The Early Development of Racial Bias in Infants and Childhood

Psychologists are interested in how humans process faces of their own-race and Other-races, and there are plenty of previous research on this topic. This paper will summarize previous paper about Other-race Effect (ORE), and how do ORE develop racial bias in children. Researchers used Implicit Association Test (IAT) to assess implicit racial bias and found that implicit racial bias are different in different cultures and counties.

Lying on the Dissection Table: Anatomizing Faked Responses

Research has shown that even experts cannot detect faking above chance, but recent studies have suggested that machine learning may help in this endeavor. However, faking differs between faking conditions, previous efforts have not taken these differences into account, and faking indices have yet to be integrated into such approaches. We reanalyzed seven data sets (N = 1,039) with various faking conditions (high and low scores, different constructs, naïve and informed faking, faking with and without practice, different measures [self-reports vs. implicit association tests; IATs]). We investigated the extent to which and how machine learning classifiers could detect faking under these conditions and compared different input data (response patterns, scores, faking indices) and different classifiers (logistic regression, random forest, XGBoost). We also explored the features that classifiers used for detection. Our results show that machine learning has the potential to detect faking, but detection success varies between conditions from chance levels to 100%. There were differences in detection (e.g., detecting low-score faking was better than detecting high-score faking). For self-reports, response patterns and scores were comparable with regard to faking detection, whereas for IATs, faking indices and response patterns were superior to scores. Logistic regression and random forest worked about equally well and outperformed XGBoost. In most cases, classifiers used more than one feature (faking occurred over different pathways), and the features varied in their relevance. Our research supports the assumption of different faking processes and explains why detecting faking is a complex endeavor.

AgingPLUS: Examining the Malleability of Implicit Views of Aging

AgingPLUS also examines whether the intervention can change participants’ implicit VOA. To that end, participants completed a lexical decision-making task (LDMT) and the Brief Implicit Association Test (BIAT) at baseline and post-intervention. One-way ANCOVAs with baseline scores as covariate were used for these analyses. For LDMT, there was no significant difference between the groups regarding their post-intervention latencies for old-positive words, F(1,181) = 0.01, p = .60, old-negative words, F(1,181) = 0.43, p = .51, young-positive words, F(1,181) = 0.19, p = .67, and young-negative words, F(1,181) = 1.16, p = .28. For BIAT, both groups showed a slight preference for the young at baseline (mean d = 0.39), and post-intervention (mean d = 0.38). There was no significant difference between the groups regarding post-intervention d scores, F(1,181) = 0.002, p = .97. These preliminary findings suggest that in the current subsample, AgingPLUS did not significantly change participants’ implicit VOA.

Dehumanization of Older Family Members: Novel Determinants of Elder Abuse Proclivity by Caregivers

Elder abuse affects one in six older persons globally. Three limitations converge to impede progress in prevention: most research is victim- rather than perpetrator-based; the reliance on explicit, self-reported factors; and failure to account for psychological factors that motivate abuse in the first place. The current study will be the first to address these gaps by examining whether family caregivers’ dehumanization of older persons, or the denial of humanness to older persons as one of the most hateful age stereotypes, could explain elder abuse proclivity. Implicit dehumanization of older persons was measured by a novel implicit-association-test developed for this study. Explicit dehumanization was measured by a semantic differential question widely used in the literature. We used the reliable and validated 8-item Caregiver Abuse Screen to measure elder abuse proclivity. In the final survey of 585 caregivers, dehumanization was found to be prevalent with 51% of the caregivers implicitly and 31% explicitly dehumanizing older persons. As predicted, implicit and explicit dehumanization uniquely contributed to elder abuse proclivity (OR=1.23, 95% CI=1.02-1.50, p=.03) and (OR=1.26, 95% CI=1.05-1.51, p=.01), respectively, after adjusting for relevant covariates including caregiver burden, and caregivers’ and care-recipients' health. Also as predicted, implicit dehumanization improved the prediction of abuse proclivity above and beyond the explicit dehumanization of older persons and caregiver burden. Socio-etiological models of elder abuse perpetration and corresponding prevention design should consider the inclusion of dehumanization as a key risk factor for abuse proclivity in family caregivers.

Adopting Evaluative Conditioning to Improve Coach–Athlete Relationships

Coach–athlete relationships are key to athletes’ well-being, development, training, and sports performance. The present study explored the effect of an evaluative conditioning (EC) intervention on the improvement of coach–athlete relationships. We applied a 6-week EC intervention to the athletes in a volleyball team with two of their coaches involved in the EC while the third coach taken as control. In the EC, we repeatedly presented the coaches’ facial images (i.e., conditioned stimuli) together with positively valenced pictures and words (i.e., unconditioned stimuli) to the athletes. The results showed that the EC intervention led the athletes to recognize their coaches’ neutral faces as showing more happiness, respond faster to coach-positive associations in the implicit association test (IAT), and give higher ratings to the coaches in the Coach–Athlete Relationship Questionnaire (CART-Q). The present study suggests that EC may be adopted as an effective intervention for coach–athlete relationships, altering athletes’ affective associations with their coaches to be more positive and improving their explicitly evaluation of the relationship.

Implicit Associations between Adverbs of Place and Actions in the Physical and Digital Space

Neuropsychological, behavioral, and neurophysiological evidence indicates that the coding of space as near and far depends on the involvement of different neuronal circuits. These circuits are recruited on the basis of functional parameters, not of metrical ones, reflecting a general distinction of human behavior, which alternatively attributes to the individual the role of agent or observer. Although much research in cognitive psychology was devoted to demonstrating that language and concepts are rooted in the sensorimotor system, no study has investigated the presence of implicit associations between different adverbs of place (far vs. near) and actions with different functional characteristics. Using a series of Implicit Association Test (IAT) experiments, we tested this possibility for both actions performed in physical space (grasp vs. look at) and those performed when using digital technology (content generation vs. content consumption). For both the physical and digital environments, the results showed an association between the adverb near and actions related to the role of agent, and between the adverb far and actions related to the role of observer. Present findings are the first experimental evidence of an implicit association between different adverbs of place and different actions and of the fact that adverbs of place also apply to the digital environment.

The Implicit Association Test in Introductory Psychology Textbooks: Blind Spot for Controversy

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) has been widely discussed as a potential measure of “implicit bias.” Yet the IAT is controversial; research suggests that it is far from clear precisely what the instrument measures, and it does not appear to be a strong predictor of behavior. The presentation of this topic in Introductory Psychology texts is important as, for many students, it is their first introduction to scientific treatment of such issues. In the present study, we examined twenty current Introductory Psychology texts in terms of their coverage of the controversy and presentation of the strengths and weaknesses of the measure. Of the 17 texts that discussed the IAT, a minority presented any of the concerns including the lack of measurement clarity (29%), an automatic preference for White people among African Americans (12%), lack of predictive validity (12%), and lack of caution about the meaning of a score (0%); most provided students with a link to the Project Implicit website (65%). Overall, 82% of the texts were rated as biased or partially biased on their coverage of the IAT. The implications for the perceptions and self-perceptions of students, particularly when a link to Project Implicit is included, are discussed.

Implicit Metaethical Intuitions: Validating and Employing a New IAT Procedure

Philosophical arguments often assume that the folk tends towards moral objectivism. Although recent psychological studies have indicated that lay persons’ attitudes to morality are best characterized in terms of non-objectivism-leaning pluralism, it has been maintained that the folk may be committed to moral objectivism implicitly. Since the studies conducted so far almost exclusively assessed subjects’ metaethical attitudes via explicit cognitions, the strength of this rebuttal remains unclear. The current study attempts to test the folk’s implicit metaethical commitments. We present results of a newly developed Implicit Association Test (IAT) for metaethical attitudes which indicate that the folk generally tend towards moral non-objectivism on the implicit level as well. We discuss implications of this finding for the philosophical debate.