Gender & Outgroup Fear 1 Running Head: GENDER AND OUTGROUP FEAR

Prepared Learning and the Gendered Nature of Outgroup Fear C. David Navarrete Department of Psychology Michigan State University Andreas Olsson Department of Psychology Columbia University Arnold K. Ho, Wendy Berry Mendes, Lotte Thomsen, James Sidanius Department of Psychology Harvard University

Gender & Outgroup Fear 2

ABSTRACT Fear conditioning studies show that humans and other primates associate negative outcomes more readily with danger-relevant stimuli such as snakes, than with non danger-relevant stimuli such as birds. Such biases may extend to human groups as recent research demonstrates that a conditioned fear response to faces of persons of a social outgroup resists extinction whereas fear towards a social ingroup is more readily extinguished. Here we provide two key qualifications to previous work by demonstrating that (a) the fear extinction bias between ingroup and outgroup faces occurs solely when the exemplars are male, not female, and (b) the extinction bias is moderated by gender differences in fear, aggression, and social dominance. These results underscore the importance of considering gender differences in how fear and aggression are utilized as functional responses to group threats.

KEYWORDS: Evolutionary Psychology, Prejudice, Fear, Sex Differences, Racial and Ethnic Attitudes, Intergroup Bias

Gender & Outgroup Fear 3 Prepared Learning and the Gendered Nature of Outgroup Fear Research in prepared learning demonstrates that fear responses conditioned to dangerrelevant stimuli such as spiders and snakes resist extinction whereas responses towards dangerirrelevant stimuli such as birds or butterflies are more readily extinguished (Ohman & Mineka, 2001). Such biases in fear conditioning are said to be “prepared” in domains towards which a species has had sufficient exposure over time for natural selection to affect the neural circuitry underlying associative learning mechanisms. These mechanisms can then give rise to functional behavioral changes that emerge over the lifetime of the individual such as maintaining fear towards dangerous stimuli to which one has had a negative experience, thereby avoiding future harm (Seligman, 1971). There is evidence that the fear learning system in humans is sensitive to the degree of potential danger perceived to be present in the fear stimulus. For example, angry male faces paired with an aversive outcome produce a fear response greater than that found for neutral or happy male faces or angry female faces paired with an equally aversive outcome (Dimberg & Ohman, 1996). Such effects are likely due to the inferences humans make about the intentions of angry versus non angry persons, as well as perceptions of the potential for men to inflict greater harm (Ackerman et al. 2007). Likewise, there is evidence that infants evince a gender bias in stranger anxiety towards unfamiliar men (Freedman, 1961), suggesting that even in the early months of human development, the psychological system for prepared fear learning may be sensitive to sex differentiated patterns of aggression. Though the fear system underling prepared learning may be useful under some circumstances, prepared learning may be at the root of some persistent social problems affecting modern societies—including xenophobia. Previous studies have observed that race bias and fear

Gender & Outgroup Fear 4 learning rely on overlapping neural systems (e.g. Phelps et al., 2000), suggesting a shared mechanistic link between the two, and thus the potential to use a fear conditioning paradigm to investigate prepared fear learning in an intergroup context. Recently, Olsson et al., (2005) reported that conditioned fear towards facial displays of male individuals belonging to a racial group other than one’s own resists extinction, whereas fear towards faces of one’s own racial group does not. Their results held for both white and black American research participants towards white and black outgroup targets and was unrelated to participants’ measured level of negative bias against the racial outgroup. The sole behavioral variable found to be associated with a reduction in prepared fear was participants’ history of intimate interracial contact. Such findings suggest that though the mechanisms underlying prepared learning of outgroup fear may be due both to evolved social categorization mechanisms and life history experiences, the psychological system dedicated to fear learning of outgroups may operate orthogonally to those processing areas that manage socially transmitted stereotypes and attitudes. The Present Study Given the knowledge that (a) males have historically been the primary agents of intergroup aggression in humans (Daly & Wilson, 1988; Keeley, 1996; Kelly, 2005; Wrangham & Peterson, 1996), and (b) the potential for harm present in the stimulus prepares the fear system for functionally specialized behavioral outcomes (Seligman, 1971; Ohman & Mineka, 2001), we had several expectations about the outcome of a fear conditioning experiment using male and female ingroup and outgroup targets. We expected that a facial image of a male rather than female outgroup individual should more strongly activate the fear system that leads to the persistence of conditioned fear to a face. Therefore, we tested the prediction that the conditioned fear to a face of a male outgroup target would resist extinction, but that conditioned fear towards

Gender & Outgroup Fear 5 the face of a female outgroup target, or towards ingroup males and females, would be readily extinguished. Based on considerations of how the fear system is designed to produce functionally specialized outcomes, we also expected that the persistence of learned fear towards an outgroup male might be generated by separate motivational systems related to how men and women respond differentially to threats. Since women are often the targets but less commonly the agents of physical aggression (Campbell, 1993), we expected that for them, responses should be associated with vigilant behavior such as wariness around strangers, locking doors and avoiding nighttime walks. However, since men are often the targets and almost exclusively the agents of physical aggression—especially intergroup violence (Daly & Wilson, 1988)—we expected that their responses might be associated with traits related to aggression and dominance, such as a history of fighting, angry outbursts, and social dominance ideation—traits that might be expected to be of some utility in generating retaliatory responses to violent provocation in intergroup contexts. Here we describe a study that tested these hypotheses. In doing so, we also report analyses that explored the extent to which the persistence of conditioned fear to the face of an outgroup male is tied to socially transmitted stereotypes and attitudes, or to a history of close, intergroup contact. Method Participants Study participants were 165 white and 35 black U.S. citizens from the psychology study pools at Harvard University (N = 85) and Michigan State University (N = 115). Volunteers were composed of students, university staff, and community members who were paid $20 or given

Gender & Outgroup Fear 6 course credit to participate in “a study that explores the mind-body connection in response to social groups.” Following the widely accepted exclusionary criteria adopted by Olsson et al., (2005), data from 33 participants were excluded from the analysis because of technical problems (n = 5), for displaying no skin conductance response (n = 13), or for failure to acquire a, conditioned response to at least one of the two reinforced conditioned stimuli during acquisition (n = 11). In addition, after beginning the procedure, four participants elected to discontinue participation, leaving an analyzable sample consisting of 139 white and 28 black American participants (Age range: 18-61: M = 21.8, SD = 7.1). Stimuli and experimental protocol were identical across both samples. Pretest Procedure Upon arrival, participants completed pretest measures that included the measures listed below. Questionnaires used seven-point range response scales anchored at both poles (e.g. 1 = “Strongly Agree; 7 = “Strongly Disagree”) and implicit bias was measured via latency-response (i.e. Implicit Association Tests). Descriptive statistics are reported in Table 1. Explicit Race Attitudes. Explicit race bias was measured using Attitudes Towards Blacks scale (Brigham, 1993). Sample items: (a) “Generally, Blacks are not as smart as Whites.” (b) “It is likely that Blacks will bring violence to neighborhoods when they move in.” African American participants completed the measure with the word “Whites” substituting for “Blacks”. Social Dominance. Social dominance was measured using the Social Dominance Orientation scale (SDO; Pratto et al., 1994). Social dominance orientation is defined as one’s dispositional preference of group-based dominance hierarchies. Individuals high on social dominance orientation are competitive, prefer social hierarchy over equality, and endorse the belief that the groups to which they belong should dominate other groups. Sample items: (a) “In

Gender & Outgroup Fear 7 getting what your group wants, it is sometimes necessary to use force against other groups.” (b) “Superior groups should dominate inferior groups.” Fear. Items assaying history of fearful behavior were based on Senn and Dzinas’ (1996) Fear of Rape Scale. Sample items: (a) “Before I go to bed at night I double check to make sure the doors are securely locked.” (b) “I avoid going out alone at night.” Aggressive Behavior. Items assaying history of aggressive behavior came from the BussPerry Aggression Questionnaire (Buss & Perry, 1992). Sample items: (a) “I get into fights more than the average person.” (b) “I have threatened people I know.” (c) “If somebody hits me, I hit back.” Implicit Race Bias. Implicit bias was measured using the Implicit Association Test (IAT). The two IAT’s assessed implicit race bias on two independent constructs—stereotypic and evaluative race bias. The first measured the internalization of physical vs. mental concepts stereotypically applied to white and black Americans (e.g. math, brainy, athletic, strong) by measuring participants’ reaction times in associating Black and White targets, and physical- and mental-related words into stereotype-congruent word-pair categories (e.g., African American or physical) versus stereotype incongruent categories (e.g., European American or physical). The other measured the accessibility of evaluative concepts not typically associated with racial stereotypes (e.g. joy, love, agony, horrible) but with high affective valence nonetheless, also measured via time response lag on a computer (Amodio and Devine, 2006). Outgroup Contact. Intergroup contact measured the number of white and black friends, acquaintances, and romantic partners had by participants. Past interracial contact was coded such that greater values indicated more outgroup relative to ingroup contact. The relative contact

Gender & Outgroup Fear 8 measure was created by subtracting the number of ingroup versus outgroup contacts. (Olsson et al., 2005). Conditioning Procedure Following the pretest, participants underwent a delayed fear conditioning protocol, where a conditioned response was engendered to four categories of conditioned stimuli via electric shock and noise. Conditioned stimuli were composed of images of white and black American male and female faces that appeared on a computer screen. Before the procedure, skin conductance electrodes were attached to the second and fourth distal phalanges of the left hand, and shock electrodes were attached to the right wrist. Shock amplitude was then assessed by the participant as “uncomfortable, but not painful” by a work-up procedure. During fear conditioning, participants were presented with black and white facial images such that target’s racial group was experimentally manipulated within subjects. Half the participants were exposed to male faces only, and the other half were exposed solely to female faces such that the gender of the target exemplar was manipulated between subjects.1 Each stimulus was presented once per trial across three learning phases: habituation (3 trials), acquisition (5 trials) and extinction (6 trials). During fear acquisition, one image from each stimulus category (the reinforced conditioned stimulus, CS+) was paired with an aversive outcome (the unconditioned stimuli, UCS) whereas the other image (the unreinforced conditioned stimulus, CS-) was presented without the UCS. An electrical shock simultaneously paired with a short burst of white noise (90db) together constituted the UCS. Each conditioned stimulus was presented for 6 seconds and co-terminated with the UCS or not (CS+/-) followed by an interstimulus interval of 12-14 seconds. During the extinction phase that followed, stimuli

Gender & Outgroup Fear 9 were presented without the UCS. The conditioned response was assessed via skin conductance recorded during the presentation of each stimulus, and was operationalized as the mean differential conditioned response between the CS+ and the CS- from the same category, so as to minimize preexisting differences in the emotional salience of the stimuli as a potential confound. Results SCR Scoring Following Olsson et al., (2005), SCR was measured for each trial as the peak-to-peak amplitude difference in skin conductance to the largest response (in microsiemens, μS) that began in the 0.5 to 4.5 second window following stimulus onset. Responses were scored using Mindware EDA 2.5 with a minimal response criterion of 0.02 μS. Raw SCR’s were root squared to normalize the distribution. Conditioned responses (CRs) on all learning trials were defined as the differential SCR between the CS+ and CS-, where the mean conditioned response to the CSwas subtracted from the mean conditioned response for the CS+ of the same stimulus category. The acquisition means comprised differential SCRs to the five presentations following the first trial of the CS+ paired with a shock (i.e. presentations 5 through 9 of each CS). The extinction means were based on the SCRs to the last five presentations of each CS (i.e. presentations 10 through 14). Data were analyzed on participants whose acquisition mean was greater than zero to at least one of the two reinforced conditioned stimuli. Data Analyses Fear extinction towards each stimulus category was calculated for each subject as their mean conditioned response across extinction trials during the extinction phase (Table 2). Following Olsson et. al., (2005) a conditioned response that was statistically indistinguishable from zero during the final five extinction trials was interpreted as being readily extinguished,

Gender & Outgroup Fear 10 whereas one that was significantly greater than zero was interpreted as resistant to extinction. These contrasts were tested within a 2 x 2 mixed effects ANOVA, in which target gender was the between subject effect and target race was the within-subjects effect. Consistent with our expectations, the conditioned response towards a face of a female of either race, or a male of one’s own race was readily extinguished during the extinction phase, but the response towards a face of a male from the outgroup was resistant to extinction (Figure 1). The two-way interaction term was significant, F(1, 166) = 4.74, η2 = .47, p = .03, revealing that resistance to extinction between ingroup and outgroup targets was greater when the targets were male. Furthermore, there was no race bias in the extinction of learned fear when the targets consisted of images of females (Table 2). These results are consistent with the notion that male but not female individuals from a social outgroup serve as prepared stimuli in a fear-learning context.2 [Figure 1 about here] We then explored the extent to which individual differences in pre-existing behavioral and attitudinal variables assessed in a pretest might be related to a fear conditioning bias between ingroup and outgroup male targets. Because conditioned fear for both ingroup and outgroup male targets were correlated, following Olsson et al., (2005), we computed a measure of outgroup bias in conditioned fear by subtracting ingroup face conditioned responses from outgroup face responses, with higher values indicative of higher levels of outgroup bias in conditioned fear. However, since a key motivation was to search for predictors that attenuate or exacerbate the prepared learning effect particularly in the condition and phase for which it was found, we restricted our analyses to outgroup bias in conditioned fear solely across the extinction phase in the male target condition. We refer to this variable as biased extinction in our analyses described below.

Gender & Outgroup Fear 11 We first examined the bivariate correlations among conditioned fear and the following individual differences variables: explicit race bias, implicit race bias, fear, aggression, social dominance, and interracial contact. The correlation analysis revealed that the sole significant correlate of biased extinction was the variable measuring interracial contact, such that more contact led to less bias (Table 3). Of key importance to the interpretation of the results of the present investigation as well as the interpretation of the results reported by Olsson et al., (2005), we explored the possibility that the fear system underlying biased extinction may operate on different motivational systems between men and women. In doing so we conducted a multiple regression analysis where biased extinction was the dependent variable, while subject differences in gender, fearfulness, aggression, and social dominance were the independent predictors. Since the traits of aggression and social dominance are hypothesized to be characteristic of intergroup encounters primarily among men, these variables were entered into the model with interaction terms forming two-way interactions and a three-way interaction with participant gender. Since fearful behavior is hypothesized to be of greater utility among females in intergroup encounters, a two-way interaction term with gender was added. The results revealed a significant effect for fearfulness that was qualified by a significant two-way interaction with gender (Table 4), such that greater fearfulness was associated with greater extinction bias for female subjects only. A significant three-way interaction for subject gender, aggression and social dominance also emerged, revealing that, compared to female subjects, males high in social dominance orientation3 and aggression showed greater bias (Figure 2). The regression results indicate that though there was no significant difference between men

Gender & Outgroup Fear 12 and women in their levels of biased extinction, such bias is predicted by different traits between men and women. [Figure 2 about here] Discussion In a fear conditioning paradigm where a learned response was engendered toward male and female faces of white and black Americans, we found that (1) social outgroup targets serve as prepared stimuli solely when the exemplar is male, and (2) that the effect may be generated by separate motivational systems that reflect different behavioral responses to outgroup threats between men and women—namely, fear among women, and the fusion of aggression and social dominance among men. Consistent with the findings reported by Olsson et al., (2005), we found no evidence that the explicit endorsement or implicit internalization of racial stereotypes is related to race bias in conditioned fear, but that the bias is reduced among participants with close, interracial contact. This suggests that the prepared effect may be reduced life experiences or by unknown dispositional factors that facilitate both intergroup contact and biased fear extinction. These results underscore the importance of studying the psychology of intergroup bias as a gendered phenomenon—in terms of both the agents and targets. These results also highlight the need for further exploration of “approach” oriented responses to outgroup threat such as aggression and social dominance, not only “avoidant” responses. The latter suggests the potential for fresh look into the underlying mechanisms that generate xenophobia, and perhaps into the nature of prepared learning itself. Given that recent neurophysiological studies have implicated the amygdala in the expression of race bias (e.g. Phelps et al. 2000), our results raise the question as to whether prepared learning in an intergroup context engenders a response that can be described as fear or some other kind of agonistic emotional state associated with amygdala

Gender & Outgroup Fear 13 activation. For many individuals, an aversive encounter with a formidable exemplar of a prepared stimulus such as a large predator may lead to fear and avoidance. However, for those with a penchant for agonistic social encounters—primarily males with a particular style or role in dealing with threats to oneself and one’s group—such encounters may evoke the motivation to retaliate, aggress against, and eliminate the offending stimulus. This phenomenon has its analogues in many animal societies, where agonistic solutions to threats such as chasing away or dispatching strangers or predators are often the purview of the more formidable adult male members of the group (e.g. Rowell, 1972; van Shaik & Noordwijk, 1989). As such, the dispositional traits of fearfulness, aggression and social dominance measured in the present study may have their roots in phylogenetically ancient dispositions and agonistic states that affect the decision rules on which neural systems generate adaptive responses that fit the individual based on the potential for functional outcomes. Demonstrations of prepared learning are typically taken as evidence that natural selection has shaped certain neural systems dedicated to treating certain categories of stimuli as prepared to be associated with aversive outcomes—the utility of which enables the avoidance of certain dangerous stimuli that have been persistently associated with deleterious consequences over evolutionary time. These effects are not likely to be due solely to socially transmitted information reinforcing negative associations with the prepared stimuli since such effects do not extend to other culturally defined fear-relevant stimuli such as visual images of broken electrical outlets and firearms (e.g. Cook, Hodes, & Lang, 1986). Nevertheless, a conclusion that the fear learning system that produces the effect we describe is “cognitively impenetrable” or that it is impervious to individual development, socialization practices, or cultural influence is not at all warranted. Indeed the dispositional traits that influence contact, fear, aggression and social

Gender & Outgroup Fear 14 dominance that predict the effect in our analyses do vary considerably between individuals and are, in fact, sensitive to socialization, experience and cultural influence. We consider these results a starting point for more sophisticated studies that explore other individual difference variables that may affect prepared learning. Likewise, investigations using related neurophysiological measures of anxious arousal which examine the effects of conditioned fear on longitudinally assessed extinction trials (e.g. Milad & Quirk, 2002), will likely provide greater insight into the development of the human predisposition to learn and maintain intergroup fear and aggression. Far from claiming that racial enmity is somehow “hardwired” into our nervous system, we think that it is unlikely that humans have had sufficient exposure to outgroups defined by race to have evolved neural machinery that is dedicated to produce racist xenophobia (Kurzban et al. 2001). Rather, even if the decision rules that produce intergroup bias were innate, they are likely to be derived from neural circuitry designed to keep individuals safe from harm from dangerous agents such as poisonous animals or large predators. Given that the human lineage has long been characterized by intergroup conflict, the processes of biological and cultural evolutionary forces have produced human minds that reliably develop a predisposition to categorize unfamiliar males from a social outgroup automatically into the fear-relevant domain—perhaps even bypassing neural processing of the semantic knowledge of socially transmitted stereotypes. Such direct activation of the fear system may thereby produce a robust prepared learning effect typically found only for stimuli with persistent deleterious fitness consequences over deep evolutionary time.

Gender & Outgroup Fear 15

References Ackerman, J.M., Shapiro, J.R., Neuberg, S.L., Kenrick, D.T., Becker, D.V., Griskevicius, V., Maner, J.K., & Schaller, M. (2006). They all look the same to me (unless they’re angry): From out-group homogeneity to out-group heterogeneity. Psychological Science, 17 (10), 836-840. Amodio, D. M. & Devine, P. G. (2006). Stereotyping and evaluation in implicit race bias: Evidence for independent constructs and unique effects on behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 652-661. Brigham, J.C. (1993). "College Students' Racial Attitudes." Journal of Applied Social Psychology. 23:1933-67 Buss, A. H., & Perry, M. P. (1992). The aggression questionnaire. Journal of Personality and. Social Psychology, 63, 452-459. Campbell, A. (1993). Men, women and aggression. New York: Basic Books. Cook E.W. III, Hodes R.L. & Lang P.J. (1986) Preparedness and phobias: Effects of stimulus content on human visceral conditioning. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 95, 195-207. Daly, M., & Wilson, M. (1988). Homicide. Hawthorne, NY: Aldine. Dimberg, U. and Öhman, A. (1996). Behold the wrath: psychophysiological responses to facial stimuli, Motivation & Emotion. 20: 149–182. Freedman, D.G. (1961) The infant’s fear of strangers and the flight response. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry. 2 (4) , 242–248.

Gender & Outgroup Fear 16 Islam, M. & Hewstone, M. (1993). Dimensions of Contact as Predictors of Intergroup Anxiety, Perceived Outgroup Variability, and Outgroup Attitude: An Integrative Model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 64, 936-950. Keeley, L. H. (1996). War Before Civilization: The Myth of the Peaceful Savage. New York: Oxford University Press. Kelly, R. C. (2005). The evolution of lethal intergroup violence. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 102, 15294-15298. Kurzban, R., Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (2001). Can race be erased? Coalitional computation and social categorization. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 98(26), 15387-15392. Milad, M.R. & Quirk, G.J. (2002). Neurons in medial prefrontal cortex signal memory for fear extinction. Nature. 420(6911):70-4. Ohman, A., & Mineka, S. (2001). Fear, phobias and preparedness: Toward and evolved module of fear and fear learning. Psychological Review, 108, 483-522. Olsson, A., Ebert, J.P., Banaji, M.R., & Phelps, E.A. (2005). The Role of Social Groups in the Persistence of Learned Fear. Science, 309, 785-787. Phelps, E.A., O'Connor, K.J., Cunningham, W.A., Funayma, E.S., Gatenby, J.C., Gore, J.C., Banaji, M.R. (2000). Performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activity, Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 12: 1-10. Pratto, F., Sidanius, J., Stallworth, L.M. & Malle, B.F. (1994). Social dominance orientation: A personality variable predicting social and political attitudes. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 67, 741-763. Rowell, T. (1974). Contrasting adult male roles in different species of nonhuman primates.

Gender & Outgroup Fear 17 Archives of sexual behavior. 3(2): 143-149. Seligman, M. E. P. (1971). Phobias and preparedness. Behavior Therapy, 2, 307-321. Senn, C.Y. & Dzinas, K. (1997). Measuring fear of rape: A new scale. Canadian Journal of Behavioural Science, 28, 141-1 van Shaik, C.P. & Noordwijk, M.A. The special role of male Cebus monkeys in predation avoidance and its effect on group composition. Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology. 24(5): 254-255. Wrangham, R. W., & Peterson, D. (1996). Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co.

Gender & Outgroup Fear 18 Author Note Research was funded by the National Science Foundation (#SES-0409798). We thank Marilyn Brewer, Tony Greenwald, Dan Fessler, Diana Fleischman, Norb Kerr, Rob Kurzban, and Andreas Wilke and for their helpful comments on an earlier manuscript. Thanks to Alissa Cardone, Katie LaRoche, Katie Heikkenen, Ben Asher, Kierstin Lorence, Joe Sbar, Jnanna David and Nicole Boucher for lab assistance. Correspondence should be sent to C. David Navarrete, Department of Psychology, Michigan State University, East Lansing, MI 48824, USA. Email: [email protected]

Gender & Outgroup Fear 19 Figure Captions Figure 1. Fear extinction by target gender and target group. Higher values denote greater resistance to extinction of learned fear measured as the differential SCR between CS+ vs. CSfrom each category. Zero values denote complete extinction, and error bars indicate standard errors. Figure 2. Extinction Bias and Aggression. Values separated by participant gender and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO). High/Low SDO indicates participants whose SDO scores were above or below +1.5 SD on the grand mean in the male target condition. Measurement units are standardized.

Gender & Outgroup Fear 20

Figure 1.

t165 = 1.25, p = .22

t165 < 1, p = .43

t165 < 1, p = .54

t165 = 3.77, p = .0002

Gender & Outgroup Fear 21

Figure 2.

Gender & Outgroup Fear 22

Table 1. Descriptive statistics for behavioral and attitudinal measures. With the exception of Implicit Bias, variables were measured on range response scales from 1 to 7, and were anchored on both poles. Implicit Bias represent d-scores, with higher values corresponding to more race bias in favor of the racial ingroup. “E” and “S” after Implicit Race bias variables correspond to evaluative and stereotype, respectively. Implicit bias scales were reversed for black participants.

α = Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficient.

Variable

N

Mean

S.D.

Min-Max

α

Explicit Bias

76

2.45

.90

1 - 5.8

.88

Implicit Race Bias-E

80

0.35

.33

.24 - .46

n/a

Implicit Race Bias-S

80

0.22

.42

.11 - .32

n/a

Fear

83

3.23

.95

1.4 – 5.5

.93

Aggression

84

2.83

.90

2.8 - 3.2

.94

Social Dominance

84

2.37

1.0

1 – 5.7

.92

Gender & Outgroup Fear 23 Table 2. Descriptive statistics for conditioned response to faces belonging to ingroup and outgroup categories during habituation (Hab), acquisition (Acq), and extinction trials (Ext). S.E. calculated within an omnibus model.

Target Condition Female Female Female Female Female Female Male Male Male Male Male Male

Phase/Group

N

Mean

S.E.

Hab/Ingroup Hab/Outgroup Acq/Ingroup Acq/Outgroup Ext/Ingroup Ext/Outgroup Hab/Ingroup Hab/Outgroup Acq/Ingroup Acq/Outgroup Ext/Ingroup Ext/Outgroup

83 83 83 83 83 83 84 84 84 84 84 84

0.02 0.01 0.22 0.23 0.03 0.02 0.00 -0.03 0.30 0.28 0.01 0.09

0.03 0.02 0.03 0.03 0.02 0.02 0.02 0.03 0.04 0.03 0.02 0.03

95% C.I. -0.04 -0.03 0.16 0.18 -0.02 -0.02 -0.05 -0.08 0.23 0.22 -0.03 0.04

0.07 0.06 0.27 0.28 0.07 0.06 0.04 0.03 0.37 0.35 0.06 0.14

Gender & Outgroup Fear 24 Table 3. Correlations between extinction bias and the following individual difference variables: Explicit Bias, (Attitudes Towards Blacks/Whites; Brigham, 1993); Implicit Bias-E & S (Evaluative & Stereotype IAT; Amodio & Devine, 2006); Outgroup Contact (Contact; Olsson et al. 2005); Fear (Senn & Dzinas, 1996); Aggression (Buss & Perry, 1992); and Social Dominance Orientation (SDO: Pratto et. al. 1994). Relevant comparisons in boldface. Numbers in parentheses denote N observations for each variable.

1 1. Extinction Bias (84)

2

3

4

5

6

7

-

2. Explicit Bias (76)

-.02

-

3. Implicit Bias-E (80)

-.15

.28*

-

4. Implicit Bias-S (80)

.10

.19

.38†

-

5. Contact (84)

-.24*

.04

.14

.18

-

.16

-.01

.18

.12

-.02

-

7. Aggression (84)

-.02

.47†

-.01

.03

.19

.15

-

8. SDO (80)

-.13

.53†

12.

.09

.10

-.18

.27*

6. Fear (83)

* p < .05, † p < .01

Gender & Outgroup Fear 25 Table 4. Regression Results. Predictors of biased fear extinction between ingroup and outgroup males. Continuous variables were zero-centered and subject gender was dummy-coded 1 (male) and 0 (female). SDO and Aggress denote Social Dominance Orientation and aggression, respectively. Full model: N = 79; F(9, 69) = 4.52; p < .0001; R2 = .22.

Predictor 1. Gender

B

S.E.

β

-.10

.07

-.41

2. Fear

.10*

.05

.40

3. Aggress

-.02

.03

-.07

4. SDO

-.02

.03

.00

Gender x Fear

-.18*

.08

-.72

Gender x Aggress

-.02

.04

-.08

Gender x SDO

-.06

.04

-.25

Aggress x SDO

-.04

.02

-.18

Gender x Aggress x SDO

.09†

.03

.35

Constant

.05

.04

.

* p < .05, † p < .01

Gender & Outgroup Fear 26

Footnotes 1

Male faces were identical to that used by Olsson et al. (2005). Female faces were from models

7F, 9F, 11F, and 13F from the MacBrain Face Stimulus Set overseen by Nim Tottenham and supported by the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation Research Network on Early Experience and Brain Development. All faces had neutral expressions. 2

When entered as covariates in this model, dummy-variables for subject race, subject gender,

and sample location yielded a significant main effect in fear extinction for race (p < .01), such that black subjects showed greater resistance to extinction of learned fear than white subjects. However, the target race x target gender interaction term was unaffected by this main effect. These variables did not significantly interact with target gender or target race. 3

Explorations of the regression estimates at various levels of the measured constructs revealed

that the three-way interaction was caused primarily by male participants upper end of the distribution of SDO (> 1.5 SD above mean) whose aggression scores strongly correlated with biased extinction (see Fig. 2).