Social power and frontal alpha asymmetry

ABSTRACT

Recent studies have shown that the states of high and low social power (the ability to control or influence another’s thoughts, feelings, or behaviours) are related to left and right frontal hemisphere activity, respectively, suggesting a connection with two neurobiological motivational systems—the Behavioural Activation and Inhibition Systems. However, an important and outstanding question is which state of social power is associated with differences in hemispheric activity. In the current study, we addressed this outstanding issue by examining differences in frontal alpha asymmetry while participants engaged in an established episodic recall task, priming states of high, low, or neutral social power. Our results showed that it was the low social power state that was associated with hemispheric differences; that is, the low social power state was associated with significantly less left-frontal cortical activity relative to both the high and neutral social power states, while the latter two states did not differ. We discuss our results considering previous work on social power and the notion that different social power states are associated with different cognitive and behavioural tendencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Social power
• frontal alpha asymmetry
• behavioural activation system
• behavioural inhibition system
• approach-inhibition theory of power

Acknowledgments

This work was supported by an Ontario Graduate Fellowship awarded to CMG, a SSHRC Insight grant and infrastructure funding from the Canada Foundation for Innovation, held by SSO. We thank Dr. Ciro Civile, along with two anonymous reviewers, for valuable comments and discussion.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

¹ A post-hoc sensitivity analysis using G*Power 3.1 (Faul, Erdfelder, Buchner, & Lang, 2009; Faul, Erdfelder, Lang, & Buchner, 2007) suggests that the smallest effect size that can be found with 80% power with the current design is Cohen’s F = 0.44. This suggests that our study is underpowered for finding medium and small effects.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Canada Foundation for Innovation; Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada;Ontario Graduate Fellowship; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.