The emotional basis of prejudice

August 22, 2017Kristen Lindquist

Across the US and the globe, there has recently been an uptick in prejudice. Prejudice is defined as a hostile or negative attitude towards others on the basis of their group affiliation, whether that group is based on race, religion, sex, political ideology, country of origin, mental abilities, or any category. People can be prejudiced towards anyone on the basis of almost anything, and history is rife with examples. Sadly, perhaps one of the most enduring features of human behavior is that people find reasons to like people who are like them, and dislike people who are not.

Decades of research show that prejudice is a deeply emotional phenomenon. Anyone who is being honest can admit to at least occasionally feeling hatred towards their political enemies, fearful towards people who look and sound different from them, or disdainful of people who hold different religious views. Our emotions are powerful determinants of behaviors, so it sometimes seems that once these feelings are set in motion, there is no allaying prejudiced behavior. Yet research that my collaborators and I recently published in the journal Emotion demonstrates that not all emotions are equal when it comes to prejudice.

We’ve long known that even if people don’t want to feel negative towards people who are different from them, they automatically do so. This negativity can stem from any number of factors, including the fact that our society associates negative things with a certain group of people, that you’ve had a negative experience with a single individual from a group and now you generalize to that whole group, or even the fact that you just feel a little uncomfortable interacting with people who are different from you. Even well-meaning people sometimes feel uncomfortable with people who are from another race, demographic, or religion because they don’t know how to act or are afraid that they’ll say the wrong thing. These feelings typically arise as a gut reaction when you interact with a person from another group, but our research shows that precisely how you interpret that gut reaction makes all the difference for whether you feel prejudice or not towards that person.

In our research, we studied prejudice towards Black Americans amongst White American participants. We chose to study these groups given the historical prevalence of prejudice towards Black Americans in the US, but in principle, we could have studied any number of groups across time and space, and the results would be similar. In our studies, we first measured White participants’ gut reactions towards pictures of Black male faces. We did so using a procedure called the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) that allows us to assess to what extent people have negative gut reactions towards certain stimuli. To do so, participants are very quickly shown pictures of either White or Black faces prior to seeing an ambiguous stimulus that participants don’t know the meaning of (e.g., a Chinese character or an abstract shape). Participants are then asked to what extent they think that the ambiguous stimulus is good or bad. Research shows that the more that people have negative gut reactions to Black faces, the more likely they are to believe that the ambiguous stimulus is bad after being very briefly exposed to Black, but not White faces. This is because they misattribute their negative gut reactions towards the faces to the ambiguous stimulus. The AMP regularly shows that people vary in how much they have negative gut reactions to Black faces, with some people having highly negative gut reactions and some people having rather neutral gut reactions to Black faces. Critically, we hypothesized that it was not just how negative participants’ gut reaction was that mattered for prejudice, but also how they made meaning of that gut reaction as feelings of specific emotions. We reasoned that if participants interpreted their gut reaction as fear towards Black Americans that this would result in more prejudiced behavior towards Black Americans. In contrast, we predicted that people who had negative gut reactions, but who interpreted their reaction as sympathy towards Black Americans due to their plight with racism and oppression throughout US history, would be less likely to show prejudiced behavior.

To test this hypothesis, we manipulated how people made meaning of their negative gut reactions. After completing the AMP, half the participants were told that it assessed feelings of fear towards Black Americans. The other half of participants were told that the AMP assessed feelings of sympathy towards Black Americans. Next, we measured participants’ reports of fear, sympathy, and their tendency to literally see Black faces as more aggressive. We found that only those participants who scored highly on the AMP, demonstrating their negative gut reactions to Black faces, who were also encouraged to interpret their reactions as fear were more likely to report finding Black Americans as threatening. Those participants were also more likely to see Black faces as more aggressive in a perceptual test. In contrast, participants with negative gut reactions on the AMP who interpreted their reactions as sympathy were less likely to report fear and to see Black faces as aggressive. Participants who were encouraged to interpret their gut reactions as fear were also more likely to show skin conductance responses–a measure of how much sweat is secreted on the skin and a physiological measure of increased emotional reactions–to pictures of Black faces.

These findings are evidence that we are not necessarily slaves to our emotions when it comes to prejudice. Even if you have negative gut reactions to people from another group, it’s how you make meaning of those reactions as specific emotions that ultimately matters for prejudice. These findings ultimately suggest that we can combat prejudice by changing people’s gut reactions and by changing how they make meaning of those gut reactions as specific emotions. Although changing the latter might ultimately be the most fruitful, it’s also likely to be difficult to do, as people’s gut reactions are automatic and unbidden. We might be better off getting people to learn to make meaning of their gut reactions in a more prosocial manner.

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Emotional Yoga: The importance of emotional flexibility for emotional well-being

June 16, 2016June 16, 2016Tom Hollenstein

Whether you are frequently wearing Lulu Lemon gear or not, it is difficult to miss the assurgency of yoga as a popular fitness activity. Taking the emphasis away from measurement-based exercise, like marathon running or bench presses, yoga is first and foremost about flexibility. Breathe. Stretch. Relax. Repeat.

In a similar way, one branch of emotion research over the past decade has begun to show the benefits of emotional flexibility.

In the most general sense, flexibility requires change in response to an event. With objects, as with bodies, this is often reflected in bending or changing shape somehow in order to accommodate shifting conditions without losing integrity. The opposite, then, is rigidity, where the object or body resists and retains its pre-existing shape. At its core, the concept of flexibility/rigidity is all about adaptation to local conditions in the environment.

With emotional flexibility, the same distinctions apply.

From moment-to-moment, emotions ebb and flow in a constant stream from one state to the next. A simple ritual of reading the newspaper can create a sequence of anger at a politician, sadness about the passing of a favorite celebrity, and a chuckle from the cartoon on page 12. Interacting with other people also punctuates that ebb and flow through complaints, joking, or interest.

A group of researchers led by Peter Kuppens and Peter Koval have examined this ebb and flow as emotional inertia, or the tendency to remain in an emotional state, even when conditions are changing (rigidity). To measure inertia, they use a type of correlation called an autocorrelation, which refers to the degree of correlation between a first moment (let’s call it time 1) with the next moment (let’s call it time 2) and so on. Higher autocorrelations of emotional states means that a person’s emotions are similar across multiple instances and that they are not changing very much. This indicates greater rigidity. Imagine being stuck in an angry mood all day and not reacting positively when you see an old friend. This would be pretty rigid. Now you might think that the reverse could be a good thing—getting stuck in a positive mood in the face of negative events, but this can be rigid too. Imagine you stay positive in the face of a slew of negative events during a really bad day (e.g., you get passed up for a promotion, you learn a friend is sick, you get in a fender-bender on the way home). This might buffer you from the effects of the negative events, but staying positive might also mean that you’re not appropriately reacting to those events or doing anything to change them. It might be more adaptive to get sad or angry when you get passed over for a promotion because it will make you try harder in the future. Consistent with this logic, a series of studies demonstrated that higher inertia, of both positive and negative emotions, has been associated with rumination and low self-esteem, but especially depression and the onset of depression in adolescents. Getting stuck, even in positive states, is not desirable.

But individual’s emotions don’t rise and fall in a vacuum. Most of the time, one’s emotions are ebbing and flowing because of interacting with someone else, whose emotions are also ebbing and flowing. Now add a third person. How can we measure that complexity?

My research group examines emotional flexibility among two or three interacting people by first viewing them as complex dynamic systems. Without getting too technical, the idea is that two people – let’s call them a “dyad” (as opposed to a monad or triad) – form a system of mutual influence on each other. The emotional patterns or “dynamics” of the interaction reveal the nature of that system. At a relatively simple level, we can characterize these dyadic systems as more or less flexible by measuring (1) the range of emotional states experienced; (2) the number of changes in emotional states experienced across time; and (3) the tendency to have short vs. long durations in emotional states. The image below shows the difference between a flexible mother-child dyad discussing a conflict they have at home and a rigid dyad doing the same thing.

Figure from Hollenstein, T. (2013). State Space Grids. New York: Springer.

These state space grids depict all possible emotional states of the mother (horizontal axis) and child (vertical axis) along 5 categories of different types of emotional experiences (e.g., a Hi Pos experience might be feeling excited whereas a Lo Pos experience might be feeling calm). This is simplified for the sake of illustration but can be done with any type of emotional experiences. Each box or cell of the grid represents one state; for example, the bottom left cell is for those moments when both mother and child are in highly negative states (e.g., angry, anxious). The dots and blue lines trace the sequence of those states across the interaction, and the size of the dot indicates how long they were in that particular state. Thus, you can see that the flexible dyad on the left has a greater range of states, (more cells occupied), makes more transitions (more lines), and has shorter durations (smaller dots) than the dyad on the right. The pattern for the flexible dyad on the left is like a movie, with the parent and child sharing and exchanging emotional expressions in fluid motions. The pattern for the rigid dyad on the right is like a series of still photographs, with the parent and child posing for a while and then shifting poses only occasionally. Using this technique, my colleagues and I have been able to show how:

Parent-child rigidity goes up when emotional conflict increases in adolescence
Greater parent-child rigidity is associated with young children’s anxiety/depression and aggression problems
Parents and children who have been successfully treated for the child’s aggression problems show greater flexibility following the intervention
Dyadic flexibility is correlated and changes with brain activity indicating the use of self control
Mother-daughter rigidity in early adolescence predicts both mothers’ and daughters’ anxiety and depression five years later

Although it is not immediately intuitive, these studies indicate that these effects occur above and beyond emotional intensity or the emotions being experienced – inertia and rigidity in both positive and negative states is problematic. The take home message is clear: experiencing and expressing emotions in a flexible way is generally indicative of healthy functioning in day-to-day life.

Colloquially, it is common to use flexibility and rigidity when describing others. We praise people for going with the flow, chilling out, or rolling with the punches, but then denigrate the stick in the mud or someone stuck in a rut. Perhaps what we are picking up on is a person’s ability to move in and out of emotional states with relative ease. In addition to making sure to do your sun salutations or enough reps, it is just as important to stretch your emotional muscles.

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We Are Not Born Alone

March 10, 2016Tom Hollenstein

Relationships are good for us. For years, correlational study after correlational study has reported better health and mental health, longer life, less stress and negative emotions, and more happiness and positive emotions for those with good relationships compared to those with poor and/or few relationships.

As an example, consider an upcoming deadline at work that you worry you will not be able to meet, potentially resulting in dire consequences for your company and/or your job. Anxiety. Stress. The better you are able to manage that anxiety, the more likely you are to be able to focus and complete the task. If you are alone, both at home and at work, then the regulation of this stress is all on you. If you have good relationships both at work and at home, there are people to support you, encourage you, and help you feel less anxious.

How does this work?

The prevailing explanation is that relationships add benefits to individuals. Our default, or baseline, is as a solitary individual. This solitary baseline can then be enhanced by close relationships. Have one good relationship? That’s great. Have two? That’s even better. Have great relationships at home, work, and in the community? That’s the best. Let’s call this the Law of Added Positives: psychologically and biologically, good relationships provide extra positives to minimize individuals’ negatives.

However, according to Social Baseline Theory, based on evolution, neuroscience, and emotion advanced by James Coan and colleagues, the Law of Added Positives is not the way things work. In fact, they seem to work in reverse.

For millions of years, humans have been born into environments that included other people. Life begins with strong physical attachments to a mother that become strong emotional attachments to her and a group of (often related) others. Those that bonded and worked together for common solutions thrived; those that fought and worked against each other did not. An isolated individual was and remains an anomaly, someone unlikely to have the resources – resources that are as much psychological (e.g., emotional) and biological (e.g., neurological) as material. (e.g., food) – to survive and reproduce.

That is, our baseline or default circumstance is social.

Human biological systems evolved for – and now expect – a social environment where existential risk is distributed (i.e., safety in numbers) and survival efforts are shared. Fight the bear by yourself and you will expend a lot of energy and are less likely to survive; be one of a group fighting off the attacking bear, each individual using less energy with a greater likelihood that you survive. Less energy and greater chance of survival – that is what evolution is all about.

So how does this translate to modern day humans and the relationships-health connection? First consider some preliminary evidence provided by Proffitt and colleagues.

Perception of effort is biased by energy cost/benefit. People perceive hills as steeper and distances as farther away when they are wearing a heavy backpack compared to when they are not. This is taken as evidence that neurobiological systems automatically adjust the perception of difficulty based on the energy required.
Social proximity reduces perception of energy costs. If your friend is standing next to you with a heavy backpack, you will perceive the hill as less steep and the distance as not as far. Just being near someone else lightens the load.
The closer the relationship, the greater the effect. It is not merely the presence of any other human being that indicates load sharing. Your best friend has a bigger effect on your perception of incline and distance than a new acquaintance.

So, if you’re facing that deadline at work alone, it may make the task seem more difficult and less possible.

Coan and colleagues developed Social Baseline Theory based on this and other evidence but tested it more directly, by looking at threat processing in the brain. They conducted a hand-holding fMRI study with three conditions: no hand holding, holding the hand of a stranger, and holding the hand of their partner. Participants received a mild ankle shock on 20% of trials in which they saw a threat cue on a screen. Threat-related brain activity was greatest in the alone condition, less in the stranger condition, and the least in the partner condition. Like the backpack studies, those with the least amount of threat-related brain activity had the highest quality relationships with their hand-holder. Other studies have shown this effect as well.

Instead of relationships adding some extra positives, as the Law of Added Positives would assume, those with the most load sharing were the most efficient at processing threat, requiring the least energy. As social connection and therefore load sharing, diminished, more energy for neural activation was required to deal with the threat. Maybe the law is one of Added Negatives.

Perhaps the greatest implication of Social Baseline Theory is the way that we conduct psychological, especially emotional, research. In an effort to minimize extraneous variables, much of what we have come to understand about human thoughts and feelings and behavior has come from experimental isolation – a single human alone in a room in front of a computer. The assumption has been that the individual is the fundamental unit of analysis and when we include other people it is to enhance or diminish whatever capacities were witnessed in isolation. Perhaps what we have revealed is human functioning at its least efficient, most taxing, and least natural.

Photo credit: https://flic.kr/p/9yH8Mm Shared via a Creative Commons license.

Pride and Guilt: Affective Keys to Sustainability

January 21, 2016January 28, 2016Lisa Williams

By most accounts, the 2015 Paris COP21 Summit in December was a success. Member nations committed to restricting global warming to no more than 2°C, and ideally only 1.5°C, above pre-industrial levels – largely by cutting greenhouse gas emissions. While such nation-level commitment is of utmost import, slowing or curbing the negative effects of climate change will also require people to take actions themselves. A body of recent research highlights how emotions might play a pivotal role in motivating such actions.

Empirical findings point to two specific emotions that might be at the heart of pro-environmental action: pride and guilt. Pride arises from engaging in socially-valued behaviors and reinforces doing them. Guilt, on the other hand, stems from performing socially-sanctioned behaviors and dissuades doing them.

It appears that the simple anticipation of pride or guilt carries the potential to shape pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, anticipated pride from engaging in sustainable behavior and guilt from not doing so promotes intentions to engage in sustainable consumption.^1,2 As such, it appears that it would require no more than thinking about the pride one would feel after buying an electric car or the guilt over choosing to not install solar panels to bring about sustainable choices.

There is also promise that pride and guilt can be leveraged to promote sustainability at the group level. In one study, when guilt was elicited by thinking about the in-group’s responsibility for environmental damage, individuals endorsed efforts to redress the damage.³ Pride elicited by thinking about the in-group’s responsibility for environmental protection led individuals to endorse further environmental protection.

We have insight into why pride and guilt have these effects. Once feeling guilty or proud, individuals feel more responsible for their choices,^4,5thus increasing the likelihood that they take it upon themselves to make better choices. More generally, both pride and guilt promote self-control,⁶ which is key if individuals want to change entrenched past patterns of behavior.

Whether at the individual or group-level, felt in the moment or anticipated in the future, or via responsibility or self-control, it is clear that pride and guilt carry the power to lead us to engage in actions that benefit the environment. If we set personal sustainability targets, pride and guilt will provide the impetus to stick to them.

The challenge, then, becomes how to capitalize on pride and guilt to maximize positive environmental behavior. Research in the context of voting behavior suggests that something as simple as the threat of publicizing individuals’ (in)action can be the spark to bring about these socially-oriented emotions, and, in so doing, behavioral change.⁷In fact, I’d suggest that pride and guilt may underlie the success of the Neighbourhood Scoreboards Project,⁸which investigated the effect of posting energy usage and ranking on the facades of houses in a neighborhood in Sydney, Australia. Simple outcome: a 2.5% drop in energy consumption.

References:

¹ Onwezen, M. C., Antonides, G., & Bartels, J. (2013). The Norm Activation Model: An exploration of the functions of anticipated pride and guilt in environmental behavior. Journal of Economic Psychology, 39, 141–153.

² Onwezen, M. C., Bartels, J., & Antonides, G. (2014). The self‐regulatory function of anticipated pride and guilt in a sustainable and healthy consumption context. European Journal of Social Psychology, 44(1), 53–68.

³ Harth, N. S., Leach, C. W., & Kessler, T. (2013). Guilt, anger, and pride about in-group environmental behavior: Different emotions predict distinct intentions. Journal of Environmental Psychology, 34, 18–26.

⁴ Antonetti, P., & Maklan, S. (2014). Feelings that make a difference: How guilt and pride convince consumers of the effectiveness of sustainable consumption choices. Journal of Business Ethics, 124(1), 117–134.

⁵ Antonetti, P., & Maklan, S. (2014). Exploring postconsumption guilt and pride in the context of sustainability. Psychology and Marketing, 31(9), 717–735.

⁶ Hofmann, W., & Fisher, R. R. (2012). How guilt and pride shape subsequent self-control. Social Psychological and Personality Science, 3(6), 682–690.

⁷ Panagopoulos, C. (2010). Affect, social pressure and prosocial motivation: Field experimental evidence of the mobilizing effects of pride, shame and publicizing voting behavior. Political Behavior, 32, 369–386.

⁸ Vande Moere, A., Tomitsch, M., Hoinkis, M., Johansen, S., & Trefz, E. (2011). Comparative Feedback in the Street: Exposing Residential Energy Consumption on House Facades. Proceedings of 13th IFIP TC13 Conference on Human-Computer Interaction (INTERACT ’11), Part I, LNCS 6946, Springer: 470-488.

Photo credit: https://www.flickr.com/photos/70626035@N00/14327910926 licensed via Creative Commons

The emotional potency of peers during adolescence

June 10, 2015Leah Somerville

If you had to choose one event that epitomizes your experience as a teenager, what would it be? For me, I immediately think of that moment at the school dance while I was dancing with my middle school crush to November Rain by Guns n Roses. Our slow dancing skills were passable during the first part of the song, but then the tempo picked up … and let’s just say, we were not very smooth at adapting our dancing styles. Although I hope (for your sake) that the same thing didn’t happen to you, I’d bet that whatever memory you do conjure when you think back to your own adolescence is socially and emotionally charged.

It turns out that my adolescent experiences were completely typical of most adolescents—social experiences take on heightened emotional and motivational importance during adolescence as compared to other stages of life. In a study we conducted, we wanted to see how sensitive adolescents were to even the simplest, most innocuous social provocation: being looked at by a peer. During our study, we measured brain activity with functional magnetic resonance imaging in tandem with physiological arousal (measured with the skin conductance response—how much sweat is secreted on the skin during emotional events). We observed that even the simple act of being looked at by a peer was enough to induce heightened emotion reports, physiological responses, and brain activity in adolescents (when compared to adults and younger children). For instance, we saw biased activity in regions of the brain important for representing the emotional value of stimuli and in brain regions involved in thinking about ourselves (to read more, see here). All of these findings add up to the general conclusion that adolescents are highly attuned and reactive to their social environments – even very subtle ones – and that this fact influences a variety of their daily choices and feelings.

The author of this post at age 13 showing off her spiral perm.

What’s interesting about these findings is that they seem not to be unique to human adolescents. The term ‘adolescence’ is a sociocultural construct that refers only to humans, defined by simultaneous physical and psychological change that ends when an individual takes on adult roles in society (adolescence is most often defined as the approximate ages ~13-17 years). However, some aspects of biological changes during this age range, including hormone changes that define puberty, occur in other mammals as well. Some surprising results have arisen from the study of pubertal-linked changes in social behavior in non-human mammals. Pubertal rats enjoy ‘social play’ (kind of like wrestling) more frequently than adult rodents, and also seek out more novel and potentially thrilling experiences. Perhaps most intriguingly, rodents undergoing puberty also approach potential rewards (in this case, consuming alcoholic beverages) more when in social groups. Whereas adult mice spent the same amount of time consuming alcoholic substances when alone and with peer animals, juvenile animals in the pubertal stage spent more time consuming alcohol when in a cage with familiar peer animals. And it wasn’t just a motivation to consume the tasty cocktail before others got to it – they each had their own sipper.

What lessons can we learn from our furry friends about adolescence and the social potency that characterizes this age range? It is often assumed that peers take on heightened importance in adolescence due to overt concern about social status. However, it seems unlikely that such complicated, strategic motivations would drive rodents to behave differently around peers. This raises a second possibility, that there are “undercover” or non-deliberate ways that adolescents are influenced by social contexts. We believe that adolescents’ brains are biased to assign importance to social information, which imbues social settings with an extra boost in power to shape their feelings, motivations, and decisions. Although more research needs to be done to address questions like “why” and “how”, I guess that’s why I’m still mildly embarrassed by my tragic bout of dancing (and simultaneously thankful I grew up before the days of smartphone cameras).