Cardiac signals reflect the function of the autonomic nervous system (ANS) and have previously been associated with a range of self-regulatory behaviors such as emotion regulation and memory recall. It is unknown whether cardiac signals may also be associated with self-regulation in the temporal domain, in particular impulsivity. We assessed both decision impulsivity (temporal discounting, TD) and time perception impulsivity (duration reproduction, DR) in 120 participants while they underwent electrocardiography in order to test whether cardiac signals were related to these two aspects of impulsivity. We found that over the entire period of task performance, individuals with higher heart rates had a tendency toward lower discount rates, supporting previous research that has associated sympathetic responses with decreased impulsivity. We also found that low-frequency components of heart rate variability (HRV) were associated with a less accurate perception of time, suggesting that time perception may be modulated by ANS function. Overall, these findings constitute preliminary evidence that autonomic function plays an important role in both decision impulsivity and time perception.

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A major obstacle for the design of rigorous, reproducible studies in moral psychology is the lack of suitable stimulus sets. Here, we present the Socio-Moral Image Database (SMID), the largest standardized moral stimulus set assembled to date, containing 2,941 freely available photographic images, representing a wide range of morally (and affectively) positive, negative and neutral content. The SMID was validated with over 820,525 individual judgments from 2,716 participants, with normative ratings currently available for all images on affective valence and arousal, moral wrongness, and relevance to each of the five moral values posited by Moral Foundations Theory. We present a thorough analysis of the SMID regarding (1) inter-rater consensus, (2) rating precision, and (3) breadth and variability of moral content. Additionally, we provide recommendations for use aimed at efficient study design and reproducibility, and outline planned extensions to the database. We anticipate that the SMID will serve as a useful resource for psychological, neuroscientific and computational (e.g., natural language processing or computer vision) investigations of social, moral and affective processes. The SMID images, along with associated normative data and additional resources are available at https://osf.io/2rqad/.

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Objective: Australian researchers interested in studying psychological phenomena using Australian samples have a limited range of reliable sampling options, often limited to undergraduate participant pools and convenience samples subject to well-known limitations. To expand the range of sampling options available, we attempted to validate the crowdsourcing platform, Microworkers, as a viable tool for collecting data from Australian participants. Method: Across two studies, 122 Australian participants were recruited via Microworkers to complete a demographic survey (Studies 1 and 2), personality questionnaire (Study 2), and a standard decision-making task designed to elicit a framing effect (Study 2). Results: Providing a first indication of the viability of Microworkers as a recruitment platform for Australian participants by Australian researchers, we were successful in acquiring our desired sample size. Moreover, the recruited Microworkers samples were demographically diverse (in a similar fashion to Internet samples in general), and produced valid psychological data. Conclusion: Overall, these results provide promising preliminary evidence for Microworkers as a viable platform for the recruitment of Australian participants for psychological research, and for Australian researchers interested in crowdsourced participants more generally.

Traditional accounts of intergroup bias often fail to consider the complexity of intergroup phenomena by insufficiently distinguishing between (a) attitudes, emotions and action tendencies, (b) classes of threat that promote intergroup bias and (c) subtle category distinctions amongst social groups. We develop a nuanced account of antimigrant bias by distinguishing between (a) manifestations of bias in emotions and action tendencies, (b) kinds of threat that drive antimigrant bias, and(c) kinds of migrant groups (economic migrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers). By employing within-subjects designs in two prominent migrant-receiving countries (N Australia = 239, N US = 200), we find that two distinct classes of threat emerge: in-group morality threat and conflict-related threat. These threats predict specific emotion and action tendency profiles. Our findings carry important implications for the conceptualization of antimigrant bias. We also discuss implications of our findings for facilitating positive relations between receiving communities and migrants via in-group morality threat.The world is facing a migration crisis-immigration rates are at an unprecedented high and at least 65 million people are currently displaced worldwide (United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees, 2017). Understanding prejudice and discrimination toward migrants is thus essential for ensuring their

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A key source of support for the view that challenging people’s beliefs about free will may undermine moral behavior is two classic studies by Vohs and Schooler (2008). These authors reported that exposure to certain prompts suggesting that free will is an illusion increased cheating behavior. In the present paper, we report several attempts to replicate this influential and widely cited work. Over a series of five studies (sample sizes of N = 162, N = 283, N = 268, N = 804, N = 982) (four preregistered) we tested the relationship between (1) anti-free-will prompts and free will beliefs and (2) free will beliefs and immoral behavior. Our primary task was to closely replicate the findings from Vohs and Schooler (2008) using the same or highly similar manipulations and measurements as the ones used in their original studies. Our efforts were largely unsuccessful. We suggest that manipulating free will beliefs in a robust way is more difficult than has been implied by prior work, and that the proposed link with immoral behavior may not be as consistent as previous work suggests.