Social learning is a fundamental mechanism for efficiently transferring and coordinating norms, skills, and sophisticated cultural information to individuals. However, the psychological mechanisms underlying social learning remain unclear. To investigate this, we recruited adult participants (N = 103), who observed a model's performance in a…

Purpose: Emotional speech communication involves multisensory integration of linguistic (e.g., semantic content) and paralinguistic (e.g., prosody and facial expressions) messages. Previous studies on linguistic versus paralinguistic salience effects in emotional speech processing have produced inconsistent findings. In this study, we investigated…

A large research literature details the powerful behavioral consequences that a trustworthy appearance can have on adult behavior. Surprisingly, few studies have investigated how these biases operate among children, despite the theoretical importance of understanding when these biases emerge in development. Here, we used an economic trust game to…

Typically developing adults with low and high Autism Spectrum Quotient (AQ) scores made rapid social evaluations of neutral faces when these were primed by briefly presented emotional faces. High AQ participants rated neutral faces as more threatening than low AQ participants, regardless of the prime condition. Both groups rated target neutral…

Surprisingly little is known about how relationship information is used predict others' behavior. We examine a key element of this ability--how relationship information is used to anticipate how others will react to events in which they are not directly involved. This requires both using relationship information to modify expected reactions (e.g.,…

A crossmodal effect has been observed in the processing of facial and vocal emotion in adults and infants. For the first time, we assessed whether this effect is present in childhood by administering a crossmodal task similar to those used in seminal studies featuring emotional faces (i.e., a continuum of emotional expressions running from…

Autobiographical memory difficulties have been widely reported in adults with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). The aim of the current study was to explore the potential correlates of autobiographical memory performance (including depressed mood, rumination, working memory and theory of mind) in adults with ASD, relative to a group of typical adults…

To chart the developmental path of children's attribution of pride to others, we presented children (4 years 0 month to 11 years 11 months of age, N = 108) with video clips of head-and-face, body posture, and multi-cue (both head-and-face and body posture simultaneously) expressions that adults consider to convey pride. Across age groups, 4- and…

Research on facial expressions in individuals with Down syndrome (DS) has been conducted using photographs. Our goal was to examine the effect of motion on perception of emotional expressions. Adults with DS, adults with typical development matched for chronological age (CA), and children with typical development matched for developmental age (DA)…

Self-control can be defined as the choice of a larger, more delayed reinforcer over a smaller, less delayed reinforcer, and impulsiveness as the opposite. Previous research suggests that exposure to visual food cues affects adult humans' self-control. Previous research also suggests that food deprivation decreases adult humans' self-control. The…

Mentally retarded adults (N=180) were asked 30 yes/no questions, to determine if their acquiescence is explained by indiscriminant yea-saying in response to the yes/no question format or due to subjects submitting to the influence of the interviewer. After selected questions, the interviewer either nodded his head "yes" or shook his head…

Twenty-two subjects with autism were tested on three perspective-taking tasks. Subjects were successful on two tasks that required them to make relatively direct connections between eating and hunger or visual access and knowledge. They failed a task which used stimuli of a more transient nature and less predictable reactions of the protagonists.…

A formal model is presented that decomposes the attribution of personal dispositions into identification and dispositional inference processes. Two illustrative experiments trace the processing of behavioral and situational information at the identification and dispositional inference stages and examine attributions as a joint product of the…