Many methods for reducing implicit prejudice have been identified, but little is known about their relative effectiveness. We held a research contest to experimentally compare interventions for reducing the expression of implicit racial prejudice. Teams submitted 17 interventions that were tested an average of 3.70 times each in 4 studies (total N = 17,021), with rules for revising interventions between studies. Eight of 17 interventions were effective at reducing implicit preferences for Whites compared with Blacks, particularly ones that provided experience with counterstereotypical exemplars, used evaluative conditioning methods, and provided strategies to override biases. The other 9 interventions were ineffective, particularly ones that engaged participants with others' perspectives, asked participants to consider egalitarian values, or induced a positive emotion. The most potent interventions were ones that invoked high self-involvement or linked Black people with positivity and White people with negativity. No intervention consistently reduced explicit racial preferences. Furthermore, intervention effectiveness only weakly extended to implicit preferences for Asians and Hispanics.

In this paper we report an investigation conducted on a brain-damaged patient who presents a selective impairment in processing elements of some semantic categories, in particular animals, fruit, and vegetables. His difficulties appear mainly when naming pictures, but are also present when naming to definition and when retrieving visual attributes of concepts from memory. The pattern of the patient's performance is compatible with an explanation which posits the locus of the impairment at the level of the structural description, considered as the repository of concepts' visual properties. The results are discussed with reference to the constraints they impose on models of normal conceptual representation and processing.

Recent controversies about the level of replicability of behavioral research analyzed using statistical inference have cast interest in developing more efficient techniques for analyzing the results of psychological experiments. Here we claim that complementing the analytical workflow of psychological experiments with Machine Learning-based analysis will both maximize accuracy and minimize replicability issues. As compared to statistical inference, ML analysis of experimental data is model agnostic and primarily focused on prediction rather than inference. We also highlight some potential pitfalls resulting from adoption of Machine Learning based experiment analysis. If not properly used it can lead to over-optimistic accuracy estimates similarly observed using statistical inference. Remedies to such pitfalls are also presented such and building model based on cross validation and the use of ensemble models. ML models are typically regarded as black boxes and we will discuss strategies aimed at rendering more transparent the predictions.

In the present study, startle responses during resting states as well as during the presentation of a set of emotive slides were recorded from a 32-year-old male patient with a rare localized lesion of the right amygdala. The startle reflex is a response modulated by affective states: it has been reliably used in the literature to measure the aversiveness of emotive stimuli. The animal literature has shown that the circuit of this reflex is directly influenced by amygdala projections. The startle responses of the patient were compared with those of eight age-matched normal subjects. The patient's startle amplitudes showed an overall impaired response and an inhibited reflex contralateral to the lesion. In addition, he failed to show the typical startle potentiation induced by an aversive emotive background. The data confirm, in the human, previous results from the literature in other species on amygdala involvement in startle and emotional responses. Furthemore, the observation of the importance of the right amygdala in the modulation of emotion is consistent with the hypothesis of right hemisphere specialization for aversive emotions. The results are discussed in the context of the literature on human amygdala lesions.