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.

The pace of children’s vocabulary learning reaches a peak between the ages of 8 and 10 years; however, little research has focused children’s acquisition of new vocabulary after toddlerhood. The purpose of this study was to contrast two theories that address how contiguous presentation of words and images produces object naming. The Naming Hypothesis predicts an advantage to hearing the name before seeing the image (Horne & Lowe,1996), whereas accounts based on perceptual conditioning may predict an advantage to observing the image first (Greer & Longano, 2010). Children between the ages of 4 and 7 years participated. Each child received six training sessions, each consisting of 20 presentations of images of four novel birds paired with their spoken names. In the word-first condition (three sessions), the bird name was played before the image appeared on the screen, and in the bird-first condition (three sessions), the bird image was shown ahead of the auditory stimulus. After each session, the participants were tested for recall of bird names. Results are pending completion of data collection.

For years, animal researchers have demonstrated that animals living in crowded environments diversify both body and behavior, opening new resource niches for exploitation. Two studies tested the hypothesis that crowding should also lead to diversity in human psychology, illustrated by increases in creative thinking. Increased creativity would help secure new opportunities for resource acquisition in environments filled with competitors. In both studies, participants viewed a crowding or control prime, then completed measures of creativity. In Study 1, participants completed a measure of openness, a trait positively associated with creativity. Individuals exposed to crowding cues reported more openness than those exposed to the control. In study 2, participants completed self-report and behavioral measures of creativity, followed by measures of resource concern and early environment. Analyses using conditional process revealed that crowding led to increases in creativity, with these effects being mediated by increases in resource concerns and moderated by childhood environment.