The Warburg Institute

Today more than ever, we are asked to evaluate the realness, truthfulness and trustworthiness of our social world. Here, we focus on how people evaluate realistic-looking faces of non-existing people generated by generative adversarial networks (GANs). GANs are increasingly used in marketing, journalism, social media, and political propaganda. In three studies, we investigated if and how participants can distinguish between GAN and REAL faces and the social consequences of their exposure to artificial faces. GAN faces were more likely to be perceived as real than REAL faces, a pattern partly explained by intrinsic stimulus characteristics. Moreover, participants’ realness judgments influenced their behavior because they displayed increased social conformity toward faces perceived as real, independently of their actual realness. Lastly, knowledge about the presence of GAN faces eroded social trust. Our findings point to potentially far-reaching consequences for the pervasive use of GAN faces in a culture powered by images at unprecedented levels.

Is there a way to visually depict the image people “see” of themselves in their minds’ eyes? And if so, what can these mental images tell us about ourselves? We used a computational reverse-correlation technique to explore individuals’ mental “self-portraits” of their faces and body shapes in an unbiased, data-driven way (total N = 116 adults). Self-portraits were similar to individuals’ real faces but, importantly, also contained clues to each person’s self-reported personality traits, which were reliably detected by external observers. Furthermore, people with higher social self-esteem produced more true-to-life self-portraits. Unlike face portraits, body portraits had negligible relationships with individuals’ actual body shape, but as with faces, they were influenced by people’s beliefs and emotions. We show how psychological beliefs and attitudes about oneself bias the perceptual representation of one’s appearance and provide a unique window into the internal mental self-representation—findings that have important implications for mental health and visual culture.

Changing collective behaviour and supporting non-pharmaceutical interventions is an important component in mitigating virus transmission during a pandemic. In a large international collaboration (Study 1, N = 49,968 across 67 countries), we investigated self-reported factors associated with public health behaviours (e.g., spatial distancing and stricter hygiene) and endorsed public policy interventions (e.g., closing bars and restaurants) during the early stage of the COVID-19 pandemic (April-May 2020). Respondents who reported identifying more strongly with their nation consistently reported greater engagement in public health behaviours and support for public health policies. Results were similar for representative and non-representative national samples. Study 2 (N = 42 countries) conceptually replicated the central finding using aggregate indices of national identity (obtained using the World Values Survey) and a measure of actual behaviour change during the pandemic (obtained from Google mobility reports). Higher levels of national identification prior to the pandemic predicted lower mobility during the early stage of the pandemic (r = −0.40). We discuss the potential implications of links between national identity, leadership, and public health for managing COVID-19 and future pandemics.

The sensation of internal bodily signals, such as when your stomach is contracting or your heart is beating, plays a critical role in broad biological and psychological functions ranging from homeostasis to emotional experience and self-awareness. The evolutionary origins of this capacity and, thus, the extent to which it is present in nonhuman animals remain unclear. Here, we show that rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) spend significantly more time viewing stimuli presented asynchronously, as compared to synchronously, with their heartbeats. This is consistent with evidence previously shown in human infants using a nearly identical experimental paradigm, suggesting that rhesus monkeys have a human-like capacity to integrate interoceptive signals from the heart with exteroceptive audiovisual information. As no prior work has demonstrated behavioral evidence of innate cardiac interoceptive ability in nonhuman animals, these results have important implications for our understanding of the evolution of this ability and for establishing rhesus monkeys as an animal model for human interoceptive function and dysfunction.We anticipate that this work may also provide an important model for future psychiatric research, as disordered interoceptive processing is implicated in a wide variety of psychiatric conditions.

Photojournalistic images shape our understanding of sociopolitical events. How humans are depicted in images may have far-reaching consequences for our attitudes towards them. Social psychology has shown how the visualization of an ‘identifiable victim effect’ can elicit empathic responses. However, images of identifiable victims in the media are the exception rather than the norm. In the context of the Syrian refugee crisis, the majority of images in Western media depicted refugees as large unidentifiable groups. While the effects of the visual depiction of single individuals are well-known, the ways in which the visual framing of large groups operates, and its social and political consequences, remain unknown. We here focus on the visual depiction of refugees to understand how exposure to the dominant visual framing used in the media, depicting them in large groups of faceless individuals, affects their dehumanization and sets off political consequences. To that end we brought together insights from social psychology, social sciences and the humanities to test a range of hypotheses using methods from social and political psychology in 10 studies with the participation of 3951 European citizens. Seeing images of large groups resulted in greater implicit dehumanization compared with images depicting refugees in small groups. Images of large groups are also explicitly rated as more dehumanizing, and when coupled with meta-data such as newspaper headlines, images continue to play a significant and independent role on how (de)humanizing we perceive such news coverage to be. Moreover, after viewing images of large groups, participants showed increased preference for more dominant and less trustworthy-looking political leaders and supported fewer pro-refugee policies and more anti-refugee policies. In terms of a mechanistic understanding of these effects, the extent to which participants felt pity for refugees depicted in large groups as opposed to small groups mediated the effect of visual framing on the choice of a more authoritarian-looking leader. What we see in the media and how it is shown not only has consequences for the ways in which we relate to other human beings and our behaviour towards them but, ultimately, for the functioning of our political systems.

At the heart of social cognition is our ability to distinguish between self and other and correctly attribute mental and affective states to their origin. Emotional egocentricity bias (EEB) reflects the tendency to use one’s own emotional state when relating to others. Although interoception underpins our emotional experience, little is known about its role on how we affectively relate to others. Here, we assessed how cardiac interoceptive impact, manipulated by presenting affective stimuli across different phases of the cardiac cycle coupled with trait-like levels of interoceptive accuracy, modulate the EEB. Individuals with higher interoceptive accuracy displayed an increased EEB when the other’s emotional state was presented at the point of maximum interoceptive impact (i.e., at systole), whereas the reverse was observed for individuals with lower interoceptive accuracy. These findings show how interoceptive activity provides the physiological context within which we process other’s emotional states in parallel to ours.

Standard measures of interoception are typically limited to the conscious perception of heartbeats. However, the fundamental purpose of interoceptive signaling, is to regulate the body. We present a novel biofeedback paradigm to explore the neurobehavioral consequences of three different types of engagement with cardiac interoception (Attend, Feel, Regulate) while participants perform a ‘cardiac recognition’ task. For both the Feel and Regulate conditions, participants displayed enhanced recognition of their own heartbeat, accompanied by larger heartbeat-evoked potentials (HEPs), suggesting that these approaches could be used interchangeably. Importantly, meta-cognitive interoceptive insight was highest in the Regulate condition, indicative of stronger engagement with interoceptive signals in addition to greater ecological validity. Only in the passive interoception condition (Feel) was a significant association found between accuracy in recognising one’s own heartbeat and the amplitude of HEPs. Overall, our results imply that active conditions have an important role to play in future investigation of interoception.

Influential theories posit that bodily responses are important for decision-making under uncertainty. However, the evidence of the role of our ability to perceive subtle bodily changes (interoception) in decision-making under uncertainty is mixed. These differences may arise from the fact that uncertainty, a part of daily decision-making, can be fractionated into risk (known probabilities) and ambiguity (unknown probabilities). Here we examine the role of arousal and interoception in shaping risky and ambiguous decisions. We measured skin conductance responses and heart rate changes while participants (N = 40) made gambling decisions in the context of risky and ambiguous lotteries. Results reveal that the anticipation phase produced the largest arousal responses, suggesting that the anticipation is a major contributor to arousal during gambling behavior, regardless of the uncertainty type. Moreover, physiological responses were higher following positive outcomes than negative outcomes. We did not find any direct relation between interoceptive dimensions and the attitudes toward risk and ambiguity. However, in those with higher interoceptive accuracy, skin conductance responses differentiated between risk and ambiguity as well as between the gamble phases (decision, anticipation, and outcome). Together, our findings demonstrate that decision-making under uncertainty is to some extent associated with individual differences in the ability both to generate and to perceive accurately subtle changes in bodily arousal during the decision-making process. However, these changes seem to be moderately related to the type of uncertainty (risk or ambiguity).