Associate Professor 10 McAlester Hall (573) 882-1805 BartholowB@missouri.edu Lab: Social Cognitive Neuroscience Lab

My research generally is focused on two broad but related areas. First, I am interested in basic aspects of social cognition including person perception (e.g., stereotyping, prejudice, impression-formation and change) and aggression, and in how these processes are affected by alcohol consumption. In order to understand how alcohol influences cognition and perception, it is crucial to first understand how these processes operate normally. To this end, much of our experimental research is characterized by studies that investigate how people make sense of and respond to others’ behavior, and studies in which these processes are tested while participants are under the influence of alcohol. Alcohol is known to cause a number of cognitive impairments and affective changes that lead to deficits in behavioral control, many of which have implications for social behaviors (e.g., aggression, risk-taking). Contemporary models of many social-cognitive phenomena emphasize the role of cognitive and behavioral control in adaptive social functioning. Thus, studying the effects of alcohol on social cognition provides a way to understand not only the implications of intoxication, but also the function of various cognitive mechanisms that are important for flexible social cognition.

The second broad line of research in the lab examines how social/environmental factors (e.g., peer influences, drinking context) and individual differences (e.g., personality, alcohol expectancies) contribute to alcohol involvement among young adults, and how neurocognitive reactivity to alcohol-related cues might predict vulnerability to alcohol abuse and related disorders.

In most of our research, we employ a combination of behavioral and psychophysiological measures (especially event-related brain potentials; ERPs) to provide a broad basis for understanding how environmental contingencies and stimulus events are interpreted and processed at a basic neurocognitive level, and how these basic processes mediate or explain overt behaviors.

Bartholow, B. D. (in press). On the role of conflict and control in social cognition: Event-related brain potential investigations. Psychophysiology.

Ito, T. A., & Bartholow, B. D. (in press). The neural correlates of race. Trends in Cognitive Sciences.

Bartholow, B. D., Lust, S. A., & Tragesser, S. (in press). Specificity of P3 event-related potential reactivity to alcohol cues in individuals low in alcohol sensitivity. Psychology of Addictive Behaviors.

Dickter, C. L., & Bartholow, B. D. (in press). Ingroup categorization and response conflict: Interactive effects of target race, flanker compatibility and infrequency on N2 amplitude. Psychophysiology.

Henry, A. E., Bartholow, B. D., & Arndt, J. (in press). Death on the brain: Effects of mortality salience on the neural correlates of ingroup and outgroup categorization. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.

Bartholow, B. D., Riordan, M. A., Saults, J. S., & Lust, S. A. (2009). Psychophysiological evidence of response conflict and strategic control of responses in affective priming. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 655-666.

Lust, S. A., & Bartholow, B. D. (2009). Self-reported and P3 event-related potential evaluations of condoms: Does what we say match how we feel? Psychophysiology, 46, 420-424.

Bartholow, B. D., & Amodio, D. M. (2009). Using event-related brain potentials in social psychological research: A brief review and tutorial. In E. Harmon-Jones & J. S. Beer (Eds.), Methods in social neuroscience (pp. 198-232). New York: Guilford Press.

Bartholow, B. D., & Dickter, C. L. (2008). A response conflict account of the effects of stereotypes on racial categorization. Social Cognition, 26, 273-291.

Dickter, C. L., & Bartholow, B. D. (2007). Event-related brain potential evidence of ingroup and outgroup attention biases. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience, 2, 189-198.

Sher, K. J., Bartholow, B. D., Peuser, K., Erickson, D., & Wood, M. D. (2007). Stress-response dampening effects of alcohol: Attention as a mediator and moderator. Journal of Abnormal Psychology, 116, 362-377.

Bartholow, B. D., Bushman, B. J., & Sestir, M. A. (2006). Chronic violent video game exposure and desensitization: Behavioral and event-related brain potential data. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 42, 532-539.

Bartholow, B. D., Dickter, C. L., & Sestir, M. A. (2006). Stereotype activation and control of race bias: Cognitive control of inhibition and its impairment by alcohol. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 90, 272-287.

Bartholow, B. D., & Heinz, A. (2006). Alcohol and aggression without consumption: Alcohol cues, aggressive thoughts, and hostile perception bias. Psychological Science, 17, 30-37.

Bartholow, B. D., Pearson, M. A., Dickter, C., Sher, K. J., Fabiani, M., & Gratton, G. (2005). Strategic control and medial frontal negativity: Beyond errors and response conflict. Psychophysiology, 42, 33-42.

Bartholow, B. D., Anderson, C. A., Carnagey, N. L., & Benjamin, A. J. Jr. (2005). Interactive effects of life experience and situational cues on aggression: The weapons priming effect in hunters and nonhunters. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 41, 48-60.

Bartholow, B. D., Pearson, M. A., Gratton, G., & Fabiani, M. (2003). Effects of alcohol on person perception: A social cognitive neuroscience approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85, 627-638.

Bartholow, B. D., Fabiani, M., Gratton, G., & Bettencourt, B. A. (2001). A psychophysiological analysis of cognitive processing of and affective responses to social expectancy violations. Psychological Science, 12, 197-204.