CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 224Social and Intergroup PsychologyPsychology of Moral and Emotional JudgmentFace Recognition and Perception

Social groups that elicit disgust are differentially processed in mPFC

Open access
Harris, Lasana T., Fiske, Susan T.·2007·Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
DOI 10.1093/scan/nsl037PMC PMC2555430
Open this paper in CoChat — free accountOpen PDF

Abstract

Social neuroscience suggests medial pre-frontal cortex (mPFC) as necessary for social cognition. However, the mPFC activates less to members of extreme outgroups that elicit disgust, an emotion directed toward both people and objects. This study aimed to counteract that effect. Participants made either superficial categorical age estimations or individuating food-preference judgments about people, while fMRI recorded neural activity. Besides replicating the reduced mPFC activity to extreme outgroups that elicit disgust, this study demonstrates that the same type of judgment for these individuals is processed in a region anatomically distinct from social groups that elicit exclusively social emotions (pity, envy, pride). Finally, inferring individuating information (food preferences) increases mPFC activation above superficial categorical judgments. This evidence fits differentiated mPFC processing of extreme outgroups, which activate mPFC less than other groups, but suggests that individuation increases activation.

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.1093/scan/nsl037

Cites

7 of 7 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Claims the paper makes

The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.

Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.

A few free checks a day · papers already verified open instantly · results are public

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

  • Manipulations of social goals validate the prediction: inferring preference significantly increases MPFC and STS activity to otherwise dehumanized targets.

    “Besides manipulations of target persons, manipulations of social goals validate this prediction: Inferring preference, a mental-state inference, significantly increases MPFC and STS activity to these otherwise dehumanized targets (Harris & Fiske, 2007).”

    From Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide? (2011) · cites this paper as Harris & Fiske, 2007

    The Task main effect and Discussion report significantly greater mPFC activity during vegetable-preference inference than during age judgments, including for the disgust-eliciting targets. They do not report a corresponding STS increase from preference inference: the STS finding is a separate comparison in which activity was greater for other social-group members than for the disgust-eliciting targets, collapsed across tasks. (LLM, conf=0.89)

    Experimental — accuracy not yet measured

  • One indication of dehumanized perception may be reduced activation in the social-cognition neural network, including medial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal sulcus.

    “One indication of dehumanized perception may be reduced activation in the social-cognition neural network (see Amodio & Frith, 2006; Overwalle, 2009, for reviews), including medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC; Harris & Fiske, 2006) and superior temporal sulcus (STS; Harris & Fiske, 2007).”

    From Dehumanized Perception: A Psychological Means to Facilitate Atrocities, Torture, and Genocide? (2011) · cites this paper as Harris & Fiske, 2007

  • Two main factors define social relationships: power and affiliation.

    “Theories in social psychology and experimental evidence across species identify two main factors that define social relationships: power (competence, dominance, hierarchy, etc.) and affiliation (warmth, intimacy, trustworthiness, love, etc.).”

    From A map for social navigation in the human brain (2015) · cites this paper as Harris and Fiske, 2007

Self-check

Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.

The self-check needs the paper’s full text.

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Research works printed but not linked: 26

  1. Allport, G.W. (1954). The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison- Wesley.
  2. Amodio, D.M., Harmon-Jones, E., Devine, P.G. (2003). Individual differences in the activation and control of affective race bias as assessed by the startle eyeblink response and self-report. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 738-53.
  3. Barrett, L.F. (2006). Solving the emotion paradox: categorization and the experience of emotion. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10, 20-46.
  4. Cuddy, A.J.C., Fiske, S.T., Glick, P. (in press). The BIAS map: behaviors from intergroup affect and stereotypes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.
  5. Fiske, S.T. (1998). Stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination. In: Gilbert, D.T., Fiske, S.T., Lindzey, G., editors. Handbook of Social Psychology, Vol. 2, 4th edn. New York: McGraw-Hill, pp. 357-411.
  6. Fiske, S.T. (2004). Social Beings: A Core Motives Approach to Social Psychology. New York: Wiley.
  7. Fiske, S.T., Pavelchak, M.A. (1986). Category-based versus piecemeal- based affective responses: developments in schema-triggered affect. In: Sorrentino, R.M., Higgins, E.T., editors. Handbook of Motivation and Cognition: Foundations of Social Behavior. NY: Guilford Press, pp. 167-203.
  8. Fiske, S.T., Neuberg, S. (1990). A continuum of impression formation, from category-based to individuating processes: influences of information and motivation on attention and interpretation. In: Zanna, M.P. editor. Advances in Experimental Psychology, Vol. 23. New York: Academic Press, pp. 1-74.
  9. Fiske, S.T., Lin, M., Neuberg, S. (1999). The continuum model: Ten years later. In: Trope, Y., Chaiken, S., editors. Dual-process Theories in Social Psychology. New York, NY: Guilford Press, pp. 231-54.
  10. Fiske, S.T., Cuddy, A.J.C., Glick, P. (in press). Universal dimensions of social perception: warmth, then competence. Trends in Cognitive Science.
  11. Fiske, S.T., Cuddy, A.J.C., Glick, P., Xu, J. (2002). A model of (often mixed) stereotype content: competence and warmth respectively follow from perceived status and competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 878-902.
  12. Haslam, N., Bain, P., Douge, L., Lee, M., Bastian, B. (2005). More human than you: attributing humanness to self and others. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 89, 937-50.
  13. Heal, J. (1996). Simulation, theory, and content. In: Carruthers, P., Smith, P., editors. Theories of Theories of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 75-89.
  14. Heider, F. (1958). The Psychology of Interpersonal Relations. New York: Wiley.
  15. Kelley, H.H. (1972). Attribution in social interaction. In: Jones, E.E., Kanouse, D.E., Kelley, H.H., Nisbett, R. E., Valins, S., Weiner, B., editors. Attribution: Perceiving the Cause of Behavior. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Elbaum & Associates, pp. 1-26.
  16. Leyens, J.P., Rodriguez-Perez, A., Rodriguez-Torres, R., et al. (2001). Psychological essentialism and the differential attribution of uniquely human emotions to ingroups and outgroups. European Journal of Social Psychology, 31, 395-411.
  17. Leyens, J.Ph., Cortes, B.P., Demoulin, S., et al. (2003). Emotional prejudice, essentialism, and nationalism. European Journal of Social Psychology, 33, 703-18.
  18. McArthur, L.A. (1972). The how and what of why: some determinants and consequences of causal attribution. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 171-93.
  19. Mitchell, J.P., Banaji, M.R., Macrae, C.N. (2005). The link between social cognition and self-referential thought in the medial prefrontal cortex. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 17, 1306-15.
  20. Niedenthal, P., Krauth-Gruber, S., Ric, F. (2006). Psychology of Emotion: Interpersonal, Experiential and Cognitive Approaches. NY: Psychological Press.
  21. Opotow, S. (1990). Moral exclusion and injustice: an introduction. Journal of Social Issues, 46, 1-20.
  22. Phelps, E.A., O'Connor, K.J., Cunningham, W.A., et al. (2000). Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12, 729-38.
  23. Rozin, P., Fallon, A.E. (1987). A perspective on disgust. Psychological Review, 94, 23-41.
  24. Staub, E. (1989). The Roots of Evil: The Origins of Genocide and Other Group Violence. NY: Cambridge University Press.
  25. Struch, N., Schwartz, S.H. (1989). Intergroup aggression: its predictors and distinctness from in-group bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 364-73.
  26. Talairach, J., Tournoux, P. (1988). Co-planar Stereotaxic Atlas of the Human Brain. New York: Thieme.

Cited by

Sorted by citations

Authors
Harris, L. T., & Fiske, S. T.
Affiliations
Princeton University (US)
ORCID
Venue
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience
Publisher
Oxford University Press (OUP)
Published
2007-03-01
Volume
2
Issue
1
Pages
45-51
ISSN
  • 1749-5016 (ISSN-L)
  • 1749-5024
DOI
10.1093/scan/nsl037
PMC
PMC2555430
OpenAlex
W2121385238
Cited by
224
References
7
Citations by year
2026: 3 · 2025: 9 · 2024: 6 · 2023: 8 · 2022: 14 · 2021: 18 · 2020: 22 · 2019: 21 · 2018: 6 · 2017: 12 · 2016: 11 · 2015: 15 · 2014: 22 · 2013: 13 · 2012: 13
FWCI
12.78
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Licence
Locations
  • Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • UCL Discovery (University College London) (submittedVersion)
Funders
Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (R24HD047879)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Sociology and Political Science › Social and Intergroup Psychology
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment
  • Life Sciences › Neuroscience › Cognitive Neuroscience › Face Recognition and Perception
Keywords
disgust, medial prefrontal cortex, social cognition, individuation, age estimation, social emotions, pity, envy, pride, social categorization
MeSH terms
Affect, Female, Group Processes, Humans, Magnetic Resonance Imaging, Male, Social Perception, Stereotyping, Prefrontal Cortex, Expressed Emotion, Young Adult

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review