Participants played a videogame in which they were required to make speeded shoot/don't-shoot decisions in response to armed and unarmed targets, half of whom were Black, half of whom were White. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), recorded during the game, assessed attentional processes related to target race and object type. Early ERP components (i.e., the P200 and N200) differentiated between Black and White targets, as well as between armed and unarmed targets. Explicitly measured cultural stereotypes predicted both this racial ERP differentiation and racial bias in the game. Most importantly, the degree of racial differentiation in the early ERP components predicted behavioral bias in the videogame and mediated the relationship between cultural stereotypes and bias.

The extent to which foods differ in their likelihood of eliciting ambivalent attitudes and the effect of dietary restraint on these attitudes was investigated. Positive and negative attitudes toward 5 categories of food were collected from 82 female undergraduates. Two measures of restrained eating, the Restraint Scale and the Drive for Thinness subscale of the EDI-2, were also collected. Ambivalence scores computed from the separate positive and negative evaluations were higher on average for desserts and candies, high-sugar foods, and high-carbohydrate foods than for fruits and vegetables and meats. In addition, food attitudes were more ambivalent on average for restrained eaters, with ambivalence increasing as a function of restraint for high-fat and high-carbohydrate foods in particular. By contrast, dietary restraint was associated with less ambivalence toward fruits and vegetables. Restrained eating also seemed to affect the negative attitude component more than the positive component. These latter effects suggest the importance of attitudes toward food in understanding restrained eating and its effect on behavior.

The positivity offset refers to a tendency for the positive motivational system to respond more than the negative motivation system at low levels of evaluative input. The negativity bias refers to a tendency for the negative motivational system to respond more intensely than the positive motivational system when evaluative input increases. While there is evidence that these represent general aspects of evaluative responding, individuals also vary in their level of positivity offset and negativity bias. In two studies, we explore individual differences in these features of evaluative responding to determine if they are stable across time, internally consistent, only modestly related to self-report measures of affect, and have predictive validity. We found that individuals with stronger positivity offsets formed more positive impressions of targets described by only neutral information and individuals with stronger negativity biases formed even more negative impressions of targets described by negative information.

Event-related potentials were used to track social Perception Processes associated with viewing faces of racial in group and outgroup members. Activity associated with three distinct processes was detected. First, peaking at approximately 170 ms, faces were distinguished from nonface stimuli. Second, peaking at approximately 250 ms, ingroup members were differentiated from outgroup members, with a larger component suggesting greater attention to ingroup members. This effect may reflect the spontaneous application of a deeper level of processing to ingroup members. Third, peaking at approximately 520 ms, evaluative differentiation of ingroup and outgroup members occurred, with greater ingroup bias displayed by those with higher levels of prejudice on an explicit measure. Together, the results demonstrate the promise of using neural processes to track the presence, timing, and degree of activation of components relevant to social perception, prejudice, and stereotyping.

The degree to which perceivers automatically attend to and encode social category information was investigated. Event-related brain potentials were used to assess attentional and working-memory processes on-line as participants were presented with pictures of Black and White males and females. The authors found that attention was preferentially directed to Black targets very early in processing (by about 100 ms after stimulus onset) in both experiments. Attention to gender also emerged early but occurred about 50 ms later than attention to race. Later working-memory processes were sensitive to more complex relations between the group memberships of a target individual and the surrounding social context. These working-memory processes were sensitive to both the explicit categorization task participants were performing as well as more implicit, task-irrelevant categorization dimensions. Results are consistent with models suggesting that information about certain category dimensions is encoded relatively automatically.

This paper provides an overview of recent research on alcohol and aggression. We examine major experimental laboratory paradigms used in research on the social factors and psychological processes that elicit aggression among healthy persons under conditions of acute alcohol intoxication and sobriety. Issues concerning the validity of such experimental research in relation to violence in everyday life are discussed along with empirical evidence that attests to the importance of experimentation for an understanding of alcohol-induced violence. The theoretical roles of provocation and frustration as cues that elicit alcohol-induced aggression are also considered. We conclude with a presentation of a newly developed experimental laboratory procedure that can reliably produce disjunctively escalated aggressive responding — the triggered displaced aggression paradigm (TDAP) — and discuss its potential for revealing more about the mechanisms involved in alcohol-induced aggression.

Event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which provide on-line measures of categorization processes, were used to assess the implicit and explicit categorization of stimuli along evaluative (positive and negative) and nonevaluative (people and no-people) dimensions. Participants were exposed to stimuli that simultaneously varied along both dimensions, but were explicitly instructed to categorize along only one of them. Consistent with prior research, the late positive potential (LPP) of the ERP was sensitive to participants' explicit categorization task. However, the LPP also revealed implicit categorization along the non-task-relevant dimension. Additionally, there was evidence of an implicit negativity bias in which negative stimuli spontaneously received greater processing than positive stimuli and a people/no-people analog in which stimuli containing people received greater processing than stimuli without people. Results suggest the operation of adaptively beneficial implicit categorization processes, triggered by significant proximal stimuli, serving broad, cross-situational goals.

The primary objectives of this article are (a) to put forth an explicit operational formulation of positive human health that goes beyond prevailing "absence of illness" criteria; (b) to clarify that positive human health does not derive from extant medical considerations, which are not about wellness, but necessarily require a base in philosophical accounts of the "goods" in life; (c) to provoke a change of emphasis from strong tendencies to construe human health as exclusively about the mind or the body toward an integrated and positive spiral of mind-body influences; (d) to delineate possible physiological substrates of human flourishing and offer future directions for understanding the biology of positive health; and (e) to discuss implications of positive health for diverse scientific agendas (e.g., stress, class and health, work and family life) and for practice in health fields (e.g., training, health examinations, psychotherapy, and wellness intervention programs).

Negative information tends to influence evaluations more strongly than comparably extreme positive information. To test whether this negativity bias operates at the evaluative categorization stage, the authors recorded event-related brain potentials (ERPs), which are more sensitive to the evaluative categorization than the response output stage, as participants viewed positive, negative, and neutral pictures. Results revealed larger amplitude late positive brain potentials during the evaluative categorization of (a) positive and negative stimuli as compared with neutral stimuli and (b) negative as compared with positive stimuli, even though both were equally probable, evaluatively extreme, and arousing. These results provide support for the hypothesis that the negativity bias in affective processing occurs as early as the initial categorization into valence classes.

Facial muscle activity and self-reports were examined for racial bias in 3 studies. In the first 2 experiments, While participants imagined cooperating with a Black or White partner. Experiment 1 manipulated reward structure in the context of cooperating with a deficient partner. Experiment 2 manipulated partner deficiency and willingness to expend compensatory effort. On both facial EMG and self-report measures, joint rewards produced more negative affect than independent rewards. However, all partners were liked more when they were willing to try to compensate for their deficits. In addition, more liking was reported for Black partners, but EMG activity indicated bias against Blacks. Experiment 3 investigated individual differences in prejudice. Again, a greater preference for Blacks than Whites occurred on self-report measures, but in their facial muscle activity, high-prejudiced participants exhibited bias against Blacks.

The authors conducted a meta-analysis of 49 studies to investigate 2 explanations of how alcohol increases aggression by decreasing sensitivity to cues that inhibit it. Both the level of anxiety and inhibition conflict moderated the difference between the aggressive behavior of sober and intoxicated participants, but neither level adequately accounted for variation in effect sizes. Additional analyses of 3 social psychological moderating variables-provocation, frustration, and self-focused attention-showed that the aggressiveness of intoxicated participants relative to sober ones increased as a function of frustration but decreased as a function of provocation and self-focused attention. The authors also examined the moderating effects of dose.