19 research outputs found
Cardiac afferent activity modulates the expression of racial stereotypes
Negative racial stereotypes tend to associate Black people with threat. This often leads to the misidentification of harmless objects as weapons held by a Black individual. Yet, little is known about how bodily states impact the expression of racial stereotyping. By tapping into the phasic activation of arterial baroreceptors, known to be associated with changes in the neural processing of fearful stimuli, we show activation of race-threat stereotypes synchronized with the cardiovascular cycle. Across two established tasks, stimuli depicting Black or White individuals were presented to coincide with either the cardiac systole or diastole. Results show increased race-driven misidentification of weapons during systole, when baroreceptor afferent firing is maximal, relative to diastole. Importantly, a third study examining the positive Black-athletic stereotypical association fails to demonstrate similar modulations by cardiac cycle. We identify a body–brain interaction wherein interoceptive cues can modulate threat appraisal and racially biased behaviour in context-dependent ways
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What immersive virtual environment technology can offer to social cognition
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Encoding flexibility revisited: Evidence for enhanced encoding of stereotype-inconsistent information under cognitive load
This experiment tested two key components of the Encoding Flexibility Model of stereotyping. Results demonstrated that a cognitive load increased the attention paid to stereotype-inconsistent information, and decreased the attention paid to stereotype-consistent information. Cognitive load also enhanced the perceptual encoding of inconsistent information while diminishing the perceptual encoding of consistent information. Implications of these results for the role of efficiency and the interaction of motivation and ability in social cognition are discussed
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Judging compound social categories: Compound familiarity and compatibility as determinants of processing mode
Three experiments tested the hypothesis that judgments about a group formed by two paired categories would rely on stored instances of individual category members (i.e., exemplars) in some cases, but not in others. Specifically, judgments of a relatively unfamiliar compound category (e.g., male elementary schoolteachers) were expected to rely on exemplars, whereas alternative sources of information, particularly abstract stereotypes, would be available for making judgments of a more familiar category (e.g., female elementary schoolteachers). Experiments 1 and 2 demonstrated support for these hypotheses. Experiment 3 ruled out the possibility that the differences in judgment strategy between the familiar and unfamiliar compound categories arose from the relative incompatibility of the two constituent categories (e.g., males and elementary schoolteachers), rather than familiarity. Implications for stereotype development and change are discussed