, cognitive psychologists have long postulated mechanisms that process conflicts elicited by multi-dimensional stimuli (such as the Stroo...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic partner choice (mate-seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

What motives do people prioritize in their social lives? Historically, social psychologists, especially those adopting an evolutionary perspective, have devoted a great deal of research attention to sexual attraction and romantic-partner choice (mate-seeking). Research on long-term familial bonds (mate retention and kin care) has been less thorough...

Given the centrality of physical attractiveness in women’s mate value, we predicted that mating motive salience would increase the weight of physical attractiveness in women’s happiness. At an individual difference level, women with chronically high levels of mating motivation weighed physical attractiveness more heavily in their happiness than oth...

Growing evidence suggests that angry faces do not “pop-out” of crowds, and that the evidence for such effects has tended to arise from methodological issues and stimulus confounds. In contrast, evidence that angry faces exert special influence at later stages of information processing is accumulating. Here we use two common paradigms to show that p...