Three studies (two conducted in Israel and one in the United States) examined associations between self-rated dispositional happiness and tendencies to treat memories of positive and negative events as sources of enhanced or attenuated happiness through the use of "endowment" and "contrast." Although participants generally endorsed items describing happiness-enhancing tendencies more than happi...

Motivational tendencies to happy and angry faces are well-established, e.g., in the form of aggression. Approach-avoidance reactions are not only elicited by emotional expressions, but also linked to the evaluation of stable, social characteristics of faces. Grounded in the two fundamental dimensions of face-based evaluations proposed by Oosterhof and Todorov (2008), the current study tested wh...

High-risk behavior in adolescents is associated with injury, mental health problems, and poor outcomes in later life. Improved understanding of the neurobiology of high-risk behavior and impulsivity shows promise for informing clinical treatment and prevention as well as policy to better address high-risk behavior. We recruited 21 adolescents (age 14-17) with a wide range of high-risk behavior ...

Two studies tested the prediction that more positive intergroup contact would be associated with reduced aggressive intergroup action tendencies, an effect predicted to occur indirectly via reduced intergroup threat perceptions, and over and above well-established effects of contact on intergroup attitudes. Study 1, using data based on a cross-section of the general population of eight European...

BACKGROUND Sex differences are present in many neuropsychiatric conditions that affect emotion and approach-avoidance behavior. One potential mechanism underlying such observations is testosterone in early development. Although much is known about the effects of testosterone in adolescence and adulthood, little is known in humans about how testosterone in fetal development influences later neur...

This article challenges the common view that improvements in critical thinking are best pursued by investigations in informal logic. From the perspective of research in psychology and neuroscience, human inference is a process that is multimodal, parallel, and often emotional, which makes it unlike the linguistic, serial, and narrowly cognitive structure of arguments. Attempts to improve infere...

A neo-Darwinian heuristic for decisions involving altruism is'hypothesized in this article. Following W. Hamilton's (1964) analysis of inclusive fitness, the assumption of this study is that tendencies to help another person are selected against, except when the donor and recipient are related and share genes underlying these tendencies. An important social psychological implication of Hamilton...

This paper provides new insights into the effect of the widespread transition from defined benefit (DB) to defined contribution (DC) pension plans on employee mobility. Pension plans may affect employee mobility both through an “incentive effect,” where the bundle of benefit characteristics, such as vesting rules, relative liquidity and the risk/return tradeoff affect turnover directly, and a “...

The way in which attachment styles are expressed in the moment as individuals navigate their real-life settings has remained an area largely untapped by attachment research. The present study examined how adult attachment styles are expressed in daily life using experience sampling methodology (ESM) in a sample of 206 Spanish young adults. Participants were administered the Attachment Style Int...

Psychopathy (PP) is associated with marked abnormalities in social emotional behaviour, such as high instrumental aggression (IA). A crucial but largely ignored question is whether automatic social approach-avoidance tendencies may underlie this condition. We tested whether offenders with PP show lack of automatic avoidance tendencies, usually activated when (healthy) individuals are confronted...