Social groups are organized along dominance hierarchies, which determine how we respond to threats posed by dominant and subordinate others. The persuasive impact of these dominance threats on mental and physical well-being has been well described but it is unknown how dominance rank of others bias our experience and learning in the first place. We introduce a model of conditioned social domina...

Behavioral inhibition (BI) is a temperament characterized in young children by a heightened sensitivity to novelty, social withdrawal, and anxious behaviors. For many children, these social difficulties dissipate over time. For others, patterns of social withdrawal continue into adolescence. Over time, attention biases to threat may influence the stability of BI and its association with social ...

Security training has been shown to be an important factor that impacts employees’ intentions to comply with organization’s security policies. In this study, we define and then study the impact of two sub-constructs of security training, threat appraisal and policy awareness, on intentions to comply with organizational security policies. Injunctive and descriptive norms, which are standards of ...

The delay discounting paradigm was used to examine its utility in understanding motivational factors among socially anxious individuals. Participants (n=88) who reported high and low levels of social anxiety were randomly assigned to either a social threat or non-threat condition and their subsequent rates of discounting were examined. A significant difference in rates of discounting was found ...

BACKGROUND Previous research has documented effects of ambiguous outcome social situations on individual differences in cardiovascular reactivity in laboratory contexts. PURPOSE This study tested whether interpretations of ambiguous social situations are associated with daily life cardiovascular responses using ambulatory approaches. METHODS There were 206 high school adolescents assessed o...

Oxytocin reduces amygdala responses to threatening social stimuli in males and has been suggested to facilitate approach-related processing by either decreasing anxiety or intensifying salience. The current administration study tested whether oxytocin either reduces or enhances amygdala responses during threat approach in a placebo-controlled randomized, double-blind, between-subjects design wi...

This study investigates the post-performance effects of stereotype threat. Undergraduate students (N = 130) classified as either stronglyor weaklyidentified with academics were told a diagnostic anagram task either typically shows poorer performance for their gender (stereotype threat) or no gender differences (no stereotype threat), and received arbitrary positive or negative feedback on an in...

The stress hormone cortisol is important for the regulation of social motivational processes. High cortisol levels have been associated with social fear and avoidance, which play an important role in social anxiety disorder (SAD), as does hypervigilant processing of social threat. However, causal effects of cortisol on threat processing in SAD remain unclear. In an event-related potential (ERP)...