Social Attention
A huge part of what makes us human is our ability to socially engage with each other (for better or worse!). Fascinatingly enough, we can use the faint electrical signals from the brain recorded at the surface of our scalps to shed some light on how that all works. Here are some of the questions that I’ve worked on finding answers to over the past few years.
1) Does the brain learn to anticipate rejection?
One of the main things I’ve been interested in looking at in this area over the years has been how we react to social rejection. From this literature, we know that experiencing social discrimination over a long period of time (i.e., chronic) is associated with a host of negative health outcomes like high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, and so forth. An interesting theory as to why this occurs is hypervigilance, the idea that knowing you’re in an environment in which you COULD be discriminated against at any time places a person in a chronic state of vigilance which, if maintained for too long, can lead to those negative health outcomes.
Drawing on this idea, I used a well-established social exclusion paradigm called the Cyberball task to explore this question. In this paradigm, participants engage in a game of catch with virtual avatars who, after an initial period of fair play, begin to exclude the participant from their game. Me and my colleagues showed that the strength of the attention-related response (i.e., the P300) preceding actual trial outcomes on the Cyberball task rose once rejection became more likely, a short-term manifestation of the hypervigilance phenomena captured in electrical waves from the brain.
Kiat, J.E., Cheadle, J.E. Goosby, B.J. (2018). The Impact of Social Exclusion on Anticipatory Attentional Processes. International Journal of Psychophysiology.
2) How does social information change the way we judge the experiences of others?
Building on the idea of anticipatory processes, I ran a study looking at how something as simple as knowing a person’s name changes the way we process their experiences. Look at this face expressing mild discomfort. How does it make you feel? As you might expect, there’s a lot of variability in how we react to these situations. Some folks report feeling nothing, while others report feeling like they’re experiencing the pain themselves. Specifically, I was interested in looking at how that changes based on something as simple as knowing the name of the person.
To shed light on the variation in response, I ran a study looking at how specific factors influence what drives our empathic responses. Media features of this investigative line can be found here and here! The idea behind this study was that individuation (i.e., knowing a person’s name) changes how you empathize with them. In this project, we found that empathy for pain expressed by named faces was predicted by the neural response during the presentation of the faces, while empathy for pain expressed by unnamed faces was predicted by the neural response of the pain phase itself.
In other words, these results suggest that empathy for individuals we don’t know draws more heavily on the “facts of the case”, while just knowing the name of a person may be enough to make us draw on other factors unrelated to such.
Kiat, J.E., Cheadle, J.E. (2017). The Impact of Individuation on the Bases of Human Empathic Responding. Neuroimage. 155, 312-321.
3) How does social information change the way we respond to the actions of others?
Another study I worked with utilized a novel Lunchroom task paradigm developed by Caitlin Hudac & Allison Skinner. News features of this can be found here and here! In this paradigm, in which participants are repeatedly socially included or rejected by virtual characters, with the trick being that sometimes those events were forewarned by the presentation of subtle racially stereotyped warnings. Our results showed the highest level of attention-related reactivity to inclusion events preceded by racial stereotypes. In other words, being included by folks who might be racist is more alarming than being rejected by them or included or rejected by folks who aren’t.
