Beyond gender stereotypes in language comprehension: self sex-role descriptions affect the brain’s potentials associated with agreement processing

We recorded Event-Related Potentials to investigate differences in the use of gender information during the processing of reflexive pronouns. Pronouns either matched the gender provided by role nouns (such as “king” or “engineer”) or did not. We compared two types of gender information, definitional information, which is semantic in nature (a mother is female), or stereotypical (a nurse is likely to be female). When they followed definitional role-nouns, gender-mismatching pronouns elicited a P600 effect reflecting a failure in the agreement process. When instead the gender violation occurred after stereotypical role-nouns the Event Related Potential response was biphasic, being positive in parietal electrodes and negative in anterior left electrodes. The use of a correlational approach showed that those participants with more “feminine” or “expressive” self sex-role descriptions showed a P600 response for stereotype violations, suggesting that they experienced the mismatch as an agreement violation; whereas less “expressive” participants showed an Nref effect, indicating more effort spent in linking the pronouns with the possible, although less likely, counter-stereotypical referent

How do you say ‘hello’? Personality impressions from brief novel voices

On hearing a novel voice, listeners readily form personality impressions of that speaker. Accurate or not, these impressions are known to affect subsequent interactions; yet the underlying psychological and acoustical bases remain poorly understood. Furthermore, hitherto studies have focussed on extended speech as opposed to analysing the instantaneous impressions we obtain from first experience. In this paper, through a mass online rating experiment, 320 participants rated 64 sub-second vocal utterances of the word ‘hello’ on one of 10 personality traits. We show that: (1) personality judgements of brief utterances from unfamiliar speakers are consistent across listeners; (2) a two-dimensional ‘social voice space’ with axes mapping Valence (Trust, Likeability) and Dominance, each driven by differing combinations of vocal acoustics, adequately summarises ratings in both male and female voices; and (3) a positive combination of Valence and Dominance results in increased perceived male vocal Attractiveness, whereas perceived female vocal Attractiveness is largely controlled by increasing Valence. Results are discussed in relation to the rapid evaluation of personality and, in turn, the intent of others, as being driven by survival mechanisms via approach or avoidance behaviours. These findings provide empirical bases for predicting personality impressions from acoustical analyses of short utterances and for generating desired personality impressions in artificial voices

Exploring the Neural Correlates of Social Stereotyping

Judging people on the basis of cultural stereotypes is a ubiquitous facet of daily life, yet little is known about how this fundamental inferential strategy is implemented in the brain. Using fMRI, we measured neural activity while participants made judgments about the likely actor (i.e., person-focus) and location (i.e., place-focus) of a series of activities, some of which were associated with prevailing gender stereotypes. Results revealed that stereotyping was underpinned by activity in areas associated with evaluative processing (e.g., ventral medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala) and the representation of action knowledge (e.g., supramarginal gyrus, middle temporal gyrus). In addition, activity accompanying stereotypic judgments was correlated with the strength of participants' explicit and implicit gender stereotypes. These findings elucidate how stereotyping fits within the neuroscience of person understanding.Psycholog

Thought suppression in the context of the normative window model of prejudice

The following study presents a novel investigation of the moderating role of social norms in the suppression of stereotype-related thoughts and the subsequent rebound effect, hypothesizing that suppressing stereotyping thoughts regarding certain social groups leads to a greater rebound effect than suppressing stereotyping thoughts about other social groups. This experiment showed no evidence that social norms prescribing the way one should think about prejudice against a certain social group moderates the rebound effect. Participants in the suppression condition experienced the rebound effect, however the rebound effect was not significantly different across target social groups. While my results replicate past research in demonstrating the rebound effect across conditions, the results did not support my hypothesis as I did not find a significant difference in ease of thought suppression between social groups

Behavioral Economics and Developmental Science: A New Framework to Support Early Childhood Interventions

Public policies have actively responded to an emergent social and neuroscientific evidence base documenting the benefits of targeting services to children during the earliest period of their development. But problems of low utilization, inconsistent participation, and low retention continue to present themselves as challenges. Although most interventions recognize and address structural and psycho-social barriers to parent’s engagement, few take seriously the decision making roles of parents. Using insights from the behavioral sciences, we revisit assumptions about the presumed behavior of parents in a developmental context. We then describe ways in which this framework informs features of interventions that can be designed to augment the intended impacts of early development, education and care initiatives by improving parent engagement

Anterior Temporal Lobe Tracks the Formation of Prejudice

Despite advances in understanding the brain structures involved in the expression of stereotypes and prejudice, little is known about the brain structures involved in their acquisition. Here, we combined fMRI, a task involving learning the valence of different social groups, and modeling of the learning process involved in the development of biases in thinking about social groups that support prejudice. Participants read descriptions of valenced behaviors performed by members of novel social groups, with majority groups being more frequently encountered during learning than minority groups. A model-based fMRI analysis revealed that the anterior temporal lobe tracked the trial-by-trial changes in the valence associated with each group encountered in the task. Descriptions of behavior by group members that deviated from the group average (i.e., prediction errors) were associated with activity in the left lateral pFC, dorsomedial pFC, and lateral anterior temporal cortex. Minority social groups were associated with slower acquisition rates and more activity in the ventral striatum and ACC/dorsomedial pFC compared with majority groups. These findings provide new insights into the brain regions that (a) support the acquisition of prejudice and (b) detect situations in which an individual's behavior deviates from the prejudicial attitude held toward their group

Performance on Indirect Measures of Race Evaluation Predicts Amygdala Activation

We used fMRI to explore the neural substrates involved in the unconscious evaluation of Black and White social groups. Specifically, we focused on the amygdala, a subcortical structure known to play a role in emotional learning and evaluation. In Experiment 1, White American subjects observed faces of unfamiliar Black and White males. The strength of amygdala activation to Black-versus-White faces was correlated with two indirect (unconscious) measures of race evaluation (Implicit Association Test [IAT] and potentiated startle), but not with the direct (conscious) expression of race attitudes. In Experiment 2, these patterns were not obtained when the stimulus faces belonged to familiar and positively regarded Black and White individuals. Together, these results suggest that amygdala and behavioral responses to Black-versus-White faces in White subjects reflect cultural evaluations of social groups modified by individual experience.Psycholog