Gijsbert Bijlstra

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• Dr.
• Professor (Associate) at Radboud University

Every year, billions of people celebrate Christmas all over the world—a religious event that is characterized by transient yet considerable changes in people’s social, cultural, and demographic environment. Drawing on the Bias of Crowds model, we investigate the impact of Christmas on implicit bias. In Study 1, we used Project Implicit data of more...

We systematically investigate whether reinforcement learning can modify social category biases in emotion recognition. In Experiment 1 (N = 40), we replicated that the Happy Face Advantage is influenced by social category membership. People were faster at recognizing happiness as happiness than anger as anger for White–Dutch faces, while no differe...

The second coming of the Ku Klux Klan popularized the Klan and its ideas in the early 1920s, terrorizing Black American, their allies, and others deemed un-American. This article investigates the extent to which the cultural legacy of racial hatred of the Klan has persisted over the years. We use data from large online databases, multiverse analyse...

Discrimination in the evaluation of others is a key cause of social inequality around the world. However, relatively little is known about psychological interventions that can be used to prevent biased evaluations. The limited evidence that exists on these strategies is spread across many methods and populations, making it difficult to generate rel...

The 2020 Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in response to the murder of George Floyd highlighted the lingering structural inequalities faced by Black people in the United States. In the present research, we investigated whether these protests led to reduced implicit and explicit racial bias among White U.S. Americans. Combining data from Project Im...

The harm-made mind phenomenon implies that witnessing intentional harm towards agents with ambiguous minds, such as robots, leads to augmented mind perception in these agents. We conducted two replications of previous work on this effect and extended it by testing if robots that detect and simulate emotions elicit a stronger harm-made mind effect t...

Traditionally, causal claims in social cognition research have been reserved for experimental designs. However, restricting causal claims to experimental research limits the type of questions that can be answered satisfactorily – including questions about geographical differences or changes over time recently popularized in the field of social cogn...

The second coming of the Ku Klux Klan popularized the Klan and its ideas in the early 1920s, terrorizing Black American, their allies, and others deemed un-American. The present paper investigates the extent to which the cultural legacy of racial hatred of the Klan has persisted over the years. We use data from large online databases, multiverse an...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

Biases in favor of culturally prevalent social ingroups are ubiquitous, but random assignment to arbitrary experimentally created social groups is also sufficient to create ingroup biases (i.e., the minimal group effect; MGE). The extent to which ingroup bias arises from specific social contexts versus more general psychological tendencies remains...

In 2019, mass immigration of Venezuelans to Colombia peaked, which for Colombian residents was accompanied by fear of potential conflicts and negative consequences. Given the lack of literature on the effectiveness of perspective taking in combating discrimination in ongoing conflict situations, the present experiment (between-subjects design) inve...

In 2019, mass immigration of Venezuelans to Colombia peaked, which for Colombian residents was accompanied by fear of potential conflicts and negative consequences. Given the lack of literature on the effectiveness of perspective taking in combatting discrimination in ongoing conflict situations, the present experiment (between-subjects design) inv...

Collaborations may sometimes increase the likelihood of engaging in dishonest behaviour. As yet, it remains unknown what factors contribute to this phenomenon. Here, we investigate whether it matters with whom people are collaborating for the extent to which they are dishonest. We aim to (I) replicate dishonest collaboration effects and (II) examin...

Every year, billions of people celebrate Christmas all over the world—a religious event that is characterized by transient yet considerable changes in people’s direct social, cultural, and demographic environment. Drawing upon situational models, the present research investigated change in implicit bias towards racial, religious, and sexual minorit...

This paper presents the results of a preregistered pilot study test- ing an experimental framework to measure altruistic behaviour towards robots. We define altruistic behaviour as behaviour that benefits others at a personal cost to the behaving individual. The pi- lot study explores feelings of guilt and perceived mind (i.e., agency and experienc...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...

The 2020 Black Lives Matter protests in response to the murder of George Floyd highlighted the lingering structural inequalities faced by Black people in the United States. In the present research, we investigated whether these protests led to reduced implicit and explicit racial bias among White US Americans. Combining data from Project Implicit,...

The accurate and swift decoding of emotional expressions from faces is fundamental for social communication. Yet, emotion perception is prone to error. For example, the ease with which emotions are perceived is affected by stereotypes (Bijlstra, Holland, & Wigboldus, 2010). Moreover, the introduction of face masks mandates in response to the Covid-...

Face masks are now worn frequently to reduce the spreading of the SARS-CoV-2 virus. Their health benefits are undisputable, but covering the lower half of one's face also makes it harder for others to recognize facial expressions of emotions. Three experiments were conducted to determine how strongly the recognition of different facial expressions...

The COVID-19 pandemic (and its aftermath) highlights a critical need to communicate health information effectively to the global public. Given that subtle differences in information framing can have meaningful effects on behavior, behavioral science research highlights a pressing question: Is it more effective to frame COVID-19 health messages in t...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

The accurate and swift decoding of emotional expressions from faces is fundamental for social communication. Yet, emotion perception is prone to error. For example, the ease with which emotions are perceived is affected by stereotypes (Bijlstra et al., 2010). Moreover, the introduction of face masks mandates in response to the Covid-19 pandemic add...

Significance Communicating in ways that motivate engagement in social distancing remains a critical global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This study tested motivational qualities of messages about social distancing (those that promoted choice and agency vs. those that were forceful and shaming) in 25,718 people in 89 countries...

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the Psychological Science Accelerator coordinated three large-scale psychological studies to examine the effects of loss-gain framing, cognitive reappraisals, and autonomy framing manipulations on behavioral intentions and affective measures. The data collected (April to October 2020) included specific measures...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

The COVID-19 pandemic has increased negative emotions and decreased positive emotions globally. Left unchecked, these emotional changes might have a wide array of adverse impacts. To reduce negative emotions and increase positive emotions, we tested the effectiveness of reappraisal, an emotion-regulation strategy that modifies how one thinks about...

Finding communication strategies that effectively motivate social distancing continues to be a global public health priority during the COVID-19 pandemic. This cross-country, preregistered experiment (n = 25,718 from 89 countries) tested hypotheses concerning generalizable positive and negative outcomes of social distancing messages that promoted p...

In this paper, research on implicitly measured teacher associations with social groups of students (attitudes and stereotypes) is reviewed. The aim of this review is to describe the theoretical and methodological underpinnings of the use of implicit measures in educational research, to summarize the research completed so far in which implicit measu...

To draw valid and reliable conclusions from child studies involving facial expressions, well-controlled and validated (child) facial stimuli are necessary. The current study is the first to validate the facial emotional expressions of child models in school-aged children. In this study, we validated the Radboud Faces Database child models in a larg...

Previous research showed that penalty-takers’ body language affects the impressions goalkeepers form about them. Furthermore, it is often assumed that body language influences goalkeepers’ performance. However, as yet, there is no empirical evidence that indicates whether this latter effect exists. The present research was aimed at (1) replicating...

Recent evidence shows that body context may alter the categorization of facial expressions. However, less is known about how facial expressions influence the categorization of emotional bodies. We hypothesized that context effects would be displayed bidirectionally, from bodies to faces and from faces to bodies. Participants viewed emotional face-b...

Facial expressions play a central role in diverse areas of psychology. However, facial stimuli are often only validated by adults, and there are no face databases validated by school-aged children. Validation by children is important because children still develop emotion recognition skills and may have different perceptions than adults. Therefore,...

Across two studies majority group children’s (8-13 years) perception of positive and negative emotions in ethnic in-group and disadvantaged ethnic out-group peers was examined. Study 1 (N = 302) showed that children expected in-group peers to feel better in a positive situation compared to out-group peers. Whereas, in a negative situation, children...

Recently, Cognition and Emotion published an article (Craig & Lipp, 2018) demonstrating that age cues affect the speed and accuracy of emotion recognition. The authors claimed that the observed effect of target age on emotion recognition is better explained by evaluative than stereotype associations. Although we agree with their conclusion, we beli...

We used a Face-in-the-Crowd task to examine whether hostile environments predict enhanced detection of anger, and whether such enhanced cognition occurs for a di erent negative emotion, sadness, as well. We conducted a well-powered, preregistered study in 100 college students and 100 individuals from a community sample with greater exposure to host...

Most research on emotion recognition focuses on facial expressions. However, people communicate emotional information through bodily cues as well. Prior research on facial expressions has demonstrated that emotion recognition is modulated by top-down processes. Here, we tested whether this top-down modulation generalizes to the recognition of emoti...

Two studies examined when and why children (10-13 years) help ethnic in-group and out-group peers. In Study 1 (n = 163) children could help an out-group or in-group peer with a word-guessing game by entering codes into a computer. While children evaluated the out-group more negatively than the in-group, they helped out-group peers more than in-grou...

The present contribution highlights the importance of context while investigating dishonesty in collaborative settings.

The present research was aimed at investigating whether human-robot interaction (HRI) can be improved by a robot’s nonverbal warning signals. Ideally, when a robot signals that it cannot guarantee good performance, people could take preventive actions to ensure the successful completion of the robot’s task. In two experiments, participants learned...

An important aspect of a robot's social behavior is to convey the right amount of trustworthiness. Task performance has shown to be an important source for trustworthiness judgments. Here, we argue that factors such as a robot's behavioral style can play an important role as well. Our approach to studying the effects of a robot's performance and be...

We investigated whether stereotype associations between specific emotional expressions and social categories underlie stereotypic emotion recognition biases. Across two studies, we replicated previously documented stereotype biases in emotion recognition using both dynamic (Study 1) and static (Study 2) expression displays. Stereotype consistent ex...

Many research fields concerned with the processing of information contained in human faces would benefit from face stimulus sets in which specific facial characteristics are systematically varied while other important picture characteristics are kept constant. Specifically, a face database in which displayed expressions, gaze direction, and head or...

The goal of the present paper was to demonstrate the influence of general evaluations and stereotype associations on emotion recognition. Earlier research has shown that evaluative connotations between social category members and emotional expression predict whether recognition of positive or negative emotional expressions will be facilitated (e.g....

The present research explored the nonconscious motivational influence of self-symbols. In line with recent findings on the motivational influence of positive affect, we hypothesized that positive affect associated with self-symbols may boost motivation. In Study I people drank more of a beverage when the brand name contained name letters. Study 2 e...