The influence of body posture on social cognitive conflict: an event-related potential study

Abstract

Event Abstract Back to Event The influence of body posture on social cognitive conflict: an event-related potential study Eric C. Sun1* and Eddie Harmon-Jones1 1 University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Australia Aims: The present study is aimed to examine whether body posture has an impact on the processing of social cognitive conflict. Previous research has found that some Caucasian Americans show exaggerated cognitive conflict processing when completing a weapons identification task that measured prejudice toward African Americans. In the present experiment, the weapons identification task was modified so that it was suitable for measuring conflict of being prejudiced toward Muslims. Method: The body posture of participants (sitting upright vs. supine), the face prime (White vs. Muslim), and the target (tool vs. gun) were manipulated. Participants’ brain potentials were simultaneously measured throughout the experiment. The behavioural results revealed the response biases in both reaction time and error rate. Results: Faster reaction times occurred on correct gun trials preceded by the Muslim prime, while higher error rates occurred on tool trials preceded by the Muslim prime. The ERP results revealed that erroneous responses elicited larger negative deflections than correct responses, typical of the error-related negativity (ERN). Moreover, the ERN magnitude of White-Gun errors was smaller in the supine posture than in the sitting upright posture. Conclusion: This result suggests that participants had decreased conflict in the supine posture. However, the Muslim-Tool ERN, the neural detection of prejudiced errors, was not modulated by body posture. These results may indicate that salient conflict, such as the prejudiced errors, may not be modifiable by body posture. Implications for motivation, prejudice, and self-regulation were discussed. Keywords: Motivation, Body posture, Prejudice, error-related negativity (ERN), conflict monitoring Conference: ASP2017: 27th Annual Meeting for the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology, Parramatta, Australia, 29 Nov - 1 Dec, 2017. Presentation Type: Poster Presentation Topic: Abstract (Student Award) Citation: Sun EC and Harmon-Jones E (2019). The influence of body posture on social cognitive conflict: an event-related potential study. Conference Abstract: ASP2017: 27th Annual Meeting for the Australasian Society for Psychophysiology. doi: 10.3389/conf.fnhum.2017.224.00009 Copyright: The abstracts in this collection have not been subject to any Frontiers peer review or checks, and are not endorsed by Frontiers. They are made available through the Frontiers publishing platform as a service to conference organizers and presenters. The copyright in the individual abstracts is owned by the author of each abstract or his/her employer unless otherwise stated. Each abstract, as well as the collection of abstracts, are published under a Creative Commons CC-BY 4.0 (attribution) licence (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/) and may thus be reproduced, translated, adapted and be the subject of derivative works provided the authors and Frontiers are attributed. For Frontiers’ terms and conditions please see https://www.frontiersin.org/legal/terms-and-conditions. Received: 30 Oct 2017; Published Online: 25 Jan 2019. * Correspondence: Mr. Eric C Sun, University of New South Wales, School of Psychology, Kensington, Australia, hikaru924@gmail.com Login Required This action requires you to be registered with Frontiers and logged in. To register or login click here. Abstract Info Abstract The Authors in Frontiers Eric C Sun Eddie Harmon-Jones Google Eric C Sun Eddie Harmon-Jones Google Scholar Eric C Sun Eddie Harmon-Jones PubMed Eric C Sun Eddie Harmon-Jones Related Article in Frontiers Google Scholar PubMed Abstract Close Back to top Javascript is disabled. Please enable Javascript in your browser settings in order to see all the content on this page.