Complementarity in daily marijuana and alcohol among emerging adults.

Objective: The relationship between marijuana and alcohol use among late adolescents was examined as whether marijuana use was related to quantity of alcohol consumed that day, and whether changes in marijuana and alcohol use frequency over 3 years were related. Method: College students (n = 375) reported marijuana and alcohol use for 28 days over 3 years. Results: Within-day analyses showed that more alcohol was consumed on days on which marijuana was used. Co-use varied by alcohol use problems, day of week, and year in study; the relation between marijuana and alcohol use was stronger among those who reported less problematic alcohol use, on weekdays, and as time increased. Daily level co-use relations also differed marginally by gender. At the annual level, there was a marginal relation between changes in use such that increasing use of one substance over time was weakly associated with increased use of the other substance over the same time period. Conclusions: Results add to the emerging conclusion of complementary marijuana and alcohol co-use within a single day, showing it occurs for both women and men, across a full range of marijuana use, and increases with time while being affected by alcohol use problems and day of week. The overall strong co-use relationship highlights risky behavior among late adolescents and supports an emphasis on common underlying substance use causes. However, the different pattern when assessed yearly demonstrates the importance of tailoring the timescale of analysis to the specific substance use question. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).

Anxiety increases sensitivity to errors and negative feedback over time.

Anxiety is characterized by sensitivity to negative external and internal information, apparent both in symptoms (e.g., hypervigilance and worry) and neural performance monitoring measures (i.e., feedback- and error-related negativity (FRN and ERN)). Here we examine whether anxiety is associated with persistent neural sensitivity to negative performance markers reflected in both the FRN and ERN (n = 273). Higher anxiety was associated with larger responses to both negative feedback and errors as the task progressed compared to those with lower anxiety particularly in women, suggesting that anxiety makes reactions to negative cues more persistent. Similar hypotheses were investigated for depression, which is associated with similar negative cognitive biases and deficits in reward-related processing, but results were mixed. Together, the findings identify variation over time-in-task as an overlooked dimension by which FRN and ERN may serve as a biomarker of anxiety but suggest that depression is not consistently related to performance monitoring.

Social neuroscience is more than the study of the human brain: The legacy of John Cacioppo.

John Cacioppo passed away in 2018, leaving a legacy of profound methodological, theoretical, and inferential contributions to social neuroscience. This paper serves as an introduction to the nine articles that comprise this special issue in honor of John Cacioppo's work in social neuroscience. Although he made many contributions to psychology, here we briefly review four milestones in Cacioppo's career that had important implications specifically for the development of social neuroscience today: (1) an early research focus on cardiovascular and facial EMG measurement, (2) the training of others, (3) the importance of sound inference, and (4) the definition of social neuroscience. In sum, we argue that John Cacioppo envisioned social neuroscience as having multiple levels of explanation and requiring multiple kinds of physiological evidence. It is not all just the brain!

Bioelectrical echoes from a career at the cutting edge: John Cacioppo's legacy and the use of ERPs in social psychology.

In his many writings, John Cacioppo stressed how neural and physiological events could reveal psychological phenomena. Far from merely "physiologizing" psychology, John advocated social neuroscience in service of theory development and causal inference. These themes can be seen in his ERP work, which he began in the early 1990s to answer basic questions about attitudes. Fortuitously, his foray into ERP research overlapped with the dominance of the social cognition perspective in social psychology, which argues that complex thoughts and behaviors can be understood by breaking them into their underlying elements. ERPs are a natural methodological complement to this perspective, assuming that complex thoughts and behaviors are composed to separable information processing stages that manifest on the scalp as ERPs. Social cognitive theories, with their roots in mental chronometry, are thus fertile ground for researchers possessing a way to quantify underlying mental operations. This review illustrates John's influence by tracing its impact on our own research.

The Role of Social and Ability Belonging in Men's and Women's pSTEM Persistence.

The benefits of belonging for academic performance and persistence have been examined primarily in terms of subjective perceptions of social belonging, but feeling ability belonging, or fit with one's peers intellectually, is likely also important for academic success. This may particularly be the case in male-dominated fields, where inherent genius and natural talent are viewed as prerequisites for success. We tested the hypothesis that social and ability belonging each explain intentions to persist in physical science, technology, engineering, and math (pSTEM). We further explore whether women experience lower social and ability belonging than men on average in pSTEM and whether belonging more strongly relates to intentions to persist for women. At three time points throughout a semester, we assessed undergraduate pSTEM majors enrolled in a foundational calculus or physics course. Women reported lower pSTEM ability belonging and self-efficacy than men but higher identification with pSTEM. End-of-semester social belonging, ability belonging, and identification predicted intentions to persist in pSTEM, with a stronger relationship between social belonging and intentions to persist in pSTEM for women than men. These findings held after controlling for prior and current academic performance, as well as two conventional psychological predictors of academic success.

Factors Influencing High School Students' Interest in pSTEM.

The transition from high school to college is an important choice point for the pursuit of physical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (pSTEM) career paths, with students in the United States switching from course selection that is proscribed by state graduation requirements in high school to choosing classes and paths of study more freely in college. Here two studies examine whether social factors identified to inhibit interest in pSTEM within college students similarly affect high school students, and in particular whether these factors could contribute to gender differences in interest in pursuing pSTEM. We find a lower sense of social and ability belonging and lower self-efficacy among female than male high school students pursuing pSTEM classes. In addition, for females but not males, social belonging significantly predicts intentions to continue to pursue pSTEM, highlighting the importance of considering whether low social belonging inhibits intentions to pursue pSTEM for female but not male students. We also find that perceptions of pSTEM fields as requiring innate brilliance more than hard work selectively discourage female students from intending to further pursue pSTEM. Together the studies highlight the potential impact of both subjective self-perceptions and perceptions about pSTEM fields on students' interest in pSTEM and further identify processes that may selectively dissuade high school females from pursuing pSTEM career paths relative to males.

The Role of Prototype Matching in Science Pursuits: Perceptions of Scientists That Are Inaccurate and Diverge From Self-Perceptions Predict Reduced Interest in a Science Career.

Self-to-prototype matching is a strategy of mental comparisons between the self-concept and the typical or "representative" member of a group to make some judgment. Such a process might contribute to interest in pursuing a science career and, relatedly, women's underrepresentation in physical science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (pSTEM) fields. Across four studies, we measured self-scientist discrepancies on communal, agentic, and scientific dimensions, and assessed participants' interest in a science career. The most consistent predictor of science interest was the discrepancy between self and scientist on the scientific dimension (e.g., intelligent, meticulous). Study 4 established that students with larger self-scientist discrepancies also had less accurate perceptions of students pursuing science, and that inaccuracy was related to lower science interest. Thus, students with lower science interest do not just perceive scientists differently from themselves but also erroneously. Discrepancy and inaccuracy together explained a significant portion of the gender gap in pSTEM interest.

University-Affiliated Alcohol Marketing Enhances the Incentive Salience of Alcohol Cues.

We tested whether affiliating beer brands with universities enhances the incentive salience of those brands for underage drinkers. In Study 1, 128 undergraduates viewed beer cues while event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Results showed that beer cues paired with in-group backgrounds (logos for students' universities) evoked an enhanced P3 ERP component, a neural index of incentive salience. This effect varied according to students' levels of identification with their university, and the amplitude of the P3 response prospectively predicted alcohol use over 1 month. In Study 2 ( N = 104), we used a naturalistic advertisement exposure to experimentally create in-group brand associations and found that this manipulation caused an increase in the incentive salience of the beer brand. These data provide the first evidence that marketing beer via affiliating it with students' universities enhances the incentive salience of the brand for underage students and that this effect has implications for their alcohol involvement.

Using trial-level data and multilevel modeling to investigate within-task change in event-related potentials.

EEG data, and specifically the ERP, provide psychologists with the power to examine quickly occurring cognitive processes at the native temporal resolution at which they occur. Despite the advantages conferred by ERPs to examine processes at different points in time, ERP researchers commonly ignore the trial-to-trial temporal dimension by collapsing across trials of similar types (i.e., the signal averaging approach) because of constraints imposed by repeated measures ANOVA. Here, we present the advantages of using multilevel modeling (MLM) to examine trial-level data to investigate change in neurocognitive processes across the course of an experiment. Two examples are presented to illustrate the usefulness of this technique. The first demonstrates decreasing differentiation in N170 amplitude to faces of different races across the course of a race categorization task. The second demonstrates attenuation of the ERN as participants commit more errors within a task designed to measure implicit racial bias. Although the examples presented here are within the realm of social psychology, the use of MLM to analyze trial-level EEG data has the potential to contribute to a number of different theoretical domains within psychology.

The effects of gender composition on women's experience in math work groups.

The present studies tested a model outlining the effects of group gender composition on self- and others' perceptions of women's math ability in a truly interactive setting with groups composed entirely of naïve participants (N = 158 4-person groups across 3 studies). One woman in each group was designated to be the "expert" by having her complete a tutorial that gave her task-relevant knowledge for a subsequent group task. Group gender composition was hypothesized to influence perceptions of women's math ability through intrapersonal processes (stereotype threat effects on performance) and interpersonal processes (social cohesion between the expert and other group members). Group composition affected the experts' performance in the group math task, but importantly, it also affected their social cohesion with group members. Moreover, both of these effects-lowered performance and poorer social cohesion in male-dominated groups-made independent contributions in accounting for group gender composition effects on perceptions of women's math ability (Studies 1 and 2). Boundary conditions were examined in a 3rd study. Women who had a history of excelling in math and had chosen a math-intensive STEM major were selected to be the designated experts. We predicted and found this would be sufficient to eliminate the effect of group gender composition on interpersonal processes, and correspondingly the effect on women's perceived math ability. Interestingly (and consistent with past work on stereotype threat effects among highly domain-identified individuals), there were continued performance differences indicative of effects on intrapersonal processes. (PsycINFO Database Record

Seeing is not stereotyping: the functional independence of categorization and stereotype activation.

Social categorization has been viewed as necessarily resulting in stereotyping, yet extant research suggests the two processes are differentially sensitive to task manipulations. Here, we simultaneously test the degree to which race perception and stereotyping are conditionally automatic. Participants performed a sequential priming task while either explicitly attending to the race of face primes or directing attention away from their semantic nature. We find a dissociation between the perceptual encoding of race and subsequent activation of associated stereotypes, with race perception occurring in both task conditions, but implicit stereotyping occurring only when attention is directed to the race of the face primes. These results support a clear conceptual distinction between categorization and stereotyping and show that the encoding of racial category need not result in stereotype activation.

Brain activation underlying threat detection to targets of different races.

The current study examined blood oxygen level-dependent signal underlying racial differences in threat detection. During functional magnetic resonance imaging, participants determined whether pictures of Black or White individuals held weapons. They were instructed to make shoot responses when the picture showed armed individuals but don't shoot responses to unarmed individuals, with the cost of not shooting armed individuals being greater than that of shooting unarmed individuals. Participants were faster to shoot armed Blacks than Whites, but faster in making don't shoot responses to unarmed Whites than Blacks. Brain activity differed to armed versus unarmed targets depending on target race, suggesting different mechanisms underlying threat versus safety decisions. Anterior cingulate cortex was preferentially engaged for unarmed Whites than Blacks. Parietal and visual cortical regions exhibited greater activity for armed Blacks than Whites. Seed-based functional connectivity of the amygdala revealed greater coherence with parietal and visual cortices for armed Blacks than Whites. Furthermore, greater implicit Black-danger associations were associated with increased amygdala activation to armed Blacks, compared to armed Whites. Our results suggest that different neural mechanisms may underlie racial differences in responses to armed versus unarmed targets.

Can marijuana make it better? Prospective effects of marijuana and temperament on risk for anxiety and depression.

Increases in marijuana use in recent years highlight the importance of understanding how marijuana affects mental health. Of particular relevance is the effect of marijuana use on anxiety and depression given that marijuana use is highest among late adolescents/early adults, the same age range in which risk for anxiety and depression is the highest. Here we examine how marijuana use moderates the effects of temperament on level of anxiety and depression in a prospective design in which baseline marijuana use and temperament predict anxiety and depression 1 year later. We found that harm avoidance (HA) is associated with higher anxiety and depression a year later, but only among those low in marijuana use. Those higher in marijuana use show no relation between HA and symptoms of anxiety and depression. Marijuana use also moderated the effect of novelty seeking (NS), with symptoms of anxiety and depression increasing with NS only among those with high marijuana use. NS was unrelated to symptoms of anxiety and depression among those low in marijuana use. The temperament dimension of reward dependence was unrelated to anxiety and depression symptoms. Our results suggest that marijuana use does not have an invariant relationship with anxiety and depression, and that the effects of relatively stable temperament dimensions can be moderated by other contextual factors.

Testing an expanded theory of planned behavior model to explain marijuana use among emerging adults in a promarijuana community.

Opinions about marijuana use in the United States are becoming increasingly favorable, making it important to understand how psychosocial influences impact individuals' use in this context. Here, we used the theory of planned behavior to examine the influence of initial attitudes, norms, and efficacy to resist use on initial intentions and then to examine the effect of initial intentions on actual marijuana use measured 1 year later using data drawn from a community with relatively high use. We expanded the traditional theory of planned behavior model by investigating 2 types of normative influence (descriptive and injunctive) and 2 types of intentions (use intentions and proximity intentions), reasoning that exposure to high use in the population may produce high descriptive norms and proximity intentions overall, but not necessarily increase actual use. By contrast, we expected greater variability in injunctive norms and use intentions and that only use intentions would predict actual use. Consistent with hypotheses, intentions to use marijuana were predicted by injunctive norms (and attitudes) and in turn predicted marijuana use 1 year later. By contrast, descriptive norms were relatively high among all participants and did not predict intentions. Moreover, proximity intentions were not predictive of actual use. We also found that increasing intentions to use over a 1-year period predicted greater use. Given the greater efficacy of theory-based as compared with non-theory-based interventions, these findings provide critical information for the design of successful interventions to decrease marijuana-associated harms.

Toward a comprehensive understanding of executive cognitive function in implicit racial bias.

Although performance on laboratory-based implicit bias tasks often is interpreted strictly in terms of the strength of automatic associations, recent evidence suggests that such tasks are influenced by higher-order cognitive control processes, so-called executive functions (EFs). However, extant work in this area has been limited by failure to account for the unity and diversity of EFs, focus on only a single measure of bias and/or EF, and relatively small sample sizes. The current study sought to comprehensively model the relation between individual differences in EFs and the expression of racial bias in 3 commonly used laboratory measures. Participants (N = 485) completed a battery of EF tasks (Session 1) and 3 racial bias tasks (Session 2), along with numerous individual difference questionnaires. The main findings were as follows: (a) measures of implicit bias were only weakly intercorrelated; (b) EF and estimates of automatic processes both predicted implicit bias and also interacted, such that the relation between automatic processes and bias expression was reduced at higher levels of EF; (c) specific facets of EF were differentially associated with overall task performance and controlled processing estimates across different bias tasks; (d) EF did not moderate associations between implicit and explicit measures of bias; and (e) external, but not internal, motivation to control prejudice depended on EF to reduce bias expression. Findings are discussed in terms of the importance of global and specific EF abilities in determining expression of implicit racial bias.

Social identity modifies face perception: an ERP study of social categorization.

Two studies examined whether social identity processes, i.e. group identification and social identity threat, amplify the degree to which people attend to social category information in early perception [assessed with event-related brain potentials (ERPs)]. Participants were presented with faces of Muslims and non-Muslims in an evaluative priming task while ERPs were measured and implicit evaluative bias was assessed. Study 1 revealed that non-Muslims showed stronger differentiation between ingroup and outgroup faces in both early (N200) and later processing stages (implicit evaluations) when they identified more strongly with their ethnic group. Moreover, identification effects on implicit bias were mediated by intergroup differentiation in the N200. In Study 2, social identity threat (vs control) was manipulated among Muslims. Results revealed that high social identity threat resulted in stronger differentiation of Muslims from non-Muslims in early (N200) and late (implicit evaluations) processing stages, with N200 effects again predicting implicit bias. Combined, these studies reveal how seemingly bottom-up early social categorization processes are affected by individual and contextual variables that affect the meaning of social identity. Implications of these results for the social identity perspective as well as social cognitive theories of person perception are discussed.

The effect of context on responses to racially ambiguous faces: changes in perception and evaluation.

Reactions to individuals who possess features associated with multiple racial groups may be particularly susceptible to external contextual influences, leading to meaningfully different racial perceptions and judgments in different situations. In the present study, we found that an extrinsic race-label cue not only changed evaluative associations activated by a racially ambiguous face, but also changed quickly occurring neural responses sensitive to racial perception. Behaviorally, prototypical Black faces and racially ambiguous faces labeled as Black activated more negative implicit associations than prototypical White faces and racially ambiguous faces labeled as White. Neurally, prototypical faces and racially ambiguous faces cued with the same race elicited similar responses. Specifically, prototypical Black and racially ambiguous faces labeled as Black elicited larger P200s but smaller N200s than prototypical White and racially ambiguous faces labeled as White. These results show that racial perception can be changed by an external cue and this, in turn, influences subsequent evaluative reactions.

The role of expression and race in weapons identification.

Emotional expressions can signal intentions and so possess the power to moderate social inferences. Here, we test whether stereotypes implicitly elicited by a stigmatized racial outgroup member are moderated by facial expression. Participants classified pictures of guns and tools that were primed with pictures of Black and White male faces posing angry, happy, and neutral expressions. Across the 3 measures examined--response latencies, error rates, and automatic processing, facial expression modulated implicit stereotyping (Study 1, n = 71; Study 2, n = 166). A Black angry prime elicited implicit stereotyping, while a Black happy prime diminished implicit stereotyping. Responding after neutral primes varied as a function of the expression context. When viewed alongside more threatening expressions (Study 1), neutral Black targets no longer elicited implicit stereotyping, but when viewed alongside more threatening expressions (Study 2), neutral Black targets primed crime and danger-relevant stereotypes. These results demonstrate that an individual can activate different associations based on changes in emotional expression and that a feature present in many everyday encounters (a smile) attenuates implicit racial stereotyping.

Cannabis cue reactivity and craving among never, infrequent and heavy cannabis users.

Substance cue reactivity is theorized as having a significant role in addiction processes, promoting compulsive patterns of drug-seeking and drug-taking behavior. However, research extending this phenomenon to cannabis has been limited. To that end, the goal of the current work was to examine the relationship between cannabis cue reactivity and craving in a sample of 353 participants varying in self-reported cannabis use. Participants completed a visual oddball task whereby neutral, exercise, and cannabis cue images were presented, and a neutral auditory oddball task while event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded. Consistent with past research, greater cannabis use was associated with greater reactivity to cannabis images, as reflected in the P300 component of the ERP, but not to neutral auditory oddball cues. The latter indicates the specificity of cue reactivity differences as a function of substance-related cues and not generalized cue reactivity. Additionally, cannabis cue reactivity was significantly related to self-reported cannabis craving as well as problems associated with cannabis use. Implications for cannabis use and addiction more generally are discussed.

Tracking the dynamics of the social brain: ERP approaches for social cognitive and affective neuroscience.

Event-related potential (ERP) approaches to social cognitive and affective neuroscience (SCAN) are not as widely used as other neuroimaging techniques, yet they offer several unique advantages. In particular, the high temporal resolution of ERP measures of neural activity make them ideally suited for studying the dynamic interplay of rapidly unfolding cognitive and affective processes. In this article, we highlight the utility of ERP methods for scientists investigating questions of SCAN. We begin with a brief description of the physiological basis of ERPs and discussion of methodological practices. We then discuss how ERPs may be used to address a range of questions concerning social perception, social cognition, attitudes, affect and self-regulation, with examples of research that has used the ERP approach to contribute important theoretical advances in these areas. Whether used alone or in combination with other techniques, the ERP is an indispensable part of the social and affective neuroscientist's methodological toolkit.