Joshua Foster

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at University of South Alabama

The Oxford Handbook of Human Memory covers the science of human memory, its application to clinical disorders, and its broader implications for learning and memory in real-world contexts. Written by field leaders, the handbook integrates behavioral, neural, and computational evidence with current theories of how humans learn and remember. Following...

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotion...

Working memory (WM) flexibly updates information to adapt to the dynamic environment. Here, we used alpha-band activity in the EEG to reconstruct the content of dynamic WM updates and compared this representational format to static WM content. An inverted encoding model using alpha activity precisely tracked both the initially encoded position and...

Representations in working memory need to be flexibly transformed to adapt to our dynamic environment and variable task demands. Recent work has demonstrated that activity in the alpha frequency band enables precise decoding of visual information during both perception and sustained storage in working memory. Extant work, however, has focused exclu...

Functional MRI (fMRI) plays a key role in the study of attention. However, there remains a puzzling discrepancy between attention effects measured with fMRI and with electrophysiological methods. While electrophysiological studies find that attention increases sensory gain, amplifying stimulus-evoked neural responses by multiplicatively scaling the...

Understanding how forgiveness relates to mental health outcomes may improve clinical care. This study assessed 248 adult psychiatric inpatients, testing associations of forgiveness, religious comfort (RC), religious strain (RS), and changes in depressive symptomatology from admission to discharge. Experiencing divine forgiveness and self-forgivenes...

Functional MRI (fMRI) plays a key role in the study of attention. However, there remains a puzzling discrepancy between attention effects measured with fMRI and with electrophysiological methods. While electrophysiological studies find that attention increases sensory gain, amplifying stimulus-evoked neural responses by multiplicatively scaling the...

The three goals of this chapter are to introduce readers to construct of narcissism, to review the literature on the evolutionary origins of narcissism, and to review the literature on narcissism and emotions. Narcissism will be discussed as both a personality trait that is comprised by grandiose and vulnerable expressions, as well as a personality...

Intro Prior literature indicates that nontraditional attitudes are linked to higher intelligence. However, such attitudes in adolescence often accompany counter-normative, delinquent-type behaviors, which are themselves negatively linked with intelligence. This points to the possibility of suppression in the relationship between intelligence and no...

Scholars posit that economically prosperous times should produce higher individualism and narcissism, and economically challenging times lower individualism and narcissism. This creates the possibility that narcissism among U.S. college students, which increased between 1982 and 2009, may have declined after the Great Recession. Updating a cross-te...

Current theories propose that the short-term retention of information in working memory (WM) and the recall of information from long-term memory (LTM) are supported by overlapping neural mechanisms in occipital and parietal cortex. However, the extent of the shared representations between WM and LTM is unclear. We designed a spatial memory task tha...

Temporal attention, the allocation of attention to a moment in time, improves perception. Here, we examined the computational mechanism by which temporal attention improves perception, under a divisive normalization framework. Under this framework, attention can improve perception of a target signal in three ways: stimulus enhancement (increasing g...

Religion and spirituality (R/S) often play crucial roles in the lives of people seeking mental health care. However, patients’ preferences for addressing R/S in their treatment, especially in inpatient settings, has not been understood. This study examined preferences for R/S integration and factors that predict inpatients’ attitudes toward specifi...

Objective: Suicidal behavior is a leading cause of injury and death, so research identifying protective factors is essential. Research suggests gratitude and life hardships patience are character strengths that might protect against the deleterious association of struggles with ultimate meaning and suicide risk. However, no studies have evaluated...

Here, we examined the computations by which temporal attention, the allocation of attention to a moment in time, improves perception, under a divisive normalization framework. Under this framework, attention can improve perception of a target signal in three ways: stimulus enhancement (increasing gain across all sensory channels), signal enhancemen...

Current theories propose that the short-term retention of information in working memory (WM) and the recall of information from long-term memory (LTM) are supported by overlapping neural mechanisms in occipital and parietal cortex. Both are thought to rely on reinstating patterns of sensory activity evoked by the perception of the remembered item....

Objective: Military veterans often encounter events with chronic or repeated traumas of an interpersonal nature that might lead to emotional, relational, and spiritual suffering. Research is needed to assess whether and/or how emerging conceptions of moral injury (MI) align with existing trauma-related conditions. Method: Focusing on 173 veteran...

Covert spatial attention has a variety of effects on the responses of individual neurons. However, relatively little is known about the net effect of these changes on sensory population codes, even though perception ultimately depends on population activity. Here, we measured the electroencephalogram (EEG) in human observers (male and female), and...

Are only children more narcissistic than individuals with siblings? Prior research on the topic has produced conflicting and/or inconclusive results. Dufner et al. (2019) published a recent and widely reported empirical test of this hypothesis and concluded that only children are not more narcissistic than non-only children. One of their acknowledg...

Covert spatial attention has long been thought to speed visual processing. Psychophysics studies have shown that target information accrues faster at attended locations than at unattended locations. However, with behavioral evidence alone, it is difficult to determine whether attention speeds visual processing of the target or subsequent postpercep...

Are only children more narcissistic than individuals with siblings? Dufner et al. (2019) recently published a large empirical test of this hypothesis and concluded that only children are not more narcissistic than non-only children. One of their acknowledged limitations was that their study was limited to the German population. They called for addi...

Covert spatial attention has long been thought to speed visual processing. Psychophysics studies have shown that target information accrues faster at attended locations than at unattended locations. However, with behavioral evidence alone, it is difficult to determine whether attention speeds visual processing of the target, or subsequent post-perc...

Prior research suggests that narcissism is positively associated with risk-taking behavior (e.g., gambling). The present study sought to test a contextual factor that may moderate this association. Specifically, we hypothesized that, because narcissists are generally less concerned with whether others approve of their behavior, narcissism would be...

Working memory (WM) is an online memory system that allows us to hold information “in mind” in service of ongoing cognitive processing. Here, we emphasize that short-term retention of information typically involves an interplay between WM and long-term memory (LTM), especially when task demands or interruptions divert our focus from remembered item...

This is a comment on Orben, A., Dienlin, T., & Przybylski, A. K. (2019). Social media’s enduring effect on adolescent life satisfaction. Proc Natl Acad Sci, 201902058. Comment addresses problems with how social media usage was measured in study.

A hallmark of episodic memory is the phenomenon of mentally reexperiencing the details of past events, and a well-established concept is that the neuronal activity that mediates encoding is reinstated at retrieval. Evidence for reinstatement has come from multiple modalities, including functional magnetic resonance imaging and electroencephalograph...

Few studies in positive psychology have examined associations between virtues and mental health in highly distressed samples. This study demonstrates the relevance of the virtue of patience, conceptualized as the capacity to calmly face frustration and suffering, within a spiritually integrated treatment program offering inpatient psychiatric hospi...

Narcissism can be conceptualized as a combination of maladaptive variants of Five-Factor Model facets which load onto three of the five factors—antagonism (i.e., low agreeableness), agentic extraversion, and narcissistic neuroticism. Much research examines approach and avoidance motivations in narcissism; however, few studies assess these processes...

Low empathy is a key feature of the Dark Triad traits of narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Nevertheless, prior research, which has used mostly small samples with single measures of each construct, has produced mixed findings. The present study tested associations between Dark Triad traits and empathy using (a) a large sample (N = 1035)...

War-related traumas can lead to emotional, relational, and spiritual suffering. Drawing on two community samples of war zone veterans from diverse military eras (Study 1, N = 616 and Study 2, N = 300), the purpose of this study was to examine patterns of constellations between outcomes related to moral injury (MI) and common ways in which veterans...

Background: Persons contending with serious mental health difficulties often experience struggles with religious faith and/or spirituality that may also demand clinical attention. However, research has not examined the relative importance of specific forms of spiritual struggles in mental health status or treatment outcomes of psychiatric patients....

Understanding the role of religion in mental illness has always been complicated, as some people turn to religion to cope with their illness, whereas others turn away. The overarching purpose of this study was to draw on quantitative and qualitative information to illuminate ways in which religiousness might be associated with changes in depressive...

Personality traits play a key role in understanding optimism, but few studies have examined how “darker” aspects of personality relate to individual differences in trait-level optimism. We examined whether the Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) were associated with individual differences in optimism in three con...

Covert spatial attention allows us to prioritize visual processing at relevant locations. A fast growing literature suggests that alpha-band (8–12 Hz) oscillations play a key role in this core cognitive process. It is clear that alpha-band activity tracks both the locus and timing of covert spatial orienting. There is limited evidence, however, for...

This unique reference surveys current theoretical and empirical advances in understanding individual differences in narcissistic personality, as well as the latest perspectives on controversies in the field. Wide-ranging expert coverage examines the many manifestations of narcissism, including grandiose, vulnerable, communal, and collective varieti...

The term "narcissism" is etymologically rooted in Greek mythology and specifically a story of unrequited love, jealousy, and revenge. To some degree, what is old is new in terms of how narcissism is depicted in the romantic relationships empirical literature. That is, narcissism is mostly understood to be a predictor of relationship damaging behavi...

In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of measures available to researchers who study grandiose narcissism (GN). The purpose of this chapter is to provide a brief overview of some of the more popular measures of GN. Some of these measures attempt to capture GN as a single dimension, some as a multidimensional construct, a...

In samples from America, Brazil, and Hungary (N = 937), we examined the associations between the Dark Triad traits (i.e., narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism) and individual differences in excitement (i.e., valuing personal enjoyment), promotion (i.e., valuing achievements), existence (i.e., valuing physical survival), suprapersonal (i.e....

A longstanding view holds that information is maintained in working memory (WM) via persistent neural activity that encodes the content of WM. Recent work, however, has challenged the view that all items stored in WM are actively maintained. Instead, “activity-silent” models propose that items can be maintained in WM without the need for persistent...

.

A hallmark of episodic memory is the phenomenon of mentally re-experiencing the details of past events, and a well-established concept is that the neuronal activity that mediates encoding is reinstated at retrieval. Evidence for reinstatement has come from multiple modalities, including functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) and electroenceph...

Current theories assume a functional role for covert attention in the maintenance of spatial information in working memory. Consistent with this view, both the locus of attention and positions stored in working memory can be decoded based on the topography of oscillatory alpha-band (8–12 Hz) activity on the scalp. Thus far, however, alpha modulatio...

An emerging view suggests that spatial position is an integral component of working memory (WM), such that non-spatial features are bound to locations regardless of whether space is relevant [1, 2]. For instance, past work has shown that stimulus position is spontaneously remembered when non-spatial features are stored. Item recognition is enhanced...

Research shows that grandiosity and vulnerability are distinct aspects of narcissism. The Contemporary Clinical Model (CCM) of narcissism suggests that individuals fluctuate between grandiose narcissism (GN) and vulnerable narcissism (VN). The authors examine the relative contributions of the Behavioral Approach System (BAS), the Behavioral Inhibit...

Work on the Dark Triad traits has benefited from the use of a life history framework but it has been limited to primarily Western samples and indirect assessments of life history strategies. Here, we examine how the Dark Triad traits (i.e., psychopathy, Machiavellianism, and narcissism) relate to two measures of individual differences in life histo...

Working memory is the function by which we temporarily maintain information to achieve current task goals. Models of working memory typically debate where this information is stored, rather than how it is stored. Here we ask instead what neural mechanisms are involved in storage, and how these mechanisms change as a function of task goals. Particip...

In a sample (N = 1969) drawn from six countries, we examined the relationships between individual differences in independent and interdependent self-construals and the Dark Triad traits (i.e., psychopathy, narcissism, and Machiavellianism). Overall, the Dark Traits were largely unrelated to interdependence whereas Machiavellianism and narcissism, i...

Covert spatial attention is essential for humans’ ability to direct limited processing resources to the relevant aspects of visual scenes. A growing body of evidence suggests that rhythmic neural activity in the alpha frequency band (8–12 Hz) tracks the spatial locus of covert attention, which suggests that alpha activity is integral to spatial att...

Religion and/or spirituality (R/S) can play a vital, multifacted role in mental health. While beliefs about God represent the core of many psychiatric patients’ meaning systems, research has not examined how internalized images of the divine might contribute to outcomes in treatment programs/settings that emphasize multicultural sensitivity with R/...

Recent work has shown the ability to decode working memory contents from EEG measurements. Here we investigate to what extent the type of representation underlying this decoding ability changes for different types of tasks. We employed two working memory tasks with identical items, but different task requirements. The memoranda always consisted of...

This study examined the role of working memory in the relationship between Need for Cognition (NFC) and intelligence. We previously reported that NFC is associated with intelligence but not working memory. This was unexpected as working memory has a strong relationship with fluid intelligence. 167 participants completed the NFC short scale, WAIS-II...

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is the most widely used measure of narcissism in the social-personality psychology literature. It contains 40 items that tap into a variety of traits that theoretically comprise narcissism, such as feelings of superiority and willingness to exploit others. Most researchers focus on the total score produc...

The purpose of this study was to examine the interplay between daily spiritual experiences and meaning making in a sample of 254 Salvadoran teachers with histories of exposure to violence and potential trauma. When controlling for rates of lifetime community violence exposure and demographic factors (age, gender), teachers with higher daily spiritu...

In a recent study, Bianchi (2014) showed that macroeconomic conditions (i.e. average unemployment rate) during the years of emerging adulthood (ages 18 to 25) are inversely related to adult narcissism. Fletcher (2015) called into question the robustness of the results and Grijalva et al. (2015) presented meta-analytic support for real gender differ...

Working memory (WM) is a system for the online storage of information. An emerging view is that neuronal oscillations coordinate the cellular assemblies that code the content of WM. In line with this view, previous work has demonstrated that oscillatory activity in the alpha-band (8-12 Hz) plays a role in WM maintenance but the exact contributions...

The present study builds upon previous findings by examining parental psychological control in relation to two distinct traits of the self (i.e., authenticity and contingent self-worth) and internalized aggression. A model was proposed with authenticity and contingent self-worth as serial mediators of the relationship between parental psychological...

Numerous studies have demonstrated a link between spatial attention and alpha (8-13 Hz) activity measured with electroencephalography (EEG). In spatial cueing studies, a posterior alpha desynchronization is seen contralateral to the cued visual hemifield relative to the ipsilateral side (e.g., Thut, Nietzel, Brandt, Pascual-Leone, 2006). In light o...

Empirically analyzing empirical evidence One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking...

An understudied area of personality psychology is how personality traits might facilitate structuring of one’s environment toward goals like mating. In four studies (N = 1325), we examined (1) self-reports of where individuals go to find long-term and short-term mates, (2) how personality traits are associated with the use of these locations, and (...

The State Self-Esteem Scale (SSES) measures transient feelings of self-worth. The SSES has been hypothesized to possess a number of latent structures, ranging from one to three factors. The present study compared these putative structures along with a newly hypothesized bifactor structure (i.e., one global factor, three subfactors). Results offered...

The Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) is the primary measure of grandiose narcissism (GN) despite possessing numerous limitations. Here we present a new 33-item measure of GN called the Grandiose Narcissism Scale (GNS) that exhibits a reproducible seven-factor structure that maps on to Raskin and Terry’s (1988) seven factor model. GNS subsca...

Community violence has reached concerning proportions in El Salvador, possibly affecting all sectors of society. To date, little attention has focused on the effects of violence exposure on educators in Central American countries. This study examined the relationships between lifetime community violence exposure, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD...

There is increasing consensus that mourners' general attachment security and ongoing sense of connectedness to the deceased figure prominently in adjustment to bereavement. However, the interplay between these variables has not been investigated thoroughly. We therefore studied 195 young adults who were bereaved by violent causes (homicide, suicide...

It is well documented that many relationships form via mate poaching (i.e., stealing someone’s partner), but almost nothing is known about how these relationships function. Across three studies, we observed reliable evidence that individuals who were poached by their current romantic partners were less committed, less satisfied, and less invested i...

Objective: Intelligence measures have a high-moderate correlation with academic achievement. The purpose of this study was to examine if anxiety on the day of testing moderates the relationship between intelligence and academic achievement. Method: Six hundred sixty-five participants (mean age = 22.77, SD = 5.99; 51% female; 87% white) at a large s...

Perpetrating romantic infidelity is discrepant with how most individuals see themselves and theoretically should produce cognitive dissonance. Accordingly, perpetrators of infidelity should experience symptoms of dissonance (e.g. self-concept discrepancy, psychological discomfort, poor affect) and employ tactics that reduce these symptoms (e.g. tri...

Need for Cognition (NFC) is a trait-level measure of how much individuals enjoy engaging in effortful cognition. It has previously been reported to have a small to moderate association with aspects of intelligence but this has not been fully explored. The current study presents a comprehensive evaluation of the relation between NFC and intelligence...

This article appeared in a journal published by Elsevier. The attached copy is furnished to the author for internal non-commercial research and education use, including for instruction at the authors institution and sharing with colleagues. Other uses, including reproduction and distribution, or selling or licensing copies, or posting to personal,...

Reproducibility is a defining feature of science. However, because of strong incentives for innovation and weak incentives for confirmation, direct replication is rarely practiced or published. The Reproducibility Project is an open, large-scale, collaborative effort to systematically examine the rate and predictors of reproducibility in psychologi...

According to the agency model, one of narcissism's core traits is approach orientation (i.e., strong approach motivation coupled with weak avoidance motivation). Research reviewed in this chapter strongly supports this hypothesis. However, mounting evidence suggests that strong approach motivation may be a more important and prominent feature of na...

Two studies tested whether narcissists are prone to making risky stock market investments. In Study 1, narcissistic participants reported being more inclined to invest in stocks that exhibited high volatility (i.e., large price fluctuations). In study 2, participants created hypothetical investment portfolios using a selection of real stocks whose...

It is widely accepted that narcissists become aggressive when they experience ego-threat. However, there is surprisingly little empirical research on the relationship between narcissism and aggression. Equivocal findings suggest that aggression in narcissists either occurs only in response to provocation, or regardless of provocation. One-hundred a...

Are secret romances alluring or aversive? One theory suggests that romantic secrecy increases obsessive preoccupation with romantic partners and thereby enhances romantic relationships. Another theory suggests that romantic secrecy is burdensome and thereby undermines romantic relationships. We sought to rectify these conflicting perspectives by ex...

Previous research produced conflicting results on whether narcissistic personality traits have increased among American college students over the generations. Confounding by campus may explain the discrepancy. Study 1 updates a nationwide meta-analysis of college students' scores on the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) and controls for camp...

(from the chapter) Discussing narcissism within the context of relationships is especially appropriate given the term's origin. According to Greek mythology, Narcissus was one of Greece's handsomest bachelors who was adored and pursued by all, including one particular nymph who went by the name of Echo. Alas, Narcissus only had eyes for himself and...

Much prior research demonstrates that narcissists take more risks than others, but almost no research has examined what motivates this behavior. The present study tested two potential driving mechanisms of risk-taking by narcissists (i.e., heightened perceptions of benefits and diminished perceptions of risks stemming from risky behaviors) by admin...

According to the unmitigated approach model (UAM) of narcissism, narcissists possess strong approach motivation coupled with weak avoidance motivation. The present research tests the UAM in two independent contexts: social and financial. In Study 1, narcissists report having social goals that emphasize the promotion of positive outcomes (e.g., havi...

Emotion processing is pivotal during development and deficient processing of certain emotions disrupts normal socialization increasing risk for violent behavior later in life. Psychopathy has been linked to both of these phenomena in men; however, the study of such relations has been relatively neglected in women. In the present study, 88 collegiat...

Olfaction is an important determinant of attractiveness, possibly even more so than vision when judgments are made by women. However, research that directly compares these cues using actual stimuli (e.g., t-shirt odors) is lacking. In this study, 44 women rated the attractiveness of t-shirt odors and facial photographs of 21 men either independentl...

[Twenge, J. M., Konrath, S., Foster, J. D., Campbell, W. K., & Bushman, B. J. (2008a). Egos inflating over time: A cross-temporal meta-analysis of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory. Journal of Personality, 76, 875–901.] found that Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) scores increased between 1982 and 2006 among college students nationwide,...

This study examined the within-person relationships among daily self-esteem, felt authenticity (i.e., the operation of one's "true self"), and satisfaction of psychological needs for autonomy, competence, and relatedness. We also included measures of affect to control for the variance these constructs might share with affect. Over a 2-week period,...

This article demonstrates the validity and utility of conceptualizing narcissistic personality in terms of relative approach-avoidance motivation. Across three studies (N = 1,319), narcissism predicted high approach and low avoidance motivation. That is, narcissists reported being strongly motivated to approach desirable outcomes but only weakly mo...

Our meta-analysis also finds no change over time in Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) scores among California college students, most likely due to the cultural and ethnic shifts at the University of California campuses over this time (especially the large increase in Asian-American student enrollment). Students in the rest of the country, fr...

A cross-temporal meta-analysis found that narcissism levels have risen over the generations in 85 samples of American college students who completed the 40-item forced-choice Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) between 1979 and 2006 (total n=16,475). Mean narcissism scores were significantly correlated with year of data collection when weighte...

The investment model (Rusbult, 1980) proposes that commitment is maintained by three mechanisms: Satisfaction, perceived quality of alternatives, and investment. Research suggests that the influence of these mechanisms is largely constant across a variety of individual differences and relational contexts. However, no published research has tested t...

Research has demonstrated that narcissism is related to the perpetration of aggression. Despite being commonly considered a pathological form of personality, theorists have argued that narcissism represents a mix of adaptive (e.g., Self-Sufficiency) and maladaptive (e.g., Entitlement and Exploitativeness) traits. The current study sought to examine...

Narcissism is typically viewed as a dimensional construct in social psychology. Direct evidence supporting this position is lacking, however, and recent research suggests that clinical measures of narcissism exhibit categorical properties. It is therefore unclear whether social psychological researchers should conceptualize narcissism as a category...