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Faces are categorized by gender and race very quickly, seemingly without regard to perceivers' goals or motivations, suggesting an automaticity to these judgments that has downstream consequences for evaluations, stereotypes, and social interactions. The current study investigated the extent to which early neurocognitive processes involved in the categorization of faces vary when participants' tasks goals were to categorize faces by race or by gender. In contrast to previous findings, task-related differences were found, such that differentiation in the P2 event-related potential (ERP) according to perceived gender was facilitated by having an explicit task goal of categorizing faces by gender; however, the P2 was sensitive to race regardless of task goals. Use of principal components analysis (PCA) revealed two underlying components that comprised the P2 and that were differentially sensitive to the gender and race of the faces, depending on participants' top-down task goals. Results suggest that top-down task demands facilitate discrimination of faces along the attended dimension within less than 200 ms, but that the effect of top-down task demands may not be evident when examining early ERP components that reflect more than one distinct underlying process.

Previous research has shown that alcohol consumption can increase the expression of race bias by impairing control-related processes. The current study tested whether simple exposure to alcohol-related images can also increase bias, but via a different mechanism. Participants viewed magazine ads for either alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverages prior to completing Payne's (2001) Weapons Identification Task (WIT). As predicted, participants primed with alcohol ads exhibited greater race bias in the WIT than participants primed with neutral beverages. Process dissociation analyses indicated that these effects were due to automatic (relative to controlled) processes having a larger influence on behavior among alcohol-primed relative to neutral-primed participants. Structural equation modeling further showed that the alcohol-priming effect was mediated by increases in the influence of automatic associations on behavior. These data suggest an additional pathway by which alcohol can potentially harm inter-racial interactions, even when no beverage is consumed.

Individuals display high levels of trust and express feelings of safety when interacting with social ingroup members. Here, we investigated whether cues related to ingroup membership would change perceptions of the safety of alcohol. Participants were exposed to images of beer in either a standard can or a can featuring the colors of their university (i.e., 'fan cans'). We hypothesized that exposure to fan cans would change perceptions of the risks of beer drinking. Results showed that participants exposed to fan cans rated beer consumption as less dangerous (Experiment 1), were more likely to automatically activate safety-related mental content after unconscious perception of beer cues (Experiment 2), and viewed their ingroup's party practices as less dangerous (Experiment 3). These results provide evidence that ingroup-associated colors can serve as a safety cue for alcohol, which may in theory perpetuate alcohol-related risk-taking, already a cause for concern on college and university campuses.

This experiment investigated the role of conflict in the response and evaluative categorization systems in the affective congruency effect using event-related brain potentials (ERPs). Participants completed a primed evaluative decision task in which the proportion of congruent to incongruent trials was manipulated. The size of the affective congruency effect increased along with the proportion of congruent trials. ERP data identified the locus of this effect in the response system: the lateralized readiness potential (LRP) showed that preferential response activation occurred in motor cortex following prime onset, and the fronto-central N2 (conflict monitoring) component indicated that conflict occurred when the response activated by the prime differed from the target response, irrespective of the affective congruency of the prime and target. The extent of this conflict covaried with strategic processing of primes, as participants directed less attention to primes that were likely to elicit conflict. These data support a response conflict account of affective congruency effects in the evaluative decision task and indicate that strategic control of attention is important in determining the extent to which conflict occurs.