Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility

Robust memory of face moral values is encoded in the human caudate tail: a simultaneous EEG-fMRI study

Moral judgements about people based on their actions is a key component that guides social decision making. It is currently unknown how positive or negative moral judgments associated with a person's face are processed and stored in the brain for a long time. Here, we investigate the long-term memory of moral values associated with human faces using simultaneous EEG-fMRI data acquisition. Results show that only a few exposures to morally charged stories of people are enough to form long-term memories a day later for a relatively large number of new faces. Event related potentials (ERPs) showed a significant differentiation of remembered good vs bad faces over centerofrontal electrode sites (value ERP). EEG-informed fMRI analysis revealed a subcortical cluster centered on the left caudate tail (CDt) as a correlate of the face value ERP. Importantly neither this analysis nor a conventional whole-brain analysis revealed any significant coding of face values in cortical areas, in particular the fusiform face area (FFA). Conversely an fMRI-informed EEG source localization using accurate subject-specific EEG head models also revealed activation in the left caudate tail. Nevertheless, the detected caudate tail region was found to be functionally connected to the FFA, suggesting FFA to be the source of face-specific information to CDt. A further psycho-physiological interaction analysis also revealed task-dependent coupling between CDt and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex (dmPFC), a region previously identified as retaining emotional working memories. These results identify CDt as a main site for encoding the long-term value memories of faces in humans suggesting that moral value of faces activates the same subcortical basal ganglia circuitry involved in processing reward value memory for objects in primates.

Uncovering a pseudoscience: an analysis of 'biological dentistry' Instagram posts

OBJECTIVE

This infodemiology study aimed to analyze characteristics of English-language Instagram posts on 'Biological Dentistry'.

MATERIALS AND METHODS

Using CrowdTangle, we analyzed 500 'Biological Dentistry' posts published on Instagram from May 2017 to May 2022. Two researchers assessed each post for facticity, motivation, author's profile, sentiment, and interaction metrics. Statistical analysis was employed to compare interaction metrics between dichotomized categories of posts' characteristics and determine predictors of misinformation and user engagement.

RESULTS

Over half of the posts (58.4%) were from health-related authors, and a considerable number contained misinformation (68.2%) or were financially motivated (52%). Sentiment was mostly negative or neutral (59.8%). Misinformation was associated with financial motivation (OR = 2.12) and health-related authors (OR = 5.56), while non-health-related authors' posts associated with higher engagement (OR = 1.98). Reliable content, non-health-related authorship, and positive sentiment were associated with increased user interaction.

CONCLUSION

Misinformation about 'Biological Dentistry' on Instagram is mainly spread by financially incentivized health-related authors. Yet, non-health-related authors' posts resonate more with audiences, highlighting a nuanced relationship between content facticity, authorship, and engagement.

Art perception is affected by negative knowledge about famous and unknown artists

The biographies of some celebrated artists are marked by accounts that paint a far from beautiful portrait. Does this negative-social knowledge influence the aesthetic experience of an artwork? Does an artist's fame protect their paintings from such an influence? We present two preregistered experiments examining the effect of social-emotional biographical knowledge about famous and unknown artists on the reception and perception of their paintings, using aesthetic ratings and neurocognitive measures. In Experiment 1, paintings attributed to artists characterised by negative biographical information were liked less, evoked greater feelings of arousal and were judged lower in terms of quality, than paintings by artists associated with neutral information. No modulation of artist renown was found. Experiment 2 fully replicated these behavioural results and revealed that paintings by artists associated with negative social-emotional knowledge also elicited enhanced early brain activity related to visual perception (P1) and early emotional arousal (early posterior negativity; EPN). Together, the findings suggest that negative knowledge about famous artists can shape not only explicit aesthetic evaluations, but may also penetrate the perception of the artwork itself.

The Online Misinformation Engagement Framework

Research on online misinformation has evolved rapidly, but organizing its results and identifying open research questions is difficult without a systematic approach. We present the Online Misinformation Engagement Framework, which classifies people's engagement with online misinformation into four stages: selecting information sources, choosing what information to consume or ignore, evaluating the accuracy of the information and/or the credibility of the source, and judging whether and how to react to the information (e.g., liking or sharing). We outline entry points for interventions at each stage and pinpoint the two early stages-source and information selection-as relatively neglected processes that should be addressed to further improve people's ability to contend with misinformation.

Distrust before first sight? Examining knowledge- and appearance-based effects of trustworthiness on the visual consciousness of faces

The present EEG study with 32 healthy participants investigated whether affective knowledge about a person influences the visual awareness of their face, additionally considering the impact of facial appearance. Faces differing in perceived trustworthiness based on appearance were associated with negative or neutral social information and shown as target stimuli in an attentional blink task. As expected, participants showed enhanced awareness of faces associated with negative compared to neutral social information. On the neurophysiological level, this effect was connected to differences in the time range of the early posterior negativity (EPN)-a component associated with enhanced attention and facilitated processing of emotional stimuli. The findings indicate that the social-affective relevance of a face based on emotional knowledge is accessed during a phase of attentional enhancement for conscious perception and can affect prioritization for awareness. In contrast, no clear evidence for influences of facial trustworthiness during the attentional blink was found.

Deepfake smiles matter less-the psychological and neural impact of presumed AI-generated faces

High-quality AI-generated portraits ("deepfakes") are becoming increasingly prevalent. Understanding the responses they evoke in perceivers is crucial in assessing their societal implications. Here we investigate the impact of the belief that depicted persons are real or deepfakes on psychological and neural measures of human face perception. Using EEG, we tracked participants' (N = 30) brain responses to real faces showing positive, neutral, and negative expressions, after being informed that they are either real or fake. Smiling faces marked as fake appeared less positive, as reflected in expression ratings, and induced slower evaluations. Whereas presumed real smiles elicited canonical emotion effects with differences relative to neutral faces in the P1 and N170 components (markers of early visual perception) and in the EPN component (indicative of reflexive emotional processing), presumed deepfake smiles showed none of these effects. Additionally, only smiles presumed as fake showed enhanced LPP activity compared to neutral faces, suggesting more effortful evaluation. Negative expressions induced typical emotion effects, whether considered real or fake. Our findings demonstrate a dampening effect on perceptual, emotional, and evaluative processing of presumed deepfake smiles, but not angry expressions, adding new specificity to the debate on the societal impact of AI-generated content.

Separating art from the artist: The effect of negative affective knowledge on ERPs and aesthetic experience

Some artists do terrible things. But does knowing something bad about an artist affect the way we perceive the work? Despite increased public interest, this question has yet to be addressed empirically. In this pre-registered study, we used aesthetic ratings and electrophysiological brain responses to shed light on the issue. We found that paintings of artists associated with negative-social biographical knowledge were liked less and found more arousing than paintings of artists associated with neutral information. Such paintings also elicited an enhanced brain response associated with fast and reflexive processing of emotional stimuli (early posterior negativity; EPN). Evaluations of quality and later, more controlled brain responses (late positive potential; LPP) were not affected. Reflecting the complexity of aesthetic experience, this pattern of results became more differentiated when the visual relatedness between the contents of the painting and the artist-related information was taken into account. Overall, our findings suggest that emotional aspects involved in art reception are not spontaneously separated from the artist, whilst evaluative judgments and more elaborate processing may be.

The influence of fake news on face-trait learning

Humans spontaneously attribute a wide range of traits to conspecifics based on their facial appearance. Unsurprisingly, previous findings indicate that this 'person evaluation' is affected by information provided about the target's past actions and behaviours. Strikingly, many news items shared on social media sites (e.g., Twitter) describe the actions of individuals who are often shown in accompanying images. This kind of material closely resembles that encountered by participants in previous studies of face-trait learning. We therefore sought to determine whether Twitter posts that pair facial images with favourable and unfavourable biographical information also modulate subsequent trait evaluation of the people depicted. We also assessed whether the effects of this information-valence manipulation were attenuated by the presence of the "disputed tag", introduced by Twitter as a means to combat the influence of fake-news. Across two preregistered experiments, we found that fictional tweets that paired facial images with details of the person's positive or negative actions affected the extent to which readers subsequently judged the faces depicted to be trustworthy. When the rating phase followed immediately after the study phase, the presence of the disputed tag attenuated the effect of the behavioural information (Experiment 1: N = 128; Mage = 34.06; 89 female, 36 male, 3 non-binary; 116 White British). However, when the rating phase was conducted after a 10-minute delay, the presence of the disputed tag had no significant effect (Experiment 2: N = 128; Mage = 29.12; 78 female, 44 male, 4 non-binary, 2 prefer not to say; 110 White British). Our findings suggest that disputed tags may have relatively little impact on the long-term face-trait learning that occurs via social media. As such, fake news stories may have considerable potential to shape users' person evaluation.

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

Background: Evidence indicates that the processing of facial stimuli may be influenced by incidental factors, and these influences are particularly powerful when facial expressions are ambiguous, such as neutral faces. However, limited research investigated whether emotional contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could be pervasively carried over to another experiment to modulate neutral face processing.

Objective: The present study aims to investigate whether an emotional text presented in a first experiment could generate negative emotion toward neutral faces in a second experiment unrelated to the previous experiment.

Methods: Ninety-nine students (all women) were randomly assigned to read and evaluate a negative text (negative context) or a neutral text (neutral text) in the first experiment. In the subsequent second experiment, the participants performed the following two tasks: (1) an attentional task in which neutral faces were presented as distractors and (2) a task involving the emotional judgment of neutral faces.

Results: The results show that compared to the neutral context, in the negative context, the participants rated more faces as negative. No significant result was found in the attentional task.

Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that incidental emotional information available in a previous experiment can increase participants’ propensity to interpret neutral faces as more negative when emotional information is directly evaluated. Therefore, the present study adds important evidence to the literature suggesting that our behavior and actions are modulated by previous information in an incidental or low perceived way similar to what occurs in everyday life, thereby modulating our judgments and emotions.