Implicit Reactions Research Articles

Medial anterior prefrontal cortex stimulation downregulates implicit reactions to threats and prevents the return of fear.

Downregulating emotional overreactions toward threats is fundamental for developing treatments for anxiety and post-traumatic disorders. The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is critical for top-down modulatory processes, and despite previous studies adopting repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS) over this region provided encouraging results in enhancing extinction, no studies have hitherto explored the effects of stimulating the medial anterior PFC (aPFC, encompassing the Brodmann area 10) on threat memory and generalization. Here we showed that rTMS over the aPFC applied before threat memory retrieval immediately decreases implicit reactions to learned and novel stimuli in humans. These effects enduringly persisted 1 week later in the absence of rTMS. No effects were detected on explicit recognition. Critically, rTMS over the aPFC resulted in a more pronounced reduction of defensive responses compared to rTMS targeting the dorsolateral PFC. These findings reveal a previously unexplored prefrontal region, the modulation of which can efficiently and durably inhibit implicit reactions to learned threats. This represents a significant advancement toward the long-term deactivation of exaggerated responses to threats.

In masks we trust: explicit and implicit reactions to masked faces vary by political orientation

Previous studies in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic indicated that wearing a medical-style mask affects whether a stranger’s face is judged as more trustworthy, socially desirable, or likely to be ill. However, given political controversies around mask use, these effects might vary by political orientation. In a pre-registered online experiment, we measured evaluations of trustworthiness, social desirability and perceived illness in masked and unmasked faces by 1241 British and US participants. We included questions on political orientation, along with the implicit online-VAAST approach/avoid task to test reaction times to masked/unmasked faces. There was a medium-sized effect of masks on trustworthiness and a significant interaction with political orientation, in that conservatives found masked faces less trustworthy than did liberals. Participants were quicker to approach masked than unmasked faces, but conservatives were relatively slower than liberals. The effects on trustworthiness suggest that differential moralization of novel social norms can affect how their adherents are evaluated in terms of their suitability for social interactions. Furthermore, the congruence between implicit and explicit methods implies that such differences can have deep-seated effects on reactions.

Racialized Disgust and the Depiction of Native Americans in the Ranown Cycle Westerns

This article explores mainstream audience reactions concerning race and how they intersect with late 1950s Westerns known as the Ranown cycle. Synthesizing ideas from critical philosophy of race, philosophy of film, cognitive film theory, and philosophy of emotion, I analyze how these films elicit racialized reactions of sociomoral disgust toward Native American characters. Because such responses are not ordinarily processed through higher-level forms of cognition, I argue that these embodied, affective, implicit reactions are key to understanding how films like those in the Ranown cycle convey feelings, perspectives, and ideas concerning race, with important implications for ideology as well as philosophizing about film.

Is mixed reality technology an effective tool for retail? A vividness and interaction perspective

There is increasing interest in studies analyzing the influence of technologies that integrate virtual and real-world components on consumer behavior. These technologies include augmented reality, virtual reality and mixed reality. Mixed reality is a user environment in which physical reality and digital content are combined in a way that enables interaction with and among real-world and virtual objects. In spite of previous works related with MR and retails spaces, little is known about how consumers respond to MR features and which elements of the MR-based experience, such as vividness and novelty, impact behavior. In this study, we have explored the relative advantage of mixed reality in retail shopping practices over a traditional-based purchase. Implicit reactions of shoppers when interacting with products with and without MR glasses were compared. The results reveal that participants wearing MR glasses exhibited different patterns of interaction (i.e., frequency and interaction with product duration) that differed from those indicated by participants who did not wear the MR technology. At the level of purchase decision, our results show that the use of MR smart glasses has an impact on decision times that relates to a utilitarian purchase type. Based on participants’ explicit answers to questionnaires, the reported findings further show that the perceived hedonic and utilitarian values of the purchase experience were higher when MR was used, which also affected future purchase intentions and perceived emotional state as reported by consumers’ experience and satisfaction in the context of retail.

Impact of textual warnings on emotional brain responses to ultra-processed food products.

Ultra-processed food products (UPF) have been associated with numerous non-communicable diseases. Despite this, the addictive nature of UPF, and the aggressive marketing strategies used to promote them, has created a strong emotional connection between UPF and consumers, and supports their increasing UPF global consumption. In view of the emotional link that consumers often have with UPF, modulating emotional reactions to UPF (by using strategies such as textual warnings) is important in changing consumers' behavior. Since emotions are better understood by assessing individuals' implicit reactions, we conducted an electroencephalographic study applying the event-related potential technique to investigate whether textual warnings were able to modulate the brain responses to UPF stimuli. Twenty-six participants (19 women) viewed pictures of UPF preceded by a warning sentence about the health risks of consuming UPF or a control sentence while the electroencephalogram was recorded. In addition, the participants rated the picture in respect of pleasantness, arousal, and intention to consume. As emotions are associated with motivational circuits in the brain, we focused on a well-known event-related potential brain marker of the motivational relevance associated with emotional stimuli, namely late positive potential (LPP). The late positive potential amplitude was larger for pictures depicting UPF under the warning condition compared to the control condition, a result that was accompanied by lower pleasantness ratings during the warning condition (compared to the control). Textual warnings about the negative health consequences of consuming UPF changed the emotional responses toward UPF, possibly increasing the motivation to avoid UPF. These results shed new light on the impact of textual warnings on UPF-evoked emotions.

Implicit and explicit workplace aggression: The moderating effect of perceived support

ABSTRACT The present study examined how restaurant employees’ perceptions of supervisory and organizational support moderate the influence of implicit aggression on the explicit behavioral outcomes of anger and aggression. The moderated process revealed that perceived supervisory support was critical in mitigating the adverse effect of implicit aggression on explicit anger reactions among restaurant workers. Among employees reporting low levels of PSS, the relationship between implicit aggression and explicit anger reactions at work was significant. Among employees reporting moderate to high levels of PSS, there was no association. Notably, the results also demonstrated that employees’ perceived organizational support did not interact with implicit aggression to influence explicit aggressive behaviors in the foodservice workplace. Thus, the findings of this study demonstrate the importance of perceptions of support from direct supervisors above and beyond that of the organization when attempting to mitigate explicit aggressive displays and anger in the workplace.

The Bilingual Native Speaker Competence: Evidence From Explicit and Implicit Language Knowledge Using Elicited Production, Sentence-Picture Matching, and Pupillometry.

The present pilot study investigated potential effects of early and late child bilingualism in highly proficient adult bilinguals. It has been shown that some early second language (eL2) speakers stagnate when it comes to complex linguistic phenomena and that they display subtle difficulties in adulthood. Therefore, we have chosen the complex structure of double object constructions. We investigate the long-term achievement in a combined-method approach using elicited production, explicit comprehension by sentence-picture matching and a measure of implicit linguistic knowledge, namely pupillometry. This eye tracking method is suitable for measuring implicit reactions of the pupils to unexpected or ungrammatical stimuli. For production, ditransitive structures were elicited by means of a game. For comprehension, a sentence-picture matching task was conducted. Two pictures were shown on a monitor that were equal with respect to the involved objects, but the thematic roles of direct and indirect objects were interchanged. Items were controlled for length, gender, animacy, semantic likelihood and word order. Reaction times and accuracy scores were analyzed. To this end, N = 18 bilingual adult speakers of German (+ another language, mean age: 26.5) with different ages of onset participated in this study and were compared to N = 26 monolingual German adult speakers (mean age 23.9). All participants had a proficiency of German above 89% correct in placement and cloze tests. Results show fully comparable productive and comprehensive competencies in monolinguals and bilinguals including the reaction times in the sentence-picture matching task and a word order effect on the reaction times in both groups. In the pupillometry task, we found monolinguals and bilinguals to be sensitive to differing conditions with respect to grammatical and ungrammatical utterances. However, we find between group differences in pupil dilations in that bilinguals react differently to strong grammatical violations than monolinguals. These results are discussed with respect to the term of native speaker competence and the variation within both groups.

Implicit and explicit aggression among restaurant employees: The moderating effect of perceived support

ABSTRACT The present study examined how restaurant employees’ perceptions of supervisory and organizational support moderate the influence of implicit aggression on the explicit behavioral outcomes of anger and aggression. The moderated process revealed that perceived supervisory support was critical in mitigating the adverse effect of implicit aggression on explicit anger reactions among restaurant workers. Among employees reporting low levels of PSS, the relationship between implicit aggression and explicit anger reactions at work was significant. Among employees reporting moderate to high levels of PSS, there was no association. Notably, the results also demonstrated that employees’ perceived organizational support did not interact with implicit aggression to influence explicit aggressive behaviors in the foodservice workplace. Thus, the findings of this study demonstrate the importance of perceptions of support from direct supervisors above and beyond that of the organization when attempting to mitigate explicit aggressive displays and anger in the workplace.

Food as an eye-catcher. An eye-tracking study on Children's attention to healthy and unhealthy food presentations as well as non-edible objects in audiovisual media.

BACKGROUNDFood presentations within media content are often made responsible for todays' obesity epidemic. This assessment is based on the assumption that food presentations create cue reactivity, which in turn affects the amount of food intake.OBJECTIVEThis study investigates children's implicit reactions (cue reactivity) toward healthy, unhealthy, and non‐ediblel objects.METHODSWe conducted an experimental eye‐tracking study comparing children's cue reactivity assessed with visual attention toward healthy and unhealthy food presentations, as well as non‐edible objects. We controlled for the role of children's hunger, body mass index (BMI), and age.RESULTSResults indicated no difference between healthy and unhealthy food presentations, yet food generally aroused more visual attention in children compared to non‐edible objects. Explicit memory for the embedded foods or objects was mediated through visual attention. However, unhealthy food presentations also directly affected children's explicit memory.CONCLUSIONSCompared to non‐edible objects, food presentations seem to be eye‐catchers that immediately grab children's attention and they are also able to maintain this attention. Yet, for unhealthy food presentations, memory seems to be less dependent on visual attention. That is, compared to healthy products or non‐edible objects, unhealthy food presentations do not require the same amount of visual attention in order to be remembered.

Implicit Reactions to Women in High Power Body Postures: Less Wonderful But Still Weaker

People rapidly form impressions of others based on their gender. Women tend to be liked more than men but men tend to be regarded as more powerful. However, a person’s nonverbal behavior has the potential to confirm or override these stereotypical impressions. Specifically, expansive, open body postures (e.g., based on widespread limbs) tend to convey high power compared to contracted, closed body positions. In three studies, we tested whether postural variations affected evaluations of men and women and impressions of their power. In Study 1, images of women elicited a more positive reactions than images of men in an affective misattribution procedure, but only when women enacted contracted body postures. In Studies 2 and 3, participants were slower to classify images of expansive postures as high power when enacted by women and slower to classify contracted postures as low power when enacted by men, but rated men and women similarly in explicit power-related judgments. Expansive body postures thus appeared to eliminate the usual positive reaction to women relative to men, but women still did not implicitly convey power to the same degree as men. Gender did not interfere with explicit, more controlled judgments of power. Together these studies demonstrate that gender implicitly interferes with perceptions of a person’s power, even in the presence of potentially individuating body postures.

An Eye for an Eye? Third Parties' Silence Reactions to Peer Abusive Supervision: The Mediating Role of Workplace Anxiety, and the Moderating Role of Core Self-Evaluation.

Currently, a few scholars have studied the spillover effects of abusive supervision from third parties’ perspective. However, these limited researches mainly focus on third parties’ explicit behavior response to peer abusive supervision, ignoring their implicit reactions (e.g., silence) and the emotional mechanism among it. To fill the above gaps, drawing on affective events theory, we construct a theoretical model that explains the relationship among peer abusive supervision, third parties’ workplace anxiety, third parties’ silence, and third parties’ core self-evaluation. Multi-wave data from 283 front-line employees (57% male and 43% female; 57.2% are 30 years old and below, 31.1% are 31–40 years old and 11.7% are over 40 years old), who come from eight real estate and insurance companies in China, were used to support our framework. In particular, our empirical results indicated that peer abusive supervision was positively related to third parties’ silence, among which workplace anxiety played a partial mediating role. In addition, third parties’ core self-evaluation moderated the relationship between peer abusive supervision and silence, meanwhile, the mediating role of workplace anxiety. Specifically, the effect of peer abusive supervision on workplace anxiety, and the mediating effect of workplace anxiety, was weaker when the third parties’ core self-evaluation was higher rather than lower. The results contribute to both theory and practice.

Implicit and explicit systems differently predict possible dangers

One strategy to address new potential dangers is to generate defensive responses to stimuli that remind learned threats, a phenomenon called fear generalization. During a threatening experience, the brain encodes implicit and explicit memory traces. Nevertheless, there is a lack of studies comparing implicit and explicit response patterns to novel stimuli. Here, by adopting a discriminative threat conditioning paradigm and a two-alternative forced-choice recognition task, we found that the implicit reactions were selectively elicited by the learned threat and not by a novel similar but perceptually discriminable stimulus. Conversely, subjects explicitly misidentified the same novel stimulus as the learned threat. This generalization response was not due to stress-related interference with learning, but related to the embedded threatening value. Therefore, we suggest a dissociation between implicit and explicit threat recognition profiles and propose that the generalization of explicit responses stems from a flexible cognitive mechanism dedicated to the prediction of danger.

An Investigation of Civilian Implicit Attitudes Toward Police Officers

This research investigated civilian implicit attitudes toward police. Previous research has solely used explicit measures (or examined police officers’ implicit reactions to civilians). Two studies assessed the implicit activation of safety and fear when participants were primed with police using a Word Fragment Completion Task (e.g., Johnson and Lord 2010). In a college sample, police primes led to increased safety and decreased fear construct activation, whereas in an online sample, both safety and fear became more accessible. Overall, results indicated that a wide range of individual differences in implicit attitudes toward police exist, that implicit reactions to police officers might be distinct from explicit global evaluations, and that, despite the existence of negative police-civilian interactions, the appearance of police officers might still tend to activate safety-related thoughts. The findings prompt the need to further assess the underlying cognitive components of civilian attitudes toward police officers.

A systematic approach for the thermodynamic modelling of CO2-amine absorption process using molecular-based models

The development of new amine systems for CO2 capture is a topic of high interest because of the limitations current aqueous amine systems have for capturing CO2 at large scale. Having a robust and systematic approach for describing the absorption of CO2 would help accelerating the discovery of high performance amine solvents. In this contribution, a molecular-based equation of state is applied to describe the absorption of CO2 in aqueous solutions of single and blended amines at conditions of relevance for post-combustion CO2 capture. A scheme of implicit reactions is used to describe the formation of carbamate and/or bicarbonate products resulting from the chemical reactions between CO2 and five amines of practical industrial interest. This procedure eliminates the need to specify the detailed equilibrium reactions and significantly reduces the number of parameters required to represent the absorption process. A maximum of two adjustable model parameters (one of which with a linear temperature dependence), optimised for a fixed amine concentration, suffices to represent the absorption of CO2 in aqueous solutions of single amines over a broad range of temperatures (298–413 K) and partial pressures of CO2 (0.1–1000 kPa). The extrapolation capabilities of the model are tested by predicting the absorption of CO2 in aqueous solutions of single amines for different amines concentrations (∼8.5–35 wt%), with modelling results showing good quantitative agreement with solubility, speciation and enthalpy of absorption data available in literature. Furthermore, without introducing any new model parameter, the absorption of CO2 in various amine blends is satisfactorily predicted by considering competing interactions for the reactive sites in the model of CO2. The developed models are then used to assess the CO2 capture performance of selected amine systems in terms of two key process parameters: solvent cyclic capacity and regeneration energy. Results for systems with the same total amine mass concentration show that the highest molar cyclic capacities are obtained for 30 wt% piperazine (0.45 molCO2.molAmine-1), whereas the greatest energy savings for solvent regeneration are estimated for 30 wt% methyldiethanolamine (2.3 GJ.tCO2-1). Moreover, two piperazine–promoted blends showed the potential for reducing up to ∼26% the energy consumption for solvent regeneration and separating up to ∼41% more CO2 in a molar basis when compared to the benchmark 30 wt% monoethanolamine. Altogether, these results demonstrate the feasibility of the developed approach as a reliable platform for the screening of amine solvents as function of key process parameters, and as a valuable tool for process modelling.

Affective Responses to Gay Men Using Facial Electromyography: Is There a Psychophysiological “Look” of Anti-Gay Bias

ABSTRACTDespite a wealth of attitudinal studies that elucidate the psychological correlates of anti-gay bias, studies that provide evidence of the physiological correlates of anti-gay bias remain relatively scarce. The present study addresses the under-representation of physiological research in the area of homonegativity by examining psychophysiological markers, namely the affective manifestations of anti-gay prejudice, and their correspondence with anti-gay behavior. Facial electromyography (EMG) was the technique used to acquire the psychophysiological markers via recordings from two facial muscle sites. Whether heterosexual men’s implicit affective reactions to gay male couples best predicted their overt and covert discriminatory behavior toward a presumed gay male confederate was determined. The strength of the implicit affective reactions to predict anti-gay discrimination was then tested against the strength of participants’ implicit cognitive reactions acquired via the Implicit Association Test (IAT). Results indicated that the affective reactions recorded via facial EMG emerged as the strongest predictor of discrimination toward gay men compared to the cognitive reactions recorded using the IAT. Findings support the contention that emotional reactions to gay men using implicit techniques such as facial EMG are potentially valuable pathways toward understanding the nature and sequelae of anti-gay behavior.

Adults' implicit associations to infant positive and negative acoustic cues: Moderation by empathy and gender.

In this study a novel auditory version of the Single Category Implicit Association Test (SC-IAT-A) was developed to investigate (a) the valence of adults' associations to infant cries and laughs, (b) moderation of implicit associations by gender and empathy, and (c) the robustness of implicit associations controlling for auditory sensitivity. Eighty adults (50% females) were administered two SC-IAT-As, the Empathy Quotient, and the Weinstein Noise Sensitivity Scale. Adults showed positive implicit associations to infant laugh and negative ones to infant cry; only the implicit associations with the infant laugh were negatively related to empathy scores, and no gender differences were observed. Finally, implicit associations to infant cry were affected by noise sensitivity. The SC-IAT-A is useful to evaluate the valence of implicit reactions to infant auditory cues and could provide fresh insights into understanding processes that regulate the quality of adult-infant relationships.

Public Interest Analysis Based on Implicit Feedback of IPTV Users

Modern information systems make it increasingly easy to gain more insight into the public interest, which is becoming more and more important in diverse public and corporate activities and processes. The disadvantage of existing research that focuses on mining the information from social networks and online communities is that it does not uniformly represent all population groups and that the content can be subjected to self-censoring or curation. In this paper, we propose and describe a framework and a method for estimating public interest from the implicit negative feedback collected from the Internet protocol television (IPTV) audience. Our research focuses primarily on the channel change events and their match with the content information obtained from closed captions. The presented framework is based on concept modeling, viewership profiling, and combines the implicit viewer reactions (channel changes) into an interest score. The proposed framework addresses both above-mentioned disadvantages or concerns. It is able to cover a much broader population, and it can detect even minor variations in user behavior. We demonstrate our approach on a large pseudonymized real-world IPTV dataset provided by an ISP, and show how the results correlate with different trending topics and with parallel classical long-term population surveys.

Targeting implicit approach reactions to snack food in children: Effects on intake.

Implicit approach reactions to energy-dense snack food can facilitate unhealthy eating in children. Therefore, an experiment was conducted to test whether modifying implicit reactions to snack food by means of a go/no-go task can reduce consumption of this food. The effectiveness of this intervention on actual snack intake after exposure to a food or a control advertisement was tested. Children (133; age range = 7-10 years) played an advergame promoting either energy-dense food or nonfood products. Subsequently, children conducted either a go/no-go food task in which the advertised food was consistently associated with no-go cues, or a go/no-go control task in which colored circles were consistently associated with no-go cues. Afterward, they could eat the advertised food and a new food. Candy intake was weighed and caloric intake was determined. Results show that children who performed the go/no-go food task consumed significantly and considerably fewer calories (34%) than the children who carried out the control task. No main effect of type of advertisement was found. Furthermore, the effect of the go/no-go food task was similar after each type of advertisement, similar for advertised and new foods, and was significant for both girls and boys. Targeting implicit reactions to high-energy snacks proved effective in decreasing intake of snacks in children. Furthermore, the previously reported stimulating effect of food promoting advergames on intake may disappear when a short cognitive task is presented directly after the game. Future work should evaluate the clinical implications of these findings. (PsycINFO Database Record

Facial Masculinity and Beardedness Determine Men’s Explicit, but Not Their Implicit, Responses to Male Dominance

Sexual dimorphism in facial shape and beardedness are salient human secondary sexual traits that enhance perceptions of men’s social dominance. The majority of this evidence, however, comes from studies measuring explicit ratings. To our knowledge, few studies have tested whether facial masculinity and beardedness are implicitly associated with dominance. In the current study, we use a within-subjects design to test whether facial masculinity and beardedness drive implicit reactions and overt ratings of male dominance. Participants viewed stimuli depicting the same men when clean-shaven, with heavy stubble, and fully bearded that were morphed to be either more masculine or less masculine using computer graphic software. Participants completed an affective priming word categorisation task as well as explicit ratings of social dominance. No facilitation effects were observed for masculinised or bearded faces on implicit judgements relating to dominance. In contrast, results revealed that masculinized versions of clean-shaven, stubbled and fully bearded faces received higher explicit dominance ratings than feminized versions. However, the effects of facial masculinity were largest within clean-shaven stimuli and decreased as faces became more hirsute, suggesting that facial masculinity had diminishing returns on dominance ratings. Our results support a role for masculine facial shape and beardedness in explicit, but not implicit, judgments of dominance among men.

Seeing the Unseen: Evidence for Indirect Recognition of Brief, Concealed Emotion

The study examined explicit recognition vs. implicit reactions to spontaneous, brief expressions of emotion. Explicit recognition, where participants indicated which emotion they thought the stimulus individual was feeling, was compared to implicit reaction, based on a) electrodermal response (skin conductance response amplitude) to the stimulus video, and b) affiliative attitude towards the sender. Participants were exposed to a stimulus set of 20 spontaneously produced emotion expressions less than 500ms in duration and that represented one of five universal emotions (anger, fear, sadness, disgust and happiness), or a neutral comparison. In Experiment 1, individuals did not explicitly recognize emotion associated with the expressions, but had a higher electrodermal response, specifically for expressions of anger and sadness. Experiment 2 (n = 80) replicated the electrodermal findings of Experiment 1 and also showed that indirect recognition effects can be seen in social behavior, with expressions of distress (fear and sadness) resulting in greater affiliative attitudes towards the sender than expressions of threat (anger and disgust).