Andrés Haye

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

BackgroundSeveral 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.ResultsResults 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.ConclusionOur 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.

Early Neural Markers of Implicit Attitudes: N170 Modulated by Intergroup and Evaluative Contexts in IAT.

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is the most popular measure to evaluate implicit attitudes. Nevertheless, its neural correlates are not yet fully understood. We examined event related potentials (ERPs) in response to face- and word processing while indigenous and non-indigenous participants performed an IAT displaying faces (ingroup and outgroup members) and words (positive and negative valence) as targets of category judgments. The N170 component was modulated by valence of words and by ingroup/outgroup face categorization. Contextual effects (face–words implicitly associated in the task) had an influence on the N170 amplitude modulation. On the one hand, in face categorization, right N170 showed differences according to the association between social categories of faces and affective valence of words. On the other, in word categorization, left N170 presented a similar modulation when the task implied a negative-valence associated with ingroup faces. Only indigenous participants showed a significant IAT effect and N170 differences. Our results demonstrate an early ERP blending of stimuli processing with both intergroup and evaluative contexts, suggesting an integration of contextual information related to intergroup attitudes during the early stages of word and face processing. To our knowledge, this is the first report of early ERPs during an ethnicity IAT, opening a new branch of exchange between social neuroscience and social psychology of attitudes.

The discursive nature of inner speech

If inner speech is first of all speech, then a critical departure point is to study its discursive nature. The aim of this paper is to deepen the notion of inner speech from a discursive and dialogical perspective. Drawing on the works of Vygotsky, Bakhtin, and Vološinov, we discuss the idea that consciousness is structured by language, exploring the concept of internalization, and making an analogy between acts of thinking and uttering. Inner discourse is understood as a dialogical movement of interchange between different ideological positions. Furthermore, we propose a distinction between inner discourse and self-talk: inner discourse is a basal dialogical process that may give form to syntactically well-organized self-talk, but also to processes that are on the border of language because of a weak or very instable syntactic organization. Consequently, inner discourse should be conceived of not as a homogeneous and unitary process but as a heterogeneous class of discursive practices.

Confianza en instituciones políticas en Chile: un modelo de los componentes centrales de juicios de confianza

Resumen es: La confianza que los ciudadanos depositan en las instituciones politicas es importante para las democracias. Sin embargo, existen dudas acerca de la natu...

Situational Flexibility of In-Group-Related Attitudes: A Single Category IAT Study of People with Dual National Identity

An experiment was conducted to examine the situational flexibility of in-group-related attitudes at the implicit and explicit level. Seventy-one men and women with dual, Turkish-German, national identities were asked to think about positive aspects of either their German or their Turkish identity. Later, attitudes toward Germans and Turks were assessed using a single category implicit association test (SC-IAT) and self-report scales. Results showed that attitudes toward Turks were generally more positive than attitudes toward Germans, that SC-IAT scores reflecting attitudes toward Turks and Germans were unrelated, and that the identity priming affected mens, but not womens, SC-IAT scores. This finding is discussed in terms of mens greater flexibility in national identification. Explicit attitude measures were largely unaffected by the priming.

Relación entre orientación política y condición socioeconómica en la cultura política chilena: una aproximación desde la psicología política

A partir de un estudio longitudinal sobre cultura politica en chilenos, discutimos la paradojal evidencia encontrada en la literatura que plantea que, por un lado, las actitudes politicas mas pro-democraticas y anti-autoritarias se observarian en sectores sociales acomodados y, por otro lado, las actitudes mas pro-conservadoras y anti-igualitaristas se observarian en grupos sociales dominantes. Nuestros datos muestran que el patron de actitudes politicas (autoritarismo, apoyo a la democracia, conservadurismo y nacionalismo) es similar entre personas de derecha de estrato alto, izquierda de estrato bajo, y centro de estrato medio. En cambio, quienes manifiestan una orientacion politica incongruente con su condicion socioeconomica presentan actitudes politicas diferenciadas del patron predominante. Concluimos que la paradoja puede resolverse explicando el patron de actitudes politicas de un grupo en funcion del (des)ajuste de la orientacion politica a sus condiciones socioeconomicas.

Living being and speaking being: toward a dialogical approach to intentionality.

One of the main goals of cognitive science is to shed light on human knowledge. This paper states that, if daily conversations, literature, and private thought, are proper expressions of human behavior, then cognitive sciences ought to elaborate a concept of knowledge suited to this kind of activities. I draw upon the notion of discourse in Bakhtin to specify the attributes of knowing needed to account for human behavior, whose manifestations in everyday life are not reduced to representing objects but essentially oriented toward responding to others. As a central aspect of knowledge, I focus on intentionality and offer a discussion about different aspects of it. Specifically, I examine the difference between intentionality as the faculty of representation (aboutness) and intentionality as the subjective positioning toward contextually relevant ideological perspectives (meaning).

A dialogical conception of concepts

Classical psychology and philosophy have conceived of thinking as being intimately related to concepts. According to predominant psychological theories, concepts are the building blocks of propositional thought. Although important authors such as William James and Lev Vygotsky offered alternative accounts of concepts, they have been largely ignored. This is particularly surprising in the case of sociocultural theories, which have not elaborated further on this important aspect of psychological life. This article seeks to explore these alternative theorizations on concepts in order to contribute to an understanding of concepts as processes that unfold through speech according to social dynamics. We also discuss some aspects of the theory of discourse of Bakhtin and Vološinov, in order to study the implications of a dialogical theory for the conception of concepts. We propose to conceive concepts as generic generalization processes that unfold through discourse in response to others’ generalizations.

Discursively constituted experience, or experience as reply: A rejoinder

The goal of the paper is to briefly sketch a theoretical proposal about the role played by discourse in the texture and texturing of lived experience. Inspired by the work of Bakhtin, we develop implications of concepts of inner speech, dialogicality, and specially outsideness, disputing the idea that phenomenological approaches are well equipped to account for human experience. The main argument is that so-called “immediate” experience is discursively mediated and, as such, is constituted by a dialogical dynamic of co-affection. We raise the idea that the streams of experience consist in social and psychological movements of reply.

Discursive analysis of experience: Alterity, positioning, and tension

We explore a dialogical conception of experience as experience of otherness, in order to suggest how to put together its socio-linguistic constitution and its phenomenologically non-reflexive nature. Through the analysis of a piece of conversation accounting for the flow of tension during verbal interaction, we argue that the felt and lived character of experience is attached to the positioning efforts among interlocutors within a discursive field. In contrast to attempts at conciliating a normative notion of social discourse with a phenomenological notion of immediate experience, we suggest that experience is discursive in itself insofar as it involves the lived or felt encounter with others, and that it can be accounted for using several, old and new, discourse analysis tools, for instance from Discursive Psychology and Conversation Analysis.