Citation

Krendl AC, Zucker HR, Kensinger EA. Soc. Neurosci. 2016; 12(3): 349-360.

Affiliation

Department of Psychology , Boston College.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2016, Informa - Taylor and Francis Group)

DOI

10.1080/17470919.2016.1166155

PMID

26982459

Abstract

In order to determine if highly negative stigma is a more salient cue than other negative emotional, non-stigmatized cues, participants underwent EEG while passively viewing or actively regulating their emotional response to images of highly negative stigmatized (e.g., homeless individuals, substance abusers), or highly negative non-stigmatized (e.g., a man holding a gun, an injured person) individuals. ERP analyses focused on the N2 (associated with detecting novelty), the early positive potential (associated with processing emotion), and a sustained late positive potential (associated with modulating regulatory goals). A salience effect for highly negative stigma was revealed in the early positive potential, with higher magnitude ERP responses to images of highly negative stigmatized as compared to highly negative non-stigmatized individuals 355 ms post-stimulus onset. Moreover, the amplitude of this effect was predicted by individual differences in implicit bias. Our results also demonstrated that the late positivity response was not modulated by regulatory goals (passively view versus to reappraise) for images of highly negative stigmatized individuals, but was for images of highly negative, non-stigmatized individuals (replicating previous findings). Our findings suggest that the neural response to highly negative stigma is salient and rigid.

Language: en