My research focuses on the physiological and motivational processes that are associated with, and influence, cognitive processes and judgments. My students and I examine electrical brain activity when people make like-dislike judgments (attitudes) or activate memories about categories of people (stereotypes). Attitudes are evaluative (like-dislike) judgments that help guide behavior – we use our attitudes to decide with whom we associate, what foods to eat, what TV shows to watch, et cetera. Stereotypes are memory structures that we use to help us understand and prepare for social interactions (especially with people we do not know well). We can measure brain activity that occurs when people see another person (or food, object, etc.) to examine issues such as: how quickly do we activate attitudes, how automatic are stereotypes, and how are attitudes influenced by emotions, moods and motivation states (e.g., how do food attitudes change when people are hungry). An objective of this research is to understand how the brain makes judgments and how it adjusts these judgments based on other relevant information when needed. Some of our research also explores whether brain activity can be used to assess a person’s attitude even if they lie about it.
Affect
The structure of affect (with Ulrich Schimmack), The handbook of attitudes (2005)
We reviewed the literature on affect, with a special emphasis on affective experience. We proposed...
Attitudes
Understanding Knowledge Effects on Attitude-Behavior Consistency : The Role of Relevance, Complexity, and Amount of Knowledge (with Leandre R. Fabrigar, Richard E. Petty, and Steven M. Smith), Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2006)
The role of properties of attitude-relevant knowledge in attitude-behavior consistency was explored in 3 experiments....
Attitudes to the right: Evaluative processing is associated with lateralized late positive event-related brain potentials (with John T. Cacioppo and Wendy L. Gardner), Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin (1996)
The authors recently developed a paradigm to investigate the evaluative categorization stage of attitudes using...
Electrocortical Differentiation of Evaluative and Nonevaluative Categorizations (with John T. Cacioppo), Psychological Science (1996)
The evaluative categorizations that underlie affective and attitudinal judgments have often been equated with nonevaluative...
Food Attitudes
Structure of Food Attitudes: Replication of Aikman, Crites, & Fabrigar (2006) (with Shelley N. Aikman), Appetite (2007)
Recent research by Aikman, Crites, and Fabrigar [(2006). Beyond affect and cognition: Identification of the...
Beyond affect and cognition: Identification of the informational bases of food attitudes (with Shelley N. Aikman and Leandre R. Fabrigar), Journal of Applied Social Psychology (2006)
Two studies were conducted to identify the informational bases of food attitudes. Study I was...
Hash browns for breakfast, baked potatoes for dinner: Changes in food attitudes as a function of motivation and context (with Shelley N. Aikman), European Journal of Social Psychology (2005)
Two studies investigated whether participants' motivational state and the context in which attitude reports are...
Impact of nutrition knowledge on food evaluations (with Shelley N. Aikman), European Journal of Clinical Nutrition (2005)
Objective: This study explored whether nutrition knowledge interacted with evaluations of a food’s healthiness to...
Memory
Immediate and delayed stimulus repetitions evoke different ERPs in a serial-probe recognition task. (with Pedro Delgado, James V. Devine, and Dora I. I. Lozano), Psychophysiology (2000)
Examined whether event-related potentials (ERPs) associated with stimulus repetition and recognition in a serial-probe recognition...
Event-related potentials and serial position effects in a visual probe recognition task (with James V. Devine, Dora I. Lozano, and Selene Moreno), Psychophysiology (1998)
In two experiments, we explored the utility of using event-related brain potentials (ERPs) evoked during...
Stereotypes
Assessing stereotype incongruities using the N400 ERP component (with Katherine R. White, Jennifer H. Taylor, and Guadalupe Corral), Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2009)
Numerous discoveries regarding stereotypes have been uncovered by utilizing techniques and methods developed by cognitive...
No subject area
Making inferences concerning physiological responses: A reply to Rossiter, Silberstein, Harris, & Nield (with Shelley N. Aikman), Journal of Advertising Research (2001)
Comments on the J. R. Rossiter et al (see record 2001-01255-001) study of brain electrical...