The time course of moral perception: an ERP investigation of the moral pop-out effect

Humans are highly attuned to perceptual cues about their values. A growing body of evidence suggests that people selectively attend to moral stimuli. However, it is unknown whether morality is prioritized early in perception or much later in cognitive processing. We use a combination of behavioral methods and electroencephalography to investigate how early in perception moral words are prioritized relative to non-moral words. The behavioral data replicate previous research indicating that people are more likely to correctly identify moral than non-moral words in a modified lexical decision task. The electroencephalography data reveal that words are distinguished from non-words as early as 200 ms after onset over frontal brain areas and moral words are distinguished from non-moral words 100 ms later over left-posterior cortex. Further analyses reveal that differences in brain activity to moral vs non-moral words cannot be explained by differences in arousal associated with the words. These results suggest that moral content might be prioritized in conscious awareness after an initial perceptual encoding but before subsequent memory processing or action preparation. This work offers a more precise theoretical framework for understanding how morality impacts vision and behavior

Changing Minds: Behavioral and Neural Insights Into Impression Updating

Person perception is a dynamic, evolving process. Because other people are an endless source of social information, people need to update their impressions of others based upon new information. This dissertation presents a program of research that integrates social psychological theory with the methods of cognitive neuroscience in order to gain new insights into the neural dynamics that support impression updating. After a brief introduction reviewing previous neuroimaging and behavioral work relevant to impression updating (Chapter 1), we begin by identifying an extended network of regions involved in the updating process (Chapter 2). In subsequent studies, we attempt to characterize general principles guiding activity of this network. First, we dissociate aspects of this network involved in meaningful updating of person representations from regions whose activity is more indicative of a response to mere inconsistency (Chapter 3). Next, we demonstrate that the perceived frequency of a given behavior is strongly predictive of its ultimate impact on both behavioral and neural markers of impression updating (Chapter 4). Further, we begin to assess bottom-up influences on updating (Chapter 5), demonstrating that behavioral frequency ultimately has a greater impact on updating outcomes than either behavioral domain or valence. Finally, we demonstrate that group membership can exert a top-down influence on the updating process (Chapter 6)

Context-dependent learning in social interaction: Trait impressions support flexible social choices

How do humans learn, through social interaction, whom to depend on in different situations? We compared the extent to which inferred trait attributes—as opposed to learned reward associations previously examined in feedback-based learning contexts—could adaptively inform cross-context social decision making. In four experiments, participants completed a novel task in which they chose to “hire” other players to solve math and verbal questions for money. These players varied in their trait-level competence across these contexts, and, independently, in the monetary rewards they offered to participants across contexts. Results revealed that participants chose partners primarily based on context-specific traits, as opposed to either global (e.g., cross-context) trait impressions or material rewards. When making choices in novel contexts—including determining who to choose for social and emotional support—participants generalized trait knowledge from past contexts that required similar traits. Reward-based learning, by contrast, demonstrated significantly weaker context-sensitivity and generalization. These findings suggest that people form context-dependent trait impressions from interactive feedback and use this knowledge to make flexible social decisions. These results support a novel theoretical account of how interaction-based social learning can support context-specific impression formation and adaptive decision making

Social Attributions from Faces : Determinants, Consequences, Accuracy, and Functional Significance

Since the early twentieth century, psychologists have known that there is consensus in attributing social and personality characteristics from facial appearance. Recent studies have shown that surprisingly little time and effort are needed to arrive at this consensus. Here we review recent research on social attributions from faces. Section I outlines data-driven methods capable of identifying the perceptual basis of consensus in social attributions from faces (e.g., What makes a face look threatening?). Section II describes nonperceptual determinants of social attributions (e.g., person knowledge and incidental associations). Section III discusses evidence that attributions from faces predict important social outcomes in diverse domains (e.g., investment decisions and leader selection). In Section IV, we argue that the diagnostic validity of these attributions has been greatly overstated in the literature. In the final section, we offer an account of the functional significance of these attributions. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Psychology Volume 66 is November 30, 2014. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/catalog/pubdates.aspx for revised estimates

Cues to racial prototypicality exacerbate bias in pain perception

Racial disparities in pain care may be facilitated by perceptual bias, consequent to pervasive structural inequities. While perceptual disruptions in recognizing pain on Black faces have been demonstrated under tightly controlled conditions (e.g., controlling for low-level stimulus differences in luminance and facial structure, using all male stimuli), cues to racial prototypicality may magnify such effects by activating stronger representations of the Black racial category. Indeed, such cues (e.g., skin tone, facial features, gender) moderate social perception, with some evidence pointing towards deleterious consequences in the domain of health. Here, we assessed how these factors shape racial bias in pain perception: we examined the effects of racially prototypic facial cues in Experiments 1 and 2 and target gender in a meta-analysis across five additional experiments. Overall, darker skin tones were associated with more stringent pain perception, while racially prototypic structural features exacerbated racial bias in pain perception. Moreover, target gender reliably moderated the effect of race on pain outcomes: racial biases in both pain perception and treatment were larger for male (versus female) targets. Though their pain was seen more readily than the pain of Black men, Black women consistently received the lowest amounts of pain treatment. These data demonstrate the overall robustness of racial bias in pain perception and its facilitation of gaps in treatment, but also the extent to which these biases are shaped by both bottom-up and top-down cues to racial prototypicality

The Dorsomedial Prefrontal Cortex Plays a Causal Role in Integrating Social Impressions from Faces and Verbal Descriptions

Several neuroimaging studies point to a key role of the dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC) in the formation of socially relevant impressions. In 3 different experiments, participants were required to form socially relevant impressions about other individuals on the basis of text descriptions of their social ehaviors, and to decide whether a face alone, a trait adjective (e.g.,“ selfish”), or a face pre sented with a trait adjective was consistent or inconsistent with the impression they had formed. Before deciding whether the target stimulus matched the impression they had previously formed, participants received transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS) over the dmPFC, the inferior frontal gyrus (IFG, also implicated in social impression formation), or over a control site (vertex). Results from the 3 experiments converged in showing that interfering with dmPFC activity significantly delayed participants in responding whether a face- adjective pair was consistent with the impression they had formed. No effects of TMS were observed following stimulation of the IFG or when evaluations had to be made on faces or trait adjectives presented alone. Our findings critically extend previous neuroimaging evidence by indicating a causal role of the dmPFC in creating coherent impressions based on the integration of face and verbal description of social behaviors

Double dissociation: Circadian off-peak times increase emotional reactivity; aging impairs emotion regulation via reappraisal.

This study explored how the effectiveness of specific emotion regulation strategies might be influenced by aging and by time of day, given that in older age the circadian peak in cognitive performance is earlier in the day. We compared the benefit gained by 40 older (60–78 years; 20 women) and 40 younger (18–30 years; 20 women) adults during either on-peak or off-peak circadian times on 2 specific types of cognitive emotion regulation strategies: distraction and reappraisal. Participants rated their negative emotional responses to negative and neutral images under 3 conditions: a baseline nonregulation condition, a distraction condition involving a working memory task, and a reappraisal condition that involved reinterpreting the situation displayed using specific preselected strategies. First, as hypothesized, there was a crossover interaction such that participants in each age group reported more negative reactivity at their off-peak time of day. Second, a double dissociation was observed as circadian rhythms affected only negative reactivity —with reactivity highest at off-peak times—and aging diminished reappraisal but not distraction ability or reactivity. These findings add to growing evidence that understanding the effects of aging on emotion and emotion regulation depends on taking both time of day and type of regulatory strategy into account

Cues to racial prototypicality exacerbate bias in pain perception

Racial disparities in pain care may be facilitated by perceptual bias, consequent to pervasive structural inequities. While perceptual disruptions in recognizing pain on Black faces have been demonstrated under tightly controlled conditions (e.g., controlling for low-level stimulus differences in luminance and facial structure, using all male stimuli), cues to racial prototypicality may magnify such effects by activating stronger representations of the Black racial category. Indeed, such cues (e.g., skin tone, facial features, gender) moderate social perception, with some evidence pointing towards deleterious consequences in the domain of health. Here, we assessed how these factors shape racial bias in pain perception: we examined the effects of racially prototypic facial cues in Experiments 1 and 2 and target gender in a meta-analysis across five additional experiments. Overall, darker skin tones were associated with more stringent pain perception, while racially prototypic structural features exacerbated racial bias in pain perception. Moreover, target gender reliably moderated the effect of race on pain outcomes: racial biases in both pain perception and treatment were larger for male (versus female) targets. Though their pain was seen more readily than the pain of Black men, Black women consistently received the lowest amounts of pain treatment. These data demonstrate the overall robustness of racial bias in pain perception and its facilitation of gaps in treatment, but also the extent to which these biases are shaped by both bottom-up and top-down cues to racial prototypicality