Motivation Modulates Brain Networks in Response to Faces Varying in Race and Status: A Multivariate Approach

Abstract

Previous behavioral and neuroimaging work indicates that individuals who are externally motivated to respond without racial prejudice tend not to spontaneously regulate their prejudice and prefer to focus on nonracial attributes when evaluating others. This fMRI multivariate analysis used partial least squares analysis to examine the distributed neural processing of race and a relevant but ostensibly nonracial attribute (i.e., socioeconomic status) as a function of the perceiver’s external motivation. Sixty-one white male participants (Homo sapiens) privately formed impressions of black and white male faces ascribed with high or low status. Across all conditions, greater external motivation was associated with reduced coactivation of brain regions believed to support emotion regulation (rostral anterior cingulate cortex), introspection (middle cingulate), and social cognition (temporal pole, medial prefrontal cortex). The reduced involvement of this network irrespective of target race and status suggests that external motivation is related to the participant’s overall approach to impression formation in an interracial context. The findings highlight the importance of examining network coactivation in understanding the role of external motivation in impression formation, among other interracial social processes.

Punishing the privileged: Selfish offers from high-status allocators elicit greater punishment from third-party arbitrators

“…Moreover, perceptual antecedents of status such as clothing are demonstrably confounded with important social dimensions like competence [76,77], making it difficult to reliably isolate effects of status. To avoid these potential pitfalls in our initial exploration of how status shapes justice decision making, we therefore used our existing procedure for ascribing status levels through learned color-coded background cues [78][79][80][81][82].…”

Regional and network neural activity reflect men’s preference for greater socioeconomic status during impression formation

“…We chose an unconstrained impression formation task because it allows participants to form their impressions anonymously based on all available information, thereby minimizing pressures to conform to any perceived expectations from the experimenter or society more generally 22 . Although this approach may minimize socially desirable responding, it also limits the experimenter’s ability to verify that participants are indeed forming impressions.…”

“…Fortunately, a body of work using similar impression formation tasks has repeatedly found them to elicit activity in brain regions supporting social cognition (e.g., MPFC) when contrasted with non-social tasks 44 , 45 . More recent work using this impression formation task to focus specifically on status-based evaluative responses has consistently identified preferential VMPFC responses to high (vs. low) status along several social dimensions including moral status 23 , 24 and SES 22 . These responses are consistent with other neuroimaging work focusing on status-based evaluations, which generally elicit greater VMPFC responses when participants evaluate high-status (vs. low-status) individuals in an array of paradigms beyond impression formation 6 .…”

“…In recent years, neuroimaging studies have increasingly adopted a network-based approach for characterizing the neural mechanisms underlying numerous cognitive phenomena 37 , including the domain of person perception 22 , 38 . This approach is important because distributed patterns of neural activity may not only account for more variance, but they may also better predict real-world outcomes 39 .…”

“…This approach is important because distributed patterns of neural activity may not only account for more variance, but they may also better predict real-world outcomes 39 . At present, there are few studies that explore how networks of brain regions support status-based impression formation 22 . However, such approaches can be useful as a complement to focused ROI analyses, providing further insight into differences within and between participant groups.…”