He sees the forest, I see the trees: Narrative perspective shifts how abstractly people construe a text.

Humans tell stories to share information, evoke emotions, and change opinions. An inherent dimension of these stories is the narrative perspective from which they are told: Sometimes stories are told from a person's first-person narrative perspective (e.g.

Choosing to avoid: The evaluative impact of autonomous selection of approach and avoidance behaviors.

Much of everyday learning affords us autonomy over the information we learn about, but evaluative learning research often strips participants of this autonomy. The present research assesses the effects of autonomy in the form of sampling decisions in the traditionally passive approach-avoidance (AA) training. In three experiments, participants completed an AA task, in which half of the participants were given genuine autonomy over how frequently they interacted with each stimulus, and the other half were yoked to engage in the AA behaviors of a high-autonomy participant.

It's good and it's bad: Sampling processes can generate decision-framing effects.

Framing a choice in terms of gains versus losses can have a dramatic impact on peoples' decisions, sometimes completely reversing their choices. This decision-framing effect is often assumed to stem from individuals' inherent motivational biases to react more strongly to negative information. However, more recent work suggests these decision biases can also stem from biases in the information samples based on which people make their decisions.

Bridging the gap between autonomous and predetermined paradigms: The role of sampling in evaluative learning.

Whereas most evaluative learning paradigms remove participants' autonomy over the information they receive, other research traditions have demonstrated that information sampling has an important role in learning. We investigated the impact of information sampling on a central evaluative learning paradigm: evaluative conditioning. We compared a traditional evaluative conditioning paradigm with a paradigm in which participants have autonomy over the stimulus pairings they receive.

When the going gets tough, the committed get going: Preexisting goal commitment determines the consequences of experiencing regulatory nonfit.

A body of empirical research shows that pursuing goals via means that do not fit (vs. do fit) one's regulatory mode creates resistance that disrupts motivation. However, other empirical research shows that resistance sometimes motivates people to work harder toward their goals, suggesting that regulatory nonfit (vs.

I can see myself enjoying that: Using imagery perspective to circumvent bias in self-perceptions of interest.

People experience life satisfaction when pursuing activities that genuinely interest them. Unfortunately, cultural stereotypes (e.g.

Does the future look bright? Processing style determines the impact of valence weighting biases and self-beliefs on expectations.

People regularly form expectations about their future, and whether those expectations are positive or negative can have important consequences. So, what determines the valence of people's expectations? Research seeking to answer this question by using an individual-differences approach has established that trait biases in optimistic/pessimistic self-beliefs and, more recently, trait biases in behavioral tendencies to weight one's past positive versus negative experiences more heavily each predict the valence of people's typical expectations. However, these two biases do not correlate, suggesting limits on a purely individual-differences approach to predicting people's expectations.