Kathleen C. McCulloch

• PhD New York University
• Perception Cognition and Neuroscience Research Group at University of Central Lancashire

A signature feature of self-regulation is that once a goal is satiated, it becomes deactivated, thereby allowing people to engage in new pursuits. The present experiments provide evidence for vicarious goal satiation, a novel phenomenon in which individuals experience "post-completion goal satiation" as a result of unwittingly taking on another per...

Two experiments explored how counterfactual mind-sets interact with implementation intentions and affect their flexibility. Participants engaged in a subtractive mind-set, an additive mind-set, or a control condition and were subsequently given either goal intentions or implementation intentions that facilitated cue detection (Experiment 1) or the...

In two experiments, we examined the mechanisms underlying the wide-ranging benefits of prayer on well-being. In line with research on psychological distance, we hypothesized that greater perspective mediates the emotional benefits of prayer. Participants were randomly assigned to pray or think about a personal problem and then reported their emotio...

What happens when people see others making progress toward a goal that they also hold? Is it motivating or could it undermine goal pursuit because people feel that they have made progress themselves (i.e., they experience vicarious goal satiation)? We investigated these questions in a longitudinal field context – a group weight loss programme. N =...

Five experiments investigated a previously unrecognized phenomenon—remembering that one enacted a mundane behavioral decision when one only intended to do so—and its psychological mechanisms. The theoretical conceptualization advanced in this research proposes that this error stems from a misattribution when an intention and a behavior are similar....

Introduction: Whether the post-categorical, semantic properties of task-irrelevant speech are processed has been a source of debate between two central accounts. The first, a structural account, proposes that the semantic content of irrelevant speech is filtered out early on, and thus remains unprocessed. The second account proposes that the semant...

Five experiments investigated a previously unrecognized phenomenon—remembering that one enacted a mundane behavioral decision when one only intended to do so—and its psychological mechanisms. The theoretical conceptualization advanced in this research proposes that this error stems from a misattribution when an intention and a behavior are similar....

Objective. What happens when people see others making progress toward a goal that they also hold? Is it motivating or could it undermine goal pursuit because people feel that they have made progress themselves (i.e., they experience vicarious goal satiation)? Methods. We investigated these questions in a longitudinal field context – a group weight...

Drawing on theories of mimicry as a schema-driven process, we tested whether the degree of verbal mimicry is dependent on the congruence between interactants’ power dynamic (symmetric vs. asymmetric), task type (cooperative vs. competitive) and interaction context (negotiation vs. social). Experiment 1 found higher verbal mimicry amongst dyads who...

Four experiments uncovered an action dominance error by which people’s natural focus on actions hinders appropriate responses to social and nonsocial stimuli. This surprising error comprises higher rates of both omission (misses) and commission (false alarms) when, in responding to action and inaction demands, people have higher numbers of action t...

We have an abundance of perceptual information from multiple modalities specifying our body proportions. Consequently, it seems reasonable for researchers to assume that we have an accurate perception of our body proportions. In contrast to this intuition, recent research has shown large, striking distortions in people's perceptions of the relative...

While many studies show a positive relationship between verbal mimicry and negotiation success (e.g., Taylor & Thomas, 2008), a few recent studies have shown the opposite (Ireland & Henderson, 2014). In this paper we seek to resolve this discrepancy by testing, based on schema expectation theory, whether the benefits of verbal mimicry are dependent...

We examined the role of reward sensitivity and the motivation to balance ‘have-to’ and ‘want-to’ goals in vicarious goal satiation. In Experiment 1, participants who read about a target who completed an academic goal performed worse on an academic (‘have-to’) task and were more interested in engaging in inherently rewarding (‘want-to’) activities t...

Given that observing one's body is ubiquitous in experience, it is natural to assume that people accurately perceive the relative sizes of their body parts. This assumption is mistaken. In a series of studies, we show that there are dramatic systematic distortions in the perception of bodily proportions, as assessed by visual estimation tasks, wher...

Power holders exhibit more approach behavior than those without power and are even expected by others to do so. We proposed that this strong association between power and approach should make approach behavior a useful cue for perceiving one’s level of power: If I am approaching things, I must be powerful. Across three experiments, engaging in appr...

Although self-control often requires behavioral inaction (i.e., not eating a piece of cake), the process of inhibiting impulsive behavior is commonly characterized as cognitively active (i.e., actively exerting self-control). Two experiments examined whether motivation for action or inaction facilitates self-control behavior in the presence of temp...

Functional counterfactual thinking involves a unique set of circumstances where one can both reflect on past events and imagine future possibilities. A key aspect of a counterfactual's functionality is that insight about past mistakes is converted into plans for future action, thereby improving self-regulatory success. If counterfactual thinking is...

The cohesiveness of a society depends, in part, on how its individual members manage their daily activities with respect to the goals of that society. Hence, there should be a degree of social agreement on what constitutes action and what constitutes inaction. The present research investigated the structure of action and inaction definitions, the e...

As little is known about the effectiveness of different types of implementation intentions on the regulation of emotions, the present experiments focused on the differential effectiveness of various implementation intentions on the down-regulation of disgust responses. In Experiment 1, an antecedent-focused implementation intention based on cogniti...

A signature feature of self-regulation is that once a goal is satiated, it becomes deactivated, thereby allowing people to engage in new pursuits. The present experiments provide evidence for vicarious goal satiation, a novel phenomenon in which individuals experience "post-completion goal satiation" as a result of unwittingly taking on another per...

Working Memory (WM) plays a crucial role in many high-level cognitive processes (e.g., reasoning, decision making, goal pursuit and cognitive control). The prevalent view holds that active components of WM are predominantly intentional and conscious. This conception is oftentimes expressed explicitly, but it is best reflected in the nature of major...

As implementation intentions are a powerful self-regulation tool for thought and action (meta-analysis by P. M. Gollwitzer & P. Sheeran, 2006), the present studies were conducted to address their effectiveness in regulating emotional reactivity. Disgust- (Study 1) and fear- (Study 2) eliciting stimuli were viewed under 3 different self-regulation i...

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General action and inaction goals can influence the amount of motor or cognitive output irrespective of the type of behavior in question, with the same stimuli producing trivial and important motor and cognitive manifestations normally viewed as parts of different systems. A series of experiments examined the effects of instilling general action an...

In this article we analyzed the information processing that underlies nonconscious impression formation. In the first experiment, the nonconscious activation of the impression formation goal led to a faster analysis of the trait implications of behaviors, compared with a control group. In Experiment 2, participants who were nonconsciously primed wi...

In social psychological models of goals, particular means or goals that receive more activation are pursued while their counterparts are "inhibited." To account for inhibition, these theories emphasize structural distribution of resources and the consequences of goal or means choices. Absent are alternate accounts of inhibition based on memory proc...

The aim of this study was to examine the influence of gender on exposure to gender-tailored HIV-prevention brochures. During an unobtrusive observation of participants' reading of brochures, both men and women were likely to avoid gender-mismatched brochures. However, women were more likely to selectively approach gender-matched brochures over gend...

This commentary highlights the strengths of the associative-propositional evaluation model. It then describes problems in proposing a qualitative separation between propositional and associative processes. Propositional processes are instead described as associative. Propositions are ordered associations, whereas many other associations do not depe...

Over the past two decades, a new picture of the cognitive unconscious has emerged from a variety of disciplines that are broadly part of cognitive science. According to this picture, unconscious processes seem to be capable of doing many things that were thought to require intention, deliberation, and conscious awareness. Moreover, they accomplish...

Intentions to do more good and less bad are reliably associated with actual efforts in the intended directions (Ajzen, 1991; Godin & Kok, 1996; Sheeran, 2002). However, intention-behavior relations are modest, largely due to the fact that people, despite having formed strang intentions, fail to act on them (Orbell & Sheeran, 1998). Given this predi...

Recalling a past experience often requires the suppression of related memories that compete with the retrieval target, causing memory impairment known as retrieval-induced forgetting. Two experiments examined how retrieval-induced forgetting varies with the similarity of the competitor and the target item (target-competitor similarity) and with the...

When people form connections between several memories that share a common retrieval cue, the tendency for those memories to interfere with one another during later retrieval attempts is often eliminated. Three experiments examined whether forming such connections might also protect memories from retrieval-induced forgetting, the phenomenon in which...

When people form connections between several memories that share a common retrieval cue, the tendency for those memories to interfere with one another during later retrieval attempts is often eliminated. Three experiments examined whether forming such connections might also protect memories from retrieval-induced forgetting, the phenomenon in which...