In Study 1, we examined the moderating impact of alexithymia (i.e., a difficulty identifying and describing feelings to other people and an externally oriented cognitive style) on the automatic processing of affective information. The affective priming paradigm was used, and lower priming effects for high alexithymia scorers were observed when congruent (incongruent) pairs involving nonverbal primes (angry face) and verbal target were presented. The results held after controlling for participants' negative affectivity. The same effects were replicated in Studies 2 and (...) 3, with trait anxiety and depression entered as additional covariates. In Study 3, no moderating impact of alexithymia was found for verbal-facial pairs suggesting that the results cannot be merely explained in terms of transcoding limitations for high alexithymia scorers. Overall, the present results suggest that alexithymia could be related to a difficulty in processing and automatically using high arousal emotional information to respond to concomittant behavioural demands. (shrink)

Past research has found that mere in‐group/out‐group categorizations are sufficient to elicit biases in face memory. The current research yields novel evidence that mere social categorization is also sufficient to modulate processes underlying face perception, even for faces for which we have strong perceptual expertise: same‐race (SR) faces. Using the composite face paradigm, we find that SR faces categorized as in‐group members (i.e., fellow university students) are processed more holistically than are SR faces categorized as out‐group members (i.e., students at (...) another university). Hence, holding perceptual expertise with faces constant, categorizing an SR target as an out‐group member debilitates the strong holistic processing typically observed for SR faces. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn four studies, we examined the moderating impact of Interoceptive Accuracy and Interoceptive Sensibility (IS, ass...

ABSTRACTResearch that dissociates different types of processes within a given task using a processing tree approach suggests that attitudes may be acquired through evaluative conditioning in the absence of explicit encoding of CS-US pairings in memory. This research distinguishes explicit memory for the CS-US pairings from CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory. It has been suggested that the latter effect may be due to an implicit misattribution process that is assumed to operate when US evocativeness is (...) low. In the present research, the latter assumption was supported neither by two high-powered experiments nor by complementary meta-analytic evidence, whereas evocativeness exerted an influence on explicit memory. This pattern of findings is inconsistent with the view that CS-liking acquired without encoding of CS-US pairs in explicit memory reflects an implicit misattribution process at learning. Hence, the underlying learning process is awaiting further empirical scrutiny. (shrink)

ABSTRACTTwo high-powered experiments examined the role of evaluative response production in the extinction of evaluative conditioning by positioning EC in the procedural and conceptual framewo...

Recent studies have shown that same‐race (SR) faces are processed more holistically than other‐race (OR) faces, a difference that may underlie the greater difficulty at recognizing OR than SR faces (the “other‐race effect”). This article provides original evidence suggesting that the holistic processing of faces may be sensitive to the observers' racial categorization of the face. In Experiment 1, Caucasian participants performed a face‐composite task with Caucasian faces, Asian faces, and racially ambiguous morphed face stimuli. Identical morphed face stimuli were (...) processed more holistically when categorized as SR than as OR faces. Experiment 2 further suggests that this finding was not underlain by strategic or training effects. Overall, these results support the view that one's categorization of a face as belonging to the same or another race plays a critical role in the holistic processing of this face. (shrink)