What happened when? Brain and behavioral responses to violated expectations about the structure and content of episodic memories

Episodic memories are not static but can be modified on the basis of new experiences, potentially allowing us to make valid predictions in the face of an ever-changing environment. Recent research has identified mnemonic prediction errors as a possible trigger for such modifications. In the present study, we investigated the influence of different types of mnemonic prediction errors on brain activity and subsequent memory performance using a novel paradigm for episodic modification. Participants encoded different episodes which consisted of short toy stories. During a subsequent functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) session, episodic retrieval was cued by presenting videos showing the original episodes, or modified versions thereof. In modified videos either the order of two subsequent action steps was changed (violating structure expectancy) or an object was exchanged for another (violating content expectancy). While brain responses to structure expectancy violations were only subtle, content expectancy violations recruited brain areas relevant for processing of new object information. In a post-fMRI memory test, the participants' tendency to accept modified episodes as originally encoded increased significantly when they had experienced expectancy violations during the fMRI session. Our study provides valuable initial insights into the neural processing of different types of mnemonic prediction errors and their influence on subsequent memory.

Mnemonic prediction errors promote detailed memories

When our experience violates our predictions, it is adaptive to update our knowledge to promote a more accurate representation of the world and facilitate future predictions. Theoretical models propose that these mnemonic prediction errors should be encoded into a distinct memory trace to prevent interference with previous, conflicting memories. We investigated this proposal by repeatedly exposing participants to pairs of sequentially presented objects (A → B), thus evoking expectations. Then, we violated participants’ expectations by replacing the second object in the pairs with a novel object (A → C). The following item memory test required participants to discriminate between identical old items and similar lures, thus testing detailed and distinctive item memory representations. In two experiments, mnemonic prediction errors enhanced item memory: Participants correctly identified more old items as old when those items violated expectations during learning, compared with items that did not violate expectations. This memory enhancement for C items was only observed when participants later showed intact memory for the related A → B pairs, suggesting that strong predictions are required to facilitate memory for violations. Following up on this, a third experiment reduced prediction strength prior to violation and subsequently eliminated the memory advantage of violations. Interestingly, mnemonic prediction errors did not increase gist-based mistakes of identifying old items as similar lures or identifying similar lures as old. Enhanced item memory in the absence of gist-based mistakes suggests that violations enhanced memory for items’ details, which could be mediated via distinct memory traces. Together, these results advance our knowledge of how mnemonic prediction errors promote memory formation.

Constructing and Validating Students’ Psychological Contract Violation Scale

For two and a half decades, psychological contracts are researched mainly in work organisations as drivers of the attitudes and behaviours of employees, overlooking the importance of understanding the nature of the psychological contracts of students in higher education. This study constructs and validates a new scale for measuring the perceived psychological contract violations of students in the context of faculty incivility. A mixed-method approach was applied to study the issue in three phases. First, a qualitative method was used to capture and analyse the perceived entitlements of students, as described by 78 college students, resulting in 37 items or elements identified by students as reflecting their psychological contracts. Second, a sample of 244 students was studied to identify the perceptions of violated expectations of students. In the final phase, items were rephrased as expectations and were given to the third sample of 154 undergraduate college students to determine the level of fulfilment of these expectations. Additionally, to ascertain discriminate and convergent validity measures, students were asked about the extent to which they experienced faculty incivility (discriminant validity) and frustration with the quality of interaction with their faculty (convergent validity). From these results, students’ psychological contract violation scale was constructed and validated.

Interventions for Softening Can Lead to Hardening of Opinions: Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial

Motivated by the goal of designing interventions for softening polarized opinions on the Web, and building on results from psychology, we hypothesized that people would be moved more easily towards opposing opinions when the latter were voiced by a celebrity they like, rather than by a celebrity they dislike. We tested this hypothesis in a survey-based randomized controlled trial in which we exposed respondents to opinions that were randomly assigned to one of four spokespersons each: a disagreeing but liked celebrity, a disagreeing and disliked celebrity, a disagreeing expert, and an agreeing but disliked celebrity. After the treatment, we measured changes in the respondents' opinions, empathy towards the spokespersons, and use of affective language.Unlike hypothesized, no softening of opinions was observed regardless of the respondents' attitudes towards the celebrity. Instead, we found strong evidence of a hardening of pre-treatment opinions when a disagreeing opinion was attributed to an expert or when an agreeing opinion was attributed to a disliked celebrity. We also observed a pronounced reduction in empathy for disagreeing spokespersons, indicating a punitive response. The only celebrity for whom, on average, empathy remained unchanged was the one who agreed, even though they were disliked. Our results could be explained as a reaction to violated expectations towards experts and as a perceived breach of trust by liked celebrities. They confirm that naive strategies at mediation may not yield intended results, and how difficult it is to depolarize---and how easy it is to further polarize or provoke emotional responses.

Mnemonic prediction errors promote detailed memories

When our experience violates our predictions, it is adaptive to update our knowledge to promote a more accurate representation of the world and facilitate future predictions. Theoretical models propose that these mnemonic prediction errors should be encoded into a distinct memory trace to prevent interference with previous, conflicting memories. We investigated this proposal by repeatedly exposing participants to pairs of sequentially presented objects (A->B), thus evoking expectations. Then, we violated participants’ expectations by replacing the second object in the pairs with a novel object (A->C). The following item memory test required participants to discriminate between identical old items and similar lures, thus testing detailed and distinctive item memory representations. In two experiments, mnemonic prediction errors enhanced item memory: participants correctly identified more old items as old when those items violated expectations during learning, compared to items that did not violate expectations. This memory enhancement for C items was only observed when participants later showed intact memory for the related A->B pairs, suggesting that strong predictions are required to facilitate memory for violations. Following up on this, a third experiment reduced prediction strength prior to violation and subsequently eliminated the memory advantage of violations. Interestingly, mnemonic prediction errors did not increase gist-based mistakes of identifying old items as similar lures or identifying similar lures as ‘old’. Enhanced item memory in the absence of gist-based mistakes suggests that violations enhanced memory for items’ details, which could be mediated via distinct memory traces. Together, these results advance our knowledge of how mnemonic prediction errors promote memory formation

Favouring a disunited Kingdom? How negative perceptions of the EU-referendum relate to individual mobility and collective action considerations

One consequence of the EU-referendum’s pro-Brexit outcome was a renewed call for Scottish independence. Supporting this call can be construed as a form of collective action Scots may engage in. However, Scots may also consider individual mobility strategies including - in extreme cases - emigration. The current research investigated how identity-dynamics relate to these identity management strategies in post-referendum Scotland. We found a positive association between perceiving the EU-referendum as having violated expectations and considering individual mobility responses, mediated by identity subversion (i.e., the perception that the referendum results fundamentally changed the UK’s identity). Furthermore, we found that perceiving the EU-referendum as having violated expectations was related to higher collective action intentions, mediated by disidentification from UK citizens. Taken together, these findings underscore the pervasive role social identity processes play in shaping political decisions and individual behaviour.

US Nationwide Coronavirus Newspaper Coverage of Federal/National Government Responses: Community Structure Theory and a “Violated Buffer”

Community structure analysis (Pollock, 2007, 2013a, 2015) compared city characteristics and newspaper coverage of federal/Trump administration coro­navirus responses in 18 major US cities, sampling all 250+ word articles from 01/28/20 to 04/03/20. The resulting 123 articles were coded for “promi­nence” and “direction” (favorable/un­favorable/balanced-neutral coverage), then combined into each newspaper’s composite “Media Vector” (range= 0.3850 to -0.6433, or 1.033). Fifteen of 18 newspapers (83%) displayed negative coverage of federal COVID-19 responses. Pearson correlations and regression analysis confirmed a robust “violated buffer” pattern (higher proportions of economically/socially “buffered” privi­leged groups are associated with neg­ative coverage of “biological threats or threats to a cherished way of life”: Pollock, 2007: 101), manifest in polit­ical and religious polarization and links between health access or generational privilege and negative coverage of feder­al COVID-19 actions. Higher proportions voting Democratic or Catholic member­ship in cities were associated strongly with negative coverage of federal efforts, while voting Republican and Evangelical membership accompanied positive feder­al coverage, evoking nationwide partisan “tribalism”. Privileged healthcare access (physicians/100,000, municipal health­care spending) and economically “privi­leged” age groups 45-64 and 65+ were all connected to negative coverage of federal COVID-19 responses, illuminat­ing overall “violated” expectations that the national government is responsible for nationwide disaster protection. Keywords: COVID-19, community struc­ture theory, newspapers, government, media.

Turning the Face Inversion Effect on Its Head: Violated Expectations of Orientation, Lighting, and Gravity Enhance N170 Amplitudes

Face inversion effects occur for both behavioral and electrophysiological responses when people view faces. In EEG, inverted faces are often reported to evoke an enhanced amplitude and delayed latency of the N170 ERP. This response has been attributed to the indexing of specialized face processing mechanisms within the brain. However, inspection of the literature revealed that, although N170 is consistently delayed to a variety of face representations, only photographed faces invoke enhanced N170 amplitudes upon inversion. This suggests that the increased N170 amplitudes to inverted faces may have other origins than the inversion of the face's structure. We hypothesize that the unique N170 amplitude response to inverted photographed faces stems from multiple expectation violations, over and above structural inversion. For instance, rotating an image of a face upside–down not only violates the expectation that faces appear upright but also lifelong priors about illumination and gravity. We recorded EEG while participants viewed face stimuli (upright vs. inverted), where the faces were illuminated from above versus below, and where the models were photographed upright versus hanging upside–down. The N170 amplitudes were found to be modulated by a complex interaction between orientation, lighting, and gravity factors, with the amplitudes largest when faces consistently violated all three expectations. These results confirm our hypothesis that face inversion effects on N170 amplitudes are driven by a violation of the viewer's expectations across several parameters that characterize faces, rather than a disruption in the configurational disposition of its features.

The Enhancing Versus Backfiring Effects of Positive Emotion in Consumer Reviews

Researchers, marketers, and consumers often believe that amplifying emotional content is impactful for the spread of information and purchasing decisions. However, there is little systematic investigation of when emotionality backfires. This research demonstrates when and why positive emotion can have enhancing versus backfiring effects. The authors find that reviewers who express greater positive emotion are indeed more positive toward their products, regardless of product type. In addition, expressed emotion for hedonic products has a positive impact when read by others, but this emotion backfires for utilitarian products, leading others to be less positive. The authors construct a conceptual model of these effects and show that violated expectations leading to decreased trust underlie this divergence between reviewers and readers. The effects occur in well-controlled experiments as well as computational linguistic analysis of 100,000 Amazon reviews across 500 products. Indeed, emotional reviews of utilitarian products are less likely to become popular and be displayed on the product’s front page on Amazon. This work also introduces a novel tool for quantifying natural language in marketing: the Evaluative Lexicon.