Does the beauty premium effect always exist? - an ERP study of the facial attractiveness stereotype in public's attitudes toward in-Service Chinese civil servant.

Objectives: Civil servants image is one of the most important representatives of government image. Therefore, it is of great significance to study the factors affecting the public's attitudes toward in-service civil servants. The current study aims to learn whether female facial attractiveness would affect the male public's attitudes toward in-service civil servants using event-related potentials. Methods: Participants were recruited to view attractive/unattractive faces followed by positive/negative adjectives. We observed that positive adjectives after unattractive faces elicited smaller N400 amplitudes than negative adjectives, and the N400 amplitude elicited by attractive faces after negative adjectives was significantly smaller than that elicited by unattractive faces. What's more, we found that the voltage of N400 was negative correlated with reaction time. Results: It showed that the incongruity of physically appearance and in-service civil servant positions lead to longer reaction time. The unattractive civil servant is more congruent with positive adjectives than the attractive one in the public's mind. Conclusion: We explain these findings from two aspects. First, the public is more rational for in-service civil servants, and factors that are unrelated to governing capacity, such as physical attractiveness, do not influence their attitudes. Second, civil servants are the position that requires technical ability to serve the public rather than communication ability, which was represented by physically attractive.

Rational civil servant interviewers: evidence from an event-related potential study of beauty premiums in Chinese civil servant interviews.

Physical attractiveness can greatly influence business job applications (the "beauty premium" effect). However, little is known about whether and how physical attractiveness influences interviewers' evaluations of Chinese civil servant applicants, given that many characteristics of civil service appear to be different from those of business jobs. Using event-related potentials (ERPs), the current study investigated how female job candidates' physical attractiveness influenced interviewers' evaluations in Chinese civil servant interviews for both technical and managerial positions. The behavioral results showed that for the managerial positions, attractive female candidates had a much higher acceptance rate than unattractive candidates. However, for the technical positions, no significant difference was found between attractive and unattractive candidates. At the brain level, for the managerial positions, pairs of attractive faces with managerial posts elicited smaller N400 and larger late positive potential (LPP) amplitudes than did pairs of unattractive faces with managerial posts. However, this relationship was not observed for technical posts. The negative correlation between N400 amplitude and acceptance rate as well as the positive correlation between LPP amplitude and acceptance rate further confirmed these results. The present study suggests that beauty could potentially influence if candidates are accepted in real Chinese civil servant interviews, as observed experimentally in this research.

The double-edged sword effect of performance pressure on public employees: The mediation role of mission valence.

Performance pressure is a unique stressor in the public sector. Prior studies revealed that it could be a challenge that stimulates functional behavior (i.e., vigor and dedication) or a threat that leads to dysfunctional consequences (i.e., exhaustion and depersonalization). But these articles failed to provide an integrated theoretical model to explain both phenomena simultaneously. We introduced the double-edged sword effect (also called the "too-much-of-good-thing" effect) of performance pressure to fill this theoretical gap. Furthermore, the mediation role of mission valence was examined to explore the buffet mechanism toward this nonlinear relationship. We collected 1,464 valid questionnaire data from snowball sampling to test the research model. Our results revealed that: (1) performance pressure had an inverted U-shaped relationship with dedication and mission valence; (2) performance pressure hurt vigor rather than the curvilinear relationship; (3) mission valence can mediate the inverted U-shaped relationship between performance pressure and dedication. These empirical findings give theoretical contributions and practical insights to public personnel management.

Why Do You Trust News? The Event-Related Potential Evidence of Media Channel and News Type.

Media is the principal source of public information, and people's trust in news has been a critical mechanism in social cohesion. In recent years, the vast growth of new media (e.g., internet news portals) has brought huge change to the way information is conveyed, cannibalizing much of the space of traditional media (e.g., traditional newspapers). This has led to renewed attention on media credibility. The study aims to explore the impact of media channel on trust in news and examine the role of news type. Twenty-six participants were asked to make trust-distrust decisions after reading a variety of news headlines from different media channels while undergoing electroencephalography (EEG) monitoring. The electrophysiological results showed that, for hard news (e.g., important news related to public life), the new media condition elicited smaller N100 and larger P200 amplitudes than the traditional media condition. However, for soft news (e.g., entertainment, and non-related to vital interest), there was no significant difference. The study suggests that the fitness of media channel and news type may influence the evaluation of news, impacting participants' affective arousal and attention allocation in the early stage and influencing trust in news. These results provide neurocognitive evidence of individuals' trust toward hard and soft news consumed via different media channels, yielding new insights into trust in media and contributing to media trust theory.

Modulating activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex alter corruption behavior: A transcranial direct current stimulation study.

Corruption behavior has gained worldwide concern for its great harmfulness to public society. In order to reduce corruption, researchers have carried out numerous studies on corrupt prevention. Researchers found that except for external supervision, the internal factor such as moral judgment also have an impact on corruption behavior. Previous brain imaging and stimulation studies suggested that dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (DLPFC) is critical brain area which integrates emotional and cognitive process of moral judgments. Therefore, in the current study, we applied tDCS (transcranial direct current stimulation) over DLPFC to investigated the modulation effect of cortical excitability on corruption behavior. According to the characteristics of corruption, we designed an incomplete information invest game task based on trust game, then adopted a between-subject design to compare participants' corruption rate and reaction time (RT) among right anodal/left cathodal, left anodal/right cathodal and sham tDCS. The results showed that, in contrast to sham stimulation, left anodal/right cathodal tDCS reduced corruption rate both in high and low entrusted amount while right anodal/left cathodal tDCS only prolonged subjects' reaction time (RT) of dishonest response only in high entrusted amount. A possible explanation for the results of current study is that the left DLPFC is associated with the emotional process, which influenced the moral intuition aspect of moral judgment and reflected in the change of immoral behavior rate. While the right DLPFC is associated with cognitive control, which influenced the moral reasoning aspect of moral judgment and reflected in the change of reaction time. This explanation is also consistent with the Emotion-Evoked Collective Corruption Model and dual process theory of brain function.

Does the aura surrounding healthy-related imported products fade in China? ERP evidence for the country-of-origin stereotype.

Chinese consumers' craze about imported products, especially foods and drugs, peaked after various safety incidents, such as the contamination of Chinese dairy products. Recently, this boom has gradually receded because of the constant quality problems of imported products and the stricter safety supervision of domestic products. Researchers have measured consumer's perception toward domestic and imported products in various ways. In the current research, we investigated whether the country-of-origin stereotype has weakened in Chinese young consumers at the neurological level. By using a word-pair paradigm, 21 young participants were required to classify positive or negative words while event-related potentials were recorded. The results showed that reaction time to identify negative words following presentation of imported products (imported-negative condition) was longer than domestic products (domestic-negative condition). The amplitudes of N270 and LPP evoked in the imported-negative condition were significantly larger than those in the domestic-negative condition, possibly reflecting the higher expectation conflict when participate identified the adjectives as negative primed by imported healthy-related products. These findings revealed that young Chinese consumers still evaluated imported products better than domestic products.

The Brand Scandal Spillover Effect at the Country Level: Evidence From Event-Related Potentials.

The spillover effect of brand scandals commonly exists, and this effect will damage the image of the company, industry or even country in which the scandal occurred. Most previous studies on the brand scandal spillover effect have mainly focused on the corporate and industry levels. However, with the development of brand internalization and media technology, the spillover effect at the country level is becoming increasingly common. In the current study, we conducted an event-related potentials study to explore the spillover effect of brand scandals on the country level as well as its underlying neural basis. Specifically, we compared consumers' attitudes toward countries of origin with different stereotypes during different types of brand scandals. When a competence scandal took place in a competence stereotype country, a larger P2 mean amplitude was elicited compared to a warmth stereotype country. When a morality scandal took place in a warmth stereotype country, a larger LPP mean amplitude was induced compared to a competence stereotype country. We explain the current results based on expectancy violations theory. When competence scandals take place in competence stereotype countries, there will be a greater degree of violation of expectations compared with that in warmth stereotype countries, which leads to a negative evaluation of the country of origin. When morality scandals take place in warmth stereotype countries, people had a stronger negative emotional arousal when morality scandals happened in the warmth stereotype country.

Beauty premium: Event-related potentials evidence of how physical attractiveness matters in online peer-to-peer lending.

Although it is well known that attractiveness-based impressions affect the labor market, election outcomes and many other social activities, little is known about the role physical attractiveness plays in financial transactions. With the development of online finance, peer-to-peer lending has become one of the most important ways in which businesses or individuals raise capital. However, because of information asymmetry, the lender must decide whether or not to lend money to a stranger based on limited information, resulting in their decision being influenced by many other factors. In the current study, we investigated how potential borrowers' facial attractiveness influenced lenders' attitudes toward borrowers' repayment behavior at the brain level by using event-related potentials. At the priming stage, photos of attractive borrowers induced smaller N200 amplitude than photos of unattractive borrowers. Meanwhile, at the feedback stage, compared with the condition of repaying on time, breach of repayment from unattractive borrowers induced larger feedback-related negativity (FRN) amplitude, which was a frontal-central negative deflection and would be enhanced by the unexpected outcome. Furthermore, smaller P300 amplitude was also elicited by the condition of not repaying on time. These differences in the FRN and P300 amplitudes were not observed between negative and positive feedback from attractive borrowers. Therefore, our findings suggest that the beauty premium phenomenon is present in online peer-to-peer lending and that lenders were more tolerant toward attractive borrowers' dishonest behavior.