Previous research suggests that individuals pursue close relationships because they help people cope with mortality awareness (Mikulincer, Florian, & Hirschberger, 2003). Further, there is some evidence to suggest that individuals achieve a sense of death transcendence through the prospect of parenthood. For example, following reminders of death, people have a greater desire for children (e.g., Wisman & Goldenberg, 2005), have more vivid and accessible parenthood-related cognitions (Yaakobi, Mikulincer, & Shaver, 2014), and are more negative toward strict birth-control policies and more positive toward younger family members (Zhou, Liu, Chen, & Yu, 2008). However, no prior work has examined parenting behaviors directly. For this reason, the purpose of the present research was to examine whether people display more behaviors associated with responsive caregiving following reminders of mortality. Participants were exposed to a mortality salience manipulation in which they were randomly assigned to complete items relating to their fear of death or public speaking (the control condition). Following this, everyone took part in a simulated baby paradigm to assess participants’ responses to a simulated infant doll that was programmed (wirelessly) to begin crying inconsolably (Rutherford, Goldberg, Luyten, Bridgett, & Mayes, 2013). The extent to which participants engaged in caregiver-based touching behaviors (i.e., holding the baby in a meaningful way in an attempt to calm or soothe the baby) toward the simulated crying infant served as the dependent variable. The results revealed that, in comparison to the control condition, reminders of death led participants to engage in a greater degree of caregiver-based touching behaviors while interacting with a simulated crying infant. Overall, these initial findings suggest that reminders of death influence actual caregiving behaviors and suggest that people may display more optimal parenting behavior in the real world when thoughts of death are salient.

Background: There is significant variation in toddlers’ abilities to suppress dominant responses and perform subdominant responses, an aspect of temperament known as effortful control. Effortful control emerges relatively late in infancy, beginning around 12 months of age and surging around 24 months of age. This late pattern of development allows for earlier-developing factors to influence the development of effortful control, like the parent-infant attachment relationship and other temperamental constructs. While the importance of the parent-infant attachment relationship is widely supported by research, one noteworthy limitation of this body of work is the underwhelming amount of research on the father-infant attachment relationship (Hoffman, 2000; Lounds, Borkowski, Whitman, Maxwell, & Weed, 2005). Evidence suggests that father-child interactions provide children with unique experiences that may not occur with their mothers (Grossmann, et al., 2002). For this reason, the current study examines both parent-infant attachment relationships. Previous research has also shown that one aspect of temperament can moderate the expression of other aspects of temperament (Gartstein & Rothbart, 2003; Kochanska, 1993; Rothbart, Ahadi, & Evans, 2000). With each dimension of temperament emerging at different times, it is important to understand which temperamental constructs predict a greater capacity for effortful control.

Objective: The purpose of this study was to examine whether secure mother-infant and father-infant attachment relationships at 12 months predicted high levels of effortful control at 3 years of age. A second line of interest was to examine whether infant levels of negative affectivity and surgency/extraversion at 6 months predicted high levels of effortful control at 3 years of age.

Methods: 33 toddlers (age in years, M = 3.16) and their parents (32 mothers; 32 fathers) participated in the current study. Parents completed the Infant Behavior Questionnaire (IBQ), a parent-report measure of infant temperament, when the infant was 6 months old. Mothers and infants returned to the laboratory when the infant was 12 months old and participated in the strange situation procedure, a measure of parent-infant attachment. Fathers and infants returned to the laboratory when the infant was 13 months old and completed the same strange situation procedure. When the child reached 3 years of age, mother, father, and child returned to the laboratory and completed a battery of tasks measuring effortful control.

Results: The relationship between effortful control and parent-infant attachment was investigated using a Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. Preliminary analyses were preformed to ensure no violation of the assumptions of normality, linearity, and homoscedascity. Attachment was investigated using infant attachment behaviors measured in the strange situation procedure. There was a moderate, positive correlation between infant resistant behaviors (M = 2.33, SE = .272) with dad and effortful control scores (M = .105, SE = .065), r = .310, n = 30, p = .048, with high resistance behaviors associated with higher levels of effortful control. Additionally, there was a moderate, negative correlation between infant contact maintenance behaviors (M = 1.34, SE = .151) with mom and effortful control scores, r = -.338, n = 30, p = .034, with high contact maintenance associated with lower levels of effortful control. The relationship between effortful control and temperament was investigated using Pearson product-moment correlation coefficient. Preliminary analyses were performed to ensure no violation of the assumptions of normality, linearity, and homoscedasticity. Temperament was investigated using parental reports on the Infant Behavior Questionnaire. There was a moderate, positive correlation between the low pleasure dimension (M =5.50, SE = .152) of temperament and effortful control (M = .105, SE = .065), r = .354, n = 31, p = .025, with high scores in low pleasure associated with higher scores of effortful control.

Conclusion: These results suggest that the father-infant attachment relationship is unique from the mother-infant attachment relationship, as different interaction behaviors with mom and dad are associated with effortful control. Interestingly, infant resistant behaviors with dad at 12 months are associated with higher levels of effortful control. Secondly, infant contact maintenance behaviors with mom are associated with lower levels of effortful control. These results could be explained by the fact that these interaction behaviors displayed by an infant exist on a continuum. It could be argued that children who exhibit high levels of resistant behavior towards mom are also able to resist a dominant response and initiate a subdominant response easily, indicating high level of effortful control. Similarly, while some contact maintenance is a component of secure attachment, too much contact maintenance could indicate an insecure attachment relationship, as the child could be too dependent on their parents and fail to explore the environment.

Context effects within attitude research are well documented; however, recent developments in evolutionary psychology (e.g., fundamental motives framework) offer new possibilities for the study of attitudes. The Fundamental Motives Framework states that we have motives which reflect evolutionary goal relevant to survival and reproduction, and these motives weave their way through human life, guiding behavior to satisfy goals. These motives interact with behavior in several ways, but research remains to be done in certain areas. In two studies, we examined how fundamental motives interact with women’s attitudes of potential (male) partners. In two studies, we examined two separate fundamental motives and a number of attitude items. We predicted in Study 1 that women would have more positive attitude toward a cold, but competent man when primed with resource scarcity (as compared to a control. In Study 2, we predicted that women would have a more positive attitude toward a cold but dominant man when primed with disease threat. In both studies, we found that women’s attitudes toward our two “real” men were affected by fundamental motives. In Study 1, women expressed less of a preference of the warm over the cold (but competent) man when primed with resource scarcity, and in Study 2 women expressed less of a preference of the warm over the cold (but dominant) man when primed with resource scarcity. We discuss potential mediators, though found no evidence to support a mediator at this time.

When do people self-radicalize? When and how, for instance, do so-called “lone wolves” go from mild dislike for a target group to extreme hatred, all without any negative additional information? The evidence gathered about recent lone wolf terror attacks around the world suggests that the attackers all too often sat in a room somewhere and simply “thought” themselves into extremely negative attitudes. Attitude Representation Theory (Lord & Lepper, 1999) suggests that self-radicalization can happen to anyone, and describes how the process of self-radicalization might work. Self-radicalization, defined as adopting a more negative attitude toward a stimulus at time 2 than at time 1 without any additional external information, can occur through self-generated thoughts that, in the interval, increase the probability of more negative associations to the attitude object. What might those intervening self-generated thoughts be? One possibility is that they might consist of generalization. People generalize all the time. Especially when we know little about them, we tend to assume that others who misbehave in one situation will do so in other situations.

To test whether generalization might polarize negative attitudes toward a social group, we gave MTurk workers (of many different ages and backgrounds) information about 14 members of a fictitious group, who called themselves choosy, aggressive, wordy, blunt, tense, dissatisfied, restless, rebellious, demanding, strict, argumentative, cunning, and anxious. Then a randomly selected half of the participants were asked to generalize, by writing in a text box for 5 minutes detailed descriptions of how members of VSG#62 might display the 14 traits in both work and social situations. After that, all participants completed a battery of demographic and individual difference questionnaires, tried to recall the initial 14 traits attributed to members of VSG#62, and reported for the second time how much they liked or disliked the group. As predicted, participants who did math problems continued to dislike the VSG#62 group, but no more than they had previously. Participants who were encouraged to generalize, in contrast, reported disliking the VSG#62 group more intensely than they had before. We discuss the sample, and potential individual differences that might influence these effects.

Alzheimer’s Disease (AD) is the most common form of dementia and is currently estimated to affect over 5 million Americans. There is no treatment for AD, and the incidence is expected to increase, as our population grows older. Many risk factors for AD have been identified, several of which involve stress and inflammation. Repeated injections of lipopolysaccharide (LPS), a bacterial endotoxin, have previously been shown in our laboratory to exacerbate AD pathology, i.e. increase amyloid-beta (A-beta) levels and cognitive dysfunction. Our study aims to explore the connection between early-life stress and AD pathology in adulthood. Furthermore, we seek to understand how inflammation interacts with previous stress exposure. Using a non-transgenic mouse line, maternal separation (MS) was implemented daily from post-natal day 2 (PND 2) to the time of weaning (PND 21) to model developmental stress. After weaning, all animals were housed under regular conditions until adulthood. At 5 months of age, animals were administered LPS for 3 or 7 days , modeling an acute stress event. Following LPS administration, cognition was assessed using a contextual fear-conditioning (CFC) paradigm. Tissue was then collected and A-beta levels were quantified. Current results demonstrate that cognition was impaired in animals exposed to early-life stress, but this effect was not potentiated by LPS administration. Additionally, MS alone was insufficient to increase A-beta levels, but MS interacted with 3 days of LPS exposure to exacerbate A-beta accumulation in the hippocampus. Overall, results suggest that early-life stress exacerbates inflammation-induced AD pathologies. Further studies are needed to identify the specific mechanisms involved in inducing these changes.