Exploring the use of visual predictions in social scenarios while under anticipatory threat

One of the less recognized effects of anxiety lies in perception alterations caused by how one weighs both sensory evidence and contextual cues. Here, we investigated how anxiety affects our ability to use social cues to anticipate the others' actions. We adapted a paradigm to assess expectations in social scenarios, whereby participants were asked to identify the presence of agents therein, while supported by contextual cues from another agent. Participants (N = 66) underwent this task under safe and threat-of-shock conditions. We extracted both criterion and sensitivity measures as well as gaze data. Our analysis showed that whilst the type of action had the expected effect, threat-of-shock had no effect over criterion and sensitivity. Although showing similar dwell times, gaze exploration of the contextual cue was associated with shorter fixation durations whilst participants were under threat. Our findings suggest that anxiety does not appear to influence the use of expectations in social scenarios.

Attentional biases to signals of negative information: Reliable measurement across three anxiety domains

Cognitive models propose that individuals with elevated vulnerability to experiencing negative emotion are characterised by biased attentional responding to negative information. Typically, methods of examining these biases have measured attention to pictures of emotional scenes, emotional faces, or rewarding or feared objects. Though these approaches have repeatedly yielded evidence of anxiety-linked biases, their measurement reliability is suggested to be poor. Recent research has shown that attentional responding to cues signalling negative information can be measured with greater reliability. However, whether such biases are associated with emotion vulnerability remains to be demonstrated. The present study conducted three experiments that recruited participants who varied in trait and state anxiety (N = 134), social anxiety (N = 122), or spider fear (N = 131) to complete an assessment of selective attention to cues signalling emotionally congruent negative information. Analyses demonstrated that anxiety and fear were associated with biased attentional responding to cues signalling negative information, and that such biases could be measured with acceptable reliability (rsplit-half = .69-.81). Implications for research on the relation between emotion and attention are discussed.

Perceiving a Danger Within: Black Americans Associate Black Men With Physical Threat

Recent work suggests that good/bad out-group favoritism of Blacks for Whites may reflect positive associations with White rather than negative associations with Black. The Dual Implicit Process Model suggests that Blacks may come to associate their own group with threat, even absent a concurrent Black-negative association. This work tests this idea among Black Americans. Three studies tested this possibility using mouse-tracking (Study 1) and evaluative priming tasks (Studies 2 and 3) to assess how quickly participants make judgments involving Black versus White male faces and names. All studies found that that Black Americans hold automatic Black-threat associations absent automatic Black-negative associations. This supports the Dual Implicit Process Model’s threat versus negativity distinction within the realm of anti-Black bias and supplements recent work by showing that the presence of out-group favoritism on one dimension (i.e., threat) can occur even in the absence of out-group favoritism on a seemingly related dimension (i.e., negativity).

Racial Bias in Police Traffic Stops: White Residents' County-Level Prejudice and Stereotypes Are Related to Disproportionate Stopping of Black Drivers

Racial disparities in policing are well documented, but the reasons for such disparities are often debated. In the current research, we weighed in on this debate using a regional-level bias framework: We investigated the link between racial disparities in police traffic stops and regional-level racial bias, employing data from more than 130 million police traffic stops in 1,413 U.S. counties and county-level measures of racial bias from more than 2 million online respondents. Compared with their population share in county demographics, Black drivers were stopped at disproportionate rates in the majority of counties. Crucially, disproportionate stopping of Black drivers was higher in counties with higher levels of racial prejudice by White residents (rs = .07-.36). Furthermore, county-level aggregates of White people's threat-related stereotypes were less consistent in predicting disproportionate stopping (rs = .00-.19). These observed relationships between regional-level bias and racial disparities in policing highlight the importance of the context in which police operate.

White civilians’ implicit danger evaluation of police officers underlies explicit perception of police

The role of implicit processes during police-civilian encounters is well studied from the perspective of the police. Decades of research on the “shooter bias” suggests that implicit Black-danger associations potentiate the perception of threat of Black individuals, leading to a racial bias in the decision to use lethal force. Left understudied are civilians’ possible associations of police with danger and how such associations pervade behavior and explicit views of the police. The current work begins to address this gap. In two within-subjects studies, we separately assess police-threat (i.e., safety/danger) and police-valence (i.e., good/bad) associations as well as their relative influences on explicit perceptions of police. Study 1 revealed that implicit threat evaluations (police-danger associations) more strongly predicted negative explicit views of the police compared to implicit valence evaluations (police-negative associations). Study 2 replicated these findings and suggests that individuals evaluate the police as more dangerous versus negative when each response is pitted against each other within single misattribution procedure trials. The possible implications for explicit attitudes toward police reform and behavior during police-civilian encounters are discussed.