Introduction

In the current chapter, I aimed to provide novel evidence that the loss of status in the domains of prestige and respect selectively activates accessibility of social threat.

To this end, I pitted social threat against non-social threat information in Study 1; and social threat against general negative valence in Study 2. I also aimed to show that this heightened accessibility of social threat extends to face processing, such that targets associated with social threat are better encoded and subsequently better remembered by low-status individuals. Finally, I expected that these effects would not be present in high-status individuals.

There is abundant evidence that social information receives preferential processing. First, it has been shown that social relations are automatically extracted from the social stream. For instance, people are often spontaneously categorised based on their relationships (e.g., family, married couple, friends). Following that initial categorisation, information about those individuals is subsequently stored within their relationships (Sedikedes, Olsen, & Reiss, 1993). Furthermore, in the domain of attribution formation, the causal effect of interpersonal demands has been shown to be the strongest dimension in attributional processing (Anderson, 1991). This work highlights how social information processing may be influenced by top-down factors such as motivation and prior expectations.

For the remainder of this section, I will first give a broad overview on how

of prior expectation in biasing social perception. Finally, in justifying the rationale underlying the current hypotheses that low social-status leads to enhanced accessibility and processing of social threat, I will draw supporting evidence from the relevant literature of social identity threat, self-esteem and rejection sensitivity.

2.1.1 The role of motivation

It is generally agreed that motivation influences information processing.

Theories on the relationship between motivation, deprivation, and goal attainment states that when an individual fails to achieve satisfaction from an important goal, they would seek alternative means of satisfying that thwarted need (Maner, DeWall, Baumeister, & Schaller, 2007). For example, Brewer and Pickett (1999) showed that heightening the need for assimilation and belonging led to increased self-stereotyping.

It has been argued that low-status individuals tend to search more exhaustively for information about others in the environment to compensate for a lack of certainty over their life outcomes (Pittman & Pittman, 1980). Importantly, these findings also suggest that motivation can influence the intervening cognitive processes.

The subjective perception of being in a low-status position may signal that one’s need for control and security is thwarted. That is, being in a vulnerable position threatens the social self, low-status individuals may feel a strong desire to restore their subjective sense of value by being aware of possible threats around them. Despite the common assumption of “automatic” biases toward threat (e.g., Carlson & Reinke, 2008; Dolan & Vuilleumier, 2003), recent evidence has suggested that not all threat processing fulfils the criteria for automaticity (Schneider & Shiffrin, 1977) in terms of the involuntary and capacity-free nature of automatic processing. Instead, processing of threat is strategically subjected to top-down goals, which influences processing of

threat at an attentional level. The current study proposes that the loss of status in the domains of social prestige and respect may trigger heightened sensitivity or accessibility to social threat-related concepts. In the next subsection, I will discuss the role of prior expectations. Specifically, I will elaborate on how prior expectations can exert top-down influences on motivation and subsequent basic cognitive processes in social information processing and face perception.

2.1.2 The role of prior expectations

Human survival relies heavily on the ability to anticipate and prepare for possible future events before actually experiencing them (Bar, 2007; Holland, 1900).

This ability is based largely on the ability to bring to the fore mental representations of prior experiences (Bar, 2007, 2009; Friston, 2005). However, if our subjective experiences are shaped by expectations set by prior mental representations and actual sensory input (Petrovic et al., 2005), then there is the inherent risk that these mental representations may bias sensory input. For example, evidence from brain imaging studies have found that false expectations can skew perceptual judgement, affective responses and neutral processing in various stimulus modalities including olfaction (e.g., De Araujo, Rolls, Velazco, Margot, & Cayeux, 2005), pain (e.g., Wager et al., 2004) and vision (e.g., Petrovic et al., 2005). The general finding from these studies is that preconceptions based on past experiences may provide misleading information that could modulate perceptual experience by enhancing prefrontal top-down influences on category-specific sensory brain activation (Diekhof et al., 2011).

Being constantly reminded of negative stereotypes about one’s in-group could trigger universal expectations of prejudice. That is, one might develop a script for intergroup rejection, in which one worries about being socially devalued and becomes

vigilant for cues communicating this rejection. Recent research supports this notion such that individual differences in prejudice expectations, such as stigma consciousness or rejection sensitivity can activate a biologically based defensive motivation system that orients individuals towards negative stimuli in order to react appropriately (Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 1990).

In line with that, Kaiser et al., (2006) found evidence suggesting that women who were high in stigma consciousness paid more attention to subliminally presented social-identity threatening cues. Furthermore, Downey and colleagues (2004) found that individuals who were high in personal sensitivity reacted to rejection-relevant cues with an augmented startle eye-blink response, which is a marker of the activation of the defensive motivation system. This suggests that they were especially sensitive to rejection cues and readily perceives rejection in other people’s behaviour.

Being in a low-status position is socially threatening as it exposes an individual to various social challenges which may be difficult to overcome given the limited disposable social resources low-status individuals have. Thus, it is possible that accessibility of social-threat related concepts may be influenced by the prior experiences of being in a socially threatening position coupled with the awareness of their unfavourable comparison compared to high-status individuals.

In conclusion, deriving from the rationale outlined in the Chapter 1, relative to others, low-status individuals are more often victims from being targets of direct and indirect forms of hostility, including social discrimination and unprovoked aggression (e.g., Bradley & Corwyn, 2002; Crocker et al., 1998; Sapolsky, 2004; Sidanius, Levin, Federico, & Prato, 2001). I proposed for the first time that low-status individuals would be motivated to detect and engage with social threat cues. An enhanced accessibility and processing of social threat could help low-status individuals navigate a more

challenging social world as this awareness would enable them to protect themselves against potential sources of further hostility. Specifically, I hypothesised that loss of status in the domains of prestige and respect increases accessibility for social threat that also extends to face memory. Two studies addressed these hypotheses, Study 1 used a lexical decision task as a measure of accessibility, and Study 2 used a face recognition task as a measure of motivated processing of relevant targets.