Eliane Deschrijver

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of Psychology

Although discrimination is typically believed to occur from well-defined categories like ethnicity, disability, and sex, studies have found that discrimination persists in minimal conditions lacking such categories. Participants have been found to preferentially allocate resources based on seemingly arbitrary shared characteristics such as dot esti...

Almaatouq et al. propose a novel integrative approach to experiments. We provide three examples of how unaddressed measurement issues threaten the feasibility of the approach and its promise of promoting commensurability and knowledge integration.

The current study investigates attitudes toward one form of sex for resources: the so-called sugar relationships, which often involve exchanges of resources for sex and/or companionship. The present study examined associations among attitudes toward sugar relationships and relevant variables (e.g., sex, sociosexuality, gender inequality, parasitic...

People across the world and throughout history have gone to great lengths to enhance their physical appearance. Evolutionary psychologists and ethologists have largely attempted to explain this phenomenon via mating preferences and strategies. Here, we test one of the most popular evolutionary hypotheses for beauty-enhancing behaviors, drawn from m...

During the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, the COVIDiSTRESS Consortium launched an open-access global survey to understand and improve individuals' experiences related to the crisis. a year later, we extended this line of research by launching a new survey to address the dynamic landscape of the pandemic. this survey was released with the goal of a...

We examined perceived self-other differences (self-uniqueness) in appraisals of one's risk of an infectious disease (COVID-19), one's adherence to behavioural precautionary measures against the disease, and the impact of these measures on one's life. We also examined the relationship of self-uniqueness with information seeking and trust in sources...

Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism would be a less context-sensitive weighting of prediction errors. There is also first support for this hypothesis on an early sensory level. However, an open question is whether this decreased context sensitivity is caused by faster updating of one???s model of the world (i.e., higher...

This is the manuscript of the paper "Comparative Optimism, Self-Superiority, Egocentric Impact Perception and Health Information Seeking: A COVID-19 Study", which was accepted for publication in Psychologica Belgica on 21 March 2022. It has not been copy-edited and may differ from the published version. Thus, it is not the version of reference.

Autistic, developmental, and nonhuman primate populations fail tasks that are thought to involve attributing beliefs, but not those thought to reflect the representation of knowledge. Instead of knowledge representations being more basic than belief representations, relational mentalizing may explain these observations: The tasks referred to as ref...

The COVIDiSTRESS global survey collects data on early human responses to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic from 173 429 respondents in 48 countries. The open science study was co-designed by an international consortium of researchers to investigate how psychological responses differ across countries and cultures, and how this has impacted behaviour, copin...

Students evaluate male professors higher than female professors. In a study that we presented to participants as a test of a new form for student evaluations of teaching (SETs), we examined if self-affirmation (contemplating elements that positively contribute to one’s self-image) reduced the gender bias. Belgian students (n = 568), who were random...

Background Comparative optimism, the belief that negative events are more likely to happen to others rather than to oneself, is well established in health risk research. It is unknown, however, whether comparative optimism also permeates people’s health expectations and potentially behaviour during the COVID‐19 pandemic. Objectives Data were colle...

Background Recent theories of autism propose that a core deficit in autism would be a less context-sensitive weighting of prediction errors. There is also first support for this hypothesis on an early sensory level. However, an open question is whether this decreased context-sensitivity is caused by faster updating of one’s model of the world (i.e....

The most dominant theory of human social cognition, the theory of mind hypothesis, emphasizes our ability to infer the mental states of others. After having represented the mental states of another person, however, we can also have an idea of how well our thinking aligns with theirs, and our sensitivity to this alignment may guide the flow of our s...

This N=173,426 social science dataset was collected through the collaborative COVIDiSTRESS Global Survey – an open science effort to improve understandings of the human experiences of the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic between 30th March and 30th May, 2020. The dataset allows a cross-cultural study of psychological and behavioural responses to the Coronavi...

Automatic imitation is the finding that movement execution is facilitated by compatible and impeded by incompatible observed movements. In the past 15 years, automatic imitation has been studied to understand the relation between perception and action in social interaction. Although research on this topic started in cognitive science, interest quic...

Background: Recent predictive coding accounts of autism spectrum disorder (ASD) suggest that a key deficit in ASD concerns the inflexibility in modulating local prediction errors as a function of global top-down expectations. As a direct test of this central hypothesis, we used electroencephalography to investigate whether local prediction error pr...

Temporal binding is understood as an effect in which a temporal interval between a voluntary action and its consequent effect is perceived as compressed. It denotes an implicit measure of a sense of agency. When people observe someone else performing an action that generates an effect, temporal binding also takes place. We aimed to test whether the...

Autism spectrum disorder is a neurodevelopmental disorder that is associated with problems in empathy. Recent research suggests that impaired control over self-other overlap based on motor representations in individuals with autism spectrum disorder might underlie these difficulties. In order to investigate the relationship of self-other distinctio...

We tested the prediction, derived from the hubris hypothesis, that bragging might serve as a verbal provocation and thus enhance aggression. Experiments 1 and 2 were vignette studies where participants could express hypothetical aggression; Experiment 3 was an actual decision task where participants could make aggressive and/or prosocial choices. O...

The role of imitation in autism spectrum disorder (ASD) is controversial. Researchers have argued that deficient control of self- and other-related motor representations (self-other distinction) might explain imitation difficulties. In a recent EEG study, we showed that control of imitation relies on high-level as well as on low-level cognitive pro...

Background Associations and regularities in our environment can foster expectations and thereby help create a perceptually predictable world (e.g., a knife next to a plate predicts with high certainty a fork on the other side). Based on several observations, it has been suggested that individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) have an above a...

For more than 15 years, motor interference paradigms have been used to investigate the influence of action observation on action execution. Most research on so-called automatic imitation has focused on variables that play a modulating role or investigated potential confounding factors. Interestingly, furthermore, a number of functional magnetic res...

Next to social problems, individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) often report severe sensory difficulties. Altered processing of touch is however a stronger mediator of social symptoms' severity than altered processing of for instance vision or audition. Why is this the case? We reasoned that sensory difficulties may be linked to social pro...

Theory of mind (ToM) research has shown that adults with high functioning autism (HFA) demonstrate typical performance on tasks that require explicit belief reasoning, despite clear social difficulties in everyday life situations. In the current study, we used implicit belief manipulations that are task-irrelevant and therefore less susceptible to...

Action observation leads to a representation of both the motor aspect of an observed action (motor simulation) and its somatosensory consequences (action-based somatosensory simulation) in the observer's brain. In the current EEG-study, we investigated the neuronal interplay of action-based somatosensory simulation and felt touch. We presented inde...

In the current EEG-study, we investigated whether individuals with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) effectively use their own sense of touch to understand tactile experiences that accompany other people’s actions (action-based touch). We tested the action-based somatosensory congruency paradigm (Deschrijver, Wiersema, & Brass, submitted) in a group o...

The way we experience the space around us is highly subjective. It has been shown that motion potentialities that are intrinsic to our body influence our space categorization. Furthermore, we have recently demonstrated that in the extrapersonal space, our categorization also depends on the movement potential of other agents. When we have to categor...

Recently, it has been shown that the medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) is involved in error execution as well as error observation. Based on this finding, it has been argued that recognizing each other’s mistakes might rely on motor simulation. In the current functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) study, we directly tested this hypothesis by in...