Anne Krendl

The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study found that even though children from all East Asian countries outperformed American children, American students reported higher self-evaluation of their math and science abilities than did students from East Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Japan (Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, & Chrostowski, 2004). Such cross-cultural differences in self-appraisal fit the stereotype of the modest East Asian and contribute to the received view that East Asians have less positive self-concepts than Americans. This view was summarized recently by Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama (1999) as follows:‘‘The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture’’(p. 766; but cf. Sedikides, Gaertner, & Vevea, 2005).

Perceivers' inferences about individuals based on their faces often show high interrater consensus and can even accurately predict behavior in some domains. Here we investigated the consensus and accuracy of judgments of trustworthiness. In Study 1, we showed that the type of photo judged makes a significant difference for whether an individual is judged as trustworthy. In Study 2, we found that inferences of trustworthiness made from the faces of corporate criminals did not differ from inferences made from the faces of noncriminal executives. In Study 3, we found that judgments of trustworthiness did not differ between the faces of military criminals and the faces of military heroes. In Study 4, we tempted undergraduates to cheat on a test. Although we found that judgments of intelligence from the students' faces were related to students' scores on the test and that judgments of students' extraversion were …

This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural structures associated with women's underperformance on math tasks. Although women in a control condition recruited neural networks that are associated with mathematical learning (i.e., angular gyrus, left parietal and prefrontal cortex), women who were reminded of gender stereotypes about math ability did not recruit these regions, and instead revealed heightened activation in a neural region associated with social and emotional processing (ventral anterior cingulate cortex).

When individuals are confronted with a complex visual scene that includes some emotional element, memory for the emotional component often is enhanced, whereas memory for peripheral (nonemotional) details is reduced. The present study examined the effects of age and encoding instructions on this effect. With incidental encoding instructions, young and older adults showed this pattern of results, indicating that both groups focused attention on the emotional aspects of the scene. With intentional encoding instructions, young adults no longer showed the effect: They were just as likely to remember peripheral details of negative images as of neutral images. The older adults, in contrast, did not overcome the attentional bias: They continued to show reduced memory for the peripheral elements of the emotional compared with the neutral scenes, even with the intentional encoding instructions.

Social interactions require fast and efficient person perception, which is best achieved through the process of categorization. However, this process can produce pernicious outcomes, particularly in the case of stigma. This study used fMRI to investigate the neural correlates involved in forming both explicit (“Do you like or dislike this person?”) and implicit (“Is this a male or female?”) judgments of people possessing well-established stigmatized conditions (obesity, facial piercings, transsexuality, and unattractiveness), as well as normal controls. Participants also made post-scan disgust ratings on all the faces that they viewed during imaging. These ratings were subsequently examined (modeled linearly) in a parametric analysis. Regions of interest that emerged include areas previously demonstrated to respond to aversive and disgust-inducing material (amygdala and insula), as well as regions strongly associated …

Although age-related deficits in emotion recognition have been widely explored, the nature and scope of these deficits remain poorly understood. We conducted two experiments to examine whether these deficits are less pronounced when older adults evaluate dynamic compared with static images, and second, whether age-related cognitive decline exacerbates these deficits. Our results suggest that age-related cognitive decline exacerbates older adults' deficits in detecting anger, but only from static faces. Furthermore, older adults do not show emotion recognition deficits when evaluating global emotions from dynamic images of faces.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

The present study compared the memory of young and older adults for details pertaining to two public events of close temporal proximity but varying emotional import—the Columbia shuttle explosion and the 2003 Super Bowl. Participants responded to surveys sent within 2 weeks of these events and then again 7 months later, providing information about event-related details (i.e., of the events themselves) and personal details (i.e., of the reception event). Both age groups rated the shuttle tragedy as significantly more emotional than the Super Bowl, and although older adults often had poorer memory overall, both age groups remembered more about the shuttle than they did about the Super Bowl. Further, the age discrepancy (young adults remembering more than older adults) was less pronounced for the shuttle than for the Super Bowl. Thus, older adults' memories appear to benefit from the emotional salience of …

Memory is susceptible to distortions. Valence and increasing age are variables known to affect memory accuracy and may increase false alarm production. Interaction between these variables and their impact on false memory was investigated in 36 young (18–28 years) and 36 older (61–83 years) healthy adults. At study, participants viewed lists of neutral words orthographically related to negative, neutral, or positive critical lures (not presented). Memory for these words was subsequently tested with a remember–know procedure. At test, items included the words seen at study and their associated critical lures, as well as sets of orthographically related neutral words not seen at study and their associated unstudied lures. Positive valence was shown to have two opposite effects on older adults' discrimination of the lures: It improved correct rejection of unstudied lures but increased false memory for critical lures (ie …

Researchers currently debate whether new semantic knowledge can be learned and retrieved despite extensive damage to medial temporal lobe (MTL) structures. The authors explored whether HM, a patient with amnesia, could acquire new semantic information in the context of his lifelong hobby of solving crossword puzzles. First, HM was tested on a series of word-skills tests believed important in solving crosswords. He also completed 3 new crosswords: 1 puzzle testing pre-1953 knowledge, another testing post-1953 knowledge, and another combining the 2 by giving postoperative semantic clues for preoperative answers. From the results, the authors concluded that HM can acquire new semantic knowledge, at least temporarily, when he can anchor it to mental representations established preoperatively.(PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)

Cognitive capacity is believed to decline with age, but it is not known whether this decline extends to tasks involving social cognition. In the current study, social neuroscience methodologies were used to examine the effects of age-related cognitive decline on older adults’ abilities to engage regulatory mechanisms (which are typically impaired by normal aging) to inhibit negative reactions to stigmatized individuals. Older and young adults were presented with images of stigmatized individuals (eg, individuals with amputations, substance abusers) and of normal controls while they underwent functional magnetic resonance imaging. All participants were also given a battery of tests to assess their executive function capacity. Young adults showed more activity in areas associated with empathy (ie, medial prefrontal cortex) than did older adults when viewing stigmatized faces. By contrast, older adults with relatively …

Although the effects of negative stereotypes and observer pressure on athletic performance have been well researched, the effects of positive stereotypes on performance, particularly in the presence of observers, is not known. In the current study, White males watched a video either depicting Whites basketball players as the best free throwers in the NBA (positive stereotype), Black basketball players as the best free throwers in the NBA (negative stereotype), or a neutral sports video (control). Participants then shot a set of free throws, during which half the participants were also videotaped (observer condition), whereas the other half were not (no observer condition). Results demonstrated that positive stereotypes improved free throw performance, but only in the no observer condition. Interestingly, observer pressure interacted with the positive stereotype to lead to performance decrements. In the negative stereotype …

P hilosophers and psychologists have long been interested in understanding the nature of self. As the various chapters in this book demonstrate, psychol-ogists have learned a great deal, although many questions remain. Chief among these is how activity in the brain gives rise to the unitary and coherent sense of self that exists across time and place. Recently, researchers have started to use the methods of neuroscience in their efforts to explore questions about the self. The advent of imaging techniques over the past two decades has provided researchers with the capacity to study the working brain in action, thus providing a new window for examining previously intractable mental states, including the phenomenological experience of self (Macrae, Heatherton, & Kelley, 2004). In this chapter, we describe neuroimaging work on three primary aspects of self: the cognitive self (ie, self-knowledge), the affective self (ie, self-esteem), and the executive self (ie, self-regulation). We do not intend this to be an exhaustive review of the neurobiology of self. Rather, our goal is to demonstrate how studying the brain can inform psychological research on various aspects of the self. Our overall approach to thinking about the self follows a social brain sciences perspective. This approach merges evolutionary theory, experimental social cogni-tion, and neuroscience to elucidate the neural mechanisms that support social behavior (Adolphs, 2003; Heatherton, Macrae, & Kelley, 2004). From an evo-lutionary perspective, the brain is an organ that has evolved over millions of years to solve problems related to survival and reproduction. Those ancestors who were …

The current study uses functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine whether regulating negative bias to stigmatized individuals has a unique neural activity profile from general emotion regulation. Participants were presented with images of stigmatized (e.g. homeless people) or non-stigmatized (e.g. a man holding a gun) social targets while undergoing fMRI and were asked either to maintain or regulate their emotional response. Their implicit bias toward these stigmatized group members was also measured. Analyses were conducted in both, an event-related fashion, considering the event to be the onset of regulation, and in a blocked-design fashion, considering the sustained activity throughout the 8-s regulatory period. In the event-related (onset) analyses, participants showed more activity throughout the prefrontal cortex when initiating a regulatory response to stigmatized as compared with …

Young adults can be surprisingly accurate at making inferences about people from their faces. Although these first impressions have important consequences for both the perceiver and the target, it remains an open question whether first impression accuracy is preserved with age. Specifically, could age differences in impressions toward others stem from age-related deficits in accurately detecting complex social cues? Research on aging and impression formation suggests that young and older adults show relative consensus in their first impressions, but it is unknown whether they differ in accuracy. It has been widely shown that aging disrupts emotion recognition accuracy, and that these impairments may predict deficits in other social judgments, such as detecting deceit. However, it is unclear whether general impression formation accuracy (eg, emotion recognition accuracy, detecting complex social cues) relies …