John Kiat

EMPATHETIC PROCESSING

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Media features of this investigative line can be found here and here

A one-sentence summary of this research line might go, “Knowing a person’s name shifts the factors which influence how emphatic we are towards them.”. This project was motivated by prior work conducted by Meyer et al. (2013) and Wang et al. (2016), which had shown that while neural responses towards known vs. unknown individuals are significantly different, behavioral ratings of those experiences were effectively identical. Building on this work, I hypothesized that, instead of influencing the same underlying process, individuation impacts empathy by shifting its informational sources. This project provided evidence to support this by showing empathy for named targets to be strongly predicted by the amount of attention participants allocate, as indexed by the P300 response, towards their faces. This pattern was completely absent for unnamed targets, providing a strong example of individuation shifting the bases of empathy towards factors related to a target’s identity. The procedure of this investigation is depicted below :

My main finding from this study was that attention-related (P300) activity during the target evaluation phase was strongly predictive of pain ratings only when the targets were individuated. Pain ratings of unindividuated targets were instead predicted by attention-related activity during the expression evaluation phase. In other words, when participants knew the names of the targets, the amount of attention they allocated towards processing their faces predicted how emphatic they were.

Kiat, J.E, Cheadle, J.E. (2017). The Impact of Individuation on the Bases of Human Empathic Responding. Neuroimage, 155, 312-321.

RISK-TAKING

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Can we model risk-taking behavior as an escalating series of decisions? My primary interest in this area was to try and model risk-taking as a multi-stage process as opposed to just looking at singular outcomes. One of the studies I conducted in this area was the first to show sequentially escalating changes in the feedback-related-negativity (FRN), a neural response associated with performance feedback processing, as a function of higher levels of risk-taking on the Balloon Analogue Risk Task, a well-known paradigm in which participants inflate balloons for cash while trying not to cause them to explode.

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In addition to this, the observed sequential rise in the FRN response was reduced among participants with higher levels of peer influence resistance, providing an intriguing link to real-world social risk tolerance. In addition to these area-specific contributions, these findings represent a neat contribution to the EEG literature at the time given the debate on the signed versus unsigned nature of the FRN response.

Kiat, J.E., Straley, E., & Cheadle, J. E. (2016). Escalating risk and the moderating effect of resistance to peer influence on the P200 and feedback-related negativity. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, 11(3),  377-386.

Click here for a poster version of the paper

I then extended this “escalation” approach to model risk-taking reactivity in a pretty fun way. Specifically, we designed a risk-taking experience around the Crocodile Dentist game. That’s right, this Crocodile Dentist game;

Using this adapted task, we asked participants to press on each tooth in a fixed order. We could then model how their ERP responses to the “press the tooth!” cues changed as a function of how many teeth had already been depressed (i.e. changes in risk level). While the data proved too noisy to look at the same sequential dynamics as I did on the BART but nonetheless, we did achieve the second goal of the study which was to find evidence for, increased reactivity, as indexed by the LPP. at higher levels of risk among binge drinkers relative to non-bingers which was a lovely real-world brain-behavior association to see. 

Relevant Publication :  Kiat, J.E., Cheadle, J.E. (in press). Tick-Tock Goes the Croc: A High-Density EEG Investigation of Risk-Taking Reactivity and Binge-Drinking Susceptibility. Social Cognitive & Affective Neuroscience.

SOCIAL EXCLUSION

News features of this investigative line here and here!

A key component of social attention involves quickly perceiving and responding to social judgments others direct toward us. To this end, my research focuses on attentional biases which influence actual as well as anticipatory responses to negative social outcomes. My collaborative work (Social Neuroscience) on this first looked at the role of social cues in biasing attention toward social exclusion. This investigation was conducted using a novel paradigm called the Lunchroom task, developed by Caitlin Hudac & Allison Skinner, in which participants are repeatedly included and excluded by virtual avatars, with each event preceded by either neutral or subtle race-identity-specific discriminatory cues. This work showed significantly reduced attentional reactivity to exclusion outcomes, as indexed by P300 responses, preceded by discriminatory cues relative to neutral ones, highlighting the importance of social cues in moderating negative social reactivity.

More recently, I have extended this line of research using the well-established Cyberball task, a paradigm in which participants engage in a game of catch with virtual avatars who after an initial period of fair play (inclusion condition) then exclude the participant from the game (exclusion condition). Me and my colleagues (Kiat, Goosby, & Cheadle, International Journal of Psychophysiology), recently found that levels of attention, again indexed by the P300, oriented to event cues preceding actual trial outcomes on the Cyberball task are significantly elevated during the exclusion vs. inclusion trial block, providing direct evidence of the impact of social exclusion on anticipatory attentional monitoring. 

Kiat, J.E., Straley, E., Cheadle, J. E. (2016). Why Won’t They Sit with Me? An Exploratory Investigation of Stereotyped Cues, Social Exclusion, and the P3b. Social Neuroscience. 12(5), 612-625

Kiat, J.E., Cheadle, J.E. Goosby, B.J. (in press). The Impact of Social Exclusion on Anticipatory Attentional Processes. International Journal of Psychophysiology. 123, 48-57.

DISABILITY PREJUDICE

This super early line of work, dates way back from my undergraduate days working with Dr. Hera Lukman. In this line of research, we sought to empirically assess the developmental onset of negative perceptions towards individuals with conspicuous strabismus by conducting a social preference experiment with children ages 5-6 and 8-12. Our results showed that both age groups showed evidence of having negative social views (willingness to share toys [ages 5-6] and willingness to sit next to [ages 8-12] towards individuals with conspicuous strabismus. As strabismus is, for the most part, a correctable condition, these findings provide a rationale for early correction to mitigate the potential impact of early discriminatory experiences.

Lukman, H., Kiat, J.E., Ganesan, A., Chua, W.L., Khor, K.L., Choong, Y.F. (2010). Strabismus-related prejudice in 5-6-year-old children. British Journal of Ophthalmology, 94, 1348-1351.

Lukman, H., Kiat, J.E., Ganesan, A., Chua, W.L., Khor, K.L., Choong, Y.F. (2010). Negative Social Reaction to Strabismus in School Children Ages 8-12 years. Journal of Pediatric Ophthalmology and Strabismus, 15(3), 238-40.