Motor resonance (MR) involves the activation of matching motor representations while observing others' actions. Recent research has shown that such a phenomenon is likely to be influenced by higher order variables such as social factors (e.g., ethnic group membership). The present study investigates whether and how the perception of a social threat elicited by an outgroup member and by contextu...

In order to investigate the behavioral role of pontine gigantocellular field (FTG) units, we have operantly reinforced discharge in these cells in unrestrained cats using lateral hypothalamic stimulation as the reinforcing stimulus. Cats readily learned to increase discharge rate in reinforced FTG cells relative to simultaneously recorded, non-reinforced control cells. Increased FTG discharge w...

Stereotypic movements are ubiquitous, occur in a variety of forms, and exist in different populations, ranging from individuals with autism to typically developing children. Although such movements are required to be restricted, repetitive, and purposeless, their definition and included activities remain broad and imprecise. Movements are typically classified into 2 groups, primary (physiologic...

OBJECTIVE To review the mounting evidence implicating early hippocampal dysfunction in the pathogenesis and the pathophysiology of schizophrenia. An account is made of recent neurodevelopmental hypotheses indicating how an early dysfunction of the hippocampal region disrupts maturational events in brain systems connected to that structure, thus inducing dysfunctional connectional development. F...

The durations and trajectories of our saccadic eye movements are remarkably stereotyped. We have no voluntary control over these properties but they are determined by the movement amplitude and, to a smaller extent, also by the movement direction and initial eye orientation. Here we show that the stereotyped durations and trajectories are optimal for minimizing the variability in saccade endpoi...

People show biases or distortions in their geographical judgments, such as mistakenly judging Rome to be south of Chicago (the Chicago-Rome illusion). These errors may derive from either perceptual heuristics or categorical organization. However, previous work on geographic knowledge has generally examined people's judgments of real-world locations for which learning history is unknown. This ar...

Abstrad—Recent studies have documented that performance in u domnifi is hindered when individuals feel that a sociocultiiral group to which they belong is negatively stereotyped in that domain. We report that implicit activation of a social identity can facilitate cis well as impede performance on a quantitative task. When a particular social identity was made salient ai an implicit level, perf...

The stereotype content model (SCM) posits that social structure predicts specific cultural stereotypes and associated emotional prejudices. No prior evidence at a societal level has manipulated both structural predictors and measured both stereotypes and prejudices. In the present study, participants (n = 120) responded to an immigration scenario depicting a high- or low-status group, competiti...

We investigated the role that linguistic abstraction may play in people's perceptions of gender in spoken language. In the first experiment, participants told stories about their best friend and romantic partner. Variations in linguistic abstraction and gender-linked adjectives for describing their close others were examined. Participants used significantly more abstract language to describe me...

We investigated the effect of incidentally presented constructs that imply self-control on activated stereotypes associated with immigrants. To activate immigrant stereotypes, participants responded to a scale that measures people's prejudice toward immigrants. They were then primed, using scrambled sentences, with words that were related to self-control (e.g., control, restrain, self-regulate)...