Vivian Zayas
Biographic Data
| ID | 275181 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Vivian Zayas |
| GIVEN NAMES | Vivian |
| FAMILY NAME | Zayas |
| SIGNATURE | ZAYAS V |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cornell University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-9534-3721 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 22 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 49 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Preemptive Buffering: Attachment Figure Representations Lessen the Affective Sting of Internally Generated Threats by Increasing Positive Affect
One of life's most frequently encountered stressors is internal threat, such as distressing autobiographical memories. Across six studies, we examined whether activating representations of attachment figures could preemptively buffer against the affective sting of such memory recall. Compared to neutral primes (e.g., stranger or neutral object), viewing a photograph of one's mother or romantic partner reduced negative affect following memory reca…
The Bittersweetness of Self-Representations: Cross-Cultural Insights That the Self Triggers Both Positive and Negative Implicit Evaluations
Positive implicit self-esteem has been argued to be a universal characteristic of the human mind. Yet, recent work using U.S. samples finds evidence suggesting that the self is implicitly bivalent. The bivalent-priming elicited by the self was markedly different from the univalent-priming elicited by personally significant, positive objects. The findings of implicit self-bivalence align with theoretical perspectives acknowledging the self's affec…
Out of sight but in mind: Experimentally activating partner representations in daily life buffers against common stressors
Lab experiments have shown that reminders of romantic partners buffer against stressors. Yet, tightly controlled experiments do not mimic what transpires in people's actual lives. Thus, an important question is as follows: To what extent do reminders of romantic partners confer affective benefits when they occur "in the wild" as people experience their daily activities? To capture people's emotional experience in real time, two studies, each span…
Mitigating the affective and cognitive consequences of social exclusion: An integrative data analysis of seven social disconnection interventions
The findings provide support for the effectiveness of social disconnection interventions that involve actual (i.e., face-to-face) or symbolic (i.e., reminders) interactions with friends. These interventions target momentary vulnerabilities that arise from social exclusion by addressing negative affect and cognitions before or after they emerge. As such, they offer a promising approach to primary prevention prior to the onset of loneliness and soc…
Negative speaks louder than positive: Negative implicit partner evaluations forecast destructive daily interactions and relationship decline
Romantic relationships are affectively complex. Any given interaction consists of both rewarding and aversive features. Recent work has shown that implicit partner evaluations (IPEs)-evaluations spontaneously triggered when one thinks about one's partner-are also affectively complex. Does such complexity in IPEs help individuals navigate rewarding and aversive aspects inherent in interactions? The present work examined the proposition that negati…
Sexy social media photos disproportionately penalize female candidates' professional outcomes: Evidence of a sexual double standard
Psychological Science in the Wake of Covid-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations
The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic’s wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon—an event that hinges on human-to-human contact—we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology…
Me as good and me as bad: Priming the self triggers positive and negative implicit evaluations
negative implicit evaluations. Moreover, tests estimating heterogeneity in the strength of implicit self-evaluations indicated that individual differences in nonclinical, healthy individuals may be limited, possibly reflecting measurement limitations, the nature of implicit self-evaluations, or both. Overall, the present work shines a spotlight on a previously undocumented effect: Despite the self's robust net positivity, the self reliably trigge…
Gendered White Lies: Women Are Given Inflated Performance Feedback Compared With Men
Are underperforming women given less truthful, but kinder performance feedback (“white lies”) compared with equally underperforming men? We test this hypothesis by using a “benchmark” of truthful (objective) evaluation of performance and then either manipulating (Study 1) or measuring (Study 2) the extent to which the feedback given to women is upwardly distorted. In Study 1, participants were asked to guess the gender of an underperforming emplo…
What is a face worth? Facial attractiveness biases experience-based monetary decision-making
There is ample evidence that attractive individuals, across diverse domains, are judged more favourably. But most research has focused on single/one-shot decisions, where decision-makers receive no feedback following their decisions, and outcomes of their judgements are inconsequential to the self. Would attractive individuals still be judged favourably in experience-based decision-making where people make iterative decisions and receive conseque…
Impressions Based on a Portrait Predict, 1-Month Later, Impressions Following a Live Interaction
When it comes to person perception, does one “judge a book by its cover?” Perceivers made judgments of liking, and of personality, based on a photograph of an unknown other, and at least 1 month later, made judgments following a face-to-face interaction with the same person. Photograph-based liking judgments predicted interaction-based liking judgments, and, to a lesser extent, photograph-based personality judgments predicted interaction-based pe…
Love You? Hate You? Maybe It’s Both: Evidence That Significant Others Trigger Bivalent-Priming
Psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and intuition all suggest that human beings can be profoundly ambivalent about significant others. However, experimental psychology has commonly assessed automatic evaluations as either positive or negative, but not both simultaneously. Experiment 1 showed that activating the mental representation of a significant other facilitated the processing of both positive and negative information ( bivalent-primin…
The involuntary excluder effect: Those included by an excluder are seen as exclusive themselves
People are highly vigilant for and alarmed by social exclusion. Previous research has focused largely on the emotional and motivational consequences of being unambiguously excluded by others. The present research instead examines how people make sense of a more ambiguous dynamic, 1-person exclusion--situations in which one person (the excluder) excludes someone (the rejected) while including someone else (the included). Using different methodolog…
Mental representations of attachment figures facilitate recovery following upsetting autobiographical memory recall
A growing literature shows that even the symbolic presence of an attachment figure facilitates the regulation of negative affect triggered by external stressors. Yet, in daily life, pernicious stressors are often internally generated--recalling an upsetting experience reliably increases negative affect, rumination, and susceptibility to physical and psychological health problems. The present research provides the first systematic examination of w…
‘Willpower’ over the life span: Decomposing self-regulation
In the 1960s, Mischel and colleagues developed a simple 'marshmallow test' to measure preschoolers' ability to delay gratification. In numerous follow-up studies over 40 years, this 'test' proved to have surprisingly significant predictive validity for consequential social, cognitive and mental health outcomes over the life course. In this article, we review key findings from the longitudinal work and from earlier delay-of-gratification experimen…
Roots of Adult Attachment: Maternal Caregiving at 18 Months Predicts Adult Peer and Partner Attachment
It is widely assumed that, within the context of a stable developmental environment, relationship experiences in early life influence later ones. To date, however, there has been no longitudinal empirical evidence for the hypothesis that early maternal caregiving predicts adult attachment dynamics with peers and partners. The present longitudinal study shows that quality of maternal caregiving experienced at 18 months of age predicted the extent …
I like you but I don't know why: Objective facial resemblance to significant others influences snap judgments
Beyond Satisfaction: The Role of Attachment in Marital Functioning
In this article, we investigate marital functioning from an attachment theory perspective. We review empirical evidence showing that, in nondistressed marriages, spouses, as attachment figures, provide each other with a subjective sense of felt security, regulate each other's affective and physiological states, and facilitate each other's functioning outside the relationship, especially with respect to exploratory behaviors. These provisions of t…
Being excluded by one means being excluded by all: Perceiving exclusion from inclusive others during one-person social exclusion
Three decades after the personality paradox: Understanding situations
Rejection sensitivity and executive control: Joint predictors of borderline personality features
Personality in Context: An Interpersonal Systems Perspective
Because a significant part of individuals' lives involve close relationships, an important and substantial part of the situations they encounter consists of other people's behaviors. We suggest that individuals' characteristic ways of behaving, which are typically attributed to “personality,” arise from two processes. One lies primarily within the individual, conceptualized as individual differences in one's cognitive and affective processing sys…
Mental representations of attachment figures facilitate recovery following upsetting autobiographical memory recall
A growing literature shows that even the symbolic presence of an attachment figure facilitates the regulation of negative affect triggered by external stressors. Yet, in daily life, pernicious stressors are often internally generated--recalling an upsetting experience reliably increases negative affect, rumination, and susceptibility to physical and psychological health problems. The present research provides the first systematic examination of w…
Beyond Satisfaction: The Role of Attachment in Marital Functioning
In this article, we investigate marital functioning from an attachment theory perspective. We review empirical evidence showing that, in nondistressed marriages, spouses, as attachment figures, provide each other with a subjective sense of felt security, regulate each other's affective and physiological states, and facilitate each other's functioning outside the relationship, especially with respect to exploratory behaviors. These provisions of t…
I like you but I don't know why: Objective facial resemblance to significant others influences snap judgments
Being excluded by one means being excluded by all: Perceiving exclusion from inclusive others during one-person social exclusion
Rejection sensitivity and executive control: Joint predictors of borderline personality features
Negative speaks louder than positive: Negative implicit partner evaluations forecast destructive daily interactions and relationship decline
Romantic relationships are affectively complex. Any given interaction consists of both rewarding and aversive features. Recent work has shown that implicit partner evaluations (IPEs)-evaluations spontaneously triggered when one thinks about one's partner-are also affectively complex. Does such complexity in IPEs help individuals navigate rewarding and aversive aspects inherent in interactions? The present work examined the proposition that negati…
What is a face worth? Facial attractiveness biases experience-based monetary decision-making
There is ample evidence that attractive individuals, across diverse domains, are judged more favourably. But most research has focused on single/one-shot decisions, where decision-makers receive no feedback following their decisions, and outcomes of their judgements are inconsequential to the self. Would attractive individuals still be judged favourably in experience-based decision-making where people make iterative decisions and receive conseque…
The involuntary excluder effect: Those included by an excluder are seen as exclusive themselves
People are highly vigilant for and alarmed by social exclusion. Previous research has focused largely on the emotional and motivational consequences of being unambiguously excluded by others. The present research instead examines how people make sense of a more ambiguous dynamic, 1-person exclusion--situations in which one person (the excluder) excludes someone (the rejected) while including someone else (the included). Using different methodolog…
Sexy social media photos disproportionately penalize female candidates' professional outcomes: Evidence of a sexual double standard
Me as good and me as bad: Priming the self triggers positive and negative implicit evaluations
negative implicit evaluations. Moreover, tests estimating heterogeneity in the strength of implicit self-evaluations indicated that individual differences in nonclinical, healthy individuals may be limited, possibly reflecting measurement limitations, the nature of implicit self-evaluations, or both. Overall, the present work shines a spotlight on a previously undocumented effect: Despite the self's robust net positivity, the self reliably trigge…
Three decades after the personality paradox: Understanding situations
Personality in Context: An Interpersonal Systems Perspective
Because a significant part of individuals' lives involve close relationships, an important and substantial part of the situations they encounter consists of other people's behaviors. We suggest that individuals' characteristic ways of behaving, which are typically attributed to “personality,” arise from two processes. One lies primarily within the individual, conceptualized as individual differences in one's cognitive and affective processing sys…
Rejection sensitivity and executive control: Joint predictors of borderline personality features
Three decades after the personality paradox: Understanding situations
Beyond Satisfaction: The Role of Attachment in Marital Functioning
In this article, we investigate marital functioning from an attachment theory perspective. We review empirical evidence showing that, in nondistressed marriages, spouses, as attachment figures, provide each other with a subjective sense of felt security, regulate each other's affective and physiological states, and facilitate each other's functioning outside the relationship, especially with respect to exploratory behaviors. These provisions of t…
Being excluded by one means being excluded by all: Perceiving exclusion from inclusive others during one-person social exclusion
‘Willpower’ over the life span: Decomposing self-regulation
In the 1960s, Mischel and colleagues developed a simple 'marshmallow test' to measure preschoolers' ability to delay gratification. In numerous follow-up studies over 40 years, this 'test' proved to have surprisingly significant predictive validity for consequential social, cognitive and mental health outcomes over the life course. In this article, we review key findings from the longitudinal work and from earlier delay-of-gratification experimen…
Roots of Adult Attachment: Maternal Caregiving at 18 Months Predicts Adult Peer and Partner Attachment
It is widely assumed that, within the context of a stable developmental environment, relationship experiences in early life influence later ones. To date, however, there has been no longitudinal empirical evidence for the hypothesis that early maternal caregiving predicts adult attachment dynamics with peers and partners. The present longitudinal study shows that quality of maternal caregiving experienced at 18 months of age predicted the extent …
I like you but I don't know why: Objective facial resemblance to significant others influences snap judgments
Mental representations of attachment figures facilitate recovery following upsetting autobiographical memory recall
A growing literature shows that even the symbolic presence of an attachment figure facilitates the regulation of negative affect triggered by external stressors. Yet, in daily life, pernicious stressors are often internally generated--recalling an upsetting experience reliably increases negative affect, rumination, and susceptibility to physical and psychological health problems. The present research provides the first systematic examination of w…
The involuntary excluder effect: Those included by an excluder are seen as exclusive themselves
People are highly vigilant for and alarmed by social exclusion. Previous research has focused largely on the emotional and motivational consequences of being unambiguously excluded by others. The present research instead examines how people make sense of a more ambiguous dynamic, 1-person exclusion--situations in which one person (the excluder) excludes someone (the rejected) while including someone else (the included). Using different methodolog…
Love You? Hate You? Maybe It’s Both: Evidence That Significant Others Trigger Bivalent-Priming
Psychoanalytic theory, clinical practice, and intuition all suggest that human beings can be profoundly ambivalent about significant others. However, experimental psychology has commonly assessed automatic evaluations as either positive or negative, but not both simultaneously. Experiment 1 showed that activating the mental representation of a significant other facilitated the processing of both positive and negative information ( bivalent-primin…
Impressions Based on a Portrait Predict, 1-Month Later, Impressions Following a Live Interaction
When it comes to person perception, does one “judge a book by its cover?” Perceivers made judgments of liking, and of personality, based on a photograph of an unknown other, and at least 1 month later, made judgments following a face-to-face interaction with the same person. Photograph-based liking judgments predicted interaction-based liking judgments, and, to a lesser extent, photograph-based personality judgments predicted interaction-based pe…
Gendered White Lies: Women Are Given Inflated Performance Feedback Compared With Men
Are underperforming women given less truthful, but kinder performance feedback (“white lies”) compared with equally underperforming men? We test this hypothesis by using a “benchmark” of truthful (objective) evaluation of performance and then either manipulating (Study 1) or measuring (Study 2) the extent to which the feedback given to women is upwardly distorted. In Study 1, participants were asked to guess the gender of an underperforming emplo…
What is a face worth? Facial attractiveness biases experience-based monetary decision-making
There is ample evidence that attractive individuals, across diverse domains, are judged more favourably. But most research has focused on single/one-shot decisions, where decision-makers receive no feedback following their decisions, and outcomes of their judgements are inconsequential to the self. Would attractive individuals still be judged favourably in experience-based decision-making where people make iterative decisions and receive conseque…
Psychological Science in the Wake of Covid-19: Social, Methodological, and Metascientific Considerations
The COVID-19 pandemic has extensively changed the state of psychological science from what research questions psychologists can ask to which methodologies psychologists can use to investigate them. In this article, we offer a perspective on how to optimize new research in the pandemic’s wake. Because this pandemic is inherently a social phenomenon—an event that hinges on human-to-human contact—we focus on socially relevant subfields of psychology…
Me as good and me as bad: Priming the self triggers positive and negative implicit evaluations
negative implicit evaluations. Moreover, tests estimating heterogeneity in the strength of implicit self-evaluations indicated that individual differences in nonclinical, healthy individuals may be limited, possibly reflecting measurement limitations, the nature of implicit self-evaluations, or both. Overall, the present work shines a spotlight on a previously undocumented effect: Despite the self's robust net positivity, the self reliably trigge…
Sexy social media photos disproportionately penalize female candidates' professional outcomes: Evidence of a sexual double standard
Out of sight but in mind: Experimentally activating partner representations in daily life buffers against common stressors
Lab experiments have shown that reminders of romantic partners buffer against stressors. Yet, tightly controlled experiments do not mimic what transpires in people's actual lives. Thus, an important question is as follows: To what extent do reminders of romantic partners confer affective benefits when they occur "in the wild" as people experience their daily activities? To capture people's emotional experience in real time, two studies, each span…
Mitigating the affective and cognitive consequences of social exclusion: An integrative data analysis of seven social disconnection interventions
The findings provide support for the effectiveness of social disconnection interventions that involve actual (i.e., face-to-face) or symbolic (i.e., reminders) interactions with friends. These interventions target momentary vulnerabilities that arise from social exclusion by addressing negative affect and cognitions before or after they emerge. As such, they offer a promising approach to primary prevention prior to the onset of loneliness and soc…
Negative speaks louder than positive: Negative implicit partner evaluations forecast destructive daily interactions and relationship decline
Romantic relationships are affectively complex. Any given interaction consists of both rewarding and aversive features. Recent work has shown that implicit partner evaluations (IPEs)-evaluations spontaneously triggered when one thinks about one's partner-are also affectively complex. Does such complexity in IPEs help individuals navigate rewarding and aversive aspects inherent in interactions? The present work examined the proposition that negati…
Preemptive Buffering: Attachment Figure Representations Lessen the Affective Sting of Internally Generated Threats by Increasing Positive Affect
One of life's most frequently encountered stressors is internal threat, such as distressing autobiographical memories. Across six studies, we examined whether activating representations of attachment figures could preemptively buffer against the affective sting of such memory recall. Compared to neutral primes (e.g., stranger or neutral object), viewing a photograph of one's mother or romantic partner reduced negative affect following memory reca…
The Bittersweetness of Self-Representations: Cross-Cultural Insights That the Self Triggers Both Positive and Negative Implicit Evaluations
Positive implicit self-esteem has been argued to be a universal characteristic of the human mind. Yet, recent work using U.S. samples finds evidence suggesting that the self is implicitly bivalent. The bivalent-priming elicited by the self was markedly different from the univalent-priming elicited by personally significant, positive objects. The findings of implicit self-bivalence align with theoretical perspectives acknowledging the self's affec…
Psychology (22 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Cognitive psychology (11 works) · Developmental psychology (10 works) · Attachment and Relationship Dynamics (8 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (7 works) · Social Psychology (7 works) · Cognition (6 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (5 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (5 works)