Christine R. Harris

Puzzlingly High Correlations in fMRI Studies of Emotion, Personality, and Social Cognition

Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studiesofemotion, personality, and social cognition have drawn much attention in recent years, with high-profile studies frequently reporting extremely high (e.g., >.8) correlations between brain activation and personality measures. We show that these correlations are higher than should be expected given the (evidently limited) reliability of both fMRI and personality measures. The high correlations are all the more puzzling because method sections rarely contain much detail about how the correlations were obtained. We surveyed authors of 55 articles that reported findings of this kind to determine a few details on how these correlations were computed. More than half acknowledged using a strategy that computes separate correlations for individual voxels and reports means of only those voxels exceeding chosen thresholds. We show how this nonindependent analysis inflates correlations while yielding reassuring-looking scattergrams. This analysis technique was used to obtain the vast majority of the implausibly high correlations in our survey sample. In addition, we argue that, in some cases, other analysis problems likely created entirely spurious correlations. We outline how the data from these studies could be reanalyzed with unbiased methods to provide accurate estimates of the correlations in question and urge authors to perform such reanalyses. The underlying problems described here appear to be common in fMRI research of many kinds—not just in studies of emotion, personality, and social cognition.

Is the Replicability Crisis Overblown? Three Arguments Examined

We discuss three arguments voiced by scientists who view the current outpouring of concern about replicability as overblown. The first idea is that the adoption of a low alpha level (e.g., 5%) puts reasonable bounds on the rate at which errors can enter the published literature, making false-positive effects rare enough to be considered a minor issue. This, we point out, rests on statistical misunderstanding: The alpha level imposes no limit on the rate at which errors may arise in the literature (Ioannidis, 2005b). Second, some argue that whereas direct replication attempts are uncommon, conceptual replication attempts are common—providing an even better test of the validity of a phenomenon. We contend that performing conceptual rather than direct replication attempts interacts insidiously with publication bias, opening the door to literatures that appear to confirm the reality of phenomena that in fact do not exist. Finally, we discuss the argument that errors will eventually be pruned out of the literature if the field would just show a bit of patience. We contend that there are no plausible concrete scenarios to back up such forecasts and that what is needed is not patience, but rather systematic reforms in scientific practice.

A Review of Sex Differences in Sexual Jealousy, Including Self-Report Data, Psychophysiological Responses, Interpersonal Violence, and Morbid Jealousy

The specific innate modular theory of jealousy hypothesizes that natural selection shaped sexual jealousy as a mechanism to prevent cuckoldry, and emotional jealousy as a mechanism to prevent resource loss. Therefore, men should be primarily jealous over a mates sexual infidelity and women over a mates emotional infidelity. Five lines of evidence have been offered as support: self report responses, psychophysiological data, domestic violence (including spousal abuse and homicide), and morbid jealousy cases. This article reviews each line of evidence and finds only one hypothetical measure consistent with the hypothesis. This, however, is contradicted by a variety of other measures (including reported reactions to real infidelity). A meta-analysis of jealousy-inspired homicides, taking into account base rates for murder, found no evidence that jealousy disproportionately motivates men to kill. The findings are discussed from a social-cognitive theoretical perspective.

Gender, Jealousy, and Reason

Research has suggested that men are especially bothered by evidence of their partners sexual infidelity, whereas women are troubled more by evidence of emotional infidelity One evolutionary account (Buss, Larsen, Westen, & Semmelroth, 1992) argues that this is an innate difference, arising from mens need for paternity certainty and womens need for male investment in their offspring We suggest that the difference may instead be based on reasonable differences between the sexes in how they interpret evidence of infidelity A man, thinking that women have sex only when in love, has reason to believe that if his mate has sex with another man, she is in love with that other A woman, thinking that men can have sex without love, should still be bothered by sexual infidelity, but less so because it does not imply that her mate has fallen in love as well A survey of 137 subjects confirmed that men and women do differ in the predicted direction in how much they think each form of infidelity implies the other, proposing innate emotional differences may, therefore, be gratuitous

Attention and the Processing of Emotional Words and Names Not So Special After All

Previous research has suggested that a persons own name or emotionally charged stimuli automatically “grab” attention, potentially challenging limited-capacity theories of perceptual processing. In this study, subjects were shown two digits surrounding a word and asked to make a speeded judgment about whether the parity of the two digits matched. When the subjects own name was presented on a few scattered trials, responses were markedly slowed (replicating a previous study). However, in a subsequent block of trials in which half the words were the subjects name, the slowing did not occur. The same slowing occurred (but even more fleetingly) when an emotionally charged word was presented between the digits. When the name was embedded among multiple distractor words, it ceased to slow reaction times. The results suggest that perceptual analysis of high-priority stimuli is subject to the usual capacity limitations of other stimuli, but when enough capacity is available for a high-priority stimulus to be perceived, a transient surprise reaction may interrupt ongoing processing.

Production of complex syntax in normal ageing and alzheimer's disease

Abstract Word-finding difficulties are among the earliest symptoms of Alzheimers disease (AD), but most AD patients retain the ability to produce well-formed sentences until the late stages of their disease. This dissociation has been used to argue for a modular distinction between grammar and the lexicon. In this paper, we offer an alternative view. First, we show that grammatical production is impaired in AD patients when grammar is assessed under highly constrained conditions in a film description task. Furthermore, these grammatical deficits are comparable in some respects to the patterns of lexical impairment observed in this and other studies of AD; specifically, patients do not produce frank lexical or grammatical errors, but they do find it difficult to access the “best fit” between meaning and form. We propose that differences in the onset time for lexical and grammatical symptoms in AD are due not to a disconnection between modules, but to fundamental differences in the automaticity and/or acce...

Psychophysiological Responses to Imagined Infidelity: The Specific Innate Modular View of Jealousy Reconsidered

Three studies measured psychophysiological reactivity (heart rate, blood pressure, and electrodermal activity) while participants imagined a mates infidelity. The specific innate modular theory of gender differences in jealousy hypothesizes that men are upset by sexual infidelity and women are upset by emotional infidelity, because of having faced different adaptive challenges (cuckoldry and loss of a mates resources, respectively). This view was not supported. In men, sexual-infidelity imagery elicited greater reactivity than emotional-infidelity imagery. But, sexual imagery elicited greater reactivity even when infidelity was not involved, suggesting that the differential reactivity may not specifically index greater jealousy. In two studies with reasonable power, women did not respond more strongly to emotional infidelity. Moreover, women with committed sexual relationship experience showed reactivity patterns similar to those of men. Hypothetical infidelity self-reports were unrelated to reactivity.

Cardiovascular responses of embarrassment and effects of emotional suppression in a social setting.

The cardiovascular effects of embarrassment and of attempts to suppress embarrassment were examined. In 2 studies, embarrassment was associated with substantial increases in systolic and diastolic blood pressure, which monotonically increased over a 2-minute embarrassment period. In contrast, heart rate (HR) rose significantly during the 1st minute of embarrassment but returned to baseline levels during the 2nd minute. This pattern of reactivity may be distinctive. The effects of trying to suppress emotion in an interpersonal situation were also tested. Relative to the no-suppression group, suppression participants showed greater blood pressure during embarrassment and during posttask recovery. Suppression did not significantly affect HR. Possible mechanisms for these results, including passive coping, are discussed. Nonverbal behavior was also examined.

Priming of Social Distance? Failure to Replicate Effects on Social and Food Judgments

Williams and Bargh (2008) reported an experiment in which participants were simply asked to plot a single pair of points on a piece of graph paper, with the coordinates provided by the experimenter specifying a pair of points that lay at one of three different distances (close, intermediate, or far, relative to the range available on the graph paper). The participants who had graphed a more distant pair reported themselves as being significantly less close to members of their own family than did those who had plotted a more closely-situated pair. In another experiment, peoples estimates of the caloric content of different foods were reportedly altered by the same type of spatial distance priming. Direct replications of both results were attempted, with precautions to ensure that the experimenter did not know what condition the participant was assigned to. The results showed no hint of the priming effects reported by Williams and Bargh (2008).

Menstrual Cycle and Facial Preferences Reconsidered.

Two previous articles reported that women prefer less feminized male faces during the fertile phase of their menstrual cycle, supposedly reflecting an evolved mating strategy whereby women choose mates of maximum genetic quality when conception is likely. The current article contends this theory rests on several questionable assumptions about human ancestral mating systems. A new empirical test also was conducted: 853 adults, primarily from North America, evaluated facial attractiveness of photos. The study included more complete evaluation of ovulatory status and a greater number (n = 258) of target women than past research. The results did not suggest any greater preference for masculine faces when fertilization was likely. The article concludes with general comments about evolutionary theorizing and interpersonal relationships.