Live Lecture  Identity and Groups

The Self Concept:
The self-concept involves self-referential processing, with different aspects:
1. **Sensorimotor self:** Includes a sense of agency and embodiment.
2. **Ongoing self:** Encompasses personality traits, motivation for self-esteem, and personal memories.
3. **Cultural/collective self:** Involves group membership, shared beliefs, skills, and rituals.

Personal vs. Social Identity:
- **Personal identity:** Identifying as an individual, influenced by motivations and self-esteem maintenance.
- **Social identity:** Identifying as a group member based on commonalities and positive social distinctiveness. People strive for a positive sense of self in both personal and social identity.

Better-Than-Average-Effect:
People tend to think more positively about themselves than the average of the group, serving self-enhancement and contributing to a positive self-view.

Self-Referential Processing and mPFC Activation:
Self-referential processing involves activation in the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC). Studies show that mPFC activation facilitates self-judgment tasks, suggesting its role in self-referential processing.

Cultural Effects on Self-Referential Processing:
Cultural effects influence self-referential processing, as observed in studies where Chinese participants showed more activation for the "mother" condition, reflecting a collective-oriented interdependent culture, while Westerners exhibited self-judgment regardless of the closeness of the other person.

Social Identity:
Social identity involves social categorization, social identification, and social comparison, aiming to maintain a positive self-concept and social identity. Individuals strive for positive self-concept and social identity simultaneously.

Social Categorization:
Social categorization includes quick attentional processing (N1 and P2) with greater peaks for outgroup members. Deeper processing (N2) shows heightened responses for ingroup members. Ingroup identification influences social categorization, as evidenced in ERP studies.

Importance of Morality for Social Identity:
A study with an implicit association task revealed that emphasizing moral values reduced social bias towards the outgroup, suggesting a connection between moral values, social categorization, and bias.

Ingroup Preference and Group Dynamics:
Ingroup preference was studied in mixed-race groups, showing rapid categorization of ingroup faces. Likability for team members was enhanced in the ingroup condition, reflecting activity in brain regions like the fusiform face area, amygdala, orbitofrontal cortex, and striatum.

Criticism and Social Bias:
Studies on criticism (moral vs. competence) indicated increased attention to ingroup feedback, with greater activation in the ventral tegmental area and enhanced categorization in the N200 for participants highly identifying with the ingroup.

About Love

Triangular Theory of Love (Sternberg, 1988):
Perfect love involves passion, intimacy, and commitment, but these factors rarely align perfectly in real life.

Evolutionary Origins, Endocrine Factors, and Neural Correlates of Love:
Love's stages have evolutionary origins, endocrine factors like oxytocin and vasopressin, and neural correlates. Prairie voles' monogamous behavior is linked to oxytocin and vasopressin receptors, emphasizing the role of these hormones.

Long-Term Relationships and Neural Correlates:
Long-term relationships show enhanced activation in reward-related brain areas like the ventral tegmental area and nucleus accumbens. The frequency of sexual activity correlates with higher brain activation.

Grief and Neural Correlates:
Complicated grief involves distinct brain activation patterns, including heightened nucleus accumbens activity in response to grief-related words. This highlights the role of reward-related brain regions in processing grief.

Take-Home Messages:
- Love involves hormonal changes and corresponding alterations in reward-related brain activity.
- Long-lasting love is associated with both increased reward-related activity and decreased judgment-related brain activity.
- Romantic love likely evolved from maternal love, sharing neural correlates.
- The hypothalamus plays a crucial role in sexual arousal within romantic relationships.
- Long-lasting grief is linked to a malfunctioning reward response in the nucleus accumbens.