Guest Editors: David S. March, Lowell Gaertner, & Michael A. Olson

Research indicates that people preferentially attend, process, and respond to physically threatening stimuli relative to merely negative (or positive) stimuli. Threats to life and limb influence many social phenomena including prejudice, attitudes, emotion, morality, response to disease (e.g., COVID-19), phobias and psychopathology, and suicide. The goal of this special issue is to advance our understanding of the role of physical threat in social functioning. For example, what is special about physically threatening stimuli? How, or in what contexts, are they differentially responded to than other stimuli? In what ways do they uniquely impact behavior, cognition, and attitudes? We invite submissions from all areas of psychology and welcome both full length articles and short research reports.

Submissions will be evaluated based on the rigor of the methods and analyses, transparency and completeness of reporting, ethical soundness, quality of reasoning, clarity of presentation, calibration of conclusions to evidence, and the originality of the ideas presented.

Social Psychological Bulletin is a diamond open access journal. All accepted manuscripts will be published open access and will be free for authors and for readers.

https://spb.psychopen.eu/index.php/spb

If you need further information on the Special Topic, please feel free to contact the Guest Editors:
David S. March (march@psy.fsu.edu)
Lowell Gaertner (gaertner@utk.edu)
Michael A. Olson (olson@utk.edu)