tanding how social information influences behavior is highlighted by recent, high profile shootings in which unarmed Black men were killed by police (e.g., Amadou Diallo, Timothy Thomas, Anthony Dwain Lee). Was race irrelevant to the police officers' decisions, or did personal and/or cultural stereotypes about Blacks contribute to the outcome? To examine this, investigators recorded electrical brain waves as participants completed a police training video game. Participants viewed pictures of Black and White men holding either guns or innocuous objects like cell phones and wallets and made quick decisions to 'shoot' armed individuals and 'not shoot' unarmed ones. Behaviorally, participants were faster and more accurate to 'shoot' armed Blacks than armed Whites. By contrast, they were faster to 'not shoot' unarmed Whites. When participants made incorrect shooting decisions, brain wave activity indicative of conflict detection was larger when the target was White than Black. The results show how racial stereotypes influence behavior, and how brain wave responses to behavioral errors can reflect stereotypes.
EXPRESSIVE WRITING AND THE REGULATION OF EMOTION OVER TIME
James W. Pennebaker, University of Texas, Austin
Emotion regulation research typically focuses on emotional responses that last seconds or minutes. Many emotional events, however, linger for much longer. Linguistic analyses of emotional upheavals such as 9/11 find that naturally-occurring emotional responses can last for weeks or even months. What, if any, emotion regulation strategies can work for extended periods of time? A series of studies will be presented that suggest that expressive writing can affect people's long-term emotional state. Expressive writing encourages people to write about traumatic experiences for 3-5 days for 15-30 minutes per day. Compared to writing about superficial topics, expressive writing has been found to reduce autonomic and enhance selected im
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Contact: Susan Rees
spr@reesgroupinc.com
608-831-0274
Society for Psychophysiological Research
7-Oct-2004
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