Neural predictors of evaluative attitudes towards celebrities
Neural predictors of evaluative attitudes towards celebrities
Our attitudes towards others influence a wide range of everyday behaviors, and have been the most extensively studied concept in the history of social psychology. Yet they remain difficult to measure reliably and objectively, since both explicit and implicit measures are typically confounded by other psychological processes. We here address the feasibility of decoding incidental attitudes based on brain activations. Participants were presented with pictures of members of a Japanese idol group inside an fMRI scanner while performing an unrelated detection task, and subsequently (outside the scanner) performed an incentive-compatible choice task that revealed their attitude toward each celebrity. We used a real-world election scheme that exists for this idol group, which confirmed both strongly negative and strongly positive attitudes towards specific individuals. Whole-brain multivariate analyses (searchlight-based support vector regression) showed that activation patterns in the anterior striatum predicted each participant’s revealed attitudes (choice behavior) using leave-one-out (as well as 4-fold) cross-validation across participants. By contrast, attitude extremity (unsigned magnitude) could be decoded from a distinct region in the posterior striatum. The findings demonstrate dissociable striatal representations of valenced attitude and attitude extremity, and constitute a first step toward an objective and process-pure neural measure of attitudes.
attitude, attitude extremity, preference, fMRI, MVPA, striatum
382-390
Izuma, Keise
67894464-b2eb-4834-9727-c2a870587e5a
Shibata, Kazuhisa
6d722f2f-5880-4174-9e28-c3213a599975
Matsumoto, Kenji
df068ed2-7c79-4c79-9e8d-ac73bfcfbeeb
Adolphs, Ralph
95a28d79-bdf7-42d6-b18a-503e85afa601
2017
Izuma, Keise
67894464-b2eb-4834-9727-c2a870587e5a
Shibata, Kazuhisa
6d722f2f-5880-4174-9e28-c3213a599975
Matsumoto, Kenji
df068ed2-7c79-4c79-9e8d-ac73bfcfbeeb
Adolphs, Ralph
95a28d79-bdf7-42d6-b18a-503e85afa601
Izuma, Keise, Shibata, Kazuhisa, Matsumoto, Kenji and Adolphs, Ralph
(2017)
Neural predictors of evaluative attitudes towards celebrities.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 12, .
(doi:10.1093/scan/nsw135).
Abstract
Our attitudes towards others influence a wide range of everyday behaviors, and have been the most extensively studied concept in the history of social psychology. Yet they remain difficult to measure reliably and objectively, since both explicit and implicit measures are typically confounded by other psychological processes. We here address the feasibility of decoding incidental attitudes based on brain activations. Participants were presented with pictures of members of a Japanese idol group inside an fMRI scanner while performing an unrelated detection task, and subsequently (outside the scanner) performed an incentive-compatible choice task that revealed their attitude toward each celebrity. We used a real-world election scheme that exists for this idol group, which confirmed both strongly negative and strongly positive attitudes towards specific individuals. Whole-brain multivariate analyses (searchlight-based support vector regression) showed that activation patterns in the anterior striatum predicted each participant’s revealed attitudes (choice behavior) using leave-one-out (as well as 4-fold) cross-validation across participants. By contrast, attitude extremity (unsigned magnitude) could be decoded from a distinct region in the posterior striatum. The findings demonstrate dissociable striatal representations of valenced attitude and attitude extremity, and constitute a first step toward an objective and process-pure neural measure of attitudes.
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Accepted/In Press date: 9 September 2016
e-pub ahead of print date: 20 September 2016
Published date: 2017
Additional Information:
This is an author-produced version of the published paper. Uploaded in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. Further copying may not be permitted; contact the publisher for details. Embargo period : 12 months
Keywords:
attitude, attitude extremity, preference, fMRI, MVPA, striatum
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Local EPrints ID: 425195
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/425195
ISSN: 1749-5016
PURE UUID: 072eef66-1ce3-4e3b-82b8-c07c72e9cf2b
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Date deposited: 11 Oct 2018 16:30
Last modified: 15 Mar 2024 22:04
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Contributors
Author:
Keise Izuma
Author:
Kazuhisa Shibata
Author:
Kenji Matsumoto
Author:
Ralph Adolphs
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