R J Stevenson
Biographic Data
| ID | 23606 |
|---|---|
| NAME | R J Stevenson |
| GIVEN NAMES | R J |
| FAMILY NAME | Stevenson |
| SIGNATURE | STEVENSON R J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-2461-5777 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 57 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 188 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 57 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1995 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Psychological induction of interoceptive states
Physiological changes to the body can give rise to interoceptive states, which are characterised by a particular feel, a bodily location, and motivational salience, with these features often evolving over time. The experimental study of interoception often involves generating a physiological change to produce the interoceptive state. This has conceptual and empirical limitations. Conceptually, isolating the role of psychological processes is diff…
Evaluating psychological accounts of diet-related mood improvements using novel control conditions
Several randomised controlled trials have now reported that improvements in diet quality can improve mood. Such trials are methodologically challenging to design, because of the dual difficulty in providing control conditions that match the treatment activity (e.g., planning, shopping, cooking), and that blind participants to the treatment condition. These concerns raise the possibility that well understood psychological processes may amplify or …
Testing a learning-based account of interoceptive hunger using an illusory induction
Physiological changes cause many interoceptive cues (e.g., a rumbling stomach), and so it is often assumed they also cause their motivational consequences (e.g., hunger). However, there is grounds to suspect that the meaning of interoceptive cues are learned and it is their meaning that causes their motivational consequences. We tested this possibility by psychologically inducing an illusory interoceptive hunger cue to see if it stimulated hunger…
Using a bodily illusion to examine the motivational basis of interoceptive hunger cues
Internal bodily sensations such as an empty rumbling stomach can lead to enhanced desire for food - hunger. As an empty rumbling stomach is caused by digestive physiology, it is often presumed that such physiological processes also cause hunger. However, psychological processes could equally generate hunger (e.g., based on what the physiological signal has come to connote), and here we outline a method to test this idea. Participants were exposed…
Barriers to adequate fruit and vegetable Consumption
Psychological induction of interoceptive hunger cues and their effect on food desire
Certain interoceptive hunger cues are caused by gut physiology. These interoceptive cues may have psychological consequences, namely an ability to enhance the desire to eat, which are independent of their physiological cause. Testing this idea is difficult because the physiological processes are normally linked to any consequence. In this preliminary report we attempted to induce an interoceptive hunger cue (a stomach rumble), to examine its psyc…
Contamination in Trypophobia
Trypophobia is a relatively common aversion to clusters of holes. There is no consensus yet on which emotions are involved in Trypophobia nor in its functional utility. This report investigates the role of disgust using contamination tasks in two studies, which contrast people with an aversion to trypophobic stimuli to those without. In Study 1, participants reported their emotional reactions to imagined contamination of trypophobic images. In St…
The Functions of Human Touch
There appears to be no attempt to categorize the specific classes of behavior that the tactile system underpins. Awareness of how an organism uses touch in their environment informs understanding of its versatility in non-verbal communication and tactile perception. This review categorizes the behavioral functions underpinned by the tactile sense, by using three sources of data: (1) Animal data, to assess if an identified function is conserved ac…
A review of the phenomenology, aetiology and treatment of animal phobia and insights for biophobia
Biophobia refers to a fear of living things, which leads to alienation from nature. The literature examining the underlying mechanisms and treatment of biophobia is sparse. This review aims to increase the readers' understanding of biophobia by examining the more extensive literature on specific phobias, namely animal phobia, as it most closely resembles biophobia. Fear, anxiety and disgust play an important role in specific phobias. Their trigge…
Parent-offspring similarity in hunger and thirst sensations
The internal (i.e., interoceptive) sensations that characterise hunger vary between people, and this may also be the case for thirst, although it has not been so well explored. There are probably both heritable and learning-based causes for this interoceptive variability. Consequently, it would seem plausible that parents and their offspring would have more similar patterns of hunger and thirst than pairs of strangers. We tested this idea, in add…
Efficiency of post-meal memory inhibition predicts subsequent food intake
Memory processes may contribute to appetite regulation. When people look at palatable foods, their desire to consume them depends upon memory retrieval (i.e., recalling if it will taste good). If memory inhibition occurs during satiety, then pleasant eating-related memories will not be retrieved, making eating less likely. In contrast, if memory inhibition is less efficient, pleasant food-related memories will be retrieved, the food will appear d…
Attention, response inhibition, and hoarding
Effects of sickness manipulation on disgust and pleasantness in interpersonal touch
The theory of the behavioral immune system (BIS) describes a set of behaviors that protect the individual from infectious diseases and that are motivated by disgust and the perceived vulnerability to disease. As interpersonal touch is one of the most common situations of potential transmission of infectious diseases in our everyday life, it seems likely that being touched by an apparently sick individual activates disgust. Our aim was to determin…
Facial disgust in response to touches, smells, and tastes
Disgust serves to defend the body from the entry of toxins and disease. Central to this function is a strong relationship with the proximate senses of smell, taste, and touch. Theory suggests that distinct and reflexive facial movements should be evoked by gustatory and olfactory disgusts, serving to impede bodily entry. While this hypothesis has received some support from facial recognition studies, whether smell and taste disgusts actually prod…
Predictors of state-based changes in wanting and liking
People report wanting food when they are hungry, and on eating it they typically report liking the experience. After eating, both wanting and liking decline, but wanting declines to a greater extent, which we term the 'affective discrepancy effect'. In this study we examine the predictors - state, sensory and memory-based - of these affective changes. Hungry participants undertook three tasks: (1) written recollections of what certain foods are l…
The relationship of health-related expectancies, fruit and vegetable intake, and positive mood
Purpose Greater fruit and vegetable (F&V) intake has been linked to more positive mood. Here, the purpose of this paper is to examine if this relationship is mediated by expectancies about their benefit to health/mental health. Design/methodology/approach Participants completed a new questionnaire to assess expectancies related to F&V intake. This was administered alongside a validated food-frequency measure of F&V intake, an assessment of positi…
The Factorial Structure of Stigma and Its Targets
We aimed to determine (1) the attributes of multiple stigmatized populations, (2) whether Kurzban and Leary’s (2001) functional typology of stigma emerges and identifies the dimensions upon which each stigma type differs, and (3) the emotional responses toward emergent stigma types. Participants ( N = 2,674) were assigned to 1/52 stigma target conditions and their attitudes surveyed. Data were analyzed by multilevel factor analysis with stigma ta…
Recollections about food when hungry and sated
The nose is hungrier than the eyes
Evaluating a Brief Behavioral Parenting Program for Parents of School-aged Children with ADHD
SYNOPSISObjective. Typical parenting programs require considerable time inputs, which can be a significant barrier to program access. Here we assessed whether a brief behavioral parenting program, 1-2-3 Magic, would be effective in reducing disruptive behavior and ADHD symptoms in school-aged children with ADHD and dysfunctional parenting in their parents. Design. Fifty-seven parents of children aged 6–12 years were randomly allocated to the trea…
Muscle and fat aftereffects and the role of gender
Body image disturbance - a cause of distress amongst the general population and those diagnosed with various disorders - is often attributed to the media's unrealistic depiction of ideal bodies. These ideals are strongly gendered, leading to pronounced fat concern amongst females, and a male preoccupation with muscularity. Recent research suggests that visual aftereffects may be fundamental to the misperception of body fat and muscle mass - the p…
Pathogen Load and Attractiveness
Elucidating knowledge and beliefs about obesity and eating disorders among key stakeholders
The findings indicate areas where the EDs and obesity fields have common ground and can work together in developing integrated health promotion programs
Wanting and liking for sugar sweetened beverages and snacks differ following depletion and repletion with energy and fluids
Compensatory up-regulation of behavioral disease avoidance in immuno-compromised people with rheumatoid arthritis
Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism
Many researchers have claimed that the emotion of disgust functions to protect us from disease. Although there have been several discussions of this hypothesis, none have yet reviewed the evidence in its entirety. The authors derive 14 hypotheses from a disease-avoidance account and evaluate the evidence for each, drawing upon research on pathogen avoidance in animals and empirical research on disgust. In all but 1 case, the evidence favors a dis…
Watching television while eating increases energy intake. Examining the mechanisms in female participants
Effect of Self-Reported Sexual Arousal on Responses to Sex-Related and Non-Sex-Related Disgust Cues
The longer-term impacts of Western diet on human cognition and the brain
Children’s response to adult disgust elicitors
Little is known about when or how different disgust elicitors are acquired. In Study 1, parents of children (0-18 years old) rated how their child would react to 22 disgust elicitors. Different developmental patterns were identified for core, animal, and sociomoral elicitors, with core elicitors emerging first. In Study 2, children (2-16 years old) were exposed alone and then with their parent to a range of elicitors derived from Study 1. Self-re…
Can the emotion of disgust be harnessed to promote hand hygiene? Experimental and field-based tests
Wanting and liking for sugar sweetened beverages and snacks differ following depletion and repletion with energy and fluids
The hippocampus and the regulation of human food intake
Human and animal data suggest that the hippocampus plays certain roles in regulating food intake. However, its actual role may be far broader than currently envisaged, a claim suggested by the centrality of the hippocampus to so many aspects of human/animal cognition. Understanding these ingestion-related functions is especially significant. This is because some degree of hippocampal impairment may be quite common, resulting for example from a We…
Individual differences in the interoceptive states of hunger, fullness and thirst
Does exposure enhance liking for the chilli burn
The Stolen Goods Market in New South Wales, Australia
Journal Article The Stolen Goods Market in New South Wales, Australia: An Analysis of Disposal Avenues and Tactics Get access Richard J. Stevenson, Richard J. Stevenson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lubica M. V. Forsythe, Lubica M. V. Forsythe Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Don Weatherburn Don Weatherburn *Richard J. Stevenson, Department of Psychology, Macquarie…
Psychological correlates of habitual diet in healthy adults
There are 3 motivations for studying the psychological correlates of habitual diet. First, diet is a major but modifiable cause of morbidity and mortality, and dietary interventions could be improved by knowing the psychological characteristics of consumers of healthy/unhealthy diets. Second, animal studies indicate that diet can impair cognition, stress responsiveness, and affective processing, but it is unclear whether this also happens in huma…
Parent-offspring similarity in hunger and thirst sensations
The internal (i.e., interoceptive) sensations that characterise hunger vary between people, and this may also be the case for thirst, although it has not been so well explored. There are probably both heritable and learning-based causes for this interoceptive variability. Consequently, it would seem plausible that parents and their offspring would have more similar patterns of hunger and thirst than pairs of strangers. We tested this idea, in add…
The characteristics of non-criminals with high psychopathy traits
Predictors of state-based changes in wanting and liking
People report wanting food when they are hungry, and on eating it they typically report liking the experience. After eating, both wanting and liking decline, but wanting declines to a greater extent, which we term the 'affective discrepancy effect'. In this study we examine the predictors - state, sensory and memory-based - of these affective changes. Hungry participants undertook three tasks: (1) written recollections of what certain foods are l…
Recollections about food when hungry and sated
A Preliminary Evaluation of the 1-2-3-Magic Parenting Program in an Australian Community Services Setting
Cognitive-behavioural parenting programs provide caregivers with alternative strategies to harsh disciplining practices but the choice of programs that are evidence-based in Australia is limited. Australian community service workers suggest that having a choice of evidence-based programs is important when matching programs to client needs, and that 1-2-3 Magic is a program used widely in Australia despite its small Australian evidence base. The e…
Does the source of an interpersonal odour affect disgust? A disease risk model and its alternatives
Using self-report, this paper explored whether a malodour's source (self, liked person, stranger) influences hedonic responding. In Study 1, participants were presented with vignettes describing various encounters with malodours. Negative affect increased when body malodours emanated from a stranger rather than oneself (the source effect). Study 2 replicated this finding using a smell diary, in which participants recorded their hedonic responses …
Barriers to adequate fruit and vegetable Consumption
Psychological induction of interoceptive hunger cues and their effect on food desire
Certain interoceptive hunger cues are caused by gut physiology. These interoceptive cues may have psychological consequences, namely an ability to enhance the desire to eat, which are independent of their physiological cause. Testing this idea is difficult because the physiological processes are normally linked to any consequence. In this preliminary report we attempted to induce an interoceptive hunger cue (a stomach rumble), to examine its psyc…
Muscle and fat aftereffects and the role of gender
Body image disturbance - a cause of distress amongst the general population and those diagnosed with various disorders - is often attributed to the media's unrealistic depiction of ideal bodies. These ideals are strongly gendered, leading to pronounced fat concern amongst females, and a male preoccupation with muscularity. Recent research suggests that visual aftereffects may be fundamental to the misperception of body fat and muscle mass - the p…
Exploring the Relationship between Psychopathy and Helping Behaviors in Naturalistic Settings
This study examined the helping behavior of participants with high (High-P; 15 males, 13 females) and low (Low-P; 14 males, 16 females) psychopathic traits without their awareness. In the first of three tests, we found Low-P participants offered more help to an apparently lost female confederate than High-P participants. In the second test, High-P compared to Low-P males offered more help to an "injured" female experimenter, the reverse was true …
Age-related changes in children's hedonic response to male body odor
Male sweat smells disgusting to many adults, but it is unclear whether children find it so. In Experiment 1A, children (mean age = 8.7 years) and adolescents (M=16.6 years) smelled male sweat and other odors, rated each for liking, and attempted their identification. Only female adolescents disliked male sweat and could identify it. Experiment 1B, using the same procedure, obtained this gender difference in adults (M=26.7 years). In Experiment 2,…
Does exposure enhance liking for the chilli burn
Is sweetness taste enhancement cognitively impenetrable? Effects of exposure, training and knowledge
The Stolen Goods Market in New South Wales, Australia
Journal Article The Stolen Goods Market in New South Wales, Australia: An Analysis of Disposal Avenues and Tactics Get access Richard J. Stevenson, Richard J. Stevenson Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Lubica M. V. Forsythe, Lubica M. V. Forsythe Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Don Weatherburn Don Weatherburn *Richard J. Stevenson, Department of Psychology, Macquarie…
Age-related changes in children's hedonic response to male body odor
Male sweat smells disgusting to many adults, but it is unclear whether children find it so. In Experiment 1A, children (mean age = 8.7 years) and adolescents (M=16.6 years) smelled male sweat and other odors, rated each for liking, and attempted their identification. Only female adolescents disliked male sweat and could identify it. Experiment 1B, using the same procedure, obtained this gender difference in adults (M=26.7 years). In Experiment 2,…
Does the source of an interpersonal odour affect disgust? A disease risk model and its alternatives
Using self-report, this paper explored whether a malodour's source (self, liked person, stranger) influences hedonic responding. In Study 1, participants were presented with vignettes describing various encounters with malodours. Negative affect increased when body malodours emanated from a stranger rather than oneself (the source effect). Study 2 replicated this finding using a smell diary, in which participants recorded their hedonic responses …
My baby doesn't smell as bad as yours
Can odours acquire fat-like properties
Olfactory-induced synesthesias
Recent reviews of synesthesia concentrate upon rare neurodevelopmental examples and exclude common olfactory-induced experiences with which they may profitably be compared. Like the neurodevelopmental synesthesias, odor-induced experiences involve different sensory modalities; are reliable, asymmetric (concurrents cannot induce), and automatic; and the inducer-concurrent relationship is learnt. Unlike neurodevelopmental synesthesias, these experi…
Age-related changes in odor discrimination
Odor naming and recognition memory are poorer in children than in adults. This study explored whether such differences might result from poorer discriminative ability. Experiment 1 used an oddity test of discrimination with familiar odors on 6-year-olds, 11-year-olds, and adults. Six-year-olds were significantly poorer at discrimination relative to 11-year-olds and adults, who did not differ. Experiment 2 used the same procedure but with hard-to-…
The characteristics of non-criminals with high psychopathy traits
Frequency and recency of infection and their relationship with disgust and contamination sensitivity
Phenomenal and access consciousness in olfaction
Disgust as a disease-avoidance mechanism
Many researchers have claimed that the emotion of disgust functions to protect us from disease. Although there have been several discussions of this hypothesis, none have yet reviewed the evidence in its entirety. The authors derive 14 hypotheses from a disease-avoidance account and evaluate the evidence for each, drawing upon research on pathogen avoidance in animals and empirical research on disgust. In all but 1 case, the evidence favors a dis…
Can the emotion of disgust be harnessed to promote hand hygiene? Experimental and field-based tests
Children’s response to adult disgust elicitors
Little is known about when or how different disgust elicitors are acquired. In Study 1, parents of children (0-18 years old) rated how their child would react to 22 disgust elicitors. Different developmental patterns were identified for core, animal, and sociomoral elicitors, with core elicitors emerging first. In Study 2, children (2-16 years old) were exposed alone and then with their parent to a range of elicitors derived from Study 1. Self-re…
Olfactory illusions
Effect of Self-Reported Sexual Arousal on Responses to Sex-Related and Non-Sex-Related Disgust Cues
Facial disfigurement is treated like an infectious disease
Limits to knowing in olfaction
Detecting olfactory rivalry
The longer-term impacts of Western diet on human cognition and the brain
Evidence that phenomenal olfactory content exceeds what can later be accessed
Flavor binding
The brain binds inputs from multiple senses to enhance our ability to identify key events in the environment. Understanding this process is based mainly on data from the major senses (vision and audition), yet compelling examples of binding occur in other domains. When we eat, in fact taste, smell, and touch combine to form flavor. This process can be so complete that most people fail to recognize that smell contributes to flavor. The flavor perc…
Watching television while eating increases energy intake. Examining the mechanisms in female participants
Is Disgust Prepared? A Preliminary Examination in Young Children
Children may be prepared to associate adult disgust reactions with adult disgust elicitors. To test this, three-year olds (and adults) were presented with two images and an emotive vocalization. The images and vocalizations included stimuli adults found disgusting, fear-provoking, and sad. On one set of trials, the main dependent variable (DV) was time spent looking at each image and on a second set of repeat trials the DV was knowledge of image-…
Psychology (50 works) · Developmental psychology (23 works) · Medicine (23 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Olfactory and Sensory Function Studies (20 works) · Cognitive psychology (19 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (17 works) · Disgust (15 works) · Neuroscience (14 works) · Clinical Psychology (12 works)