Body posture and gender impact neural processing of power-related words

ABSTRACT

Judging others’ power facilitates successful social interaction. Both gender and body posture have been shown to influence judgments of another’s power. However, little is known about how these two cues interact when they conflict or how they influence early processing. The present study investigated this question during very early processing of power-related words using event-related potentials (ERPs). Participants viewed images of women and men in dominant and submissive postures that were quickly followed by dominant or submissive words. Gender and posture both modulated neural responses in the N2 latency range to dominant words, but for submissive words they had little impact. Thus, in the context of dual-processing theories of person perception, information extracted from both behavior (i.e., posture) and from category membership (i.e., gender) are recruited side-by-side to impact word processing.

KEYWORDS:

• ERP
• gender
• language
• N2
• power
• social perception

Notes

1. This sample size represents common practices in ERP research (e.g., Luck, 2014; White et al., 2009) and research with repeated measures designs (e.g., Greenwald, 1976; Van den Stock, Righart, & de Gelder, 2007).

2. Promax rotated PCA (Dien, 2012) identified three factors, all with eigenvalues greater than one, explaining 92.14% of the variance for dominant words and 92.16% of the variance for submissive words. Time points from 172 to 252 ms for dominant words and from 156 ms to 192 ms for submissive words loaded onto the third factor with maximal loadings (greater than 0.60).

3. Specifically, there is a significant interaction between word type and posture, F(1,21) = 5.45, p = .030, η_p²= 0.21, and among word type, gender, and hemisphere, F(1,21) = 5.08, p = .035, η_p² = 0.20.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

April H. Bailey

April H. Bailey received her BA from Colgate University in 2014 and is now a graduate student in social psychology at Yale University with Dr. Marianne LaFrance and Dr. John Dovidio. Spencer D. Kelly is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Colgate University and the Co-Director for the Center of Language and Brain.

Spencer D. Kelly

April H. Bailey received her BA from Colgate University in 2014 and is now a graduate student in social psychology at Yale University with Dr. Marianne LaFrance and Dr. John Dovidio. Spencer D. Kelly is a Professor of Psychology and Neuroscience at Colgate University and the Co-Director for the Center of Language and Brain.