When talking makes you feel like a group: The emergence of group-based emotions

Group-based emotions are emotional reactions to group concerns and have been shown to emerge when people appraise events while endorsing a specific social identity. Here we investigate whether discussing a group-relevant event with other group members affects emotional reactions in a similar way. In two experiments, we confronted participants with an unfair group-relevant event, while manipulating their social identity and whether they discussed the event or an unrelated topic. Our major finding is that having group members discuss the unfair group-relevant event led to emotions that were more negative than in the irrelevant discussion and comparable to those observed when social identity had been made salient explicitly beforehand. Moreover, it also generated group-based appraisals of injustice (Experiment 1) and group-based identity (Experiment 2). This research sheds new light not only on the consequences of within-group sharing of emotions for the unfolding of intergroup relations but also on the nature of group-based emotions.     

Written threat: Electrophysiological evidence for an attention bias to affective words in social anxiety disorder

Social anxiety disorder (SAD) is associated with heightened sensitivity to threat cues, typically represented by emotional facial expressions. To examine if this bias can be transferred to a general hypersensitivity or whether it is specific to disorder relevant cues, we investigated electrophysiological correlates of emotional word processing (alpha activity and event-related potentials) in 20 healthy participants and 20 participants with SAD. The experimental task was a silent reading of neutral, positive, physically threatening and socially threatening words (the latter were abusive swear words) while responding to a randomly presented dot. Subsequently, all participants were asked to recall as many words as possible during an unexpected recall test. Participants with SAD showed blunted sensory processing followed by a rapid processing of emotional words during early stages (early posterior negativity – EPN). At later stages, all participants showed enhanced processing of negative (physically and socially threatening) compared to neutral and positive words (N400). Moreover, at later processing stages alpha activity was increased specifically for negative words in participants with SAD but not in healthy controls. Recall of emotional words for all subjects was best for socially threatening words, followed by negative and positive words irrespective of social anxiety. The present findings indicate that SAD is associated with abnormalities in emotional word processing characterised by early hypervigilance to emotional cues followed by cognitive avoidance at later processing stages. Most importantly, the specificity of these attentional biases seems to change as a function of time with a general emotional bias at early and a more specific bias at later processing stages.     

The Cognitive Social Network in Dreams: Transitivity,Assortativity, and Giant Component Proportion Are Monotonic

For five individuals, a social network was constructed from a series of his or her dreams. Three important network measures were calculated for each network: transitivity, assortativity, and giant component proportion. These were monotonically related; over the five networks as transitivity increased, assortativity increased and giant component proportion decreased. The relations indicate that characters appear in dreams systematically. Systematicity likely arises from the dreamer's memory of people and their relations, which is from the dreamer's cognitive social network. But the dream social network is not a copy of the cognitive social network. Waking life social networks tend to have positive assortativity; that is, people tend to be connected to others with similar connectivity. Instead, in our sample of dream social networks assortativity is more often negative or near 0, as in online social networks. We show that if characters appear via a random walk, negative assortativity can result, particularly if the random walk is biased as suggested by remote associations.     

How Children and Adults Represent God's Mind

For centuries, humans have contemplated the minds of gods. Research on religious cognition is spread across sub‐disciplines, making it difficult to gain a complete understanding of how people reason about gods' minds. We integrate approaches from cognitive, developmental, and social psychology and neuroscience to illuminate the origins of religious cognition. First, we show that although adults explicitly discriminate supernatural minds from human minds, their implicit responses reveal far less discrimination. Next, we demonstrate that children's religious cognition often matches adults' implicit responses, revealing anthropomorphic notions of God's mind. Together, data from children and adults suggest the intuitive nature of perceiving God's mind as human‐like. We then propose three complementary explanations for why anthropomorphism persists in adulthood, suggesting that anthropomorphism may be (a) an instance of the anchoring and adjustment heuristic; (b) a reflection of early testimony; and/or (c) an evolutionary byproduct.     

Intentional action processing results from automatic bottom-up attention: An EEG-investigation into the Social Relevance Hypothesis using hypnosis

Social stimuli grab our attention. However, it has rarely been investigated how variations in attention affect the processing of social stimuli, although the answer could help us uncover details of social cognition processes such as action understanding. In the present study, we examined how changes to bottom-up attention affects neural EEG-responses associated with intentional action processing. We induced an increase in bottom-up attention by using hypnosis. We recorded the electroencephalographic μ-wave suppression of hypnotized participants when presented with intentional actions in first and third person perspective in a video-clip paradigm. Previous studies have shown that the μ-rhythm is selectively suppressed both when executing and observing goal-directed motor actions; hence it can be used as a neural signal for intentional action processing. Our results show that neutral hypnotic trance increases μ-suppression in highly suggestible participants when they observe intentional actions. This suggests that social action processing is enhanced when bottom-up attentional processes are predominant. Our findings support the Social Relevance Hypothesis, according to which social action processing is a bottom-up driven attentional process, and can thus be altered as a function of bottom-up processing devoted to a social stimulus.     

Empathie organisationnelle,soutien organisationnel perçu et efficacité des équipes de travail dans l’industrie nucléaire

This research studies social climate's role in the efficacy of work teams. The referential work frame is based on the concept of organizational empathy (Guédon & Bernaud, 2008), which is specifically operationalized on a tri-dimensional model basis and the perceived organizational support from Eisenberger's model (Rhoades & Eisenberger, 2002). A total of 274 employees, belonging to 3 professional groups, who worked in a nuclear power house participated in this research. Linear regression analysis’ results show a major effect of organizational empathy on the efficacy of work teams, nevertheless predictors’ hierarchy varies upon occupied professional function.     

High school athletes’ self-determined motivation: The independent and interactive effects of coach,father, and mother autonomy support

ObjectivesThe purpose of the study was to examine the independent and interactive influences of athletes’ perceptions of autonomy support from their coaches, fathers, and mothers on the athletes’ self-determined motivation.DesignCross-sectional survey.MethodHigh school athletes (N = 335; M age = 15.75 years; 62.4% female; 84.2% Caucasian) completed surveys assessing the constructs of interest near the end of their season.ResultsHierarchical regression analysis results showed that autonomy support from all three social agents significantly and positively predicted self-determined motivation (R² = 0.32), and the two- and three-way interactions significantly added to the prediction (total R² = 0.35). Results showed that a relatively high level of self-determined motivation was associated with the perception that at least two of the three social agents provided high levels of autonomy support.ConclusionsThe provision of autonomy support from coaches, mothers, and fathers relate to athletes’ self-determined motivation both independently and interactively.     

Uncertainty and group identification: Moderation by warmth and competence as cues to inclusion and identity validation

Drawing upon uncertainty-identity theory, we argue that self-uncertainty creates a motivated mindset in which people desire to have their social identity validated thorough inclusion, and that this transforms the meaning of group warmth and competence to cue inclusion. US College students (N = 289) participated in an on-line experiment in which self-uncertainty and the perceived warmth and competence of their college were primed, and group identification was measured as the dependent variable. As predicted, the three-way interaction significantly affected group identification. Specifically, uncertainty weakened identification with cold-but-competent groups. We also found that uncertainty strengthened identification with cold-and-incompetent groups. This research highlights the preference for certain group attributes under uncertainty.     

社交网站使用能带来社会资本吗?

社交网站旨在维系和发展个体的人际关系网络,而社会资本是个体人际关系中潜在的、可获得的益处或资源,因此社交网站使用和社会资本存在密切关系。然而,有关一般性社交网站使用行为与社会资本关系的研究结果并不一致。针对不同类型使用行为的研究发现,特定类型的社交网站使用行为对特定类型社会资本有积极影响。社交网站中自我表露行为是获取社会资本的一种必要的途径,关系维持行为、资源动员请求行为、隐私保护行为等均是个体获取社会资本的有效行为策略。最后,就社会资本定义、线上线下社会资本存在覆盖等问题进行了探讨。     

Orienting of attention: Then and now

It is nearly 35 years since I gave the 7th Sir Frederick Bartlett lecture at Oxford University. This was published as a paper entitled “Orienting of attention in the quarterly journal”. The topic was then primarily in psychology, but now equally often in neuroscience. This paper summarizes the background of the reaction time methods used in the original paper and findings that emerged later on the sensory consequences of orienting, mainly in the visual system. It then discusses the brain network that is the source of the sensory amplification and other brain networks that are involved in attention. Next, it reviews studies of the development of attentional networks in early life. Finally, it indicates how the new tools available to explore the human brain can lead to further progress.