It takes a matter of mere milliseconds after meeting someone for the first time for a person’s brain to determine whether or not that person is likable, according to new research led by University of Freiburg psychologist and neuroscientist Dr. Bastian Schiller.
Dr. Schiller, along with colleagues from the University of Basel and the University of Bern in Switzerland, identified for the first time the subconscious process we use to process social data such as likability or antipathy, and the order in which it does so.
As they explained in the latest edition of the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, they used the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a psychological exam which measures the strength of a person’s automatic association between concepts and attributes in memory to gague reactions to ideas, phrases, or cultural trappings.
For example, they administered the IAT to a group of soccer fans, measuring their brain waves using an electroencephalogram as they responded to concepts like “love” or “death” in relation to both the names of the players on their favorite sports teams and those on the opposing squad.
Study of ‘microstates’ could lead to new treatments for social, mental disorders
The goal of the experiment was to study the individual steps used to process information and the duration it took to make subconscious social assessments. They accomplished this by analyzing a series of short phases or “microstates,” during which a neuronal network in the brain is activated to carry out a specific processing step.
Previous research had already determined that reaction times in the IAT were longer when men and women associate foreign groups with positive characteristics. The new study takes things a step further by revealing that the increased reaction time is not the result of additional processing steps. Rather, it is the result of some of the individual steps taking longer to complete.
“This study demonstrates the potential of modern electrical neuroimaging in helping to better understand the origin and time course of socially relevant processes in the human brain,” Schiller explained in a statement. He and his colleagues are currently evaluating the degree to which this discovery could be used to diagnose and treat social deficiencies or other mental issues.
“Superior to other approaches, the microstate approach allowed us to identify and time the entire chain of mental processes as they unfolded during the IAT,” the authors wrote in their new PNAS paper, adding that the findings indicate that “reaction time differences are due to quantitative and not qualitative differences in the underlying mental processes.”
—–
Image credit: Thinkstock
Comments