SPSP 2015 to feature symposia on social and personality psychology

Society for Personality and Social Psychology 16th Annual Convention

The 16th Annual Convention of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology (SPSP) will bring together 3,500 scientists to share their latest research in 84 symposia and 2,256 posters.

Symposia will cover a wide range of social and personality psychology topics; the psychology of food choice, big data, morality, romance and relationships, well-being, neuroscience, happiness, generosity and gift giving, the link between ecology and behavior, and much more.

Highlights from the symposia program include:

Challenging Misconceptions About the Psychology of Food Choice

Four talks challenge conventional wisdom about the effectiveness and consequences of traditional strategies for encouraging healthy eating habits, and suggest alternative approaches.

Happy Money 2.0: New Insights into the Relationship Between Money and Well-Being

This session investigates promising new directions in the science of spending. Research has provided evidence for how experiential consumption promotes happiness even in prospect, discusses how abundance can inhibit savoring and investigates the cost associated with lending money to friends. The session will also explore how millionaires think about wealth and well-being.

The Psychology of Gift Giving and Receiving

Gift exchanges can reveal how people think about others, what they value and enjoy, and how they build and maintain relationships. This symposium explores how gift recipients' characteristics affect which gifts are chosen, how gifts are then used, and how that in turn can affect how recipients feel about gift-givers.

Finding Psychological Signal in a Billion Tweets: Measurement Through the Language of Social Media

Millions of people express themselves through social media every day. But can this be leveraged for psychological science? This session explores new methods of language analysis from computer science and discusses how social media can be leveraged to study personality, mental health, and cross-cultural differences on a large scale.

Responses to Dominance Behavior in Others: The Good, the Bad, and the Threatening

People assess others' dominance instantaneously, but how they evaluate it varies. Women's (vs. men's) dominance may not be penalized when it's implicit or within relationships. Newcomers' dominance may be especially threatening - yet we may shrink from saying so.

Perceiving the Partner: How Beliefs About Others Shape the Relationship Experience

Relationships, and lives, are shaped fundamentally by our perceptions and expectations of others. In four talks, we consider how personality and experience influence evaluations of potential and current partners, which in turn have profound effects on the quality and development of one's relationships.

The Politics of Inequality and the Inequality of Politics

Economic inequality is at historic highs-- the wealthiest 1% own 40% of the nation's wealth. This staggering inequality raises the question: What are the psychological causes and effects of inequality? This symposium presents four talks on how subjective construals of inequality and status shape political motivations, beliefs and behaviors.