Jennifer S Beer

• Doctor of Philosophy
• University of Texas at Austin

By definition, authentic people presumably do not fall prey to the self‐evaluation biases which pervade human social cognition yet a close look at the existing literature suggests this presumption is ill‐founded. For example, only a few studies have examined whether people feel more authentic when they make decisions which express their true selves...

The present research investigated whether the differential recognition thresholds associated with memory for self-relevant negative feedback stem from processes occurring at encoding and/or suppression at retrieval. Socioemotional and monetary incentives offered before and after encoding did not significantly affect recognition thresholds for negat...

The psychological nature of the association between MPFC modulation and social evaluation remains poorly understood. Despite confounds, small samples, and mixed results in existing research, MPFC activation is often interpreted as a reflection of socioemotional association and/or perceived similarity between the self and an evaluation target. The p...

When people find themselves in the unenviable position of having to socially reject, do they have access to enhanced social sensitivity or does the role of rejector blunt their social sensitivity? This question has not received empirical attention, and there are competing hypotheses about the answer because of the paradoxical role of social rejecto...

The mentalizing network is theorized to play a central role in making sense of people (compared with nonsocial targets), but is its involvement affected when we make sense of people in a nondispassionate manner (e.g., favoritism toward others on the basis of group membership)? First, mixed findings and small samples have prevented strong conclusion...

People quickly assess the honesty of others but how honest are they with themselves and does it matter for their success and happiness? Our understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of self-insight is currently clouded by a number of measurement issues in the existing literature on self-evaluation and related constructs such as authenticity...

People quickly assess the honesty of others but how honest are they with themselves and does it matter for their success and happiness? Our understanding of the advantages and disadvantages of self-insight is currently clouded by a number of measurement issues in the existing literature on self-evaluation and related constructs such as authenticity...

People often worry how others will perceive them if they socially reject others, but do women have more to fear than men? Although previous research has shown that women are perceived negatively for behaving in counter-stereotypical ways, research on backlash has focused on business settings. The present research applies backlash theory to examine...

This chapter reviews behavioral and neuroscience research aimed at understanding self‐evaluation. The chapter addresses several questions including: How do we learn who we are? How is information about the self represented? How are our emotions and behaviors shaped by self‐evaluation and self‐knowledge? What is the neural basis of self‐evaluation a...

Despite robust associations between the ventral anterior cingulate cortex (vACC) and social evaluation, the role of vACC in social evaluation remains poorly understood. Two hypotheses have emerged from existing research: detection of positive valence and detection of opportunities for subjective reward. It has been difficult to understand whether o...

The distinction between utilitarianism and deontology has become a prevailing framework for conceptualizing moral judgment. According to the principle of utilitarianism, the morality of an action depends on its outcomes. In contrast, the principle of deontology states that the morality of an action depends on its consistency with moral norms. To id...

If you have to socially reject someone, will it help to apologize? Social rejection is a painful emotional experience for targets, yet research has been silent on recommendations for rejectors. Across three sets of studies, apologies increased hurt feelings and the need to express forgiveness but did not increase feelings of forgiveness. The invest...

We cannot see the minds of others, yet people often spontaneously interpret how they are viewed by other people (i.e., meta-perceptions) and often in a self-flattering manner. Very little is known about the neural associations of meta-perceptions, but a likely candidate is the ventromedial pFC (VMPFC). VMPFC has been associated with both self- and...

Neuroscience investigations of emotional influences on social cognition have been dominated by the somatic marker hypothesis and dual-process theories. Taken together, these lines of inquiry have not provided strong evidence that emotional influences on social cognition rely on neural systems which code for bodily signals of arousal nor distinguish...

The ventromedial prefrontal cortex is attributed with various functions during valuation, affect regulation and social cognition. Nature Neuroscience asked a moderator to lead researchers in a dialogue on shared and distinct viewpoints of this region's roles.

Social exclusion is an interactive process between multiple people, yet previous research has focused almost solely on the negative impacts on targets. What advice is there for people on the other side (i.e., sources) who want to minimize its negative impact and preserve their own reputation? To provide an impetus for research on the interactive na...

Self-insight is an important aspect of self-regulation. If we do not know what we are like, then how can we act to ensure that we are meeting our ideals? This chapter explores the neural basis of self-insight, that is, how we evaluate and represent self-relevant information. Historically, the frontal lobes became associated with self-insight throug...

Empirically analyzing empirical evidence One of the central goals in any scientific endeavor is to understand causality. Experiments that seek to demonstrate a cause/effect relation most often manipulate the postulated causal factor. Aarts et al. describe the replication of 100 experiments reported in papers published in 2008 in three high-ranking...

Recent neuroscience research provides new insight into why people tend to view themselves through rose-colored glasses and suggests a different approach for improving self-insight. Rose-colored glasses (sometimes referred to as positive illusions, positivity bias, self-serving bias, self-enhancement, or overconfidence) are a pervasive characteristi...

Early proof of concept for computational network approach in: https://psyarxiv.com/hj87w/download?format=pdf https://psyarxiv.com/etz56/download?format=pdf Amazing how much replicated from this early concept using a whole new network and brain data.

An integration of existing research and newly conducted psychophysiological interaction (PPI) connectivity analyses suggest a new framework for understanding the contribution of midline regions to social cognition. Recent meta-analyses suggest that there are no midline regions that are exclusively associated with self-processing. Whereas medial pre...

Unattractive job candidates face a disadvantage when interviewing for a job. Employers' evaluations are colored by the candidate's physical attractiveness even when they take job interview performance into account. This example illustrates unexplored questions about the neural basis of social evaluation in humans. What neural regions support the la...

Has self-enhancement been too heavily emphasized as a motivating factor in social comparisons? Recently, researchers have argued that some types of social-comparative judgments may differ in important ways from other self-evaluative phenomena typically offered as evidence of self-enhancement motivation. In contrast to a large body of research showi...

This resource is a newly organized and thoroughly updated volume of nine different sections, including anatomy and neuropharmacology, development, systems and models, fundamental cognitive mechanisms, social behavior, clinical neuropsychology, aging, psychiatric disorders, and rehabilitation. It reflects both an increase in the combined knowledge a...

One of the most robust ways that people protect themselves from social-evaluative threat is by emphasizing the desirability of their personal characteristics, yet the neural underpinnings of this fundamental process are unknown. The current fMRI study addresses this question by examining self-evaluations of desirability (in comparison with other pe...

Recent research has begun to identify neural regions associated with self-serving cognition, that is, the tendency to make claims that cast the self in an overly flattering light, yet little is known about the mechanisms supported by neural activation underlying self-serving cognition. One possibility suggested by current research is that MOFC, a r...

Most choices are complex and can be considered from a number of different perspectives. For example, someone choosing a snack may have taste, health, cost or any number of factors at the forefront of their mind. Although previous research has examined neural systems related to value and choice, very little is known about how mindset influences thes...

Neural research on social cognition has not examined motivations known to influence social cognition. One fundamental motivation in social cognition is positivity motivation, that is, the desire to view close others in an overly positive light. Positivity motivation does not extend to non-close others. The current functional magnetic resonance imag...

The current study takes a new approach to understand the neural systems that support emotion-congruent judgment. The bulk of previous neural research has inferred emotional influences on judgment from disadvantageous judgments or non-random individual differences. The current study manipulated the influence of emotional information on judgments of...

Early neural research on self-evaluation began testing whether self-evaluation was somehow neurally different than evaluations of other people and inanimate objects. Self-evaluation was lauded as potentially unique partially because of motivational and affective influences. Despite the acknowledgement that motivation influences social cognition suc...

The role of orbitofrontal cortex in emotional decision making has recently been called into question. Recent research that draws on both social psychological and neuroscience approaches (i.e., social neuroscience) suggests that orbitofrontal function may be better characterized as supporting self-insight. From this perspective, the orbitofrontal co...

Low sensation seekers are theorized to avoid risk more often because risk is emotionally more costly for them (in comparison to high sensation seekers). Therefore, individual differences in sensation seeking should predict differences in risk task-induced cortisol changes. Furthermore, the neural mediation that accounts for the relation between sen...

Even rose-colored glasses cannot hide the apparent discrepancy between models of selfcontrol and the adaptive view of positive illusions. Most models of self-control suggest that accurate perceptions of the relation between behavior and goals are fundamental for goal attainment. However, the adaptive view of positive illusions suggests that individ...

In interpersonal perception, "perceiver effects" are tendencies of perceivers to see other people in a particular way. Two studies of naturalistic interactions examined perceiver effects for personality traits: seeing a typical other as sympathetic or quarrelsome, responsible or careless, and so forth. Several basic questions were addressed. First,...

Poor self-insight has long been a hallmark of frontal lobe damage. For example, patients with frontal lobe damage have been clinically characterized by grandiose beliefs. The exact role of the frontal lobes in achieving appropriate self-insight remains unknown (e.g., Beer, 2007). Instead of questions about self-insight, most of the empirical work o...

Empirical investigations of the relation of frontal lobe function to self-evaluation have mostly examined the evaluation of abstract qualities in relation to self versus other people. The present research furthers our understanding of frontal lobe involvement in self-evaluation by examining two processes that have not been widely studied by neurosc...

Testosterone plays a role in aggressive behavior, but the mechanisms remain unclear. The present study tested the hypothesis that testosterone influences aggression through the OFC, a region implicated in self-regulation and impulse control. In a decision-making paradigm in which people chose between aggression and monetary reward (the ultimatum ga...

Extant neural models of self-evaluation are dominated by associations with medial prefrontal cortex (MPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) function and have mostly been developed from studies differentiating self-evaluation from evaluation of other people. Although self-evaluation is robustly characterized by systematic biases, current neural...

Cognitive Science research is hard to conduct, because researchers must take phenomena from the world and turn them into laboratory tasks for which a reasonable level of experimental control can be achieved. Consequently, research necessarily makes tradeoffs between internal validity (experimental control) and external validity (the degree to which...

A decision may be difficult because complex information processing is required to evaluate choices according to deterministic decision rules and/or because it is not certain which choice will lead to the best outcome in a probabilistic context. Factors that tax decision making such as decision rule complexity and low decision certainty should be di...

In order to investigate the systems underlying the automatic and controlled processes that support social attitudes, we conducted an fMRI study that combined an implicit measure of race attitudes with the Quadruple Process model (Quad model). A number of previous neural investigations have adopted the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine the...

Recent approaches to moral judgment have typically pitted emotion against reason. In an effort to move beyond this debate, we propose that authors presenting diverging models are considering quite different prototypical situations: those focusing on the resolution of complex dilemmas conclude that morality involves sophisticated reasoning, whereas...

The medial prefrontal cortex exhibits a higher resting metabolic rate than many other brain regions. This physiological default mode might support a psychological default state of chronic self-evaluation that helps people consider their strengths and weaknesses when planning future actions. However, a recent imaging study that relates medial prefro...

ONE CAN not study the relationship between emotions and decisions without including an analysis of moral judgement, both because many significant decisions that individuals make every day involve morality, and because an increasingly influential school of thought stresses the importance of emotions in moral judgement. In fact, one of the major deba...

Status is the prominence, respect, and influence individuals enjoy in the eyes of others. Theories of positive illusions suggest that individuals form overly positive perceptions of their status in face-to-face groups. In contrast, the authors argue that individuals' perceptions of their status are highly accurate--that is, they closely match the g...

Emotion regulation is a process by which we control when and where emotions are expressed. Paradigms used to study the regulation of emotion in humans examine controlled responses to emotional stimuli and/or the inhibition of emotional influences on subsequent behavior. These processes of regulation of emotion trigger activation of the ventromedial...

The role of the orbitofrontal cortex in social behavior remains a puzzle. Various theories of the social functions of the orbitofrontal cortex focus on the role of this area in either emotional processing or its involvement in online monitoring of behavior (i.e., self-monitoring). The present research attempts to integrate these two theories by exa...

Emotion has been both lauded and vilified for its role in decision making. How are people able to ensure that helpful emotions guide decision making and irrelevant emotions are kept out of decision making? The orbitofrontal cortex has been identified as a neural area involved in incorporating emotion into decision making. Is this area's function sp...

This paper investigates the construct of social cognition from an interdisciplinary perspective blending social psychology and cognitive neuroscience. This perspective argues for the inclusion of processes used to decode and encode the self, other people and interpersonal knowledge in the definition of social cognition. The neural modularity of soc...

What is the relation between self-evaluation and being liked by others? Does being liked by others lead to more positive self-evaluations (as in sociometer theory), or do positive self-evaluations lead to being liked more (self-broadcasting)? Furthermore, what might affect the extent to which self-evaluations are influenced by likability (and vice...

Socrates said that in order to lead a balanced life one must, "know thyself." In two fMRI experiments, the present study examined the mechanisms mediating two ways in which the self can be known: through direct appraisals (i.e., an individual's own self-beliefs) and reflected appraisals (i.e., an individual's perception of how others view him or he...

Damage to the orbital prefrontal cortex has been implicated in selectively diminishing electrodermal autonomic nervous system responses to anticipated punishing stimuli (e.g., losing money; Bechara, Damasio, & Damasio, 2000), but not to unanticipated punishing stimuli (e.g., loud noises; Damasio, Tranel, & Damasio, 1990). We extended this research...

Although once considered disruptive, self-conscious emotions are now theorized to be fundamentally involved in the regulation of social behavior. The present study examined the social regulation function of self-conscious emotions by comparing healthy participants with a neuropsychological population--patients with orbitofrontal lesions--characteri...

Three studies examined implicit self-theories in relation to shy people's goals, responses, and consequences within social situations. Shy incremental theorists were more likely than shy entity theorists to view social situations as a learning opportunity and to approach social settings (Study 1). Shy incremental theorists were less likely to use s...

Three studies examined implicit self-theories in relation to shy people's goals, responses, and consequences within social situations. Shy incremental theorists were more likely than shy entity theorists to view social situations as a learning opportunity and to approach social settings (Study 1). Shy incremental theorists were less likely to use s...

Two studies addressed parallel questions about the correlates and consequences of self-enhancement bias. Study 1 was conducted in a laboratory context and examined self-enhancing evaluations of performance in a group-interaction task. Study 2 assessed students' illusory beliefs about their academic ability when they first entered college and then f...

Although evidence from primates suggests an important role for the anterior temporal cortex in social behaviour, human research has to date concentrated almost solely on the orbitofrontal cortex and amygdala. By describing four cases of the temporal variant of frontotemporal dementia we show how this degenerative condition provides an excellent mod...

Two studies addressed parallel questions about the correlates and consequences of self-enhancement bias. Study 1 was conducted in a laboratory context and examined self-enhancing evaluations of performance in a group-interaction task. Study 2 assessed students' illusory beliefs about their academic ability when they first entered college and then f...

Thesis (Ph. D. in Psychology)--University of California, Berkeley, Fall 2002. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 76-85). Photocopy.

Thesis (M.A. in Psychology)--University of California, Berkeley, Spring 1999. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 21-23).