Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Mar 30, 2022
We investigated how tightness-looseness, reflecting strictness of social norms, of state of resid... more We investigated how tightness-looseness, reflecting strictness of social norms, of state of residence in the USA predicts behaviors and attitudes related to COVID-19. Because individual-level tightness may better capture current attitudes during the pandemic, whereas state-level archival measures reflect historical factors, we assessed the extent to which tightness-looseness at both levels predicted adherence to public health guidelines and biases toward outgroups related to COVID-19. In Spring 2020, 544 mTurk participants, primarily from the 13 tightest and 13 loosest states, completed survey questions about health behaviors in response to COVID-19, endorsement of future policy changes, feeling of responsibility for lives, and attitudes toward groups marginalized during the pandemic (i.e., Asians, older adults). State-level results indicated some associations with attitudes toward Asians and older adults, but effects were not robust. Results based on individuals’ ratings of the tightness of their state indicated that higher levels of perceived tightness were associated with higher levels of protective self-reported public health behaviors (e.g., mask wearing, handwashing) during COVID-19, more endorsement of future policy changes to contain the pandemic, higher reported feelings of responsibility for one’s life, and stronger negative attitudes toward Asians. The relations between tightness and health outcomes persisted after controlling for political attitudes and demographics. Thus, individual, more than state, tightness-looseness accounted for some degree of public health behaviors (unique contribution of individual tightness: R2 = .034) and attitudes toward marginalized groups ( R2 = .020) early during the COVID-19 pandemic. The implications of these findings for interventions to support behavior change or combat anti-Asian bias are discussed.
The current project will examine the relation between aging and prosocial behaviors (and the role... more The current project will examine the relation between aging and prosocial behaviors (and the role of empathy in the relation) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eriksen’s zoom model of attention implies a trade-off between the breadth and resolution of repre... more Eriksen’s zoom model of attention implies a trade-off between the breadth and resolution of representations of information. Following this perspective, we used Eriksen’s flanker task to investigate culture’s influence on attentional allocation and attentional resolution. In Experiment 1 , the spatial distance of the flankers was varied to test whether people from Eastern cultures (here, Turks) experienced more interference than people from Western cultures (here, Americans) when flankers were further from the target. In Experiment 2 , the contrast of the flankers was varied. The pattern of results shows that congruency of the flankers (Experiment 1 ) as well as the degree of contrast of the flankers compared with the target (Experiment 2 ) interact with participants’ cultural background to differentially influence accuracy or reaction times. In addition, we used evidence accumulation modeling to jointly consider measures of speed and accuracy. Results indicate that to make decisions...
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2021
Judgment of trustworthiness is an important social ability. Many studies show neural activation d... more Judgment of trustworthiness is an important social ability. Many studies show neural activation differences to variations in face trustworthiness in brain reward regions. A previously published analysis of the present fMRI data showed that older adults' (OA) reward region activation responded significantly to trustworthiness in a set of older and younger faces, whereas younger adults' (YA) activation did not-a finding inconsistent with studies that used only younger faces. We hypothesized that voxel pattern analyses would be more sensitive to YA neural responses to trustworthiness in our set of faces, replicating YA neural discrimination in prior literature. Based on evidence for OA neural dedifferentiation, we also hypothesized that voxel pattern analyses would more accurately classify YA than OA neural responses to face trustworthiness. We reanalyzed the data with two pattern classification models and evaluated the models' performance with permutation testing. Voxel patterns discriminated face trustworthiness levels in both YA and OA reward regions, while allowing better classification of face trustworthiness for YA than OA, the reverse of previous results for neural activation levels. The moderation of age differences by analytic method shines a light on the possibility that voxel patterns uniquely index neural representations of the stimulus information content, consistent with findings of impaired representation with age.
This study evaluated how differences in economic risk-taking in Westerners and East Asians reflec... more This study evaluated how differences in economic risk-taking in Westerners and East Asians reflect cultural differences in the analytic or holistic processing of probabilistic outcomes during value-based decisions. Twenty-seven Americans (US) and 51 Taiwanese (TW) young adults completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Lottery Choice Task (LCT) experiment. Participants accepted or rejected stakes with varying probabilities of winning or losing different magnitudes of points. TW participants accepted more stakes when win probabilities were > 0.50, whereas US participants reduced their acceptance rates of winning stakes more discriminately as win probabilities decreased. Both groups rejected losing stakes (win probabilities < 0.50) with similar frequency. Critically, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) responses correspondingly showed greater discrimination between win probability conditions in US than TW groups. Our findings highlight a neurocognitive mechanism in the VMPFC for how cultural differences in distinguishing between probabilistic reward outcomes shape neural computations of risk and prospects.
There is, however, at least one population for which involuntary autobiographical retrieval subst... more There is, however, at least one population for which involuntary autobiographical retrieval substantially differs from its voluntary counterpart: individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In order to support her own view—namely, that the involuntary recollection of traumatic autobiographical memories is the product of the same basic mechanisms underlying the involuntary retrieval of non-traumatic memories—Berntsen devotes Chapter 7 to a critical discussion of several theories positing special mechanisms for traumatic memories. Notwithstanding the explanatory virtues of this view, I find it ultimately unsatisfactory. Why do so many people who experience traumatic events not go onto develop PTSD, despite the fact that they experience events of ordinary involuntary autobiographical recollection? Further research may be able to tell us why some people are prone to develop PTSD, but it seems likely that the answer will involve a reference to some underlying mechanism(s). The book ends with an attractive speculation that the mechanisms by means of which we experience sudden involuntary episodic future thoughts are the same as those engaged during involuntary autobiographical memory. This idea dovetails with recent models suggesting that our capacity to mentally simulate personal futures depends on episodic memory, as this memory system evolved in the service of producing a beneficial simulation of the future versus keeping a faithful record of the past (Schacter and Addis, 2009). Moreover, Berntsen goes as far as to suggest that false memories and involuntary episodic future thoughts may be closely related. Indeed, after reading her book, I thought of the other types of simulations that come to us involuntarily, such as hypothetical and counterfactual imaginings. I wonder whether they form, along with involuntary memory retrieval, a unitary cognitive faculty whose function might be, as Berntsen suggests (p. 197), to prevent us from living in the present (De Brigard, 2014).
Previous research suggests self-provided misinformation (lying) impairs memory for the truth, whe... more Previous research suggests self-provided misinformation (lying) impairs memory for the truth, whereby more incorrect details are remembered compared to being truthful. The cognitive control processes evoked by inhibiting retrieval of truthful information may come at the expense of retaining that information in memory. Because lying requires quick adaptability to the situation, heart rate variability (HRV), reflecting cognitive control processes, is a useful metric of these cognitive demands. The present experiment extends previous research (Paige et al., 2019) and had participants complete a questionnaire orally in front of a panel while electrocardiography (ECG) data was collected. Participants were instructed to tell the truth for half of the questions and lie for the other half. For a subset of the questions, participants were instructed to elaborate on their response. After a delay, participants completed the same questionnaire on the computer, responding truthfully to all items...
Objectives Previous literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age–p... more Objectives Previous literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age–prosociality relationship occur during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, or might the pandemic—as a stressor that may differently influence young and older adults—create a boundary condition on the relationship? If so, can empathy, a well-known prosocial disposition, explain the age–prosociality relationship? This study investigated these questions and whether the target (distant others compared to close others) of prosocial behaviors differs by age. Methods Participants completed a series of surveys on dispositional empathy and prosocial behaviors for a study assessing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 330 participants (aged 18–89) from the United States who completed all of the surveys included in the present analyses. Results Age was positively related to greater prosociality during the pandemic. Although empathy was positively associated with i...
Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal
Self-relevance effects are often confounded by the presence of emotional content, rendering it di... more Self-relevance effects are often confounded by the presence of emotional content, rendering it difficult to determine how brain networks functionally connected to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are affected by the independent contributions of self-relevance and emotion. This difficulty is complicated by age-related changes in functional connectivity between the vmPFC and other default mode network regions, and regions typically associated with externally oriented networks. We asked groups of younger and older adults to imagine placing emotional and neutral objects in their home or a stranger's home. An age-invariant vmPFC cluster showed increased activation for self-relevant and emotional content processing. Functional connectivity analyses revealed age × self-relevance interactions in vmPFC connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex. There were also age × emotion interactions in vmPFC functional connectivity with the anterior insula, orbitofrontal gyrus, inferi...
Emotion and self-referential information can both enhance memory, but whether they do so via comm... more Emotion and self-referential information can both enhance memory, but whether they do so via common mechanisms across the adult lifespan remains underexplored. To address this gap, the current study directly compared, within the same fMRI paradigm, the encoding of emotionally salient and self-referential information in older adults and younger adults. Behavioral results replicated the typical patterns of better memory for emotional than neutral information and for self-referential than non-self-referential materials; these memory enhancements were present for younger and older adults. In neural activity, young and older adults showed similar modulation by emotion, but there were substantial age differences in the way self-referential processing affected neural recruitment. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found little evidence for overlap in the neural mechanisms engaged for emotional and self-referential processing. These results reveal that—just as in cognitive domains—older adults ...
Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, Mar 30, 2022
We investigated how tightness-looseness, reflecting strictness of social norms, of state of resid... more We investigated how tightness-looseness, reflecting strictness of social norms, of state of residence in the USA predicts behaviors and attitudes related to COVID-19. Because individual-level tightness may better capture current attitudes during the pandemic, whereas state-level archival measures reflect historical factors, we assessed the extent to which tightness-looseness at both levels predicted adherence to public health guidelines and biases toward outgroups related to COVID-19. In Spring 2020, 544 mTurk participants, primarily from the 13 tightest and 13 loosest states, completed survey questions about health behaviors in response to COVID-19, endorsement of future policy changes, feeling of responsibility for lives, and attitudes toward groups marginalized during the pandemic (i.e., Asians, older adults). State-level results indicated some associations with attitudes toward Asians and older adults, but effects were not robust. Results based on individuals’ ratings of the tightness of their state indicated that higher levels of perceived tightness were associated with higher levels of protective self-reported public health behaviors (e.g., mask wearing, handwashing) during COVID-19, more endorsement of future policy changes to contain the pandemic, higher reported feelings of responsibility for one’s life, and stronger negative attitudes toward Asians. The relations between tightness and health outcomes persisted after controlling for political attitudes and demographics. Thus, individual, more than state, tightness-looseness accounted for some degree of public health behaviors (unique contribution of individual tightness: R2 = .034) and attitudes toward marginalized groups ( R2 = .020) early during the COVID-19 pandemic. The implications of these findings for interventions to support behavior change or combat anti-Asian bias are discussed.
The current project will examine the relation between aging and prosocial behaviors (and the role... more The current project will examine the relation between aging and prosocial behaviors (and the role of empathy in the relation) during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Eriksen’s zoom model of attention implies a trade-off between the breadth and resolution of repre... more Eriksen’s zoom model of attention implies a trade-off between the breadth and resolution of representations of information. Following this perspective, we used Eriksen’s flanker task to investigate culture’s influence on attentional allocation and attentional resolution. In Experiment 1 , the spatial distance of the flankers was varied to test whether people from Eastern cultures (here, Turks) experienced more interference than people from Western cultures (here, Americans) when flankers were further from the target. In Experiment 2 , the contrast of the flankers was varied. The pattern of results shows that congruency of the flankers (Experiment 1 ) as well as the degree of contrast of the flankers compared with the target (Experiment 2 ) interact with participants’ cultural background to differentially influence accuracy or reaction times. In addition, we used evidence accumulation modeling to jointly consider measures of speed and accuracy. Results indicate that to make decisions...
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 2021
Judgment of trustworthiness is an important social ability. Many studies show neural activation d... more Judgment of trustworthiness is an important social ability. Many studies show neural activation differences to variations in face trustworthiness in brain reward regions. A previously published analysis of the present fMRI data showed that older adults' (OA) reward region activation responded significantly to trustworthiness in a set of older and younger faces, whereas younger adults' (YA) activation did not-a finding inconsistent with studies that used only younger faces. We hypothesized that voxel pattern analyses would be more sensitive to YA neural responses to trustworthiness in our set of faces, replicating YA neural discrimination in prior literature. Based on evidence for OA neural dedifferentiation, we also hypothesized that voxel pattern analyses would more accurately classify YA than OA neural responses to face trustworthiness. We reanalyzed the data with two pattern classification models and evaluated the models' performance with permutation testing. Voxel patterns discriminated face trustworthiness levels in both YA and OA reward regions, while allowing better classification of face trustworthiness for YA than OA, the reverse of previous results for neural activation levels. The moderation of age differences by analytic method shines a light on the possibility that voxel patterns uniquely index neural representations of the stimulus information content, consistent with findings of impaired representation with age.
This study evaluated how differences in economic risk-taking in Westerners and East Asians reflec... more This study evaluated how differences in economic risk-taking in Westerners and East Asians reflect cultural differences in the analytic or holistic processing of probabilistic outcomes during value-based decisions. Twenty-seven Americans (US) and 51 Taiwanese (TW) young adults completed a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) Lottery Choice Task (LCT) experiment. Participants accepted or rejected stakes with varying probabilities of winning or losing different magnitudes of points. TW participants accepted more stakes when win probabilities were > 0.50, whereas US participants reduced their acceptance rates of winning stakes more discriminately as win probabilities decreased. Both groups rejected losing stakes (win probabilities < 0.50) with similar frequency. Critically, ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC) responses correspondingly showed greater discrimination between win probability conditions in US than TW groups. Our findings highlight a neurocognitive mechanism in the VMPFC for how cultural differences in distinguishing between probabilistic reward outcomes shape neural computations of risk and prospects.
There is, however, at least one population for which involuntary autobiographical retrieval subst... more There is, however, at least one population for which involuntary autobiographical retrieval substantially differs from its voluntary counterpart: individuals with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). In order to support her own view—namely, that the involuntary recollection of traumatic autobiographical memories is the product of the same basic mechanisms underlying the involuntary retrieval of non-traumatic memories—Berntsen devotes Chapter 7 to a critical discussion of several theories positing special mechanisms for traumatic memories. Notwithstanding the explanatory virtues of this view, I find it ultimately unsatisfactory. Why do so many people who experience traumatic events not go onto develop PTSD, despite the fact that they experience events of ordinary involuntary autobiographical recollection? Further research may be able to tell us why some people are prone to develop PTSD, but it seems likely that the answer will involve a reference to some underlying mechanism(s). The book ends with an attractive speculation that the mechanisms by means of which we experience sudden involuntary episodic future thoughts are the same as those engaged during involuntary autobiographical memory. This idea dovetails with recent models suggesting that our capacity to mentally simulate personal futures depends on episodic memory, as this memory system evolved in the service of producing a beneficial simulation of the future versus keeping a faithful record of the past (Schacter and Addis, 2009). Moreover, Berntsen goes as far as to suggest that false memories and involuntary episodic future thoughts may be closely related. Indeed, after reading her book, I thought of the other types of simulations that come to us involuntarily, such as hypothetical and counterfactual imaginings. I wonder whether they form, along with involuntary memory retrieval, a unitary cognitive faculty whose function might be, as Berntsen suggests (p. 197), to prevent us from living in the present (De Brigard, 2014).
Previous research suggests self-provided misinformation (lying) impairs memory for the truth, whe... more Previous research suggests self-provided misinformation (lying) impairs memory for the truth, whereby more incorrect details are remembered compared to being truthful. The cognitive control processes evoked by inhibiting retrieval of truthful information may come at the expense of retaining that information in memory. Because lying requires quick adaptability to the situation, heart rate variability (HRV), reflecting cognitive control processes, is a useful metric of these cognitive demands. The present experiment extends previous research (Paige et al., 2019) and had participants complete a questionnaire orally in front of a panel while electrocardiography (ECG) data was collected. Participants were instructed to tell the truth for half of the questions and lie for the other half. For a subset of the questions, participants were instructed to elaborate on their response. After a delay, participants completed the same questionnaire on the computer, responding truthfully to all items...
Objectives Previous literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age–p... more Objectives Previous literature suggests age-related increases in prosociality. Does such an age–prosociality relationship occur during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, or might the pandemic—as a stressor that may differently influence young and older adults—create a boundary condition on the relationship? If so, can empathy, a well-known prosocial disposition, explain the age–prosociality relationship? This study investigated these questions and whether the target (distant others compared to close others) of prosocial behaviors differs by age. Methods Participants completed a series of surveys on dispositional empathy and prosocial behaviors for a study assessing their experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic. There were 330 participants (aged 18–89) from the United States who completed all of the surveys included in the present analyses. Results Age was positively related to greater prosociality during the pandemic. Although empathy was positively associated with i...
Social Behavior and Personality: an international journal
Self-relevance effects are often confounded by the presence of emotional content, rendering it di... more Self-relevance effects are often confounded by the presence of emotional content, rendering it difficult to determine how brain networks functionally connected to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC) are affected by the independent contributions of self-relevance and emotion. This difficulty is complicated by age-related changes in functional connectivity between the vmPFC and other default mode network regions, and regions typically associated with externally oriented networks. We asked groups of younger and older adults to imagine placing emotional and neutral objects in their home or a stranger's home. An age-invariant vmPFC cluster showed increased activation for self-relevant and emotional content processing. Functional connectivity analyses revealed age × self-relevance interactions in vmPFC connectivity with the anterior cingulate cortex. There were also age × emotion interactions in vmPFC functional connectivity with the anterior insula, orbitofrontal gyrus, inferi...
Emotion and self-referential information can both enhance memory, but whether they do so via comm... more Emotion and self-referential information can both enhance memory, but whether they do so via common mechanisms across the adult lifespan remains underexplored. To address this gap, the current study directly compared, within the same fMRI paradigm, the encoding of emotionally salient and self-referential information in older adults and younger adults. Behavioral results replicated the typical patterns of better memory for emotional than neutral information and for self-referential than non-self-referential materials; these memory enhancements were present for younger and older adults. In neural activity, young and older adults showed similar modulation by emotion, but there were substantial age differences in the way self-referential processing affected neural recruitment. Contrary to our hypothesis, we found little evidence for overlap in the neural mechanisms engaged for emotional and self-referential processing. These results reveal that—just as in cognitive domains—older adults ...
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