We investigated the source of the visual search advantage of some emotional facial expressions. An emotional face target (happy, surprised, disgusted, fearful, angry, or sad) was presented in an array of neutral faces. A faster detection was found for happy targets, with angry and, especially, sad targets being detected more poorly. Physical image properties (e.g., luminance) were ruled out as a potential source of these differences in visual search. In contrast, the search advantage is partly due to the facilitated processing of affective content, as shown by an emotion identification task. Happy expressions were identified faster than the other expressions and were less likely to be confounded with neutral faces, whereas misjudgements occurred more often for angry and sad expressions. Nevertheless, the distinctiveness of some local features (e.g., teeth) that are consistently associated with emotional expressions plays the strongest role in the search advantage pattern. When the contribution of these features to visual search was factored out statistically, the advantage disappeared.

Recently a psychological mechanism has been proposed between bodily purity and moral purity: the “Macbeth effect”. The act of washing their hands seems to free individuals of their guilt. However, the universality of this psychological mechanism is an empirical question that should be studied. In four studies we replicated the original Zhong & Liljenquist's experiments with Spanish samples. We were unsuccessful in replicating the Zhong & Liljenquist's results that supported cleansing as a psychological mechanism for compensating guilty: results couldn't confirm an increased mental accessibility of cleansing-related concepts or even a greater desire for cleansing products, neither a greater likelihood of taking antiseptic wipes. In addition we didn't find that physical cleansing alleviates the upsetting consequences of unethical behaviour. Spanish samples showed sensibility to morality and helping behaviour but not with cleansing as a way to reduce their threatened morality.

We examine the effect of transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) of right superior temporal sulcus (rSTS) in memorization of approach/avoidance relationship-action sentences; for example, “Alejandro accepted/rejected Marta in his group.” Sixty-five university students participated in a tDCS study, in which a between-subjects design was adopted. Sixty-four participants were also given the behavioral approach system (BAS) and behavioral inhibition system (BIS) scales. Participants were subjected to 20 min of stimulation: anodal (N = 24), cathodal (N = 21), or sham (N = 20); subsequently, they were given a list of 40 sentences (half approach and half avoidance) and told to try to memorize them. Finally, they performed a changed/same memory task (half the sentences were the “same” and half were “changed”). Previously, we had examined performance in the memory task without tDCS with another group of participants (N = 20). We found that anodal stimulation improved d’ index of discriminability (hits-false alarms) compared to sham and cathodal conditions for both approach and avoidance sentences. Moreover, the comparison between anodal and task-alone performance showed that stimulation improved d’ index of approach sentences more, as task-alone performance showed better discrimination for avoidance than for approach. Likewise, we explored a potential modulation of tDCS effect by (BAS) and (BIS) traits. We found that d’ index improvement in anodal stimulation condition only benefited low BAS and low BIS participants. Implications of these results are discussed in the context of rSTS function in encoding and memorizing verbally described intentional relationship-actions and the role of individual differences on modulating tDCS effect.