We conducted two studies to examine whether the psychological states of felt understanding and misunderstanding would affect people's basic perceptions such as pain, geographical slant, and distance. As predicted, an experimentally induced sense of felt understanding relative to misunderstanding increased pain tolerance marginally and reduced the perceived distance to the target locations significantly. In Study 2, we not only replicated Study 1's findings on pain tolerance and distance perception but also found that participants in the understanding condition perceived the same hill to be significantly less steep than those in the misunderstanding condition. Our studies demonstrated that the experimentally induced feeling of misunderstanding tends to have the aversive effect on the perception of pain, geographical slant, and distance, whereas the experimentally induced feeling of understanding tends to alleviate pain, reduce the geographical slant, and the perceived distance to a target location.

Survival for any organism, including people, is a matter of resource management. To ensure survival, people necessarily budget their resources. Spatial perceptions contribute to resource budgeting by scaling the environment to an individual’s available resources. Effective budgeting requires setting a balance of income and expenditures around some baseline value. For social resources, this baseline assumes that the individuals are embedded in their social network. A review of the literature supports the proposal that our visual perceptions vary based on the implicit budgeting of physical and social resources, where social resources, as they fluctuate relative to a baseline, can directly alter our visual perceptions.

Objective: The human brain adjusts its level of effort in coping with various life stressors as a partial function of perceived access to social resources. We examined whether people who avoid social ties maintain a higher fasting basal level of glucose in their bloodstream and consume more sugar-rich food, reflecting strategies to draw more on personal resources when threatened. Methods: In Study 1 (N = 60), we obtained fasting blood glucose and adult attachment orientations data. In Study 2 (N = 285), we collected measures of fasting blood glucose and adult attachment orientations from older adults of mixed gender, using a measure of attachment style different from Study 1. In Study 3 (N = 108), we examined the link between trait-like attachment avoidance, manipulation of an asocial state, and consumption of sugar-rich food. In Study 4 (N = 115), we examined whether manipulating the social network will moderate the effect of attachment avoidance on consumption of sugar-rich food. Results: In Study 1, fasting blood glucose levels corresponded with higher attachment avoidance scores after statistically adjusting for time of assessment and interpersonal anxiety. For Study 2, fasting blood glucose continued to correspond with higher adult attachment avoidance even after statistically adjusting for interpersonal anxiety, stress indices, age, gender, social support and body mass. In Study 3, people high in attachment avoidance consume more sugar-rich food, especially when reminded of asocial tendencies. Study 4 indicated that after facing a stressful task in the presence of others, avoidant people gather more sugar-rich food than more socially oriented people. Conclusion: Results are consistent with the suggestion that socially avoidant individuals upwardly adjust their basal glucose levels and consume more glucose-rich food with the expectation of increased personal effort because of limited access to social resources. Further investigation of this link is warranted.

Psychologists often assume that social and cognitive processes operate independently, an assumption that prompts research into how social context influences cognitive processes. We propose that social and cognitive processes are not necessarily separate, and that social context is innate to resource dependent cognitive processes. We review the research supporting social baseline theory, which argues that our default state in physiological, cognitive, and neural processing is to incorporate the relative costs and benefits of acting in our social environment. The review extends social baseline theory by applying social baseline theory to basic cognitive processes such as vision, memory, and attention, incorporating individual differences into the theory, reviewing environmental influences on social baselines, and exploring the dynamic effects of social interactions. The theoretical and methodological implications of social baseline theory are discussed, and future research endeavors into social cognition should consider that cognitive processes are situated within our social environments.

Our conscious visual experience of the environment is derived from optical information consisting of an ever-changing distribution of light specified in angular units. To transform these units into linear spatial units appropriate for the specification of spatial extents, the visual system needs geometry and a ruler to scale the information. We review the evidence that perceptual rulers derive from the body's phenotype, which is comprised of our morphology, physiology, and behavioral repertoire. We then propose that perception is also scaled relative to the socioecological environment. In this account, social resources affect perception by extending or contracting the relevant physiological ruler. Additionally, we suggest the human ecology functions to select the relevant perceptual ruler. Finally, we highlight research on individual differences as a useful method to further investigate these issues. In moving forward, a complete account of visual perception must necessarily include the socio-ecological environment.eey wodss: K visual perception, social resources, perceptual scaling, socio-ecological environmentThe information for visual perception consists of optic flow and ocular-motor adjustments, both of which consist of angular units. In order to transform these angular units into linear units appropriate for the perception of distance and size, the visual system must make use of geometry and rulers. Our embodied approach to perception contends that the body's phenotype, consisting of morphology, physiology, and behavior, provides the rulers by which spatial perceptions are scaled (Proffitt & Linkenauger, 2013). Depending on one's goals in a particular environment, different aspects of the body become relevant perceptual rulers. Picking up an object, for example, makes hand size relevant, whereas reaching to a location implicates arm's length. In the current paper, we review our embodied approach to perception, and in particular, discuss how walkable extents are scaled to the physiological resources required to traverse the extent. We then consider how social resources function to augment or deplete the resources available for locomotion, and thereby, contribute to the scaling of walkable extents. Given the inherent variability in peoples' phenotypes, we favor an individual differences approach to investigating socioecological effects in perception.