I am too just like you: nonconscious mimicry as an automatic behavioral response to social exclusion

ABSTRACT— Research across various disciplines has demonstrated that social exclusion has devastating psychological, emotional, and behavioral consequences. Excluded individuals are therefore motivated to affiliate with others, even though they may not have the resources, cognitive or otherwise, to do so. The current research explored whether nonconscious mimicry of other individuals—a low-cost, low-risk, automatic behavior—might help excluded individuals address threatened belongingness needs. Experiment 1 demonstrated that excluded people mimic a subsequent interaction partner more than included people do. Experiment 2 showed that individuals excluded by an in-group selectively (and nonconsciously) mimic a confederate who is an in-group member more than a confederate who is an out-group member. The relationship between exclusion and mimicry suggests that there are automatic behaviors people can use to recover from the experience of being excluded. In addition, this research demonstrates that nonconscious mimicry is selective and sensitive to context.     

The role of mental rotations in primate-inspired robot navigation

The use of a primate's spatial ability of mental rotation to serve as a basis for robotic navigation has been almost entirely overlooked by the robotics community to date. In this paper, the role of this cognitive capacity is presented as an adjunct to existing robotic control systems, with the underlying approach being derived from studies of primate spatial cognition. Specifically, optical flow is used as a basis for transitory representations (snapshots) that are compared to an a priori visual goal to provide corrective course action for a robot when moving through the world. The underlying architecture and procedures are described.     

The role of mental rotations in primate-inspired robot navigation

Scripts store the temporal order of component events of everyday activities as well as the temporal position of the events within the activity (early or late). When confronted with an activity, predictions are generated about how the component events will unfold. Thereby, an error-detection mechanism continuously monitors whether they unfold as anticipated or not in order to reveal errors in the unfolding activity. We investigated whether the temporal position “early” or “late” influenced the detection of errors using the pupillary response as an index of cognitive resource consumption. An event triplet consisting of three events was presented in a chronological or non-chronological temporal order. Crucially, the triplet focused either on the beginning (temporal position “early”) or the end (temporal position “late”) of an activity. We assumed that these position codes would be used to facilitate error detection when a non-chronological event was presented. Results showed that errors in the temporal order were detected more successfully in early than in late triplets. Results further suggest that strong predictions are formed about how an activity begins. Violations of this prediction must be overcome by zooming into the representation and allocating attention to the temporal position that consumes cognitive resources. Only after zooming in has taken place successfully may the position codes be used to anticipate temporal violations in unfolding event sequences.     

Plumbing the depths of the bogus pipeline: A reprise

Several years ago a debate appeared in this journal concerning the utility of the “bogus pipeline” attitude measurement technique. Cherry, Byrne, and Mitchell (Journal of Research in Personality, 1976, 10, 69–75) found that the bogus pipeline technique was vulnerable to demand characteristics, especially among persons high in social desirability. However, Gaes, Quigley-Fernandez, and Tedeschi (Journal of Research in Personality, 1978, 12, 189–192) criticized this study on methodological grounds. The present conceptual replication failed entirely to produce the Cherry et al. finding; indeed, the present data show a tendency for responsiveness to demand characteristics only among subjects responding via “paper and pencil.” This finding is consistent with the traditional conceptualization of the bogus pipeline procedures and supports the meaningfulness of data obtained using the technique within the impression management literature. Interestingly, social desirability did not enter in any way into the effects; this fact raises some intriguing questions about the social desirability construct itself.     

Stress, Glucocorticoids, and Damage to the Nervous System: The Current State of Confusion

An extensive literature demonstrates that glucocorticoids (GCs), the adrenal steroids secreted during stress, can have a broad range of deleterious effects in the brain. The actions occur predominately, but not exclusively, in the hippocampus, a structure rich in corticosteroid receptors and particularly sensitive to GCs. The first half of this review considers three types of GC effects: a) GC-induced atrophy, in which a few weeks' exposure to high GC concentrations or to stress causes reversible atrophy of dendritic processes in the hippocampus; b) GC neurotoxicity where, over the course of months, GC exposure kills hippocampal neurons; c) GC neuroendangerment, in which elevated GC concentrations at the time of a neurological insult such as a stroke or seizure impairs the ability of neurons to survive the insult. The second half considers the rather confusing literature as to the possible mechanisms underlying these deleterious GC actions. Five broad themes are discerned: a) that GCs induce a metabolic vulnerability in neurons due to inhibition of glucose uptake; b) that GCs exacerbate various steps in a damaging cascade of glutamate excess, calcium mobilization and oxygen radical generation. In a review a number of years ago, I concluded that these two components accounted for the deleterious GC effects. Specifically, the energetic vulnerability induced by GCs left neurons metabolically compromised, and less able to carry out the costly task of containing glutamate, calcium and oxygen radicals. More recent work has shown this conclusion to be simplistic, and GC actions are shown to probably involve at least three additional components: c) that GCs impair a variety of neuronal defenses against neurologic insults; d) that GCs disrupt the mobilization of neurotrophins; e) that GCs have a variety of electrophysiological effects which can damage neurons. The relevance of each of those mechanisms to GC-induced atrophy, neurotoxicity and neuroendangerment is considered, as are the likely interactions among them.     

The role of social perspective in perceiving the causes of success and failure1

An experiment was conducted to test the hypothesis that observers' causal attributions about an actor's performance at a task would be affected by their social perspective in observing the situation. Observer subjects were either assigned to serve in a role comparable to that of observer-subjects in most actor-observer experiments or were assigned a distinctive role more divergent from the social perspective of the actor. As expected, observers with a similar social perspective to that of the actor made more flattering attributions about the actor's performance than observers with a dissimilar social perspective. We concluded that actor-observer differences in attribution for an actor's performance in any one experiment cannot be taken as definitive evidence either for or against the defensive attribution idea.     

Subjective overachievement: individual differences in self-doubt and concern with performance

We discuss the construct of doubt about one's competence and suggest that doubt can have myriad consequences (e.g., self-handicapping, defensive pessimism). We focus on the effect of self-doubt when it is combined with a concern with performance and assert that this combination leads to the phenomenon of subjective overachievement. In two studies, we present a new 17-item Subjective Overachievement Scale (SOS), which includes two independent subscales measuring individual differences in self-doubt and concern with performance. The first study, consisting of two large samples (Ns = 2,311 and 1,703), provides evidence that the scale has high internal consistency and a clear two-factor structure. Additionally, the subscales have adequate test-retest reliability (Ns = 67 and 115). A second study reveals that the SOS has good convergent and discriminant validity. Both subscales are unrelated to social desirability but exhibit the predicted patterns of associations with other related constructs. The Concern with Performance Subscale is correlated with achievement motivation, whereas the Self-Doubt Subscale is correlated with scales assessing negative affectivity (e.g., self-esteem, social anxiety) and other self-related strategies associated with concerns about one's competence (e.g., self-handicapping, defensive pessimism, impostor phenomenon). The SOS, which combines the two subscales, appears to tap a unique strategy that individuals may use to deal with doubts about their own competence.