The Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) is a tingling, almost euphoric, sensation often elicited following certain visual or auditory stimulations (Barratt & Davis, 2015). Despite considerable media attention, little empirical work has investigated the underlying mechanisms. In the present study, ASMR enthusiasts and naïve observers listened to audio clips with and without ASMR-eliciting characteristics. We also manipulated participants’ expectations of ASMR, providing a measure of “placebo effects.” Although naïve participants were susceptible to suggestive instructions, experienced users were not, suggesting that initial exposure to ASMR media may evoke somatosensory responses consistent with one’s expectations. Implications for at-home stress management techniques are discussed.

In visual search, relatively infrequent targets are more likely to be "missed," a phenomenon known as the low-prevalence effect (LPE). Across five experiments, we examined the LPE in unfamiliar face matching, focusing on the roles of feedback and criterion shifting. Across experiments, observers made identity match/mismatch decisions to photograph pairs, and we manipulated target (i.e., identity mismatch) prevalence. Experiment 1 established the necessity of feedback for the LPE; observers were only sensitive to prevalence disparities when provided trial-level feedback. In Experiment 2, target prevalence affected decision criteria, without concomitant effects on perceptual sensitivity. In Experiments 3 through 5, we adopted a "retraining" paradigm, in which observers encountered blocks of high-prevalence targets midway through four 50-trial face-matching quartiles. High-prevalence targets were visually obvious (Experiment 3) or less obvious (Experiments 4 and 5). Whereas observers in equal-prevalence conditions remained unbiased throughout the experiments, those in low-prevalence conditions adopted conservative criteria by the second quartile. This criterion shift was largely resistant to "unbiasing" efforts. Only Experiment 5, which used an 18-item retraining block, revealed a successful (albeit slight) third-quartile liberal criterion shift, but observers were strongly conservative again by the fourth quartile. We discuss the applied and theoretical consequences of these results. (PsycINFO Database Record

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