Travis Proulx
Biographic Data
| ID | 4230641 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Travis Proulx |
| GIVEN NAMES | Travis |
| FAMILY NAME | Proulx |
| SIGNATURE | PROULX T |
| AFFILIATIONS | Cardiff University |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3763-3138 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 25 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 46 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 24 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2006 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
What Narcissists Look Like and Why It’s Important
Prior research investigating public perceptions of narcissistic individuals has relied on participant ratings of researcher-selected dimensions or character vignettes, limiting generalizability and ecological validity. Using reverse correlation—a bottom-up, participant-driven method—we examined how people visually represent narcissists, and the consequences of these representations on attributional perceptions (e.g., trust, leadership, attraction…
How Do People Conceptualize Narcissism and Narcissistic Individuals
INTRODUCTION: Although past decades have seen notable advances in the conceptualization and assessment of narcissism, scholarship examining lay conceptualizations of the construct remains limited. METHOD: We report two studies utilizing bottom-up, participant-driven methodologies to examine public understandings of narcissism and narcissistic individuals. In Study 1 (n = 202), we thematically analyzed layperson definitions of narcissism and compa…
The Face of Left-Wing Dissent: Progressives and Traditional Liberals Generate Divergently Negative and Positive Representations of J.K. Rowling
Recent perspectives have challenged the view that left-wingers are less likely to derogate out-group members. Building on research demonstrating heightened out-group derogation by Progressive (vs. Traditional Liberal) left-wingers, we examined whether Progressives and Traditional Liberals differentially tolerate in-group dissenters on the issue of gender identity. Using reverse correlation, Study 1 found that the Progressive-generated face of J.K…
The Progressive Values Scale: Assessing the Ideological Schism on the Left
Progressivism has increasingly challenged traditional liberalism as the dominant influence within left-wing ideology. Across four studies, we developed a measure—the Progressive Values Scale (PVS)—that characterizes distinctly progressive values within the left-wing. In Study 1, left-wing participants evaluated divisive issues, with four scale factors emerging. In Study 2, we confirmed this factor structure and included a battery of personality a…
A brief life-purpose intervention reduces trauma-film anxiety and rumination
Although there is accumulating evidence for an inverse relation between life meaning and anxiety, most of this research has used cross-sectional designs.We examined the relation between life meaningandanxietywithanexperimentaldesign (N= 103), hypothesizing that compared to control, a brief life-purpose intervention administered after a filmstressorwould result in less anxiety and film-related rumination and that anxiety wouldmediate the intervent…
How people perceive dispositionally (non-) ambivalent others and why it matters
While research has studied the consequences of being ambivalent about a single attitude object, we know little about how dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent targets are perceived. Across six experiments we examined how people perceive and mentally represent dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent others, and how people expect to interact with dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent targets. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a n…
Beyond Statistical Ritual: Theory in Psychological Science
More than 40 years ago, Paul Meehl (1978) published a seminal critique of the state of theorizing in psychological science. According to Meehl, the quality of theories had diminished in the preceding decades, resulting in statistical methods standing in for theoretical rigor. In this introduction to the special issue Theory in Psychological Science, we apply Meehl’s account to contemporary psychological science. We suggest that by the time of Mee…
Pupillometry and Hindsight Bias: Physiological Arousal Predicts Compensatory Behavior
According to violation–compensation models of cognitive conflict, experiences that violate expected associations evoke a common, biologically based syndrome of aversive arousal, which in turn motivates compensation efforts to relieve this arousal. However, while substantial research shows that people indeed respond with increased arousal to expectancy violating events, evidence for the motivating role of arousal is rarely found. In two within-sub…
Lay Belief in Biopolitics and Political Prejudice
Building on psychological research linking essentialist beliefs about human differences with prejudice, we test whether lay belief in the biological basis of political ideology is associated with political intolerance and social avoidance. In two studies of American adults (Study 1: N = 288, Study 2: N = 164), we find that belief in the biological basis of political views is associated with greater intolerance and social avoidance of ideologicall…
The expectancy bias: Expectancy-violating faces evoke earlier pupillary dilation than neutral or negative faces
Humans maintain a negativity bias, whereby they perceive threatening stimuli to be more salient than rewarding or neutral stimuli. Across 6 within-subject experimental comparisons, we tested the hypothesis that humans maintain an even stronger expectancy bias, preferentially processing stimuli that violate mental representations of expected associations. To assess this bias, we measured variations in pupillary dilation as a means of determining a…
The social pain of Cyberball: Decreased pupillary reactivity to exclusion cues
Is dissonance reduction a special case of fluid compensation? Evidence that dissonant cognitions cause compensatory affirmation and abstraction
Cognitive dissonance theory shares much in common with other perspectives that address anomalies, uncertainty, and general expectancy violations. This has led some theorists to argue that these theories represent overlapping psychological processes. If responding to dissonance and uncertainty occurs through a common psychological process, one should expect that the behavioral outcomes of feeling uncertain would also apply to feelings of dissonanc…
Threat and Defense
The psychology of meaning.
From moral philosophy and existentialism to the clinical realm of psychotherapy, The Psychology of Meaning explores the multifaceted nature of this highly subjective construct. The volume's contributors examine meaning along five dimensions - the architecture of meaning, responding to uncertainty, meaning from retrospection, compensating for meaning violations, and restoring meaning: physiological and neurocognitive mechanisms. The editors of thi…
A Raw Deal: Heightened Liberalism Following Exposure to Anomalous Playing Cards
According to the meaning maintenance model, people may respond to meaning violations by affirming unrelated beliefs to which they are committed. While this affirmation generally moves in the direction of social inequality, meaning violations that are not personally threatening—but that nevertheless evoke uncertainty—should evoke a heightened preference for social equality (i.e., a socially liberal judgment). We tested this hypothesis in an experi…
Writing autobiographical narratives increases political conservatism
The psychology of meaning
From moral philosophy and existentialism to the clinical realm of psychotherapy, The Psychology of Meaning explores the multifaceted nature of this highly subjective construct. The volume's contributors examine meaning along five dimensions the architecture of meaning, responding to uncertainty, meaning from retrospection, compensating for meaning violations, and restoring meaning: physiological and neurocognitive mechanisms. The editors of this …
Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations
The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making
Across eras and literatures, multiple theories have converged on a broad psychological phenomenon: the common compensation behaviors that follow from violations of our committed understandings. The meaning maintenance model (MMM) offers an integrated account of these behaviors, as well as the overlapping perspectives that address specific aspects of this inconsistency compensation process. According to the MMM, all meaning violations may bottlene…
Turn-frogs and careful-sweaters: Non-conscious perception of incongruous word pairings provokes fluid compensation
Jekyll and Hyde and Me: Age-Graded Differences in Conceptions of Self-Unity
This research details the changing ways in which young people of different ages differently warrant the conviction that, notwithstanding evidence of good and bad behaviours, selves can be understood as unified across the various roles and contexts that they occupy. Canadian adolescents and young adults were asked to explain the apparent disunity of self implied by good and bad behaviours manifested by the fictional character Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hy…
Mortality salience and religion: Divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non‐religious
Religious and non‐religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non‐religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, alle…
Contents Vol. 51, 2008
Cultures in Collision
Commentaries| December 17 2008 Cultures in Collision: Commentary on O'Sullivan-Lago, de Abreu, and Burgess Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Michael J. Chandler; Michael J. Chandler University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Travis Proulx Travis Proulx University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Search for other…
The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations
The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a needfor meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people's sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termedfluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are …
Mortality salience and religion: Divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non‐religious
Religious and non‐religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non‐religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, alle…
Turn-frogs and careful-sweaters: Non-conscious perception of incongruous word pairings provokes fluid compensation
A Raw Deal: Heightened Liberalism Following Exposure to Anomalous Playing Cards
According to the meaning maintenance model, people may respond to meaning violations by affirming unrelated beliefs to which they are committed. While this affirmation generally moves in the direction of social inequality, meaning violations that are not personally threatening—but that nevertheless evoke uncertainty—should evoke a heightened preference for social equality (i.e., a socially liberal judgment). We tested this hypothesis in an experi…
Is dissonance reduction a special case of fluid compensation? Evidence that dissonant cognitions cause compensatory affirmation and abstraction
Cognitive dissonance theory shares much in common with other perspectives that address anomalies, uncertainty, and general expectancy violations. This has led some theorists to argue that these theories represent overlapping psychological processes. If responding to dissonance and uncertainty occurs through a common psychological process, one should expect that the behavioral outcomes of feeling uncertain would also apply to feelings of dissonanc…
Writing autobiographical narratives increases political conservatism
The social pain of Cyberball: Decreased pupillary reactivity to exclusion cues
The expectancy bias: Expectancy-violating faces evoke earlier pupillary dilation than neutral or negative faces
Humans maintain a negativity bias, whereby they perceive threatening stimuli to be more salient than rewarding or neutral stimuli. Across 6 within-subject experimental comparisons, we tested the hypothesis that humans maintain an even stronger expectancy bias, preferentially processing stimuli that violate mental representations of expected associations. To assess this bias, we measured variations in pupillary dilation as a means of determining a…
How people perceive dispositionally (non-) ambivalent others and why it matters
While research has studied the consequences of being ambivalent about a single attitude object, we know little about how dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent targets are perceived. Across six experiments we examined how people perceive and mentally represent dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent others, and how people expect to interact with dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent targets. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a n…
The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the Coherence of Social Motivations
The meaning maintenance model (MMM) proposes that people have a needfor meaning; that is, a need to perceive events through a prism of mental representations of expected relations that organizes their perceptions of the world. When people's sense of meaning is threatened, they reaffirm alternative representations as a way to regain meaning-a process termedfluid compensation. According to the model, people can reaffirm meaning in domains that are …
Contents Vol. 51, 2008
Cultures in Collision
Commentaries| December 17 2008 Cultures in Collision: Commentary on O'Sullivan-Lago, de Abreu, and Burgess Subject Area: Psychiatry and Psychology , Women's and Children's Health Michael J. Chandler; Michael J. Chandler University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Travis Proulx Travis Proulx University of British Columbia, Vancouver, B.C., Canada Search for other…
Jekyll and Hyde and Me: Age-Graded Differences in Conceptions of Self-Unity
This research details the changing ways in which young people of different ages differently warrant the conviction that, notwithstanding evidence of good and bad behaviours, selves can be understood as unified across the various roles and contexts that they occupy. Canadian adolescents and young adults were asked to explain the apparent disunity of self implied by good and bad behaviours manifested by the fictional character Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hy…
Mortality salience and religion: Divergent effects on the defense of cultural worldviews for the religious and the non‐religious
Religious and non‐religious individuals differ in their core beliefs. The religious endorse a supernatural, divinely inspired view of the world, while the non‐religious hold largely secular worldviews. As a result they may respond differently to existential threats. Three studies confirmed this prediction. After a mortality salience (MS) or control prime, Canadian participants read, and responded to, an essay hostile to Western civilization, alle…
Turn-frogs and careful-sweaters: Non-conscious perception of incongruous word pairings provokes fluid compensation
Understanding all inconsistency compensation as a palliative response to violated expectations
The Five “A”s of Meaning Maintenance: Finding Meaning in the Theories of Sense-Making
Across eras and literatures, multiple theories have converged on a broad psychological phenomenon: the common compensation behaviors that follow from violations of our committed understandings. The meaning maintenance model (MMM) offers an integrated account of these behaviors, as well as the overlapping perspectives that address specific aspects of this inconsistency compensation process. According to the MMM, all meaning violations may bottlene…
The psychology of meaning.
From moral philosophy and existentialism to the clinical realm of psychotherapy, The Psychology of Meaning explores the multifaceted nature of this highly subjective construct. The volume's contributors examine meaning along five dimensions - the architecture of meaning, responding to uncertainty, meaning from retrospection, compensating for meaning violations, and restoring meaning: physiological and neurocognitive mechanisms. The editors of thi…
A Raw Deal: Heightened Liberalism Following Exposure to Anomalous Playing Cards
According to the meaning maintenance model, people may respond to meaning violations by affirming unrelated beliefs to which they are committed. While this affirmation generally moves in the direction of social inequality, meaning violations that are not personally threatening—but that nevertheless evoke uncertainty—should evoke a heightened preference for social equality (i.e., a socially liberal judgment). We tested this hypothesis in an experi…
Writing autobiographical narratives increases political conservatism
The psychology of meaning
From moral philosophy and existentialism to the clinical realm of psychotherapy, The Psychology of Meaning explores the multifaceted nature of this highly subjective construct. The volume's contributors examine meaning along five dimensions the architecture of meaning, responding to uncertainty, meaning from retrospection, compensating for meaning violations, and restoring meaning: physiological and neurocognitive mechanisms. The editors of this …
Threat and Defense
Is dissonance reduction a special case of fluid compensation? Evidence that dissonant cognitions cause compensatory affirmation and abstraction
Cognitive dissonance theory shares much in common with other perspectives that address anomalies, uncertainty, and general expectancy violations. This has led some theorists to argue that these theories represent overlapping psychological processes. If responding to dissonance and uncertainty occurs through a common psychological process, one should expect that the behavioral outcomes of feeling uncertain would also apply to feelings of dissonanc…
The social pain of Cyberball: Decreased pupillary reactivity to exclusion cues
Lay Belief in Biopolitics and Political Prejudice
Building on psychological research linking essentialist beliefs about human differences with prejudice, we test whether lay belief in the biological basis of political ideology is associated with political intolerance and social avoidance. In two studies of American adults (Study 1: N = 288, Study 2: N = 164), we find that belief in the biological basis of political views is associated with greater intolerance and social avoidance of ideologicall…
The expectancy bias: Expectancy-violating faces evoke earlier pupillary dilation than neutral or negative faces
Humans maintain a negativity bias, whereby they perceive threatening stimuli to be more salient than rewarding or neutral stimuli. Across 6 within-subject experimental comparisons, we tested the hypothesis that humans maintain an even stronger expectancy bias, preferentially processing stimuli that violate mental representations of expected associations. To assess this bias, we measured variations in pupillary dilation as a means of determining a…
Beyond Statistical Ritual: Theory in Psychological Science
More than 40 years ago, Paul Meehl (1978) published a seminal critique of the state of theorizing in psychological science. According to Meehl, the quality of theories had diminished in the preceding decades, resulting in statistical methods standing in for theoretical rigor. In this introduction to the special issue Theory in Psychological Science, we apply Meehl’s account to contemporary psychological science. We suggest that by the time of Mee…
Pupillometry and Hindsight Bias: Physiological Arousal Predicts Compensatory Behavior
According to violation–compensation models of cognitive conflict, experiences that violate expected associations evoke a common, biologically based syndrome of aversive arousal, which in turn motivates compensation efforts to relieve this arousal. However, while substantial research shows that people indeed respond with increased arousal to expectancy violating events, evidence for the motivating role of arousal is rarely found. In two within-sub…
The Progressive Values Scale: Assessing the Ideological Schism on the Left
Progressivism has increasingly challenged traditional liberalism as the dominant influence within left-wing ideology. Across four studies, we developed a measure—the Progressive Values Scale (PVS)—that characterizes distinctly progressive values within the left-wing. In Study 1, left-wing participants evaluated divisive issues, with four scale factors emerging. In Study 2, we confirmed this factor structure and included a battery of personality a…
A brief life-purpose intervention reduces trauma-film anxiety and rumination
Although there is accumulating evidence for an inverse relation between life meaning and anxiety, most of this research has used cross-sectional designs.We examined the relation between life meaningandanxietywithanexperimentaldesign (N= 103), hypothesizing that compared to control, a brief life-purpose intervention administered after a filmstressorwould result in less anxiety and film-related rumination and that anxiety wouldmediate the intervent…
How people perceive dispositionally (non-) ambivalent others and why it matters
While research has studied the consequences of being ambivalent about a single attitude object, we know little about how dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent targets are perceived. Across six experiments we examined how people perceive and mentally represent dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent others, and how people expect to interact with dispositionally ambivalent and non-ambivalent targets. Experiment 1 demonstrated that a n…
The Face of Left-Wing Dissent: Progressives and Traditional Liberals Generate Divergently Negative and Positive Representations of J.K. Rowling
Recent perspectives have challenged the view that left-wingers are less likely to derogate out-group members. Building on research demonstrating heightened out-group derogation by Progressive (vs. Traditional Liberal) left-wingers, we examined whether Progressives and Traditional Liberals differentially tolerate in-group dissenters on the issue of gender identity. Using reverse correlation, Study 1 found that the Progressive-generated face of J.K…
What Narcissists Look Like and Why It’s Important
Prior research investigating public perceptions of narcissistic individuals has relied on participant ratings of researcher-selected dimensions or character vignettes, limiting generalizability and ecological validity. Using reverse correlation—a bottom-up, participant-driven method—we examined how people visually represent narcissists, and the consequences of these representations on attributional perceptions (e.g., trust, leadership, attraction…
How Do People Conceptualize Narcissism and Narcissistic Individuals
INTRODUCTION: Although past decades have seen notable advances in the conceptualization and assessment of narcissism, scholarship examining lay conceptualizations of the construct remains limited. METHOD: We report two studies utilizing bottom-up, participant-driven methodologies to examine public understandings of narcissism and narcissistic individuals. In Study 1 (n = 202), we thematically analyzed layperson definitions of narcissism and compa…
Psychology (22 works) · Social Psychology (19 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (10 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (10 works) · Cognitive psychology (9 works) · Cultural Differences and Values (9 works) · Developmental psychology (7 works) · Political science (6 works) · Social Psychology (6 works) · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion (5 works)