D. Vaughn Becker

• PhD
• Arizona State University

How do natural changes in disease avoidance motivation shape thoughts about and behaviors toward ingroup and outgroup members? During the COVID-19 pandemic, political party affiliation has been a strong predictor in the United States of COVID-19-related opinions, attitudes, and behaviors. Using a six-wave longitudinal panel survey of representative...

Previous work has reported a relation between pathogen-avoidance motivations and prejudice toward various social groups, including gay men and lesbian women. It is currently unknown whether this association is present across cultures, or specific to North America. Analyses of survey data from adult heterosexuals ( N = 11,200) from 31 countries show...

Technology has enabled various alternative educational platforms, such as online courses. Compared to human instructors in traditional educational environments, alternative platforms often show a limited capacity to evaluate the learning progress of students and implement intervention strategies based on the evaluation. Here, we tested participants...

A salient objective feature of the social environment in which people find themselves is group size. Knowledge of group size is highly relevant to behavioural scientists given that humans spend considerable time in social settings and the number of others influences much of human behaviour. What size of group do people actually look for and encount...

Multiple studies report that disgust-eliciting stimuli are perceived as salient and subsequently capture selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the nature of temporal attentional biases toward disgust-eliciting stimuli and to investigate the extent to which these biases are sensitive to contextual and trait-level p...

Finding a face in a crowd is a real-world analog to visual search, but extending the visual search method to such complex social stimuli is rife with potential pitfalls. We need look no further than the well-cited notion that angry faces “pop out” of crowds to find evidence that stimulus confounds can lead to incorrect inferences. Indeed, long befo...

Multiple studies report that disgust-eliciting stimuli are perceived as salient and subsequently capture selective attention. In the current study, we aimed to better understand the nature of temporal attentional biases toward disgust-eliciting stimuli and to investigate the extent to which these biases are sensitive to contextual and trait-level p...

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...

Evolutionary theory makes further predictions about conflict. It predicts sex differences in the proclivity to attack and defend. It further suggests complementary biases in what we expect of the sexes. Finally, it suggests that the forms of human facial expressions of anger and happiness may have coevolved with the regularity of conflict as a mean...

Advances in contemporary cognitive science suggest that our internal representational systems are powerfully shaped by interacting evolutionary, developmental, and neuro-computational processes. Although Jung’s archetypes of the collective unconscious are largely dismissed by modern psychological science, something very much like them emerges from...

We revived Jung’s Archetypes to characterize what we see as an emerging confluence of evolutionary, embodied, and ecological responses to traditional cognitive models of mental representation. We propose that all humans possess archetypal representational systems that are (a) computationally grounded in perception and action, (b) shaped by learning...

Engineering grand challenges and big ideas not only demand innovative engineering solutions, but also typically involve and affect human thought, behavior, and quality of life. To solve these types of complex problems, multidisciplinary teams must bring together experts in engineering and psychological science, yet fusing these distinct areas can b...

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...

Previous studies suggest that mouse-trajectory data can reveal decision dynamics and other aspects of cognitive performance. The current study investigated whether the mouse-trajectory data can be used to make inferences about cognitive load under conditions in which motor task difficulty (e.g. moving a mouse cursor to a target that is small and ha...

Integrated with computerized education platforms, the mouse-tracking technique could provide an inexpensive and less intrusive tool for assessing cognitive load. The present study examined whether mouse-tracking can quantify changes in cognitive load. Participants performed a dual-task, which required them to perform primary tasks of moving a compu...

Moving a mouse cursor to a stimulus can reveal online choice-dynamics that are richer than simple RTs, reflecting implicit associations, like female-good/male-bad. We here develop a new mousetracking design to investigate whether such gender-valence biases interact with approach-avoidance movements--giving an object or taking it away. On every tria...

The confounded signal hypothesis maintains that facial expressions of anger and happiness, in order to more efficiently communicate threat or nurturance, evolved forms that take advantage of older gender recognition systems, which were already attuned to similar affordances. Two unexplored consequences of this hypothesis are (1) facial gender shoul...

Mating motivations can explain attractiveness benefits, but what proximate mechanisms might serve as efficient causes of these biases? There is growing evidence that visual cues of physical attractiveness capture attention and facilitate memory, enhancing salience in ways that could underlie, for example, preferring one job applicant over another....

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics...

The density hypothesis states that positive information is more similar than negative information, resulting in higher density of positive information in mental representations. The present research applies the density hypothesis to recognition memory to explain apparent valence asymmetries in recognition memory, namely, a recognition advantage for...

An emerging literature reveals that happy faces are vivid: They automatically and rapidly engage cognitive processing at many different levels. They do this in part because their form has evolved to take advantage of preexisting efficiencies in visual perception. In addition to “happy advantages” at the earliest stages of perception, perceivers add...

Working memory (WM) theoretically affords the ability to privilege social threats and opportunities over other more mundane information, but few experiments have sought support for this contention. Using a functional logic, we predicted that threatening faces are likely to elicit encoding benefits in WM. Critically, however, threat depends on both...

Proximate selfish goals reflect the machinations of more fundamental goals such as self-protection and reproduction. Evolutionary life history theory allows us to make predictions about which goals are prioritized over others, which stimuli release which goals, and how the stages of cognitive processing are selectively influenced to better achieve...

Evolutionary approaches to social cognition investigate how cognition may be intrinsically linked to long-recurring adaptive challenges of human social life. Prominent features of the evolutionary approach include the ideas that cognition is systematically modulated by fitness-relevant fundamental goals (e.g., self-protection, disease avoidance, so...

Evolutionary approaches to social cognition investigate how cognition may be intrinsically linked to long-recurring adaptive challenges of human social life. Prominent features of the evolutionary approach include the ideas that cognition is systematically modulated by fitness-relevant fundamental goals (e.g., self-protection, disease avoidance, so...

Although heterosexual women and men consistently demonstrate sex differences in jealousy, these differences disappear among lesbians and gay men as well as among heterosexual women and men contemplating same-sex infidelities (infidelities in which the partner and rival are the same sex). Synthesizing these past findings, the present paper offers a...

[This corrects the article on p. e26551 in vol. 7.].

When anger or happiness flashes on a face in the crowd, do we misperceive that emotion as belonging to someone else? Two studies found that misperception of apparent emotional expressions - "illusory conjunctions" - depended on the gender of the target: male faces tended to "grab" anger from neighboring faces, and female faces tended to grab happin...

Rapid identification of facial expressions can profoundly affect social interactions, yet most research to date has focused on static rather than dynamic expressions. In four experiments, we show that when a non-expressive face becomes expressive, happiness is detected more rapidly anger. When the change occurs peripheral to the focus of attention,...

Detecting signs that someone is a member of a hostile outgroup can depend on very subtle cues. How do ecology-relevant motivational states affect such detections? This research investigated the detection of briefly-presented enemy (versus friend) insignias after participants were primed to be self-protective or revenge-minded. Despite being told to...

Is it easier to detect angry or happy facial expressions in crowds of faces? The present studies used several variations of the visual search task to assess whether people selectively attend to expressive faces. Contrary to widely cited studies (e.g., Öhman, Lundqvist, & Esteves, 2001) that suggest angry faces "pop out" of crowds, our review of the...

For many consumer goods, the advent of online markets dramatically increases the amount of information available about products' different features and qualities. Although numerous studies have investigated the effects of information quantity on individual-level decisions, it is still unknown how the amount of attribute information affects group-le...

A number of studies have found a disjunction between women's attention to, and memory for, handsome men. Although women pay initial attention to handsome men, they do not remember those men later. The present study examines how ovulation might differentially affect these attentional and memory processes. We found that women near ovulation increased...

Across 6 studies, factors signaling potential vulnerability to harm produced a bias toward outgroup categorization--a tendency to categorize unfamiliar others as members of an outgroup rather than as members of one's ingroup. Studies 1 through 4 demonstrated that White participants were more likely to categorize targets as Black (as opposed to Whit...

When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging-thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced abil...

Social living brings humans great rewards, but also associated dangers, such as increased risk of infection from others. Although the body's immune system is integral to combating disease, it is physiologically costly. Less costly are evolved mechanisms for promoting avoidance of people who are potentially infectious, such as perceiving oneself as...

Fundamental motives have direct implications for evolutionary fitness and orchestrate attention, memory, and social inference in functionally specific ways. Motivational states linked to self-protection and mating offer illustrative examples. When self-protective motives are aroused, people show enhanced attention to, and memory for, angry male str...

When encountering individuals with a potential inclination to harm them, people face a dilemma: Staring at them provides useful information about their intentions but may also be perceived by them as intrusive and challenging—thereby increasing the likelihood of the very threat the people fear. One solution to this dilemma would be an enhanced abil...

Two experiments are reported in which participants were instructed to attend to one of two overlapping figures and report how distinctive it was (Experiment 1), or how angular it was or what it resembled (Experiment 2). Tests of recognition memory indicated that recognition of the unattended figures was below chance, consistent with the conclusion...

Does seeing a scowling face change your impression of the next person you see? Does this depend on the race of the two people? Across four studies, White participants evaluated neutrally expressive White males as less threatening when they followed angry (relative to neutral) White faces; Black males were not judged as less threatening following an...

The unfavorable treatment of people with physical disfigurements is well-documented, yet little is known about basic perceptual and cognitive responses to disfigurement. Here, we identify a specialized pattern of cognitive processing consistent with the hypothesis that disfigurements act as heuristic cues to contagious disease. Disfigurements are o...

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judg...

We examined associative priming of words (e.g., TOAD) and pseudohomophones of those words (e.g., TODE) in lexical decision. In addition to word frequency effects, reliable base-word frequency effects were observed for pseudohomophones: Those based on high-frequency words elicited faster and more accurate correct rejections. Associative priming had...

People often find it more difficult to distinguish ethnic out-group members compared with ethnic in-group members. A functional approach to social cognition suggests that this bias may be eliminated when out-group members display threatening facial expressions. In the present study, 192 White participants viewed Black and White faces displaying eit...

In three experiments, location memory for faces was examined using a computer version of the matching game Concentration. Findings suggested that physical attractiveness led to more efficient matching for female faces but not for male faces. Study 3 revealed this interaction despite allowing participants to initially see, attend to, and match the a...

Results from 2 experimental studies suggest that self-protection and mate-search goals lead to the perception of functionally relevant emotional expressions in goal-relevant social targets. Activating a self-protection goal led participants to perceive greater anger in Black male faces (Study 1) and Arab faces (Study 2), both out-groups heuristical...

This study assessed whether previously reported sex differences in jealousy could be accounted for by other related emotions. Participants were presented with hypothetical scenarios involving both a sexual and an emotional infidelity, then were asked how jealous, angry, hurt, and disgusted they would be (using continuous scales). The results replic...

Across 5 experimental studies, the authors explore selective processing biases for physically attractive others. The findings suggest that (a). both male and female observers selectively attend to physically attractive female targets, (b). limiting the attentional capacity of either gender results in biased frequency estimates of attractive females...

Past demonstrations of sex differences in jealousy have generally employed Buss et al.'s [Psychol. Sci. 3 (1992) 251] forced-choice methodology, a limitation criticized by DeSteno and Salovey [Psychol. Sci. 7 (1996) 367]. The present studies address this criticism by demonstrating the sex difference using both forced-choice and continuous measures...

Past demonstrations of sex differences in jealousy have generally employed Buss et al.'s [Psychol. Sci. 3 (1992) 251] forced-choice methodology, a limitation criticized by DeSteno and Salovey [Psychol. Sci. 7 (1996) 367]. The present studies address this criticism by demonstrating the sex difference using both forced-choice and continuous measures...

Dynamical systems and evolutionary theories have both been proposed as integrative approaches to psychology. These approaches are typically applied to different sets of questions. Dynamical systems models address the properties of psychological systems as they emerge and change over time; evolutionary models address the specific functions and conte...

Students who take a general psychology course often ask: How does this all fit together? Why in the world does one course range over neural biochemistry, cognitive development, group decision making, and sex differences in aggression? More broadly, how do all the scattered tidbits of wisdom in their psychology courses fit with what they are learnin...