Previous research has suggested that a person's own name or emotionally charged stimuli automatically "grab" attention, potentially challenging limited-capacity theories of perceptual processing. In this study, subjects were shown two digits surrounding a word and asked to make a speeded judgment about whether the parity of the two digits matched. When the subject's own name was presented on a few scattered trials, responses were markedly slowed (replicating a previous study). However, in a subsequent block of trials in which half the words were the subject's name, the slowing did not occur. The same slowing occurred (but even more fleetingly) when an emotionally charged word was presented between the digits. When the name was embedded among multiple distractor words, it ceased to slow reaction times. The results suggest that perceptual analysis of high-priority stimuli is subject to the usual capacity limitations of other stimuli, but when enough capacity is available for a high-priority stimulus to be perceived, a transient surprise reaction may interrupt ongoing processing.

Previous research offers conflicting suggestions about whether "high-priority" verbal stimuli such as an individual's own name or emotionally charged words automatically grab attention and/or can be detected without the usual capacity limitations. Nine experiments investigated this issue, using visual search through displays of words. In speeded search tasks, the subject's own name was detected more quickly than other targets, but in no case were search slopes flat enough to suggest parallel search or "pop-out". Further, names were not found to be unusually potent distractors. Emotionally charged words were neither more readily detected as targets nor more potent as distractors than neutral words. A comparison of observers' accuracy in searching briefly exposed simultaneous vs. successive displays provided further evidence that search for "highpriority" word targets is subject to the same severe capacity limitations as those that are found with search for neutral words.

This dissertation investigates the situational appraisals that are theorized to influence envy. When someone experiences an upward comparison, their response may be influenced by appraisals about the other person (e.g., similarity, closeness), the desired object (e.g. attainability), and the surrounding situation (e.g. fairness). These appraisals may elicit envy or moderate how an envier is motivated to respond. The studies in this dissertation use a variety of perspectives to investigate these appraisals and their associations with envious responses.

Chapter 1 finds that recalled envy experiences primarily occur towards superior others who are similar, in both close and distant relationships. These two studies use diverse samples to explore envy across adulthood, including differences with age in what domains people envy.

Three studies in Chapter 2 find complex, replicable patterns of relationships between appraisals and envious responses in recalled envy experiences. These studies look at envy both from the internal perspective of enviers and from the external perspective of targets of envy.

Chapter 3 uses an in-lab social comparison manipulation in order to investigate the effects of two appraisals about the superior person: similarity and closeness. These appraisals are manipulated in strangers (Study 3.1 & 3.2) and measured in pairs of established friends (Study 3.3 & 3.4). In all four studies, these appraisals have few effects on the feelings and motivations of envy immediately after a comparison, suggesting that there is not a direct causal relationship between these appraisals and envious responses.

Together, these studies uncover many nuances in the appraisal-response relationships of envy. Although envy may occur more often in particular contexts, and certain appraisals may be associated with specific responses, these appraisals do not necessarily directly elicit envy. Additionally, this research supports the contention that envy can motivate of a range of potential responses, highlighting the complexity in this social emotion.

From a functional perspective, jealousy may help protect an important relationship against a rival regardless of the types of relationships. This dissertation focuses on a valuable nonromantic relationship—namely, same-sex friendship— and investigates how people try to maintain it in a jealousy situation by examining a wide range of responses, from prosocial to antisocial. While answering this question, I also aim to overcome a major obstacle in the jealousy literature by assessing jealousy via methods reflecting more real-life situations, such as experimental manipulation in the lab and a diary method. Chapter 1, which elicited jealousy via a recall and hypothetical scenarios, finds that adults often experience friendship jealousy and when they do, they engage in both prosocial and antisocial behaviors. Chapter 2 uses an in-lab manipulation in actual same-sex friends in an ethical manner, and successfully changed self-reported emotions and behaviors. Participants in the jealousy condition were less likely to take risks in their friendships by engaging in less confrontation and acting more nicely towards rivals, most of whom were also friends with participants. Finally, using a 14-day diary method, Chapter 3 examines the early and late processes of friendship jealousy in more naturally occurring situations, and the effects of existing friendship quality as a moderator on each process. Consistent with the previous findings, real-life friendship jealousy increased both prosocial and antisocial behaviors in individuals. Moreover, the study found that better friendship quality provided a buffer against perceiving the presence of rival however, once the rival became threatening, it intensified the motivation to protect their friendships. Together, this dissertation extends the jealousy literature and our understanding of how people react to friendship jealousy and offers new insights on how jealousy unfolds in real life situations.

Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition have drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between behavioral and self-report measures of personality or emotion and measures of brain activation. We show that these correlations often exceed what is statistically possible assuming the (evidently rather limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality/emotion measures. The implausibly high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain sufficient detail to ascertain how these correlations were obtained. We surveyed authors of 54 articles that reported findings of this kind to determine a few details on how these correlations were computed. More than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for individual voxels, and reports means of just the subset of voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. We show how this non-independent analysis grossly inflates correlations, while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample. In addition, we argue that other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious correlations in some cases. We outline how the data from these studies could be reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide the field with accurate estimates of the correlations in question. We urge authors to perform such reanalyses and to correct the scientific record.

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