Nalini Ambady

Stereotyping, Prejudice, and Discrimination

American citizens are extremely fortunate to live in a democracy, and more specifically, a society that upholds egalitarian and meritocratic ideals. Americans have fought wars and faced internal struggles in order to establish this system and champion these values. Within the past two centuries, this nation has abolished slavery, given women the right to vote, and desegregated schools. In more recent years, the movement toward equal opportunity has been advanced even further; public and private schools have increased financial support for economically disadvantaged scholars, and affirmative action programs have been developed as yet another means of combating inequities. It would seem that as a society, the United States is moving toward the moral ideal of equality for one and all.

On the Universality and Cultural Specificity of Emotion Recognition: A Meta-Analysis

A meta-analysis examined emotion recognition within and across cultures. Emotions were universally recognized at better-than-chance levels. Accuracy was higher when emotions were both expressed and recognized by members of the same national, ethnic, or regional group, suggesting an in-group advantage. This advantage was smaller for cultural groups with greater exposure to one another, measured in terms of living in the same nation, physical proximity, and telephone communication. Majority group members were poorer at judging minority group members than the reverse. Cross-cultural accuracy was lower in studies that used a balanced research design, and higher in studies that used imitation rather than posed or spontaneous emotional expressions. Attributes of study design appeared not to moderate the size of the in-group advantage.

Stereotype Susceptibility: Identity Salience and Shifts in Quantitative Performance

Recent studies have documented that performance in a domain is hindered when individuals feel that a sociocultural group to which they belong is negatively stereotyped in that domain. We report that implicit activation of a social identity can facilitate as well as impede performance on a quantitative task. When a particular social identity was made salient at an implicit level, performance was altered in the direction predicted by the stereotype associated with the identity. Common cultural stereotypes hold that Asians have superior quantitative skills compared with other ethnic groups and that women have inferior quantitative skills compared with men. We found that Asian-American women performed better on a mathematics test when their ethnic identity was activated, but worse when their gender identity was activated, compared with a control group who had neither identity activated. Cross-cultural investigation indicated that it was the stereotype, and not the identity per se, that influenced performance.

Toward a histology of social behavior: Judgmental accuracy from thin slices of the behavioral stream

Publisher Summary A thin slice is defined as “a brief excerpt of expressive behavior sampled from the behavioral stream.” Thin slices can be sampled from any available channel of communication—including the face, the body, speech, the voice, transcripts, or combinations of the above. The expressive behavior sampled is diagnostic of many affective, personalities, and interpersonal conditions. This chapter focuses on thin slices and illustrates the efficiency of thin slices in providing information about social and interpersonal relations. It discusses the cognitive and affective mechanisms that influence the processing of information from thin slices of the behavioral stream. Further, the chapter discusses the theoretical and methodological boundaries of thin-slice judgments. The chapter concludes with two newspaper accounts that illustrate the importance of the accurate communication and perception of thin slices. The ultimate goal of perception and judgment of thin slices of the behavioral stream is to understand the ways in which individuals come to know and negotiate their social environment.

Stereotype Susceptibility in Children: Effects of Identity Activation on Quantitative Performance

A growing body of research indicates that the activation of negative stereotypes can impede cognitive performance in adults, whereas positive stereotypes can facilitate cognitive performance. In two studies, we examined the effects of positive and negative stereotypes on the cognitive performance of children in three age groups: lower elementary school, upper elementary school, and middle school. Very young children in the lower elementary grades (kindergarten-grade 2) and older children in the middle school grades (grades 6–8) showed shifts in performance associated with the activation of positive and negative stereotypes; these shifts were consistent with patterns previously reported for adults. The subtle activation of negative stereotypes significantly impeded performance, whereas the subtle activation of positive stereotypes significantly facilitated performance. Markedly different effects were found for children in the upper elementary grades (grades 3–5). These results suggest that the development of stereotype susceptibility is a critical domain for understanding the connection between stereotypes and individual behavior.

The effects of fear and anger facial expressions on approach- and avoidance-related behaviors.

The facial expressions of fear and anger are universal social signals in humans. Both expressions have been frequently presumed to signify threat to perceivers and therefore are often used in studies investigating responses to threatening stimuli. Here the authors show that the anger expression facilitates avoidance-related behavior in participants, which supports the notion of this expression being a threatening stimulus. The fear expression, on the other hand, facilitates approach behaviors in perceivers. This contradicts the notion of the fear expression as predominantly threatening or aversive and suggests it may represent an affiliative stimulus. Although the fear expression may signal that a threat is present in the environment, the effect of the expression on conspecifics may be in part to elicit approach.

MouseTracker: Software for studying real-time mental processing using a computer mouse-tracking method

In the present article, we present a software package, MouseTracker, that allows researchers to use a computer mouse-tracking method for assessing real-time processing in psychological tasks. By recording the streaming x-, y-coordinates of the computer mouse while participants move the mouse into one of multiple response alternatives, motor dynamics of the hand can reveal the time course of mental processes. MouseTracker provides researchers with fine-grained information about the real-time evolution of participant responses by sampling 60–75 times/sec the online competition between multiple response alternatives. MouseTracker allows researchers to develop and run experiments and subsequently analyze mouse trajectories in a user-interactive, graphics-based environment. Experiments may incorporate images, letter strings, and sounds. Mouse trajectories can be processed, averaged, visualized, and explored, and measures of spatial attraction/curvature, complexity, velocity, and acceleration can be computed. We describe the software and the method, and we provide details on mouse trajectory analysis. We validate the software by demonstrating the accuracy and reliability of its trajectory and reaction time data. The latest version of MouseTracker is freely available at http://mousetracker.jbfreeman.net.

When familiarity breeds accuracy: Cultural exposure and facial emotion recognition

Two studies provide evidence for the role of cultural familiarity in recognizing facial expressions of emotion. For Chinese located in China and the United States, Chinese Americans, and non-Asian Americans, accuracy and speed in judging Chinese and American emotions was greater with greater participant exposure to the group posing the expressions. Likewise, Tibetans residing in China and Africans residing in the United States were faster and more accurate when judging emotions expressed by host versus nonhost society members. These effects extended across generations of Chinese Americans, seemingly independent of ethnic or biological ties. Results suggest that the universal affect system governing emotional expression may be characterized by subtle differences in style across cultures, which become more familiar with greater cultural contact.

P300 as an index of attention to self-relevant stimuli

Past work suggests that information related to the self receives ‘preferential access’ to the limited pool of attentional resources. However, these studies have been limited by their reliance on response–time measures, which require overt responding and represent the combined effects of multiple stages of information processing. One aim of the present study was to extend past work by obtaining a response-independent index of attention allocation sensitive to changes in discrete stages of information processing. An additional goal was to explore the potential time course of differential sensitivity to self-relevant cues. We assessed the P300, an ERP component that provides an index of attentional resources, evoked by autobiographical self-relevant stimuli (e.g., one’s own name). As expected, P300 was augmented for self-relevant stimuli relative to control stimuli. In addition, analyses of P300 latency indicate that the effects of self-relevance are present during higher-order stages of cognitive processing related to selective attention. These results complement and extend previous work on the role of self-relevance in the selection of material for further processing.

A Dynamic Interactive Theory of Person Construal

A dynamic interactive theory of person construal is proposed. It assumes that the perception of other people is accomplished by a dynamical system involving continuous interaction between social categories, stereotypes, high-level cognitive states, and the low-level processing of facial, vocal, and bodily cues. This system permits lower-level sensory perception and higher-order social cognition to dynamically coordinate across multiple interactive levels of processing to give rise to stable person construals. A recurrent connectionist model of this system is described, which accounts for major findings on (a) partial parallel activation and dynamic competition in categorization and stereotyping, (b) top-down influences of high-level cognitive states and stereotype activations on categorization, (c) bottom-up category interactions due to shared perceptual features, and (d) contextual and cross-modal effects on categorization. The systems probabilistic and continuously evolving activation states permit multiple construals to be flexibly active in parallel. These activation states are also able to be tightly yoked to ongoing changes in external perceptual cues and to ongoing changes in high-level cognitive states. The implications of a rapidly adaptive, dynamic, and interactive person construal system are discussed.