College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences

In daily life, we frequently feel for objects without vision using our sense called Haptics. Much of the research that has been done focused on single-handed searches with no agreed-upon conclusion on whether two hands are better than one. Here, we asked if there is a clear advantage, disadvantage, or no difference in simultaneous bimanual compared to sequential unimanual search. Participants felt for a unique target amongst uniformed distractors with their left hand only, right hand only, and with both hands simultaneously. Additionally, we asked how performance might vary when the distinguishing feature of the unique target was the same or different between the hands. Simultaneous bimanual search showed significantly more efficient search than the sequential unimanual search. Surprisingly, there was no appreciable difference between performance when searching for targets with the same and different features. This suggests that the advantage of searching bimanually isn’t due to sensory redundancy or perceptual advantages from shared features. Future research will investigate the role that action coupling might play in the bimanual search advantage. These findings can apply to developments in robotics, prosthetics, and rehabilitation processes. Additionally, they can support our understanding of attentional deployment in understudied modalities like haptics. 

The present study examined people’s perceptions of others as a function of fashion choices, specifically Western wedding dresses. A total of 250 UC Riverside undergraduate participants viewed a series of pictures of the model’s silhouettes wearing Western-style wedding dresses and reported their perceptions (e.g., confident, original, shy, vain, fun) of the model in each picture. The wedding dresses varied in neckline (i.e., Sweetheart, V-Neck, Halter, High Neck) and silhouette (i.e., A-line, Mermaid, Fit and Flare, Ballgown). We found significant, reliable differences in how participants perceived the models as a function of dress silhouette and neckline. Specifically, participants perceived the models wearing the Fit and Flare silhouette to be especially confident, original, fun, and vain, but the models wearing the A-line silhouette to be the least confident, original, and fun. Furthermore, participants perceived the models wearing the V-neck neckline to be especially confident and vain, but the models wearing the High Neck to be the least confident, original, and fun. Additionally, the participants perceived the models wearing the Sweetheart neckline to be especially original, and fun, and the models wearing the Halter neckline especially confident. It is important to note that the Halter, High Neck, and Sweetheart all scored the same in the vain category. This research establishes a relationship between wedding dresses and social perceptions, which brides can use to select the dresses to convey their desired perceptions, and fashion shows and businesses can use to better serve their customers. 

Community violence exposure increases risk for fear-based disorders, such as anxiety, potentially due to disrupted recall of extinguished fear, whereby stimuli previously associated with threat continue to produce a fear response long after they have been deemed safe. However, this emerging work lacks adequate representation of youth from historically marginalized groups, despite their disproportionate exposure to community violence. As such, this study investigates whether such exposure is associated with neurological and behavioral indices of extinction recall in a sample of preadolescent Latina girls. 

Thirty-five predominantly Mexican-heritage Latina girls (MAge = 10.04, SD = 1.23, range = 8-12 years) underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) while completing an extinction recall task assessing their ability to retrieve related but competing memories of previously conditioned and extinguished threats. Following the fMRI scan, participants self-reported their community violence exposure using the Things I’ve Seen and Heard scale.

Relative to low community violence exposed youth, youth exposed to higher levels of community violence demonstrated significantly less ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) engagement in response to increasingly ambiguous conditioned stimuli and were also marginally more likely to misattribute threat to conditioned stimuli that were least likely to predict threat.

These preliminary results suggest community violence exposure may contribute to disruptions in extinction recall and elucidate a potential mechanism by which these experiences could elevate anxiety, particularly among an understudied group during a sensitive developmental period of heightened anxiety risk.

People with mental illness are often stereotyped as dangerous, unstable, or unreliable, and these stereotypes perpetuate prejudice against those who are already vulnerable. However, many of these stereotypes are Eurocentric due to a lack of diversity within psychology. The present, pre-registered research investigates whether depictions of mental illness are idiosyncratic to various racial/ethnic groups, or if these perceptions generalize across groups. Participants reported their endorsement of a series of mental illness descriptions (e.g., “This person spontaneously explodes in outbursts of anger”) as they apply to African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic/Latinxs, Caucasians, as well as to individuals with unspecified race/ethnicity. Exploratory factor analyses of these descriptions revealed three factors that describe mentally ill people — ashamed, self-destructive, irresponsible — and participants’ perceptions of mental illness on these three factors varied by racial/ethnic groups. Participants rated Asian Americans as more ashamed, but less self-destructive and irresponsible than other racial/ethnic groups. Conversely, participants rated Caucasians as less ashamed but more self-destructive and irresponsible than other racial/ethnic groups. Perceptions of mental illness did not differ between Hispanic/Latinxs and African Americans. Additional analyses indicate that, compared to Caucasian par- ticipants, non-Caucasian participants rated mentally ill members of their ingroup as more ashamed but less self-destructive and irresponsible. This research indicates that participants from different racial/ethnic groups vary in the extent to which they ascribe different facets of mental illness to their ingroup versus outgroups. Implications for Eurocentric versus more diverse perceptions of mental illness are discussed.

Our personalities color how we interpret others’ emotions. Some people have an increased tendency to identify others’ facial affect as negative or threatening, which may lead to the misinterpretation of social cues, poor responses in social settings, and could exacerbate feelings of stress or anxiety in social situations. Yet, studies linking personality traits on the Big Five Inventory (BFI), specifically neuroticism, to emotion recognition are mixed (Cunningham, 1977; Matsumoto et al., 2000). This study investigated the effect of neuroticism on people’s discriminability and speed when identifying others’ facial emotions. Participants (n = 37) judged the emotion of faces that were morphed along two emotion spectra: happiness to fear and happiness to anger. Responses determined participants’ negativity threshold, or the point on the spectrum where their judgment switched from happy to angry or fearful. We tested the hypothesis that people who scored high on the neuroticism scale of the BFI would detect negative emotions more readily than people scoring low on neuroticism. We also measured the influence of personality traits on response time. As expected, we observed that high neurotic people were more sensitive to negative facial affect than low neurotic people. This extends on the research finding that individuals high in neuroticism have high emotional reactivity to negative stimuli to include ambiguous facial expressions. However, contrary to our hypothesis, response time was not associated with neuroticism level. Together, our findings suggest that people high in neuroticism have an increased sensitivity to detect negative facial emotions. Future studies should test whether the misinterpretation of social cues leads to impoverished social connections.

Parenting behaviors greatly influence children’s ability to regulate their emotions and handle stressfulsituations. Stressful life events can be particularly problematic for children as they are less able toeffectively manage these situations. Parenting behaviors that are warm and focus on directly helpingthe child handle negative emotions may serve as protective factors against the negative effects ofstress on children’s regulatory abilities. The aim of this study was to explore the role of parentalwarmth and parents’ emotion-focused reactions as moderators of the effect of stress on children’semotion regulation. A total of 184 children between the ages of three to eleven years old (M = 7.66,SD = 2.30) participated in this study. Parents reported on their child’s emotion regulation, exposure tostressful life events, and on how they, as parents, deal with their child’s negative emotions. Parentalwarmth was coded from an interactive task. Results showed that parental warmth moderated therelation between stress and child emotion regulation, such that children of highly warm parentshad better emotion regulation even when experiencing high stress. Parents’ reactions to theirchild’s negative emotions moderated the effects of parental warmth on child emotion regulation,such that parental warmth was particularly important for children of parents who place less focuson their child’s emotions when they experience a negative event. Our findings partially supportedour hypotheses and offer new insight into the importance of parental warmth as a protective factoragainst the negative consequences of stress on children’s emotional functioning.

BACKGROUND: Machine learning methods employing neuroimaging data are useful for monitoring the activation of neural representations. Specifically, they can be used to discern the brain networks engaged in processing specific categories of items. This approach has been employed on neuroimaging data, including functional magnetic resonance imaging data and electroencephalography (EEG) data. NEW METHOD: Here, we present a task and an analytical pipeline for investigating category representations using EEG. Participants (N = 30) viewed a series of images and words of objects belonging to five categories (Animals, Tools, Food, Scenes, and Vehicles) and responded when items from the same category were presented consecutively. RESULTS: We trained support vector machines on EEG data within participants and found that both image trials and word trials yielded significant category classification accuracy, with image trials achieving higher accuracy than word trials. When comparing categories in a pair-wise fashion, all pairs were statistically distinguishable for image trials, whereas only one pair was distinguishable for word trials. Parietal and left temporal electrodes contributed more to image classification than frontal and right temporal electrodes. Category-specific activity patterns also generalized across participants for image trials. COMPARISON WITH EXISTING METHODS: Our data and analytic pipeline yielded high classification accuracies, primarily for image trials, providing support for the utility of EEG data for neural decoding. CONCLUSIONS: These methods can be instrumental for exploring the activation and reactivation of neural representations at the category level during wakefulness and, potentially, during offline states.

Loneliness and social isolation are associated with numerous adverse physical and psychological health outcomes in older adulthood, including cognitive impairment and mortality risk. Yet, how the individual and joint effects of loneliness and social isolation contribute to these outcomes remains unclear, particularly given the interplay between individual differences (loneliness) and environmental factors (social isolation) in shaping these important health outcomes in older adulthood (i.e., person-environment interactions). We used Cox regression, logistic regression, and multistate survival models to systematically investigate the individual and adjusted associations among loneliness, social isolation, cognitive aging outcomes, and mortality risk. Further, extensive between-study variability in operational definitions, modeling approaches, and covariate adjustments may be contributing to mixed results in the existing literature. In this registered report, we applied a multistudy approach (i.e., coordinated data analysis) in which independent but identical models were fit across 11 longitudinal studies representing participants from 18 countries (N_total = 175,070). Random effects meta-analyses synthesized results across studies, showing that loneliness was consistently associated with an elevated risk of cognitive impairment and mortality across statistical approaches, even after adjusting for social isolation. Conversely, social isolation was not consistently associated with cognitive impairment and showed weaker associations with mortality risk. Together, our findings suggest that loneliness is a robust, proximal predictor of major aging outcomes and highlight avenues for theory development, strategies to strengthen cognitive resilience and independence in older adulthood, and more efficient resource allocation of public health resources. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

Infants learn through everyday interactions with the physical and social environment. For infants with cerebral palsy (CP), motor impairments may disrupt everyday learning opportunities. How can we measure real-world motor behavior and learning opportunities in infants with CP? Machine learning models have been developed to quantify body position throughout a day in infants with typical development (TD) using wearable sensor data. However, these models have not been validated in infants with motor impairments. This study assessed the validity of body position classification using machine learning and sensors in infants with CP. Ten infants with CP (7-18 months; one session each) and 19 infants with TD (4-12 months; 45 sessions) wore four inertial sensors on their legs throughout a day. Ninety minutes were video recorded and manually scored for body position in five categories: supine, prone, sitting, standing, and held. Random forest classifiers were trained to predict body position from sensor-derived motion features. Models trained on datasets that varied in size (9, 45, 54 sessions) and group composition (CP, TD, CP and TD) were compared to determine the most accurate model for infants with CP. Larger training sets and training sets that included data from infants with CP were the most accurate; the final models achieved similar performance in CP and TD (86% and 89% accuracy), captured meaningful individual differences (ICCs = 0.682-0.999), and generated predictions that were correlated with motor skill assessments. Findings demonstrate that wearable sensors and machine learning can accurately classify real-world body position in infants with CP.