Eric Hehman

Advanced mouse-tracking analytic techniques for enhancing psychological science

Computer mouse-tracking is a relatively recently developed behavioral methodology that can contribute unique insight into a wide variety of psychological phenomena. By recording mouse movements en route to specific responses on a screen, researchers glean continuous information about tentative commitments to multiple response alternatives over time. This approach yields a richness of data that can be fully explored with a variety of sophisticated analytic techniques, but these approaches are relatively underutilized and can be difficult to adopt. Here we describe several techniques for researchers to examine the onset and timing of evolving decision processes; test the degree of response competition at different time points; assess trajectory complexity with spatial disorder analyses; identify qualitatively distinct psychological processes during response generation; and finally to distill unique and meaningful components from mouse-tracking data for subsequent analysis. With this guide, we hope researchers can address novel hypotheses otherwise inaccessible with more traditional methods.

Amygdala Responsivity to High-Level Social Information from Unseen Faces

Previous research shows that the amygdala automatically responds to a faces trustworthiness when a face is clearly visible. However, it is unclear whether the amygdala could evaluate such high-level facial information without a face being consciously perceived. Using a backward masking paradigm, we demonstrate in two functional neuroimaging experiments that the human amygdala is sensitive to subliminal variation in facial trustworthiness. Regions in the amygdala tracked how untrustworthy a face appeared (i.e., negative-linear responses) as well as the overall strength of a faces trustworthiness signal (i.e., nonlinear responses), despite faces not being subjectively seen. This tracking was robust across blocked and event-related designs and both real and computer-generated faces. The findings demonstrate that the amygdala can be influenced by even high-level facial information before that information is consciously perceived, suggesting that the amygdalas processing of social cues in the absence of awareness may be more extensive than previously described.

Group Status Drives Majority and Minority Integration Preferences

This research examined preferences for national- and campus-level assimilative and pluralistic policies among Black and White students under different contexts, as majority- and minority-group members. We targeted attitudes at two universities, one where 85% of the student body is White, and another where 76% of students are Black. The results revealed that when a group constituted the majority, its members generally preferred assimilationist policies, and when a group constituted the minority, its members generally preferred pluralistic policies. The results support a functional perspective: Both majority and minority groups seek to protect and enhance their collective identities.

Facial Structure Is Indicative of Explicit Support for Prejudicial Beliefs

We present three studies examining whether male facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) is correlated with racial prejudice and whether observers are sensitive to fWHR when assessing prejudice in other people. Our results indicate that males with a greater fWHR are more likely to explicitly endorse racially prejudicial beliefs, though fWHR was unrelated to implicit bias. Participants evaluated targets with a greater fWHR as more likely to be prejudiced and accurately evaluated the degree to which targets reported prejudicial attitudes. Finally, compared with majority-group members, racial-minority participants reported greater motivation to accurately evaluate prejudice. This motivation mediated the relationship between minority- or majority-group membership and the accuracy of evaluations of prejudice, which indicates that motivation augments sensitivity to fWHR. Together, the results of these three studies demonstrate that fWHR is a reliable indicator of explicitly endorsed racial prejudice and that observers can use fWHR to accurately assess another person’s explicit prejudice.

Early Processing of Gendered Facial Cues Predicts the Electoral Success of Female Politicians

This research examined how the typicality of gender cues in politicians’ faces related to their electoral success. Previous research has shown that faces with subtle gender-atypical cues elicit cognitive competition between male and female categories, which perceivers resolve during face perception. To assess whether this competition adversely impacted politicians’ electoral success, participants categorized the gender of politicians’ faces in a hand-tracking paradigm. Gender-category competition was indexed by the hand’s attraction to the incorrect gender response. Greater gender-category competition predicted a decreased likelihood of votes, but only for female politicians. Time-course analyses revealed that this outcome was evident as early as 380 ms following face presentation (Study 1). Results were replicated with a national sample, and effects became more pronounced as the conservatism of the constituency increased (Study 2). Thus, gender categorization dynamics during the initial milliseconds after viewing a female politician’s face are predictive of her electoral success, especially in more conservative areas.

Static and Dynamic Facial Cues Differentially Affect the Consistency of Social Evaluations

Individuals are quite sensitive to others’ appearance cues when forming social evaluations. Cues such as facial emotional resemblance are based on facial musculature and thus dynamic. Cues such as a face’s structure are based on the underlying bone and are thus relatively static. The current research examines the distinction between these types of facial cues by investigating the consistency in social evaluations arising from dynamic versus static cues. Specifically, across four studies using real faces, digitally generated faces, and downstream behavioral decisions, we demonstrate that social evaluations based on dynamic cues, such as intentions, have greater variability across multiple presentations of the same identity than do social evaluations based on static cues, such as ability. Thus, although evaluations of intentions vary considerably across different instances of a target’s face, evaluations of ability are relatively fixed. The findings highlight the role of facial cues’ consistency in the stability of social evaluations.

The Face–Time Continuum Lifespan Changes in Facial Width-to-Height Ratio Impact Aging-Associated Perceptions

Aging influences how a person is perceived on multiple dimensions (e.g., physical power). Here we examined how facial structure informs these evolving social perceptions. Recent work examining young adults’ faces has revealed the impact of the facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) on perceived traits, such that individuals with taller, thinner faces are perceived to be less aggressive, less physically powerful, and friendlier. These perceptions are similar to those stereotypically associated with older adults. Examining whether fWHR might contribute to these changing perceptions over the life span, we found that age provides a shifting context through which fWHR differentially impacts aging-related social perceptions (Study 1). In addition, archival analyses (Study 2) established that fWHR decreases across age, and a subsequent study found that fWHR mediated the relationship between target age and multiple aging-related perceptions (Study 3). The findings provide evidence that fWHR decreases across age and influences stereotypical perceptions that change with age.

The neural basis of stereotypic impact on multiple social categorization

Perceivers extract multiple social dimensions from anothers face (e.g., race, emotion), and these dimensions can become linked due to stereotypes (e.g., Black individuals → angry). The current research examined the neural basis of detecting and resolving conflicts between top-down stereotypes and bottom-up visual information in person perception. Participants viewed faces congruent and incongruent with stereotypes, via variations in race and emotion, while neural activity was measured using fMRI. Hand movements en route to race/emotion responses were recorded using mouse-tracking to behaviorally index individual differences in stereotypical associations during categorization. The medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) showed stronger activation to faces that violated stereotypical expectancies at the intersection of multiple social categories (i.e., race and emotion). These regions were highly sensitive to the degree of incongruency, exhibiting linearly increasing responses as race and emotion became stereotypically more incongruent. Further, the ACC exhibited greater functional connectivity with the lateral fusiform cortex, a region implicated in face processing, when viewing stereotypically incongruent (relative to congruent) targets. Finally, participants with stronger behavioral tendencies to link race and emotion stereotypically during categorization showed greater dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation to stereotypically incongruent targets. Together, the findings provide insight into how conflicting stereotypes at the nexus of multiple social dimensions are resolved at the neural level to accurately perceive other people.

Blacks' Death Rate Due to Circulatory Diseases Is Positively Related to Whites' Explicit Racial Bias: A Nationwide Investigation Using Project Implicit

Perceptions of racial bias have been linked to poorer circulatory health among Blacks compared with Whites. However, little is known about whether Whites’ actual racial bias contributes to this racial disparity in health. We compiled racial-bias data from 1,391,632 Whites and examined whether racial bias in a given county predicted Black-White disparities in circulatory-disease risk (access to health care, diagnosis of a circulatory disease; Study 1) and circulatory-disease-related death rate (Study 2) in the same county. Results revealed that in counties where Whites reported greater racial bias, Blacks (but not Whites) reported decreased access to health care (Study 1). Furthermore, in counties where Whites reported greater racial bias, both Blacks and Whites showed increased death rates due to circulatory diseases, but this relationship was stronger for Blacks than for Whites (Study 2). These results indicate that racial disparities in risk of circulatory disease and in circulatory-disease-related death rate are more pronounced in communities where Whites harbor more explicit racial bias.

Disproportionate use of lethal force in policing is associated with regional racial biases of residents

Due to a lack of data, the demographic and psychological factors associated with lethal force by police officers have remained insufficiently explored. We develop the first predictive models of lethal force by integrating crowd-sourced and fact-checked lethal force databases with regional demographics and measures of geolocated implicit and explicit racial biases collected from 2,156,053 residents across the United States. Results indicate that only the implicit racial prejudices and stereotypes of White residents, beyond major demographic covariates, are associated with disproportionally more use of lethal force with Blacks relative to regional base rates of Blacks in the population. Thus, the current work provides the first macropsychological statistical models of lethal force, indicating that the context in which police officers work is significantly associated with disproportionate use of lethal force.