Evidence for racial prejudice at the implicit level and its relationship with questionnaire measures

An intergenerational programme delays health impairment in nursing home residents: the Duplo project

PURPOSE

To analyse whether an intergenerational programme in which students interacted with institutionalised older persons had any impact on the older persons' functional status.

METHODS

Each academic year, a group of older adults living in nursing homes were divided into two arms. For the next four months, the first group received daily visits from a group of students during which they followed a pre-established activity plan, whilst the other arm proceeded with their normal activity. After 4 months, the groups crossed over, and the second arm received the student visits, whilst the first group returned to their normal activity. A battery of tests was performed at inception, crossover and the end of the second period. The tests explored mobility (Timed Up-and-Go), cognition (Mini-Mental Examination), executive function (Frontal Assessment Battery) and mood (Geriatric Depression Scale). A dichotomous aggregate "significant impairment" variable was deemed to be present when there was at least a 20% loss of function (compared to the value at the beginning of the period) in any of the aforementioned tests.

RESULTS

The study included 289 older adults who visited with 91 students. Subjects in the active phase had a lower incidence of significant impairment than those in the control phase (O.R. 0.90, p < 0.01). There were no significant differences in the individual variables.

CONCLUSION

An intergenerational project with students visiting older adults in nursing homes had a protective effect, delaying functional decay in older adults.

Automatic and controlled information processing in the context of students’ ethnic background and social status: An eye-tracking study

Based on the continuum model of impression formation (Fiske & Neuberg, 1990), information processing can be more or less automated or controlled and thus relies more or less on stereotype-based or individual-based characteristics. Also, teachers’ impression formation can be influenced by social categories like students’ ethnic background or social status. However, when teachers form an impression of students’ abilities or performance social categories should not play a role. But a lot of empirical findings show that teachers make a difference depending on students’ backgrounds. Whether this can be explained by a more automated or controlled information processing depending on students’ backgrounds is still an open question. Accordingly, the purpose of this study was to investigate teacher students’ impression formation in dependence on students’ ethnic backgrounds and social status. In order to investigate whether information processing differs according to students’ ethnic backgrounds and social status, an experimental eye-tracking study with 45 teacher students was designed. As physiological processes are strongly connected to psychological processes, specific eye-movements can be interpreted as indicators for physiological arousal in first place, but might also allow conclusions about mental processes like information processing. Pupil diameter and blink rate were measured while participants read three case vignettes with manipulated student background. Analysis of variance with repeated measures showed differences in pupil diameter and blink rate according to students’ background. Results showed less arousal when forming an impression about students without immigrant background and with high social status compared to students with immigrant background and with low social status. This might indicate more automated information processing for non-immigrant students with high-status, and more controlled processing for students with immigrant background and low-status.

Lack of affective priming indicates attitude-behaviour discrepancy for COVID-19 affiliated words

The ongoing novel coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has resulted in the enforcement of national public health safety measures including precautionary behaviours such as border closures, movement restrictions, total or partial lockdowns, social distancing, and face mask mandates in order to reduce the spread of this disease. The current study uses affective priming, an indirect behavioural measure of implicit attitude, to evaluate COVID-19 attitudes. Explicitly, participants rated their overall risk perception associated with contracting COVID-19 significantly lower compared to their perception of necessary precautions and overall adherence to public health measures. During baseline trials, participants explicitly rated COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, similar to traditional unpleasant word stimuli. Despite rating the COVID-19 affiliated words as unpleasant, affective priming was not observed for congruent prime-target COVID-19 affiliated word pairs when compared to congruent prime-target pleasant and unpleasant words. Overall, these results provide quantitative evidence that COVID-19 affiliated words do not invoke the same implicit attitude response as traditional pleasant and unpleasant word stimuli, despite conscious explicit rating of the COVID-19 words as unpleasant. This reduction in unpleasant attitude towards COVID-19 related words may contribute towards decreased fear-related behaviours and increased incidences of risky-behaviour facilitating the movement of the virus.

Teachers' Implicit Attitudes Toward Ethnic Minority Students: A Systematic Review

Although instruments to assess implicit attitudes were introduced more than 20 years ago, still there are few studies in the field of education that use them, despite the evidence that teachers with negative implicit attitudes can negatively affect the academic performance of their students. This review aims to summarize the results of studies that investigated the relationship between implicit ethnic attitudes of teachers and achievement of students. The review was conducted according to PRISMA-statement through searches in the scientific database PsychINFO, PsycARTICLES, and ERIC. Nineteen studies were included. Results show that overall teachers (from different school levels and different countries) hold negative implicit attitudes toward ethnic minority students, which play an important role in affecting the academic path of these groups of students. This review highlights the need to continue to use implicit attitudes procedures in future researches, in order to identify those factors that may contribute to the formation and expression of implicit attitudes of teachers; and the need to increase awareness of the implicit attitudes and multicultural practices of teachers in teaching programs.

Asymmetric Underlying Mechanisms of Relation-Based and Property-Based Noun-Noun Conceptual Combination

Conceptual combination is a fundamental human cognitive ability by which people can experience infinite thinking by artfully combining finite knowledge. For example, one can instantly combine “cactus” and “fish” together as “prickly fish” even if one has never previously heard of a “cactus fish.” Although two major combinatorial types—property and relational combinations—have been identified, the underlying processes of each remain elusive. This study investigates the asymmetric processing mechanisms underlying property and relational combinations by examining differential semantic activation during noun–noun conceptual combination. Across two experiments utilizing each combinatorial process as semantic priming and implementing a lexical decision task immediately after combination, we measure and compare the semantic activation patterns of intrinsic and extrinsic semantic features in these two combinatorial types. We found converging evidence that property and relational combinations involve asymmetric semantic information and entail distinct processing mechanisms. In property combination, the intrinsic feature in the modifier concept showed greater activation than the semantic feature of the same dimension in the head concept. In contrast, in relational combination, the extrinsic semantic feature in the head concept and the whole modifier concept showed similar levels of activation. Moreover, our findings also showed that these patterns of semantic activation occurred only when the combinatorial process was complete, indicating that accessing the same lexical-semantic information is not sufficient to observe asymmetric patterns. These findings demonstrate that property combination involves replacing a specific semantic feature of the head noun with that of the modifier noun, whereas relational combination involves completing the semantic feature of the head noun with the whole modifier concept. We discuss the implications of these findings, research limitations, and future research directions.

Exploring the Implicit Link Between Red and Aggressiveness as Well as Blue and Agreeableness

Previous studies have found a link between red and aggressive behavior. For example, athletes who wear red uniforms in sports are considered to have a competitive advantage. So far, most previous studies have adopted self-report methods, which have low face validity and were easily influenced by the social expectations. Therefore, the study used two implicit methods to further explore the association between red and aggressiveness. A modified Stroop task was used in Experiment 1 to probe college students' differences between "congruent" tasks (i.e., red-aggressiveness and blue-agreeableness) and "incongruent" tasks (i.e., red-agreeableness and blue-aggressiveness). Result showed that participants responded more quickly to the congruent tasks than the incongruent tasks. Then, in order to adapt to the competitive context, Experiment 2 used an implicit association test with photos of athletes as the stimulus to college students and athletes to evaluate "congruent" tasks (i.e., red uniform photo-aggressiveness and blue uniform photo-agreeableness) as well as "incongruent" tasks (i.e., red uniform photo-agreeableness and blue uniform photo-aggressiveness), respectively. According to the results, both college students and athletes respond faster to congruent tasks than to incongruent tasks. Besides, athletes' reactions to the red-aggressiveness association are faster than college students, which may relate to the athletes' professional experience. The athletes may be more aggressive and impulsive. Overall, the study has attempted to examine the association between red and aggressiveness through implicit methods, but in the future, researches are need to find a deep association from brain mechanism aspect.

Black "Reading the Mind in the Eyes" task: The development of a task assessing mentalizing from black faces

Researchers investigating various facets of theory of mind, sometimes referred to as mentalizing, are increasingly exploring how social group membership influences this process. To facilitate this research, we introduce the Black Reading the Mind in The Eyes task, a freely available 36-item Black RME task with an array of norming data about these stimuli. Stimuli have been created and equated to match the original Reading the Mind in the Eyes (RME) task which included only White faces. Norming data were collected in three waves that characterized the physical properties of the stimuli and also participants’ subjective ratings of the stimuli. Between each round of ratings, stimuli that did not equate with the original RME task or were not distinctly recognized as Black were removed and new stimuli were incorporated in the next round until we obtained 36 distinctive Black RME targets that matched the 36 mental states used in the original RME stimulus set. Both stimulus sets were similarly difficult and subsequent testing showed that neither Black nor White participants’ mentalizing accuracy varied as a function of target race. We provide instructions for obtaining the database and stimulus ratings.

Does the aura surrounding healthy-related imported products fade in China? ERP evidence for the country-of-origin stereotype

Chinese consumers’ craze about imported products, especially foods and drugs, peaked after various safety incidents, such as the contamination of Chinese dairy products. Recently, this boom has gradually receded because of the constant quality problems of imported products and the stricter safety supervision of domestic products. Researchers have measured consumer’s perception toward domestic and imported products in various ways. In the current research, we investigated whether the country-of-origin stereotype has weakened in Chinese young consumers at the neurological level. By using a word-pair paradigm, 21 young participants were required to classify positive or negative words while event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed that reaction time to identify negative words following presentation of imported products (imported-negative condition) was longer than domestic products (domestic-negative condition). The amplitudes of N270 and LPP evoked in the imported-negative condition were significantly larger than those in the domestic-negative condition, possibly reflecting the higher expectation conflict when participate identified the adjectives as negative primed by imported healthy-related products. These findings revealed that young Chinese consumers still evaluated imported products better than domestic products.

Abstract social categories facilitate access to socially skewed words

Recent work has shown that listeners process words faster if said by a member of the group that typically uses the word. This paper further explores how the social distributions of words affect lexical access by exploring whether access is facilitated by invoking more abstract social categories. We conduct four experiments, all of which combine an Implicit Association Task with a Lexical Decision Task. Participants sorted real and nonsense words while at the same time sorting older and younger faces (exp. 1), male and female faces (exp. 2), stereotypically male and female objects (exp. 3), and framed and unframed objects, which were always stereotypically male or female (exp. 4). Across the experiments, lexical decision to socially skewed words is facilitated when the socially congruent category is sorted with the same hand. This suggests that the lexicon contains social detail from which individuals make social abstractions that can influence lexical access.

Using knowledge from human research to improve understanding of contest theory and contest dynamics

Our understanding of animal contests and the factors that affect contest dynamics and decisions stems from a long and prosperous collaboration between empiricists and theoreticians. Over the last two decades, however, theoretical predictions regarding the factors that affect individual decisions before, during and after a contest are becoming increasingly difficult to test empirically. Extremely large sample sizes are necessary to experimentally test the nuanced theoretical assumptions surrounding how information is used by animals during a contest, how context changes the information used, and how individuals change behaviour as a result of both the information available and the context in which the information is acquired. In this review, we discuss how the investigation of contests in humans through the collaboration of biologists and psychologists may advance contest theory and dynamics in general. We argue that a long and productive history exploring human behaviour and psychology combined with technological advancements provide a unique opportunity to manipulate human perception during contests and collect unbiased data, allowing more targeted examinations of particular aspects of contest theory (e.g. winner/loser effects, information use as a function of age). We hope that our perspective provides the impetus for many future collaborations between biologists and psychologists.

The face-specific proportion congruency effect: social stimuli as contextual cues

Previous research shows that larger interference is observed in contexts associated with a high proportion of congruent trials than in those associated with a low proportion of congruent trials. Given that one of the most relevant contexts for human beings is social context, researchers have recently explored the possibility that social stimuli could also work as contextual cues for the allocation of attentional control. In fact, it has been shown that individuals use social categories (i.e., men and women) as cues to allocate attentional control. In this work, we go further by showing that individual faces (instead of the social categories they belong to) associated with a high proportion of congruent trials can also lead to larger interference effects compared to individual faces predicting a relatively low proportion of congruent trials. Furthermore, we show that faces associated with a high proportion of congruent trials are more positively evaluated than faces associated with a high proportion of incongruent trials. These results demonstrate that unique human faces are potential contextual cues than can be employed to apply cognitive control when performing an automatic task.

Older adults show less interference from task-irrelevant social categories: evidence from the garner paradigm

Though age-related difference in most cognitive performance has been found, there was no previous research examining age difference in multiple social categorizations. Using faces as stimuli and Garner Selective Attention Paradigm, this study explored the different characteristics of implicit and explicit social categorization between young and older adults. The results showed that young perceivers explicitly categorized gender and age of the faces faster and more readily than older perceivers did. When young adults judged specific category (gender category in Experiment 1; age category in Experiment 2), they were interfered from the completing irrelative category; however, irrelative category could not capture older adults' attention. These results first suggest perceivers' age indeed plays an important role in multiple social categorizations.

For Black men, being tall increases threat stereotyping and police stops

Height seems beneficial for men in terms of salaries and success; however, past research on height examines only White men. For Black men, height may be more costly than beneficial, primarily signaling threat rather than competence. Three studies reveal the downsides of height in Black men. Study 1 analyzes over 1 million New York Police Department stop-and-frisk encounters and finds that tall Black men are especially likely to receive unjustified attention from police. Then, studies 2 and 3 experimentally demonstrate a causal link between perceptions of height and perceptions of threat for Black men, particularly for perceivers who endorse stereotypes that Black people are more threatening than White people. Together, these data reveal that height is sometimes a liability for Black men, particularly in contexts in which threat is salient.

Looking the part (to me): effects of racial prototypicality on race perception vary by prejudice

Less racially prototypic faces elicit more category competition during race categorization. Top-down factors (e.g. stereotypes), however, affect categorizations, suggesting racial prototypicality may enhance category competition in certain perceivers. Here, we examined how prejudice affects race category competition and stabilization when perceiving faces varying in racial prototypicality. Prototypically low vs high Black relative to White faces elicited more category competition and slower response latencies during categorization (Experiment 1), suggesting a pronounced racial prototypicality effect on minority race categorization. However, prejudice predicted the extent of category competition between prototypically low vs high Black faces. Suggesting more response conflict toward less prototypic Black vs White faces, anterior cingulate cortex activity increased toward Black vs White faces as they decreased in racial prototypicality, with prejudice positively predicting this difference (Experiment 2). These findings extend the literature on racial prototypicality and categorization by showing that relative prejudice tempers the extent of category competition and response conflict engaged when initially perceiving faces.

Childhood contact predicts hemispheric asymmetry in cross-race face processing

Participants typically process same-race faces more quickly and more accurately than cross-race faces. This deficit is amplified in the right hemisphere of the brain, presumably due to its involvement in configural processing. The present research tested the idea that cross-race contact tunes cognitive and perceptual systems, influencing this asymmetric race-based deficit in face processing. Participants with high and low levels of contact performed a lateralized recognition task with same- and cross-race faces. Replicating prior work, participants with minimal contact showed cross-race deficits in processing that were larger in the right hemisphere. For participants with more contact, this lateralized deficit disappeared. This effect of contact seems to be independent of race-based attitudes (e.g., prejudice).

"Worse but Ours," or "Better but Theirs?" - The Role of Implicit Consumer Ethnocentrism (ICE) in Product Preference

The goal of this project was to investigate whether consumer ethnocentrism is purely conscious mechanism based on ideology, as suggested by Shimp and Sharma (1987), or rather is an automatic, unconscious process. The aim of the project was an introduction of the Implicit Consumer Ethnocentrism (ICE) concept, measured by the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The goal of the four studies conducted was to investigate the following issues: (a) whether ICE - an automatic mechanism underlying the preference for local products over foreign - this could be observed next to the more ideologically based classic consumer ethnocentrism; (b) what happens when the consumer's automatic preference for local products (ICE) is confronted by objective evidence of the superiority of foreign products or by the inferiority of local products. It was assumed that ICE could be reduced when foreign products were associated with a higher level of competence than local products, and this could explain the preference for foreign products over local often observed in less developed countries. In study 1 the ICE for different product categories of existing brands was tested, and in study 2 the ICE was measured in the context of non-existent brands. Both studies showed a strong in-group brand preference and confirmed the existence of new phenomena - ICE. The results of studies 3 and 4 again indicated a strong, automatic in-group brand favoritism effect as measured by IAT - participants preferred local brands over foreign. However, the inclusion of well-known foreign brands associated with high competence reduced the IAT effect (in-group preference).

Explicit Instructions Increase Cognitive Costs of Deception in Predictable Social Context

Convincing participants to deceive remains one of the biggest and most important challenges of laboratory-based deception research. The simplest and most prevalent method involves explicitly instructing participants to lie or tell the truth before presenting each task item. The usual finding of such experiments is increased cognitive load associated with deceptive responses, explained by necessity to inhibit default and automatic honest responses. However, explicit instructions are usually coupled with the absence of social context in the experimental task. Context plays a key role in social cognition by activating prior knowledge, which facilitates behaviors consistent with the latter. We hypothesized that in the presence of social context, both honest and deceptive responses can be produced on the basis of prior knowledge, without reliance on truth and without additional cognitive load during deceptive responses. In order to test the hypothesis, we have developed Speed-Dating Task (SDT), which is based on a real-life social event. In SDT, participants respond both honestly and deceptively to questions in order to appear similar to each of the dates. The dates are predictable and represent well-known categories (i.e., atheist or conservative). In one condition participants rely on explicit instructions preceding each question (external cue). In the second condition no explicit instructions are present, so the participants need to adapt based on prior knowledge about the category the dates belong to (internal cue). With internal cues, reaction times (RTs) are similar for both honest and deceptive responses. However, in the presence of external cues (EC), RTs are longer for deceptive than honest responses, suggesting that deceptive responses are associated with increased cognitive load. Compared to internal cues, deception costs were higher when EC were present. However, the effect was limited to the first part of the experiment, only partially confirming our initial hypothesis. The results suggest that the presence of social context in deception tasks might have a significant influence on cognitive processes associated with deception.

Hair penalties: the negative influence of Afrocentric hair on ratings of Black women's dominance and professionalism

Purpose: Women are penalized if they do not behave in a stereotype-congruent manner (Heilman, 1983, 2001; Eagly and Carli, 2007). For example, because women are not expected to be agentic they incur an “agency penalty” for expressing anger, dominance or assertiveness (Rudman, 1998; Rudman and Glick, 1999, 2001; Eagly and Karau, 2002; Rudman and Fairchild, 2004; Brescoll and Uhlmann, 2008; Livingston et al., 2012). Yet, all women are not equally penalized (Livingston et al., 2012). We make a novel contribution by examining how both White and Black evaluators respond to displays of Black women’s dominance, in this case, whether Black women choose to wear Afrocentric or Eurocentric hairstyles.

Design/methodology/approach: We conducted three experimental studies to examine the influence of target hairstyle and participant race on ratings of the target’s professionalism (Studies 1, 2, and 3) and dominance (Study 2). Study 1 was an online experimental study with 200 participants (112 females, 87 males, 1 missing gender; 160 Whites, 19 Blacks, 11 Latinos, 7 Asian Americans and 3 who identify as “other”; M_age = 35.5, SD = 11.4). Study 2 was an online experimental study with 510 participants (276 women, 234 males; 256 Blacks, 254 Whites; M_age = 41.25 years, SD = 12.21). Study 3 was an online experimental study with 291 participants (141 Blacks, 150 Whites, M_age = 47.5 years, SD = 11.66).

Findings: Black, as compared to White, evaluators gave higher agency penalties to Black employment candidates when they donned Afrocentric versus Eurocentric hair, rating them as more dominant and less professional.

Implications: The present research illustrates the significance of considering both target and evaluator race when examining the influence of agency, and specifically dominance, on ratings of professionalism.

Just entertainment: effects of TV series about intrigue on young adults

The potential harmful effects of media violence have been studied systematically and extensively. However, very little attention has been devoted to the intrigue and struggles between people depicted in the mass media. A longitudinal randomized experimental group-control group, pretest–posttest design study was conducted to examine the potential effects of this type of TV series on young adults. A typical and popular TV series was select as a stimulus. By scrutinizing the outline of this TV series and inspired by studies of the effects of media violence, one behavioral observation and five scales were adopted as dependent measures. The study did not find any effect of the intrigue TV series on any of the six dependent variables. Finally, possible interference variables or moderators were discussed.

Regulatory focus and generalized trust: the impact of prevention-focused self-regulation on trusting others

The current research suggests that taking self-regulatory mechanisms into account provides insights regarding individuals' responses to threats in social interactions. In general, based on the notion that a prevention-focused orientation of self-regulation is associated with a need for security and a vigilant tendency to avoid losses and other types of negative events we advocate that a prevention-focused orientation, both as a disposition as well as a situationally induced state, lowers generalized trust, thus hindering cooperation within social interactions that entail threats. Specifically, we found that the more individuals' habitual self-regulatory orientation is dominated by a prevention focus, the less likely they are to score high on a self-report measure of generalized trust (Study 1), and to express trust in a trust game paradigm as manifested in lower sums of transferred money (Studies 2 and 3). Similar findings were found when prevention focus was situationally manipulated (Study 4). Finally, one possible factor underlying the impact of prevention-focused self-regulation on generalized trust was demonstrated as individuals with a special sensitivity to negative information were significantly affected by a subtle prevention focus manipulation (versus control condition) in that they reacted with reduced trust in the trust game (Study 5). In sum, the current findings document the crucial relevance of self-regulatory orientations as conceptualized in regulatory focus theory regarding generalized trust and responses to threats within a social interaction. The theoretical and applied implications of the findings are discussed.

Evidence of nonconscious stereotyping of Hispanic patients by nursing and medical students

BACKGROUND

Current research on nonconscious stereotyping in healthcare is limited by an emphasis on practicing physicians' beliefs about African American patients and by heavy reliance on a measure of nonconscious processes that allows participants to exert control over their behaviors if they are motivated to appear nonbiased.

OBJECTIVES

The present research examined whether nursing and medical students exhibit nonconscious activation of stereotypes about Hispanic patients using a task that subliminally primes patient ethnicity. It was hypothesized that participants would exhibit greater activation of noncompliance and health risk stereotypes after subliminal exposure to Hispanic faces compared with non-Hispanic White faces and, because ethnicity was primed outside of conscious awareness, that explicit motivations to control prejudice would not moderate stereotype activation.

METHODS

Nursing and medical students completed a sequential priming task that measured the speed with which they recognized words related to noncompliance and health risk after subliminal exposure to Hispanic and non-Hispanic White faces. They then completed explicit measures of their motivation to control prejudice against Hispanics.

RESULTS

Both nursing and medical students exhibited greater activation of noncompliance and health risk words after subliminal exposure to Hispanic faces, compared with non-Hispanic White faces. Explicit motivations to control prejudice did not moderate stereotype activation.

DISCUSSION

These findings show that, regardless of their motivation to treat Hispanics fairly, nursing and medical students exhibit nonconscious activation of negative stereotypes when they encounter Hispanics. Implications are discussed.

Implicit measures of early-life family conditions: relationships to psychosocial characteristics and cardiovascular disease risk in adulthood

OBJECTIVES

An implicit measure of early-life family conditions was created to help address potential biases in responses to self-reported questionnaires of early-life family environments. We investigated whether a computerized affect attribution paradigm designed to capture implicit, affective responses (anger, fear, warmth) regarding early-life family environments was (a) stable over time, (b) associated with self-reports of childhood family environments, (c) able to predict adult psychosocial profiles (perceived social support, heightened vigilance), and (d) able to predict adult cardiovascular risk (blood pressure) either alone or in conjunction with a measure of early-life socioeconomic status.

METHOD

Two studies were conducted to examine reliability and validity of the affect attribution paradigm (Study 1, N = 94) and associated adult psychosocial outcomes and cardiovascular risk (Study 2, N = 122).

RESULTS

Responses on the affect attribution paradigm showed significant correlations over a 6-month period, and were moderately associated with self-reports of childhood family environments. Greater attributed negative affect about early-life family conditions predicted lower levels of current perceived social support and heightened vigilance in adulthood. Attributed negative affect also interacted with early-life socioeconomic status (SES) to marginally predict resting systolic blood pressure (SBP), such that those individuals high in early-life SES but who had implicit negative affect attributed to early-life family conditions had SBP levels that were as high as individuals low in early-life SES.

CONCLUSION

Implicit measures of early-life family conditions are a useful approach for assessing the psychosocial nature of early-life environments and linking them to adult psychosocial and physiological health profiles.

Is primary care providers' trust in socially marginalized patients affected by race?

BACKGROUND

Interpersonal trust plays an important role in the clinic visit. Clinician trust in the patient may be especially important when prescribing opioid analgesics because of concerns about misuse. Previous studies have found that non-white patients are perceived negatively by clinicians.

OBJECTIVE

To examine whether clinicians' trust in patients differed by patients' race/ethnicity in a socially marginalized cohort.

DESIGN

Cross-sectional study of patient-clinician dyads.

PARTICIPANTS

169 HIV infected indigent patients recruited from the community and their 61 primary care providers (PCPs.)

MAIN MEASURES

The Physician Trust in Patients Scale (PTPS), a validated scale that measures PCPs' trust in patients.

KEY RESULTS

The mean PTPS score was 43.2 (SD 10.8) out of a possible 60. Reported current illicit drug use and prescription opioid misuse were similar across patients' race or ethnicity. However, both patient illicit drug use and patient non-white race/ethnicity were associated with lower PTPS scores. In a multivariate model, non-white race/ethnicity was independently associated with PTPS scores 6.3 points lower than whites (95% CI: -9.9, -2.7). Current illicit drug use was associated with PTSP scores 5.5 lower than no drug use (95% CI -8.5, -2.5).

CONCLUSION

In a socially marginalized cohort, non-white patients were trusted less than white patients by their PCPs, despite similar rates of illicit drug use and opioid analgesic misuse. The effect was independent of illicit drug use. This finding may reflect unconscious stereotypes by PCPs and may underlie disparities in chronic pain management.

Implicit attitudes in prosopagnosia

We studied a male with acquired prosopagnosia using a battery of Implicit Association Tests (IATs) to investigate whether observing faces varying by social category would activate the patient's implicit social biases. We also asked him to categorize faces explicitly by race, gender, and political party. The patient, G.B., was marginally slower to categorize black compared to white faces. He showed congruency effects in the race and celebrity IATs, but not in the gender or political IATs. These results indicate that G.B. possesses an implicit social sensitivity to certain facial stimuli despite an inability to overtly recognize familiar faces. The results demonstrate that social biases can be retrieved based on facial stimuli via pathways bypassing the fusiform gyri. Thus the IAT effect can be added to the list of covert recognition effects found in prosopagnosia.

Response Conflict and Affective Responses in the Control and Expression of Race Bias

Models of racial attitudes traditionally have assumed that individual differences in the strength of underlying, 'implicit' associations between racial categories and stereotypical traits are the primary determinant of the expression of race bias. Thus, individual differences in performance on laboratory tasks designed to assess implicit race bias tend to be interpreted in terms of association strength. Here, we argue that such associations tell only part of the story, and probably the least interesting part. We posit that response conflict and its regulation are critical to understanding the need for control, and that affect-related processes help to determine the extent to which control resources will be implemented to overcome biased associations. We present data from a number of recent behavioral and psychophysiological studies in support of this idea, as well as conceptual accounts that point toward a model of race bias regulation that depends upon processes identified as important for regulation of thought, affect and action more generally.

On the role of conflict and control in social cognition: event-related brain potential investigations

Numerous social-cognitive models posit that social behavior largely is driven by links between constructs in long-term memory that automatically become activated when relevant stimuli are encountered. Various response biases have been understood in terms of the influence of such "implicit" processes on behavior. This article reviews event-related potential (ERP) studies investigating the role played by cognitive control and conflict resolution processes in social-cognitive phenomena typically deemed automatic. Neurocognitive responses associated with response activation and conflict often are sensitive to the same stimulus manipulations that produce differential behavioral responses on social-cognitive tasks and that often are attributed to the role of automatic associations. Findings are discussed in the context of an overarching social cognitive neuroscience model in which physiological data are used to constrain social-cognitive theories.

Following in the wake of anger: when not discriminating is discriminating

Does seeing a scowling face change your impression of the next person you see? Does this depend on the race of the two people? Across four studies, White participants evaluated neutrally expressive White males as less threatening when they followed angry (relative to neutral) White faces; Black males were not judged as less threatening following angry Black faces. This lack of threat-anchored contrast for Black male faces is not attributable to a general tendency for White targets to homogenize Black males-neutral Black targets following smiling Black faces were contrasted away from them and seen as less friendly-and emerged only for perceivers low in motivation to respond without prejudice (i.e., for those relatively comfortable responding prejudicially). This research provides novel evidence for the overperception of threat in Black males.

Contextual blending of ingroup/outgroup face stimuli and word valence: LPP modulation and convergence of measures

Background

Several event related potential (ERP) studies have investigated the time course of different aspects of evaluative processing in social bias research. Various reports suggest that the late positive potential (LPP) is modulated by basic evaluative processes, and some reports suggest that in-/outgroup relative position affects ERP responses. In order to study possible LPP blending between facial race processing and semantic valence (positive or negative words), we recorded ERPs while indigenous and non-indigenous participants who were matched by age and gender performed an implicit association test (IAT). The task involved categorizing faces (ingroup and outgroup) and words (positive and negative). Since our paradigm implies an evaluative task with positive and negative valence association, a frontal distribution of LPPs similar to that found in previous reports was expected. At the same time, we predicted that LPP valence lateralization would be modulated not only by positive/negative associations but also by particular combinations of valence, face stimuli and participant relative position.

Results

Results showed that, during an IAT, indigenous participants with greater behavioral ingroup bias displayed a frontal LPP that was modulated in terms of complex contextual associations involving ethnic group and valence. The LPP was lateralized to the right for negative valence stimuli and to the left for positive valence stimuli. This valence lateralization was influenced by the combination of valence and membership type relevant to compatibility with prejudice toward a minority. Behavioral data from the IAT and an explicit attitudes questionnaire were used to clarify this finding and showed that ingroup bias plays an important role. Both ingroup favoritism and indigenous/non-indigenous differences were consistently present in the data.

Conclusion

Our results suggest that frontal LPP is elicited by contextual blending of evaluative judgments of in-/outgroup information and positive vs. negative valence association and confirm recent research relating in-/outgroup ERP modulation and frontal LPP. LPP modulation may cohere with implicit measures of attitudes. The convergence of measures that were observed supports the idea that racial and valence evaluations are strongly influenced by context. This result adds to a growing set of evidence concerning contextual sensitivity of different measures of prejudice.

Category and stereotype activation revisited

In Study 1 (N= 230), we found that the participants' explicit prejudice was not related to their knowledge of cultural stereotypes of immigrants in Sweden, and that they associated the social category immigrants with the same national/ethnic categories. In Study 2 (N= 88), employing the category and stereotype words obtained in Study 1 as primes, we examined whether participants with varying degrees of explicit prejudice differed in their automatic stereotyping and implicit prejudice when primed with category or stereotypical words. In accord with our hypothesis, and contrary to previous findings, the results showed that people's explicit prejudice did not affect their automatic stereotyping and implicit prejudice, neither in the category nor stereotype priming condition. Study 3 (N= 62), employing category priming using facial photographs of Swedes and immigrants as primes, showed that participants' implicit prejudice was not moderated by their explicit prejudice. The outcome is discussed in relation to the distinction between category and stereotype priming and in terms of the associative strength between a social category and its related stereotypes.

Do self-presentation concerns moderate the relationship between implicit and explicit homonegativity measures?

This study investigated whether the relation between implicit and explicit homonegativity measures is affected by self-presentation concerns, since previous research in this area has been inconclusive. In Experiment 1, 70 high-school students made evaluative ratings of pictures of homosexual and heterosexual couples. Self-presentation was manipulated by either instructing participants that the study concerned attitudes regarding sexual orientation (socially sensitive) or attitudes regarding age (less sensitive). The age-instruction led to increased homonegativity but not to a stronger correlation with an Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald, McGhee & Schwartz, 1998) with homo/heterosexual couples. Concerns regarding the construct validity of the present implementation of the IAT were alleviated in Experiment 2, where heterosexual (n= 30) but not homosexual (n= 30) participants showed implicit homonegativity. The current findings are problematic for the interpretation of low correspondence between implicit and explicit attitude measures as being primarily an effect of self-presentation concerns.