The Neuroscience of Human and Artificial Intelligence Presence.

Two decades of social neuroscience and neuroeconomics research illustrate the brain mechanisms that are engaged when people consider human beings, often in comparison to considering artificial intelligence (AI) as a nonhuman control. AI as an experimental control preserves agency and facilitates social interactions but lacks a human presence, providing insight into brain mechanisms that are engaged by human presence and the presence of AI. Here, I review this literature to determine how the brain instantiates human and AI presence across social perception and decision-making paradigms commonly used to realize a social context. People behave toward humans differently than they do toward AI. Moreover, brain regions more engaged by humans compared to AI extend beyond the social cognition brain network to all parts of the brain, and the brain sometimes is engaged more by AI than by humans. Finally, I discuss gaps in the literature, limitations in current neuroscience approaches, and how an understanding of the brain correlates of human and AI presence can inform social science in the wild.

Evidence of shifting racial biases?

Racial biases are not fixed; they shift over time as cultural narratives about various social groups shift. Such shifts are usually triggered by catalytic events such as the murder of George Floyd. Dang et al. (2022) potentially document such a shift in brain responses to African Americans experiencing police violence; participants engage brain mechanisms involved in mentalising more when witnessing such atrocities, evidence of a lack of dehumanisation. This commentary urges caution towards such interpretations of these findings and encourages future research to better understanding shifting racial biases over time.

Looking with different eyes: The psychological meaning of categorisation goals moderates facial reactivity to facial expressions.

In the present research we examined whether the psychological meaning of people's categorisation goals affects facial muscle activity in response to facial expressions of emotion. We had participants associate eye colour (blue, brown) with either a personality trait (extraversion) or a physical trait (light frequency) and asked them to use these associations in a speeded categorisation task of angry, disgusted, happy and neutral faces while assessing participants' response times and facial muscle activity. We predicted that participants would respond differentially to the emotional faces when the categorisation criteria allowed for inferences about a target's thoughts, feelings or behaviour (i.e., when categorising extraversion), but not when these lacked any social meaning (i.e., when categorising light frequency). Indeed, emotional faces triggered facial reactions to facial expressions when participants categorised extraversion, but not when they categorised light frequency. In line with this, only when categorising extraversion did participants' response times indicate a negativity bias replicating previous results. Together, these findings provide further evidence for the contextual nature of people's selective responses to the emotions expressed by others.

Sticking with the nice guy: trait warmth information impairs learning and modulates person perception brain network activity.

Social learning requires inferring social information about another person, as well as evaluating outcomes. Previous research shows that prior social information biases decision making and reduces reliance on striatal activity during learning (Delgado, Frank, & Phelps, Nature Neuroscience 8 (11): 1611-1618, 2005). A rich literature in social psychology on person perception demonstrates that people spontaneously infer social information when viewing another person (Fiske & Taylor, 2013) and engage a network of brain regions, including the medial prefrontal cortex, temporal parietal junction, superior temporal sulcus, and precuneus (Amodio & Frith, Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 7(4), 268-277, 2006; Haxby, Gobbini, & Montgomery, 2004; van Overwalle Human Brain Mapping, 30, 829-858, 2009). We investigate the role of these brain regions during social learning about well-established dimensions of person perception-trait warmth and trait competence. We test the hypothesis that activity in person perception brain regions interacts with learning structures during social learning. Participants play an investment game where they must choose an agent to invest on their behalf. This choice is guided by cues signaling trait warmth or trait competence based on framing of monetary returns. Trait warmth information impairs learning about human but not computer agents, while trait competence information produces similar learning rates for human and computer agents. We see increased activation to warmth information about human agents in person perception brain regions. Interestingly, activity in person perception brain regions during the decision phase negatively predicts activity in the striatum during feedback for trait competence inferences about humans. These results suggest that social learning may engage additional processing within person perception brain regions that hampers learning in economic contexts.

Investigating the relationship between stereotyping and creativity during marketing campaigns in marketeers and audiences.

Stereotyping others in a creative process may negatively affect creative output, yet there is currently scant empirical evidence of a link between stereotyping and creativity; here, we explore this link in marketing communications. In a quasi-experiment, we introduced a novel intervention to disrupt marketeers' dependency on stereotypes and boost their creativity. The intervention decreased marketeers' use of stereotypes when selecting consumer labels-descriptive labels of a typical consumer based on consumer information-while enhancing the creativity of ideas. In another set of online experiments, we asked British residents to rate the creativity of advertisements and purchase intentions toward advertising products with different levels of stereotypical depictions of people. We found a linear relationship between the stereotypical depictions of people in advertisements and perceived creativity. We also observed a potential U-shaped relationship between stereotypical representations of people in advertisements and purchase intention, such that advertisements with low and high stereotypical representations induced greater purchase intention than did those with medium stereotypical representations. Finally, we discuss the psychological mechanisms that potentially link stereotyping and creativity and the implications for marketing communications.

The validation of short eating disorder, body dysmorphia, and Weight Bias Internalisation Scales among UK adults.

BACKGROUND: When collecting data from human participants, it is often important to minimise the length of questionnaire-based measures. This makes it possible to ensure that the data collection is as engaging as possible, while it also reduces response burden, which may protect data quality. Brevity is especially important when assessing eating disorders and related phenomena, as minimising questions pertaining to shame-ridden, unpleasant experiences may in turn minimise any negative affect experienced whilst responding. METHODS: We relied on item response theory to shorten three eating disorder and body dysmorphia measures, while aiming to ensure that the information assessed by the scales remained as close to that assessed by the original scales as possible. We further tested measurement invariance, correlations among different versions of the same scales as well as different measures, and explored additional properties of each scale, including their internal consistency. Additionally, we explored the performance of the 3-item version of the modified Weight Bias Internalisation Scale and compared it to that of the 11-item version of the scale. RESULTS: We introduce a 5-item version of the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, a 3-item version of the SCOFF questionnaire, and a 3-item version of the Dysmorphic Concern Questionnaire. The results revealed that, across a sample of UK adults (N = 987, ages 18-86, M = 45.21), the short scales had a reasonably good fit. Significant positive correlations between the longer and shorter versions of the scales and their significant positive, albeit somewhat weaker correlations to other, related measures support their convergent and discriminant validity. The results followed a similar pattern across the young adult subsample (N = 375, ages 18-39, M = 28.56). CONCLUSIONS: These results indicate that the short forms of the tested scales may perform similarly to the full versions.

This manuscript introduces short versions of existing measures of eating disorders and body dysmorphia, specifically the Eating Disorder Examination Questionnaire, the SCOFF Questionnaire, and the Dysmorphic Concern Questionnaire. We further investigate the properties of the recently introduced 3-item short version of the modified Weight Bias Internalisation Scale. Across analyses including measurement invariance testing and bivariate correlations aiming to assess convergent and discriminant validity, we find support that the short scales may perform similarly to their longer versions. These short scales may contribute in meaningful ways to research where the brevity of questionnaire-type measures may make a difference by contributing to data quality.

Cognitive causes of 'like me' race and gender biases in human language production.

Natural language contains and communicates social biases, often reflecting attitudes, prejudices and stereotypes. Here we provide evidence for a novel psychological pathway for the expression of such biases, in which they arise as a consequence of the automatized mechanisms by which humans retrieve words to produce sentences. Four experiments show that, when describing events, speakers tend to mention people who are more like them first and, thus, tend to highlight the perspectives of their own social groups. This 'like me' effect was seen in speakers from multiple demographic groups, in both English and Chinese speakers and in both first- and second-language English speakers. Psycholinguistic manipulations pinpoint that the bias is caused by greater accessibility in memory of words that refer to in-group than out-group members. These data provide a new cognitive explanation for why people produce biased language and highlight how detailed cognitive theories can have social implications.

The mental state inferences in healthcare professionals scale: a psychometric study.

BACKGROUND: Empathizing with patients is an essential component of effective clinical care. Yet, a debate persists regarding how healthcare professionals' emotions and performance are impacted when they engage in empathetic behaviors and attempt to discern patients' mental states during clinical interactions. To approach this issue, this study explores the psychometric properties of the Mental State Inferences in Healthcare Professionals Scale (MSIHPS), a novel eight-item scale to evaluate healthcare professionals' perceptions of their own disposition to infer patients' mental states during clinical interactions. METHOD: The study was conducted across various units within a regional hospital and primary care units affiliated with the Canarian Public Health Service in Spain. Data collection took place over the course of 2022, spanning from February to November. The psychometric properties of the scale were analyzed, including an exploratory and a confirmatory factor analysis, to test reliability and validity. Additionally, an item response model was run to test potentially biased items. The study collected data from a sample of 585 healthcare professionals. RESULTS: Overall, the results indicate that the psychometric properties of the tool are adequate. Furthermore, the unidimensionality of the scale was confirmed using the item response model, wherein the eight-items significantly contribute to predicting the latent construct. CONCLUSION: The MSIHPS offers the opportunity to explore the role of mentalizing in a diversity of healthcare settings. This measure can be useful to explore the relationship between healthcare professionals' disposition to infer patients' mental states and other relevant variables in clinical interactions, such as empathy and clinical performance.

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.

What is the Link Between Different Components of Empathy and Burnout in Healthcare Professionals? A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.

Research on healthcare shows that the relationship between empathy and burnout is complex. The aim of this systematic review and meta-analysis is to clarify the link between different empathic components and burnout components in healthcare professionals. A systematic review was conducted in accordance with the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidance. The search strategy was applied in PubMed, PsycINFO, CINAHL, Scopus, and Medline, from January 1990 to January 2021. Population included nurses and doctors. Key inclusion criteria were articles addressing the relationship between different components of empathy and professional performance and wellbeing or burn out, or studies using burnout and empathy measures with validity support from commonly accepted sources of evidence. Risk of bias was assessed using the Mixed Methods Appraisal Tool. From 1159 references identified, 22 studies were included in the systematic review, and 5 studies in the meta-analysis. Empathic Concern was significantly correlated with Depersonalization and Personal Accomplishment. Moreover, the links between Perspective Taking, Depersonalization and Personal Accomplishment were statistically significant. In conclusion, exploring and understanding the complex links between empathy and burnout could help healthcare professionals as well as institutions to reduce the risk of suffering burnout.

The performance of long vs. short questionnaire-based measures of depression, anxiety, and psychological distress among UK adults: A comparison of the patient health questionnaires, generalized anxiety disorder scales, malaise inventory, and Kessler scales.

It is often important to minimise the time participants in social science studies spend on completing questionnaire-based measures, reducing response burden, and increasing data quality. Here, we investigated the performance of the short versions of some widely used depression, anxiety, and psychological distress scales and compared them to the performance of longer versions of these scales (PHQ-2 vs PHQ-9, GAD-2 vs GAD-7, Malaise-3 vs Malaise-9, K6 vs K10). Across a sample of UK adults (N = 987, ages 18-86), we tested the existing factor structure and accuracy of the scales through confirmatory factor analyses and exploration of the total information functions, observing adequate model fit indices across the measures. Measurement invariance was tested across birth sex and age groups to explore whether any differences in measurement properties or measurement bias may exist, finding support for the invariance of most measures. We conducted bivariate correlations across the measures as a way of obtaining evidence of the equivalence in the rank-ordering of short vs long scales. The results followed a similar pattern across the young adult subsample (N = 375, ages 18-39) as in the overall sample. Overall, these results indicate that the short forms of the tested scales may perform similarly to the full versions. Where brevity is important, researchers may opt to use the shorter versions of the scales based on these data.

What Can Affective Science Contribute to Eradicating Structural Racism?

This introduction to the Special Issue in Affective Science on structural racism lays a challenge to affective science researchers: improve the inefficiency in our science. It describes how structural racism leads to inefficiencies in idea generation, technological development, training, and career progression in our science, limiting its ability to fully discover the role of affect in the human condition. It briefly describes the content of the special issue, and attempts to start a dialogue about best practices for inclusive science.

Comparing emotion inferences from dogs (Canis familiaris), panins (Pan troglodytes/Pan paniscus), and humans (Homo sapiens) facial displays.

Human beings are highly familiar over-learnt social targets, with similar physical facial morphology between perceiver and target. But does experience with or similarity to a social target determine whether we can accurately infer emotions from their facial displays? Here, we test this question across two studies by having human participants infer emotions from facial displays of: dogs, a highly experienced social target but with relatively dissimilar facial morphology; panins (chimpanzees/bonobos), inexperienced social targets, but close genetic relatives with a more similar facial morphology; and humans. We find that people are more accurate inferring emotions from facial displays of dogs compared to panins, though they are most accurate for human faces. However, we also find an effect of emotion, such that people vary in their ability to infer different emotional states from different species' facial displays, with anger more accurately inferred than happiness across species, perhaps hinting at an evolutionary bias towards detecting threat. These results not only compare emotion inferences from human and animal faces but provide initial evidence that experience with a non-human animal affects inferring emotion from facial displays.

Examining Preverbal Infants' Ability to Map Labels to Facial Configurations.

Language is important for emotion perception, but very little is known about how emotion labels are learned. The current studies examine how preverbal infants map novel labels onto facial configurations. Across studies, infants were tested with a modified habituation paradigm ("switch design"). Experiments 1 and 2 found that 18-month-olds, but not 14-month-olds, mapped novel labels ("blicket" and "toma") to human facial configurations associated with happiness and sadness. Subsequent analyses revealed that vocabulary size positively correlated with 14-month-olds' ability to form the mappings. Experiment 3 found that 14-month-olds were able to map novel labels to facial configurations when the visual complexity of the stimuli was reduced (i.e., by using cartoon facial configurations). This suggests that cognitive maturation and language development influence infants' associative word learning with facial configurations. The current studies are a critical first step in determining how infants navigate the complex process of learning emotion labels.

Exploring how harming and helping behaviors drive prediction and explanation during anthropomorphism.

Cacioppo and colleagues advanced the study of anthropomorphism by positing three motives that moderated the occurrence of this phenomenon; belonging, effectance, and explanation. Here, we further this literature by exploring the extent to which the valence of a target's behavior influences its anthropomorphism when perceivers attempt to explain and predict that target's behavior, and the involvement of brain regions associated with explanation and prediction in such anthropomorphism. Participants viewed videos of varying visually complex agents - geometric shapes, computer generated (CG) faces, and greebles - in nonrandom motion performing harming and helping behaviors. Across two studies, participants reported a narrative that explained the observed behavior (both studies) while we recorded brain activity (study one), and participants predicted future behavior of the protagonist shapes (study two). Brain regions implicated in prediction error (striatum), not language generation (inferior frontal gyrus; IFG) engaged more to harming than helping behaviors during the anthropomorphism of such stimuli. Behaviorally, we found greater anthropomorphism in explanations of harming rather than helping behaviors, but the opposite pattern when participants predicted the agents' behavior. Together, these studies build upon the anthropomorphism literature by exploring how the valence of behavior drives explanation and prediction.

Understanding the Links between Inferring Mental States, Empathy, and Burnout in Medical Contexts.

It is generally accepted that empathy should be the basis of patient care. However, this ideal may be unrealistic if healthcare professionals suffer adverse effects when engaging in empathy. The aim of this study is to explore the effect of inferring mental states and different components of empathy (perspective-taking; empathic concern; personal distress) in burnout dimensions (emotional exhaustion; depersonalization; personal accomplishment). A total of 184 healthcare professionals participated in the study (23% male, Mage = 44.60; SD = 10.46). We measured participants' empathy, the inference of mental states of patients, and burnout. Correlation analyses showed that inferring mental states was positively associated with perspective-taking and with empathic concern, but uncorrelated with personal distress. Furthermore, emotional exhaustion was related to greater levels of personal distress and greater levels of inferences of mental states. Depersonalization was associated with greater levels of personal distress and lower levels of empathic concern. Personal accomplishment was associated with the inference of mental states in patients, lower levels of personal distress, and perspective-taking. These results provide a better understanding of how different components of empathy and mental state inferences may preserve or promote healthcare professionals' burnout.

Jumping on the 'bad'wagon? How group membership influences responses to the social exclusion of others.

In four studies, we addressed whether group membership influences behavioral and neural responses to the social exclusion of others. Participants played a modified three-player Cyberball game (Studies 1-3) or a team-selection task (Study 4) in the absence or presence of a minimal group setting. In the absence of a minimal group, when one player excluded another player, participants actively included the excluded target. When the excluder was from the in-group and the excluded player from the out-group, participants were less likely to intervene (Studies 1-3) and also more often went along with the exclusion (Study 4). Functional magnetic resonance imaging results (Study 3) showed that greater exclusion in the minimal group setting concurred with increased activation in the dorsolateral pre-frontal cortex, a region associated with overriding cognitive conflict. Self-reports from Study 4 supported these results by showing that participants' responses to the target's exclusion were motivated by group membership as well as participants' general aversion to exclude others. Together, the findings suggest that when people witness social exclusion, group membership triggers a motivational conflict between favoring the in-group and including the out-group target. This underscores the importance of group composition for understanding the dynamics of social exclusion.

Constructing emotion categorization: Insights from developmental psychology applied to a young adult sample.

Previous research has found that the categorization of emotional facial expressions is influenced by a variety of factors, such as processing time, facial mimicry, emotion labels, and perceptual cues. However, past research has frequently confounded these factors, making it impossible to ascertain how adults use this varied information to categorize emotions. The current study is the first to explore the magnitude of impact for each of these factors on emotion categorization in the same paradigm. Participants (N = 102) categorized anger and disgust emotional facial expressions in a novel computerized task, modeled on similar tasks in the developmental literature with preverbal infants. Experimental conditions manipulated (a) whether the task was time-restricted, and (b) whether the labels "anger" and "disgust" were used in the instructions. Participants were significantly more accurate when provided with unlimited response time and emotion labels. Participants who were given restricted sorting time (2s) and no emotion labels tended to focus on perceptual features of the faces when categorizing the emotions, which led to low sorting accuracy. In addition, facial mimicry related to greater sorting accuracy. These results suggest that when high-level (labeling) categorization strategies are unavailable, adults use low-level (perceptual) strategies to categorize facial expressions. Methodological implications for the study of emotion are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2018 APA, all rights reserved).

Developmental changes in infants' categorization of anger and disgust facial expressions.

For decades, scholars have examined how children first recognize emotional facial expressions. This research has found that infants younger than 10 months can discriminate negative, within-valence facial expressions in looking time tasks, and children older than 24 months struggle to categorize these expressions in labeling and free-sort tasks. Specifically, these older children, and even adults, consistently misidentify disgust expressions as anger. Although some scholars have hypothesized that young infants would also be unable to categorize anger and disgust expressions, this question has not been empirically tested. In addition, very little research has examined developmental changes in infants' perceptual categorization abilities with high arousal, within-valence emotions. For this reason, the current study tested 10- and 18-month-olds in a looking time task and found that both age groups could perceptually categorize anger and disgust facial expressions. Furthermore, 18-month-olds showed a heightened sensitivity to novel anger expressions, suggesting that, over the second year of life, infants' emotion categorization skills undergo developmental change. These findings are the first to demonstrate that young infants can categorize anger and disgust facial expressions and to document how this skill develops and changes over time. (PsycINFO Database Record