Right or Wrong?

The N400 effect captures nuances in implicit political preferences

We conducted a study in San Antonio, Texas, in the weeks preceding the 2022 state Governor election to determine if implicit or explicit measures of political preference could predict voter behavior. We adapted an established event-related potential (ERP) paradigm showing political statements to participants one word at the time where the last word made the statement pro-Republican or pro-Democratic. Our sample of college students included decided and undecided voters, and was reflective of the demographic make-up of south-central Texas. Our implicit measures were an established authoritarianism scale and the N400 effect to the sentence-final word. The N400 is an ERP to any stimulus that engages semantic memory and has been shown to measure implicit disagreement with political statements. Explicit measures of political preference and authoritarianism were predictive of vote choice. The expected N400 effect was found for Democratic voters, with larger amplitude to pro-Republican than pro-Democratic statements. Surprisingly, decided Republican voters showed no difference in N400 responses to pro-Republican and pro-Democratic statements and there was no group difference in the N400 effect. In turn, the N400 was not predictive of voter behavior. We argue that the N400 effect reflected individual political preferences, but that ultimately voter behavior aligned with partisan identity.

How clinical decision tasks modulate emotional related EEG responses in nursing students

Healthcare professionals play a vital role in conveying sensitive information as patients undergo stressful, demanding situations. However, the underlying neurocognitive dynamics in routine clinical tasks remain underexplored, creating gaps in healthcare research and social cognition models. Here, we examined whether the type of clinical task may differentially affect the emotional processing of nursing students in response to the emotional reactions of patients. In a within-subjects design, 40 nursing students read clinical cases prompting them to make procedural decisions or to respond to a patient with a proper communicative decision. Afterward, participants read sentences about patients' emotional states; some semantically consistent and others inconsistent along with filler sentences. EEG recordings toward critical words (emotional stimuli) were used to capture ERP indices of emotional salience (EPN), attentional engagement (LPP) and semantic integration (N400). Results showed that the procedural decision task elicited larger EPN amplitudes, reflecting pre-attentive categorization of emotional stimuli. The communicative decision task elicited larger LPP components associated with later elaborative processing. Additionally, the classical N400 effect elicited by semantically inconsistent sentences was found. The psychophysiological measures were tied by self-report measures indexing the difficulty of the task. These results suggest that the requirements of clinical tasks modulate emotional-related EEG responses.

The Influence of Green Product Type, Message Framing, and Anticipated Pride on Green Consumption Behavior: An Event-Related Potential (ERP) Study

Different types of green products require different marketing approaches to promote individual green purchasing behaviors. Previous studies have focused only on the effects of message framing on the promotion of different types of green products; however, little is known about the role of underlying emotions. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), this study investigated the neural responses to message framings and anticipated pride in green product types to assess their level of influence on green consumption. Participants in this study were randomly assigned to the anticipated pride versus control groups, and asked to make green consumption decisions involving different types (self- vs. other-interested) of green products, utilizing both gain and loss framing. The behavioral results demonstrated that participants in the anticipated pride group made more green product purchase choices than those in the control group. The ERP results showed that within the loss framing of the control group, other-interested green products induced larger N400 and smaller late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes than self-interested green products, whereas the results showed the opposite trend for the anticipated pride group. These results indicate that although individuals might have biases in their motivation that lead them to focus on self-interested green products, anticipating pride reduces cognitive conflicts and increases their motivation to focus on other-interested green products in the context of loss.

Metacognitive effects of attitudinal (in)congruence on social media: relating processing fluency, subjective knowledge, and political participation

Introduction

Encountering political disagreements in our daily lives can discourage us from participating in democratic processes. To date, research has mainly focused on social motives or attitudinal mechanisms to explain this phenomenon. In the present study, we adopt a different approach and highlight metacognitive effects of attitudinal (in)congruence on processing fluency (i.e., perceived ease of processing) and subjective knowledge as well as their relationship with behavioral outcomes such as the intention to politically participate.

Methods

In a pre-registered online experiment (N = 1,258), participants saw a political social media post with six opinionated user-generated comments. These comments either all matched (congruent condition) or contradicted (incongruent condition) participants' personal opinions. Processing fluency, issue specific subjective knowledge, and intention to politically participate were then measured using established self-report scales.

Results

In line with our hypotheses, the congruent stimuli evoked a higher feeling of processing fluency than the incongruent ones (d = 0.21). Furthermore, participants in the congruent condition indicated a higher intention to politically participate (d = 0.23) and rated their own knowledge on the topic as higher (d = 0.22) than participants in the incongruent condition-even though the factual knowledge gain should be equal in both conditions. Finally, we observed positive relationships between processing fluency and subjective issue knowledge (β = 0.11) as well as between subjective issue knowledge and issue-specific political participation (β = 0.43).

Discussion

Our findings highlight the importance of considering metacognitive constructs such as subjective knowledge to explain political behaviors and suggest that attitudinal congruence influences the way we perceive our own knowledge and information processing.

Integrating media content analysis, reception analysis, and media effects studies

Every day, the world of media is at our fingertips, whether it is watching movies, listening to the radio, or browsing online media. On average, people spend over 8 h per day consuming messages from the mass media, amounting to a total lifetime dose of more than 20 years in which conceptual content stimulates our brains. Effects from this flood of information range from short-term attention bursts (e.g., by breaking news features or viral 'memes') to life-long memories (e.g., of one's favorite childhood movie), and from micro-level impacts on an individual's memory, attitudes, and behaviors to macro-level effects on nations or generations. The modern study of media's influence on society dates back to the 1940s. This body of mass communication scholarship has largely asked, "what is media's effect on the individual?" Around the time of the cognitive revolution, media psychologists began to ask, "what cognitive processes are involved in media processing?" More recently, neuroimaging researchers started using real-life media as stimuli to examine perception and cognition under more natural conditions. Such research asks: "what can media tell us about brain function?" With some exceptions, these bodies of scholarship often talk past each other. An integration offers new insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms through which media affect single individuals and entire audiences. However, this endeavor faces the same challenges as all interdisciplinary approaches: Researchers with different backgrounds have different levels of expertise, goals, and foci. For instance, neuroimaging researchers label media stimuli as "naturalistic" although they are in many ways rather artificial. Similarly, media experts are typically unfamiliar with the brain. Neither media creators nor neuroscientifically oriented researchers approach media effects from a social scientific perspective, which is the domain of yet another species. In this article, we provide an overview of approaches and traditions to studying media, and we review the emerging literature that aims to connect these streams. We introduce an organizing scheme that connects the causal paths from media content → brain responses → media effects and discuss network control theory as a promising framework to integrate media content, reception, and effects analyses.

Beyond speaking: neurocognitive perspectives on language production in social interaction

The human faculty to speak has evolved, so has been argued, for communicating with others and for engaging in social interactions. Hence the human cognitive system should be equipped to address the demands that social interaction places on the language production system. These demands include the need to coordinate speaking with listening, the need to integrate own (verbal) actions with the interlocutor's actions, and the need to adapt language flexibly to the interlocutor and the social context. In order to meet these demands, core processes of language production are supported by cognitive processes that enable interpersonal coordination and social cognition. To fully understand the cognitive architecture and its neural implementation enabling humans to speak in social interaction, our understanding of how humans produce language needs to be connected to our understanding of how humans gain insights into other people's mental states and coordinate in social interaction. This article reviews theories and neurocognitive experiments that make this connection and can contribute to advancing our understanding of speaking in social interaction. This article is part of a discussion meeting issue 'Face2face: advancing the science of social interaction'.

The effect of contextual arousal on the integration of emotional words during discourse comprehension

This event-related potential (ERP) study examined the effect of contextual arousal on emotional word integration during discourse comprehension. We used two-sentence discourses as experimental materials. The first sentence served as an emotional context and described a high-arousal positive event, a low-arousal positive event, a high-arousal negative event, or a low-arousal negative event. The second sentence contained one negative word as the critical word, which was identical among different conditions. Thus, four conditions were included in the present study: high-arousal inconsistent, low-arousal inconsistent, high-arousal consistent, and low-arousal consistent. The ERP results showed that inconsistent emotional words elicited larger P200 and LPC than consistent words in the high-arousal context. However, only a P200 effect was observed for inconsistent emotional words in the low-arousal context. Our results indicate that a high-arousal context could lead to more elaborated emotional evaluation in the later stage of emotional word integration and suggest an important role of contextual arousal on the processing of emotional words during discourse processing.

Improvement of semantic processing ability of Chinese characters in school children: A comparative study based on 2009 and 2019 data

To explore the characteristics of semantic cognitive development of school children by observing the development changes over 10 years, a retrospective event-related potential (ERP) study was conducted on the semantic processing characteristics of Chinese characters in children aged 7–11 years with the same study design in 2009 and 2019. For the EEGs recorded in 2009, the N400 amplitude of semantic processing in children aged 7–11 years showed an approximately inverted U-shaped development trend with a slow rise at the age of 7–9, a peak at the age of 10, then a rapid decline at the age of 11. However, for the EEGs recorded in 2019, the N400 amplitude showed a gradually decreasing development trend with a slow decline for the 7–11 years class. Our data suggested that the semantic processing of Chinese characters in children aged 7–11 years in 2019 was one age stage earlier than that in 2009. The children’s brain cognition is in the process of development and change with high plasticity. 10 years of favorable social and educational environmental factors have significantly improved children’s semantic processing ability of Chinese characters.

The cheese was green with… envy: An EEG study on minimal fictional descriptions

Inconsistent information can be hard to understand, but in cases like fiction readers can integrate it with little to no difficulties. The present study aimed at examining if perspective switching can take place when only a minimal fictional description is provided (fictional world condition), as compared with general world knowledge (real world condition). Participants read sentences where food items had animated or inanimate features while EEG was recorded and performed a sentence completion task to evaluate recall. In the real-world condition, the N400 was significantly larger for sentences incongruent, rather than congruent, with general world knowledge. In the fictional world condition, the N400 elicited by congruent and incongruent sentences did not differ, confirming that the minimal description impacted online information processing. Information consistent with general knowledge was better recalled in both conditions. The current results highlight how contextual information is integrated during sentence comprehension.

A Functional Neuroimaging Investigation of Moral Foundations Theory

Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) posits that the human mind contains modules (or "foundations") that are functionally specialized to moralize unique dimensions of the social world: Authority, Loyalty, Purity, Harm, Fairness, and Liberty. Despite this strong claim about cognitive architecture, it is unclear whether neural activity during moral reasoning exhibits this modular structure. Here, we use spatiotemporal partial least squares correlation (PLSC) analyses of fMRI data collected during judgments of foundation-specific violations to investigate whether MFT's cognitive modularity claim extends to the neural level. A mean-centered PLSC analysis returned two latent variables that differentiated between social norm and moral foundation violations, functionally segregated Purity, Loyalty, Physical Harm, and Fairness from the other foundations, and suggested that Authority has a different neural basis than other binding foundations. Non-rotated PLSC analyses confirmed that neural activity distinguished social norm from moral foundation violations, and distinguished individualizing and binding moral foundations if Authority is dropped from the binding foundations. Purity violations were persistently associated with amygdala activity, whereas moral foundation violations more broadly tended to engage the default network. Our results constitute partial evidence for neural modularity and motivate further research on the novel groupings identified by the PLSC analyses.

Climate change, vaccines, GMO: The N400 effect as a marker of attitudes toward scientific issues

While the psychological predictors of antiscience beliefs have been extensively studied, neural underpinnings of the antiscience beliefs have received relatively little interest. The aim of the current study is to investigate whether attitudes towards the scientific issues are reflected in the N400 potential. Thirty-one individuals were asked to judge whether six different issues presented as primes (vaccines, medicines, nuclear energy, solar energy, genetically-modified organisms (GMO), natural farming) are well-described by ten positive and ten negative target words. EEG was recorded during the task. Furthermore, participants were asked to rate their own expertise in each of the six topics. Both positive and negative target words related to GMO elicited larger N400, than targets associated with vaccines and natural farming. The results of the current study show that N400 may be an indicator of the ambiguous attitude toward scientific issues.

COVIDisgust: Language processing through the lens of partisanship

Disgust is an aversive reaction protecting an organism from disease. People differ in how prone they are to experiencing it, and this fluctuates depending on how safe the environment is. Previous research has shown that the recognition and processing of disgusting words depends not on the word’s disgust per se but rather on individual sensitivity to disgust. However, the influence of dynamically changing disgust on language comprehension has not yet been researched. In a series of studies, we investigated whether the media’s portrayal of COVID-19 will affect subsequent language processing via changes in disgust. The participants were exposed to news headlines either depicting COVID-19 as a threat or downplaying it, and then rated single words for disgust and valence (Experiment 1; N = 83) or made a lexical decision (Experiment 2; N = 86). The headline type affected only word ratings and not lexical decisions, but political ideology and disgust proneness affected both. More liberal participants assigned higher disgust ratings after the headlines discounted the threat of COVID-19, whereas more conservative participants did so after the headlines emphasized it. We explain the results through the politicization and polarization of the pandemic. Further, political ideology was more predictive of reaction times in Experiment 2 than disgust proneness. High conservatism correlated with longer reaction times for disgusting and negative words, and the opposite was true for low conservatism. The results suggest that disgust proneness and political ideology dynamically interact with perceived environmental safety and have a measurable effect on language processing. Importantly, they also suggest that the media’s stance on the pandemic and the political framing of the issue may affect the public response by increasing or decreasing our disgust.

Neural computations in children's third-party interventions are modulated by their parents' moral values

One means by which humans maintain social cooperation is through intervention in third-party transgressions, a behaviour observable from the early years of development. While it has been argued that pre-school age children's intervention behaviour is driven by normative understandings, there is scepticism regarding this claim. There is also little consensus regarding the underlying mechanisms and motives that initially drive intervention behaviours in pre-school children. To elucidate the neural computations of moral norm violation associated with young children's intervention into third-party transgression, forty-seven preschoolers (average age 53.92 months) participated in a study comprising of electroencephalographic (EEG) measurements, a live interaction experiment, and a parent survey about moral values. This study provides data indicating that early implicit evaluations, rather than late deliberative processes, are implicated in a child's spontaneous intervention into third-party harm. Moreover, our findings suggest that parents' values about justice influence their children's early neural responses to third-party harm and their overt costly intervention behaviour.

Individual Differences in Political Ideology and Disgust Sensitivity Affect Real-Time Spoken Language Comprehension

Individuals' moral views have been shown to affect their event-related potentials (ERP) response to spoken statements, and people's political ideology has been shown to guide their sentence completion behavior. Using pupillometry, we asked whether political ideology and disgust sensitivity affect online spoken language comprehension. 60 native speakers of English listened to spoken utterances while their pupil size was tracked. Some of those utterances contained grammatical errors, semantic anomalies, or socio-cultural violations, statements incongruent with existing gender stereotypes and perceived speaker identity, such as "I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay," spoken by a male speaker. An individual's disgust sensitivity is associated with the Behavioral Immune System, and may be correlated with socio-political attitudes, for example regarding out-group stigmatization. We found that more disgust-sensitive individuals showed greater pupil dilation with semantic anomalies and socio-cultural violations. However, political views differently affected the processing of the two types of violations: whereas more conservative listeners showed a greater pupil response to socio-cultural violations, more progressive listeners engaged more with semantic anomalies, but this effect appeared much later in the pupil record.

Early EEG responses to pre-electoral survey items reflect political attitudes and predict voting behavior

Self-reports are conventionally used to measure political preferences, yet individuals may be unable or unwilling to report their political attitudes. Here, in 69 participants we compared implicit and explicit methods of political attitude assessment and focused our investigation on populist attitudes. Ahead of the 2019 European Parliament election, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) from future voters while they completed a survey that measured levels of agreement on different political issues. An Implicit Association Test (IAT) was administered at the end of the recording session. Neural signals differed as a function of future vote for a populist or mainstream party and of whether survey items expressed populist or non-populist views. The combination of EEG responses and self-reported preferences predicted electoral choice better than traditional socio-demographic and ideological variables, while IAT scores were not a significant predictor. These findings suggest that measurements of brain activity can refine the assessment of socio-political attitudes, even when those attitudes are not based on traditional ideological divides.

Hybrid Harmony: A Multi-Person Neurofeedback Application for Interpersonal Synchrony

Recent years have seen a dramatic increase in studies measuring brain activity, physiological responses, and/or movement data from multiple individuals during social interaction. For example, so-called "hyperscanning" research has demonstrated that brain activity may become synchronized across people as a function of a range of factors. Such findings not only underscore the potential of hyperscanning techniques to capture meaningful aspects of naturalistic interactions, but also raise the possibility that hyperscanning can be leveraged as a tool to help improve such naturalistic interactions. Building on our previous work showing that exposing dyads to real-time inter-brain synchrony neurofeedback may help boost their interpersonal connectedness, we describe the biofeedback application Hybrid Harmony, a Brain-Computer Interface (BCI) that supports the simultaneous recording of multiple neurophysiological datastreams and the real-time visualization and sonification of inter-subject synchrony. We report results from 236 dyads experiencing synchrony neurofeedback during naturalistic face-to-face interactions, and show that pairs' social closeness and affective personality traits can be reliably captured with the inter-brain synchrony neurofeedback protocol, which incorporates several different online inter-subject connectivity analyses that can be applied interchangeably. Hybrid Harmony can be used by researchers who wish to study the effects of synchrony biofeedback, and by biofeedback artists and serious game developers who wish to incorporate multiplayer situations into their practice.

Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs: A registered report of construct validity, internal consistency and test-retest reliability

While religious beliefs are typically studied using questionnaires, there are no standardized tools available for cognitive psychology and neuroscience studies of religious cognition. Here we present the first such tool-the Cambridge Psycholinguistic Inventory of Christian Beliefs (CPICB)-which consists of audio-recorded items of religious beliefs as well as items of three control conditions: moral beliefs, abstract scientific knowledge and empirical everyday life knowledge. The CPICB is designed in such a way that the ultimate meaning of each sentence is revealed only by its final critical word, which enables the precise measurement of reaction times and/or latencies of neurophysiological responses. Each statement comes in a pair of Agree/Disagree versions of critical words, which allows for experimental contrasting between belief and disbelief conditions. Psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic matching between Agree/Disagree versions of sentences, as well as across different categories of the CPICB items (Religious, Moral, Scientific, Everyday), enables rigorous control of low-level psycholinguistic and psychoacoustic features while testing higher-level beliefs. In the exploratory Study 1 (N = 20), we developed and tested a preliminary version of the CPICB that had 480 items. After selecting 400 items that yielded the most consistent responses, we carried out a confirmatory test-retest Study 2 (N = 40). Preregistered data analyses confirmed excellent construct validity, internal consistency and test-retest reliability of the CPICB religious belief statements. We conclude that the CPICB is suitable for studying Christian beliefs in an experimental setting involving behavioural and neuroimaging paradigms, and provide Open Access to the inventory items, fostering further development of the experimental research of religiosity.

Thematic and other semantic relations central to abstract (and concrete) concepts

In this article, we discuss multiple types of meaningful (semantic) relations underlying abstract (as compared to concrete) concepts. We adopt the viewpoint that words act as cues to meaning (Elman in Ment Lexicon 6(1):1-34, 2011; Lupyan and Lewis in Lang Cogn Neurosci 34(10):1319-1337, 2019), which is dependent on the dynamic contents of a comprehender's mental model of the situation. This view foregrounds the importance of both linguistic and real-world context as individuals make sense of words, flexibly access relevant knowledge, and understand described events and situations. We discuss theories of, and experimental work on, abstract concepts through the lens of the importance of thematic and other semantic relations. We then tie these findings to the sentence processing literature in which such meaningful relations within sentential contexts are often experimentally manipulated. In this literature, some specific classes/types of abstract words have been studied, although not comprehensively, and with limited connection to the literature on knowledge underlying abstract concepts reviewed herein. We conclude by arguing that the ways in which humans understand relatively more abstract concepts, in particular, can be informed by the careful study of words presented not in isolation, but rather in situational and linguistic contexts, and as a function of individual differences in knowledge, goals, and beliefs.

Moderators of the Liking Bias in Judgments of Moral Character

Previous research found evidence for a liking bias in moral character judgments because judgments of liked people are higher than those of disliked or neutral ones. This article sought conditions moderating this effect. In Study 1 (N = 792), the impact of the liking bias on moral character judgments was strongly attenuated when participants were educated that attitudes bias moral judgments. In Study 2 (N = 376), the influence of liking on moral character attributions was eliminated when participants were accountable for the justification of their moral judgments. Overall, these results suggest that although liking biases moral character attributions, this bias might be reduced or eliminated when deeper information processing is required to generate judgments of others’ moral character.

Extended Perspective Shift and Discourse Economy in Language Processing

Research spanning linguistics, psychology, and philosophy suggests that speakers and hearers are finely attuned to perspectives and viewpoints that are not their own, even though perspectival information is not encoded directly in the morphosyntax of languages like English. While some terms seem to require a perspective or a judge for interpretation (e.g., epithets, evaluative adjectives, locational PPs, etc.), perspective may also be determined on the basis of subtle information spanning multiple sentences, especially in vivid styles of narrative reporting. In this paper, I develop an account of the cues that are involved in evaluating and maintaining non-speaker perspectives, and present an economy-based discourse processing model of perspective that embodies two core principles. First, perspectives are subject to a “speaker-default,” but may shift to a non-speaker perspective if sufficient contextual cues are provided. Second, the processor follows the path of least resistance to maintaining perspective, opting to maintain the current perspective across sentences as long as the shifted perspective continues to be coherent. The predictions of the model are tested in a series of offline and online studies, manipulating the form of an attitude report and the tense of the sentence that follows. Implications for processing perspective and viewpoint in speech and narrative forms are explored.

An EEG Analysis of Honorification in Japanese: Human Hierarchical Relationships Coded in Language

This study examines the neural substrate of the understanding of human relationships in verbal communication with Japanese honorific sentences as experimental materials. We manipulated two types of Japanese verbs specifically used to represent respect for others, i.e., exalted and humble verbs, which represent respect for the person in the subject and the person in the object, respectively. We visually presented appropriate and anomalous sentences containing the two types of verbs and analyzed the electroencephalogram elicited by the verbs. We observed significant parietal negativity at a latency of approximately 400 ms for anomalous verbs compared with appropriate verbs. This parietal negativity could be a manifestation of the pragmatic process used to integrate the linguistic forms with the human relationships represented in the sentences. The topographies of these event-related potentials (ERPs) corresponded well with those of ERPs for two second-person pronouns in Chinese (plain ni and respectful nin). This correspondence suggests that the pragmatic integration process in honorific expressions is cross-linguistically common in part. Furthermore, we assessed the source localization by means of independent component (IC) analysis and dipole fitting and observed a significant difference in ERP between the honorific and control sentences in the IC cluster centered in the precentral gyrus and in the cluster centered in the medial part of the occipital lobe, which corresponded well with the functional magnetic resonance imaging findings for Japanese honorification. We also found several significant differences in the time-frequency analyses for the medial occipital cluster. These significant differences in the medial occipital cluster suggested that the circuit of the theory of mind was involved in the processing of Japanese honorification. Our results suggest that pragmatic and syntactic processing are performed in parallel because the person to be respected must fulfill the grammatical function appropriate for the honorific verb.

Listener's personality traits predict changes in pupil size during auditory language comprehension

Research suggests that listeners' comprehension of spoken language is concurrently affected by linguistic and non-linguistic factors, including individual difference factors. However, there is no systematic research on whether general personality traits affect language processing. We correlated 88 native English-speaking participants' Big-5 traits with their pupillary responses to spoken sentences that included grammatical errors, "He frequently have burgers for dinner"; semantic anomalies, "Dogs sometimes chase teas"; and statements incongruent with gender stereotyped expectations, such as "I sometimes buy my bras at Hudson's Bay", spoken by a male speaker. Generalized additive mixed models showed that the listener's Openness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism traits modulated resource allocation to the three different types of unexpected stimuli. No personality trait affected changes in pupil size across the board: less open participants showed greater pupil dilation when processing sentences with grammatical errors; and more introverted listeners showed greater pupil dilation in response to both semantic anomalies and socio-cultural clashes. Our study is the first one demonstrating that personality traits systematically modulate listeners' online language processing. Our results suggest that individuals with different personality profiles exhibit different patterns of the allocation of cognitive resources during real-time language comprehension.

The affect of negativity: testing the Foreign Language Effect in three types of valence framing and a moral dilemma

In decision-making people react differently to positive wordings than to negatives, which may be caused by negativity bias: a difference in emotional force of these wordings. Because emotions are assumed to be activated more strongly in one's mother tongue, we predict a Foreign Language Effect, being that such framing effects are larger in a native language than in a foreign one. In two experimental studies (N = 475 and N = 503) we tested this prediction for balanced and unbalanced second language users of Spanish and English and for three types of valence framing effects. In Study 1 we observed risky-choice framing effects and attribute framing effects, but these were always equally large for native and foreign-language speakers. In our second study, we added a footbridge dilemma to the framing materials. Only for this task we did observe a Foreign Language Effect, indicating more utilitarian choices when the dilemma is presented in L2. Hence, across two studies, we find no Foreign Language Effect for three types of valence framing but we do find evidence for such an effect in a moral decision task. We discuss several alternative explanations for these results.

ERP evidence of age-related differences in emotional processing

The present study used event-related potentials (ERPs) to examine differences in the temporal dynamics of emotion processing in young and older adults, with a specific focus on the positivity effect, that is, the preferential processing of positive over negative information. To this aim, we used a language paradigm that allowed us to investigate early ERP components as well as later components, namely the N400 and the late positive complex (LPC). Young and older adults were presented with neutral sentence stems with positive, negative or neutral/semantically-incongruent critical word endings while their electrical brain activity was recorded. There were no effects of emotional valence on early ERP components. Instead, a positivity effect was evident in young adults indexed by reduced N400s for positive sentence endings. Perhaps due to reduced semantic processing abilities, older adults did not show any N400 effect. ERP effects in this group were evident at a later processing stage and took the form of larger LPCs for neutral/incongruent information. Overall, there was no effect of emotional valence on either the N400 or the LPC in older adults. Our data suggest that with age, more effortful semantic processing may deplete resources for emotional processing.

Predicting participants' attitudes from patterns of event-related potentials during the reading of morally relevant statements - An MVPA investigation

Morality and language are hardly separable, given that morality-related aspects such as knowledge, emotions, or experiences are connected with language on different levels. One question that arises is: How rapidly do neural processes set in when processing statements that reflect moral value containing information? In the current study, participants read sentences about morally relevant statements (e.g., 'Wars are acceptable') and expressed their (dis)agreement with the statements while their electroencephalogram (EEG) was recorded. Multivariate pattern classification (MVPA) was used during language processing to predict the individual's response. Our results show that (1) the response ('yes' vs. 'no') could be predicted from 180 ms following the decision-relevant word (here acceptable), and (2) the attitude (pro vs. contra the topic) could be predicted from 170 ms following the topic word (here wars). We suggest that the successful MVPA classification is due to different brain activity patterns evoked by differences in activated mental representations (e.g. valence, arousal, etc.) depending on whether the attitude towards the topic is positive or negative and whether it is in accordance with the presented decisive word or not.

Case-by-case: Emotional stimulus significance and the modulation of the EPN and LPP

Stimuli encountered in the environment are continuously evaluated according to their affective stimulus significance. Numerous event-related potential studies have shown that the early posterior negativity (EPN) and the late positive potential (LPP) are larger for pictures high in emotional arousal compared to low arousing images. Here, we used a case-by-case approach to determine the emotional modulation of the EPN and LPP at the level of the individual case. We probed the effect in three studies regarding behavior systems of predator fear, disease avoidance, and sexual reproduction. In each study, high and low arousing pictures from the respective behavior system were presented and event-related brain potentials measured. At the group level, previous findings regarding an enhanced EPN and LPP for high compared to low arousing stimuli were replicated. Novel findings were observed when analyzing each case individually. The majority of participants showed significantly larger EPN and LPP amplitudes to pictures showing threatening compared to harmless animals (15 and 16 out of 16 tests, respectively), images of disease and mutilation compared to neutral people (15 and 17 out of 18 tests, respectively), and high-arousing erotic compared to romantic pictures (17 and 17 out of 17 tests, respectively). Further analyses exploring the tradeoff between specificity and sensitivity suggest reliance on picture categories of sexual reproduction and disease avoidance. Overall, the present findings demonstrate that the case-by-case approach can be useful for revealing a general principle of emotional stimulus processing common-to-all. Implications for the reproducibility of the findings and biomarker development are discussed.

Neural and Linguistic Considerations for Assessing Moral Intuitions Using Text-Based Stimuli

This review takes a focused look at neural and linguistic considerations for assessing moral intuitions using text-based stimuli. Relevant neural correlates of moral salience, emotional processing, moral emotions (shame and guilt), semantic processing, implicit stereotype activation (e.g., gender, age, and race stereotypes), and functional brain network development (the default mode network and salience network) are considered insofar as they relate to unique considerations for text-based instruments. What emerge are not only key considerations for researchers assessing moral intuitions using text-based stimuli but also considerations for the study of moral psychology more broadly, especially in developmental and educational contexts.

Facing stereotypes: ERP responses to male and female faces after gender-stereotyped statements

Despite gender is a salient feature in face recognition, the question of whether stereotyping modulates face processing remains unexplored. Event-related potentials from 40 participants (20 female) was recorded as male and female faces matched or mismatched previous gender-stereotyped statements and were compared with those elicited by faces preceded by gender-unbiased statements. We conducted linear mixed-effects models to account for possible random effects from both participants and the strength of the gender bias. The amplitude of the N170 to faces was larger following stereotyped relative to gender-unbiased statements in both male and female participants, although the effect was larger for males. This result reveals that stereotyping exerts an early effect in face processing and that the impact is higher in men. In later time windows, male faces after female-stereotyped statements elicited large late positivity potential (LPP) responses in both men and women, indicating that the violation of male stereotypes induces a post-perceptual reevaluation of a salient or conflicting event. Besides, the largest LPP amplitude in women was elicited when they encountered a female face after a female-stereotyped statement. The later result is discussed from the perspective of recent claims on the evolution of women self-identification with traditionally held female roles.

How Behavioral Aspects Influence the Sustainable Financial Decisions of Shareholders: An Empirical Study and Proposal for a Relevant Decision-Making Concept

Behavioral finance is an area or sub-discipline of behavioral economics that examines the real financial behavior and decision-making of people, including the knowledge of psychology and sociology. The objective of this paper was to identify and investigate the impact of significant cognitive, psychological and emotional factors affecting the financial decision-making of the shareholders of woodworking and furniture manufacturing and trading enterprises. This could lead to the design of decision-making concepts which take into account not only cognitive but also psychological and emotional factors and their influences on decision-making process, which could positively affect the sustainable development of the aforementioned types of enterprises. The mapping of the addressed issue was carried out by means of an empirical survey in the practice of the Slovak woodworking and furniture manufacturing and trading enterprises in the form of a questionnaire. The results of the survey were evaluated by descriptive, graphical and mathematical-statistical methods. Conclusions and recommendations were formulated based on the identification of key behavioral aspects (knowledge, security, freedom and sadness), the implementation of which could contribute to eliminating negative deviations and errors in the financial decision-making process of shareholders of woodworking and furniture manufacturing and trading enterprises.

Lumos!: Electrophysiological tracking of (wizarding) world knowledge use during reading

In Troyer and Kutas (2018), individual differences in knowledge of the world of Harry Potter (HP) rapidly modulated individuals' average electrical brain potentials to contextually supported words in sentence endings. Using advances in single-trial electroencephalogram analysis, we examined whether this relationship is strictly a result of domain knowledge mediating the proportion of facts each participant knew; we find it is not. Participants read sentences ending in a contextually supported word, reporting online whether they had known each fact. Participants' reports correlated with HP domain knowledge and reliably modulated event-related brain potentials to sentence-final words within 250 ms. Critically, domain knowledge had a dissociable influence in the same time window for endings that participants reported not having known and/or were less likely to be known/remembered across participants. We hypothesize that knowledge impacts written word processing primarily by affecting the neural processes of (implicit) retrieval from long-term memory (LTM): Greater knowledge eases otherwise difficult retrieval processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

He had it Comin': ERPs Reveal a Facilitation for the Processing of Misfortunes to Antisocial Characters

Human sociality and prosociality rely on social and moral feelings of empathy, compassion, envy, schadenfreude, as well as on the preference for prosocial over antisocial others. We examined the neural underpinnings of the processing of lexical input designed to tap into these type of social feelings. Brainwave responses from 20 participants were measured as they read sentences comprising a randomly delivered ending outcome (fortunate or unfortunate) to social agents previously profiled as prosocial or antisocial individuals. Fortunate outcomes delivered to prosocial and antisocial agents aimed to tap into empathy and envy/annoying feelings, respectively, whereas unfortunate ones into compassion for prosocial agents and schadenfreude for antisocial ones. ERP modulations in early attention-capture (100-200 ms), semantic fit (400 ms), and late reanalysis processes (600 ms) were analyzed. According to the functional interpretation of each of these event-related electrophysiological effects, we conclude that: 1) a higher capture of attention is initially obtained in response to any type of outcome delivered to a prosocial versus an antisocial agent (frontal P2); 2) a facilitated semantic processing occurs for unfortunate outcomes delivered to antisocial agents (N400); and 3) regardless of the protagonist's social profile, an increased later reevaluation for overall unfortunate versus fortunate outcomes takes place (Late Positive Potential). Thus, neural online measures capture a stepwise unfolding impact of social factors during language comprehension, which include a facilitated processing of misfortunes when they happen to occur to antisocial peers (i.e., schadenfreude).

"You Should Praise" - "You Should Kill": The Contingent Negative Variation Indicates Moral Goodness and Badness

Moral advice (how to behave in life) is often conveyed by short, simple sentence constructions: "You - should - (plus verb with moral meaning)." Yet how moral prescriptions are processed has never been studied from a neurocognitive perspective. The results of this study suggest that the contingent negative variation (CNV) serves as a neural correlate for moral (and immoral) predictive phrases. In step 1, the original CNV paradigm (S1-S2-motor response) was extended using action-demanding three-word phrases taken from everyday contexts (e.g., "Ready-Set-Go"). In step 2, these commands were replaced by abstract words, each phrase then including a verb of moral or immoral meaning (e.g., "You should hope," "You should praise," and "You should lie"). During recording, each phrase type (e.g., moral or immoral) was presented blockwise. The task varied according to block order: Participants (n = 19) had to either listen attentively or respond with a finger tap immediately after the final word of a phrase. Electroencephalogram (EEG) data were bandpass filtered (0.1-30 Hz) and analyzed at the onset of the second word, yielding two independent responses: a bilateral CNV and a bilateral motor-related negativity, both decreasing from anterior to posterior. The results show that the CNV is sensitive to phrase constructions of moral resp. immoral valence. Thus, transfer to remote semantic fields seems possible. Importantly, this transfer is combined with a change of time frames, from restricted and highly pragmatic (as in the original paradigm) to indefinite and vague. Thus, a CNV may indicate not only preparation to action but also general guidelines for social life. An N400 occurring as an additional, task-dependent result cannot be sufficiently explained on the basis of the present data.

Neurophysiological effect of exposure to gossip on product endorsement and willingness-to-pay

With the proliferation of social networking sites, it is common to encounter gossip and product endorsement from different social influences (friends, strangers or celebrities) in the same context. This research examines gossip as a facilitator of reputational social exchange, and shows that exposure to gossip moderates the social influence of product endorsement. Participants read positive and negative gossip about different endorsers, and event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded during product endorsement. Behavioral results indicate that gossip about a close friend or celebrity (relative to a stranger) and positive (vs. negative) gossip increase consumer willingness-to-pay following product endorsement respectively. ERP results reveal two distinct ERP components following exposure to gossip. During the late stage (350-500 ms) of product endorsement, exposure to gossip about a close friend (relative to celebrity or a stranger) and negative (relative to positive) gossip each elicited a distinctively larger N400 response. During the later stage (500-700 ms), positive (versus negative) gossip elicited a larger LPP during friend endorsement relative to celebrity endorsement. The findings illustrate the motivational significance of gossip about friends from a social learning perspective. We also discuss the marketing implications for friend endorsement versus celebrity endorsement.

Asymmetric morality: Blame is more differentiated and more extreme than praise

Despite extensive recent investigations of moral judgments, little is known about how negative judgments like blame might differ from positive judgments like praise. Drawing on theory from both social and moral cognition, the present studies identify and test potential asymmetries in the extremity and differentiatedness of blame as compared to praise. The amplified blame hypothesis predicts that people will assign greater blame for negative behaviors than praise for positive behaviors. The differentiated blame hypothesis predicts that, as compared to praise judgments, blame judgments will more finely differentiate among distinct mental states that precede action, such as thoughts, desires, and intentions. A series of studies—using varied stimulus sets and samples—together provide robust support for the differentiated blame hypothesis and somewhat weaker support for the amplified blame hypotheses. These results illustrate systematic asymmetries between blame and praise, generally revealing that blame is more extreme and differentiated than praise. Together, the findings reflect the social costs and social regulatory function of moral judgments, suggesting that blame and praise are not mirror images and that blame might be more complex.

Distinct neural responses to social and semantic violations: An N400 study

We investigated event-related brain potential correlates of encountering context-incongruent social information. Building on evidence that information semantically incongruent with its context elicits an N400 response (a prominent negative-going deflection in the ongoing electroencephalogram; EEG), we hypothesized that statements incongruent (relative to congruent) with basic standards of amicable treatment by others (e.g., "Your friend breaks your computer and then laughs [apologizes]") would elicit larger-amplitude N400 responses. EEG was recorded from N = 20 undergraduates while they viewed 106 semantic-dimension and 106 social-dimension sentences. We obtained the classic N400 effect to semantic violations, but we did not observe greater N400 amplitudes to incongruent than to congruent social-dimension sentences. Our findings of N400 modulation by semantic violations but not social norm violations help clarify potential boundary conditions for eliciting the N400.

Grounding the neurobiology of language in first principles: The necessity of non-language-centric explanations for language comprehension

Recent decades have ushered in tremendous progress in understanding the neural basis of language. Most of our current knowledge on language and the brain, however, is derived from lab-based experiments that are far removed from everyday language use, and that are inspired by questions originating in linguistic and psycholinguistic contexts. In this paper we argue that in order to make progress, the field needs to shift its focus to understanding the neurobiology of naturalistic language comprehension. We present here a new conceptual framework for understanding the neurobiological organization of language comprehension. This framework is non-language-centered in the computational/neurobiological constructs it identifies, and focuses strongly on context. Our core arguments address three general issues: (i) the difficulty in extending language-centric explanations to discourse; (ii) the necessity of taking context as a serious topic of study, modeling it formally and acknowledging the limitations on external validity when studying language comprehension outside context; and (iii) the tenuous status of the language network as an explanatory construct. We argue that adopting this framework means that neurobiological studies of language will be less focused on identifying correlations between brain activity patterns and mechanisms postulated by psycholinguistic theories. Instead, they will be less self-referential and increasingly more inclined towards integration of language with other cognitive systems, ultimately doing more justice to the neurobiological organization of language and how it supports language as it is used in everyday life.

Brain indices of disagreement with one's social values predict EU referendum voting behavior

Pre-electoral surveys typically attempt, and sometimes fail, to predict voting behavior on the basis of explicit measures of agreement or disagreement with a candidate or political position. Here, we assessed whether a specific brain signature of disagreement with one’s social values, the event-related potential component N400, could be predictive of voting behavior. We examined this possibility in the context of the EU referendum in the UK. In the 5 weeks preceding the referendum, we recorded the N400 while participants with different vote intentions expressed their agreement or disagreement with pro- and against-EU statements. We showed that the N400 responded to statements incongruent with one’s view regarding the EU. Crucially, this effect predicted actual voting behavior in decided as well as undecided voters. The N400 was a better predictor of voting choice than an explicit index of preference based on the behavioral responses. Our findings demonstrate that well-defined patterns of brain activity can forecast future voting behavior.

Emotion in Stories: Facial EMG Evidence for Both Mental Simulation and Moral Evaluation

Facial electromyography research shows that corrugator supercilii ("frowning muscle") activity tracks the emotional valence of linguistic stimuli. Grounded or embodied accounts of language processing take such activity to reflect the simulation or "reenactment" of emotion, as part of the retrieval of word meaning (e.g., of "furious") and/or of building a situation model (e.g., for "Mark is furious"). However, the same muscle also expresses our primary emotional evaluation of things we encounter. Language-driven affective simulation can easily be at odds with the reader's affective evaluation of what language describes (e.g., when we like Mark being furious). To examine what happens in such cases, we independently manipulated simulation valence and moral evaluative valence in short narratives. Participants first read about characters behaving in a morally laudable or objectionable fashion: this immediately led to corrugator activity reflecting positive or negative affect. Next, and critically, a positive or negative event befell these same characters. Here, the corrugator response did not track the valence of the event, but reflected both simulation and moral evaluation. This highlights the importance of unpacking coarse notions of affective meaning in language processing research into components that reflect simulation and evaluation. Our results also call for a re-evaluation of the interpretation of corrugator EMG, as well as other affect-related facial muscles and other peripheral physiological measures, as unequivocal indicators of simulation. Research should explore how such measures behave in richer and more ecologically valid language processing, such as narrative; refining our understanding of simulation within a framework of grounded language comprehension.

Religious Fundamentalism Modulates Neural Responses to Error-Related Words: The Role of Motivation Toward Closure

Examining the relationship between brain activity and religious fundamentalism, this study explores whether fundamentalist religious beliefs increase responses to error-related words among participants intolerant to uncertainty (i.e., high in the need for closure) in comparison to those who have a high degree of toleration for uncertainty (i.e., those who are low in the need for closure). We examine a negative-going event-related brain potentials occurring 400 ms after stimulus onset (the N400) due to its well-understood association with the reactions to emotional conflict. Religious fundamentalism and tolerance of uncertainty were measured on self-report measures, and electroencephalographic neural reactivity was recorded as participants were performing an emotional Stroop task. In this task, participants read neutral words and words related to uncertainty, errors, and pondering, while being asked to name the color of the ink with which the word is written. The results confirm that among people who are intolerant of uncertainty (i.e., those high in the need for closure), religious fundamentalism is associated with an increased N400 on error-related words compared with people who tolerate uncertainty well (i.e., those low in the need for closure).

Extending Situated Language Comprehension (Accounts) with Speaker and Comprehender Characteristics: Toward Socially Situated Interpretation

More and more findings suggest a tight temporal coupling between (non-linguistic) socially interpreted context and language processing. Still, real-time language processing accounts remain largely elusive with respect to the influence of biological (e.g., age) and experiential (e.g., world and moral knowledge) comprehender characteristics and the influence of the 'socially interpreted' context, as for instance provided by the speaker. This context could include actions, facial expressions, a speaker's voice or gaze, and gestures among others. We review findings from social psychology, sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics to highlight the relevance of (the interplay between) the socially interpreted context and comprehender characteristics for language processing. The review informs the extension of an extant real-time processing account (already featuring a coordinated interplay between language comprehension and the non-linguistic visual context) with a variable ('ProCom') that captures characteristics of the language user and with a first approximation of the comprehender's speaker representation. Extending the CIA to the sCIA (social Coordinated Interplay Account) is the first step toward a real-time language comprehension account which might eventually accommodate the socially situated communicative interplay between comprehenders and speakers.

Information-Acquisition Processes in Moral Judgments of Blame

When people make moral judgments, what information do they look for? Despite its theoretical and practical implications, this question has largely been neglected by prior literature. The recent Path Model of Blame predicts a canonical order in which people acquire information when judging blame. Upon discovering a negative event, perceivers consider information about causality, then intentionality, then (if the event is intentional) reasons or (if the event is unintentional) preventability. Three studies, using two novel paradigms, assessed and found support for these predictions: In constrained (Study 1) and open-ended (Study 2) information-acquisition contexts, participants were most likely, and fastest, to seek information in the canonical order, even when under time pressure (Study 3). These findings indicate that blame relies on a set of information components that are processed in a systematic order. Implications for moral judgment models are discussed, as are potential roles of emotion and motivated reasoning in information acquisition.