Environmental events such as natural disasters may influence the public's affective reactions and decisions. Shortly after the 2004 Tsunami disaster we assessed how affect elicited by thinking about this disaster influenced risk perceptions and future time perspective in Swedish undergraduates...

Measuring reaction times to number comparisons is thought to reveal a processing stage in elementary numerical cognition linked to internal, imprecise representations of number magnitudes. These intuitive representations of the mental number line have been demonstrated across species and human...

Compassion shown towards victims often decreases as the number of individuals in need of aid increases, identifiability of the victims decreases, and the proportion of victims helped shrinks. Such ``compassion fade'' may hamper individual-level and collective responses to pressing large-scale...

Subjects who judged speed in a driving scenario overestimated how fast they could decelerate when speeding compared to when keeping within the speed limit (Svenson, 2009). The purpose of the present studies were to replicate studies conducted in Europe with subjects in the U.S., to study the...

In February of 1996 a study of current and prior residents of the neighborhood adjacent to the Woolfolk Chemical Works Plant (a.k.a. Canadyne, a.k.a. SureCo, a.k.a. the Dust House) in Fort Valley, Georgia was commissioned to assess psychological and social impacts stemming from the above-named...

Why do white men fear various risks less than women and minorities? Known as the white male effect, this pattern is well documented but poorly understood. This paper proposes a new explanation: identity-protective cognition. Putting work on the cultural theory of risk together with work on...

Donation requests often convey numerical information about the people in need. In two studies we investigated the effects of numeracy and presentation format on the underlying affective and cognitive mechanisms of donation decisions. In Study 1, participants were presented with information about...

Prior studies have observed that the attractiveness of playing a simple gamble (7/36 to win $9; otherwise win nothing) is greatly enhanced by introducing a small loss (7/36 win $9; otherwise lose 5¢). The present studies tested and confirmed an explanation of this finding based on the concept of...

Prior studies have observed that the attractiveness of playing a simple gamble (7/36 to win $9; otherwise win nothing) is greatly enhanced by introducing a small loss (7/36 win $9; otherwise lose 5¢). The present studies tested and confirmed an explanation of this finding based on the concept of...