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Drawing on decades of research suggesting an attentional advantage for self‐related information, researchers generally assume that self‐related stimuli automatically capture attention. However, a literature review reveals that this claim has not been systematically examined. We aimed to fill in this dearth of evidence. Following a feature‐based account of automaticity, we set up four experiments in which participants were asked to respond to a target preceded by a cue, which was self‐related or not. In Experiment 1, larger cuing effects (faster reaction times to valid versus invalid trials) were found with a participant's own name compared with someone else's name. In Experiment 2, we replicated these results with unconscious cues. Experiment 3 suggested that these effects are not likely driven by familiarity. In Experiment 4, participants experienced greater difficulties from having their attention being captured by their own compared with someone else's name. We conclude that attentional capture by self‐related stimuli is automatic in the sense that it is unintentional, unconscious, and uncontrolled. Implications for self‐regulation and intergroup relations are discussed. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

These findings suggest that the mere activation of negative stereotypes can have broad and deleterious effects on older individuals' self-evaluation and functioning, which in turn may contribute to the often observed dependency among older people.

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Newly measured rating norms provide a database of emotion-related dimensions for 524 French trait words. Measures include valence, approach/avoidance tendencies associated with the trait, possessor-and other-relevance of the trait, and discrete emotions conveyed by the trait (i.e., anger, disgust, fear, happiness, and sadness). The normative data were obtained from 328 participants and were revealed to be stable across samples and gender. These data go beyond a dimensional structure and consider more fine-grained descriptions such as the categorical emotions, as well as the perspective of the evaluator conveyed by the traits. They should thus be particularly useful for researchers interested in emotion or in the emotional dimension of cognition, action, or personality. The database is available as supplementary material.

In the present research we elaborate on an ecological account (Fiedler, Jung, Wänke & Alexopoulos, 2012) for the unitary distance dimension postulated in construal-level theory, highlighting linguistic influences on distance regulation. We first replicate that distinct action verbs solicit similarly distant or close episodes in many judges, producing strong positive correlations between ratings of four distance aspects (time, space, probability, personal distance). A primary semantic-pragmatic dimension that accounts for a large part of the verb impact is valence: Negative action verbs trigger more distant episodes than positive verbs. Experiment 1 rules out an alternative explanation in terms of participants' mood. Experiment 2 cross-validates the valence effect with a new sample of affective state verbs. Consistent with implicit verb causality, state verbs solicit more distant episodes than action verbs, suggesting lack of intentional control and power as another semantic-pragmatic dimension. Experiment 3 supports this interpretation using high-and low-power nouns.