Implicit attitudes are defined as unconscious and inaccessible object evaluations. For decades, researchers have sought to explore and understand implicit attitudes and uncover them in individuals, and identify the role implicit biases play in behavior. The purpose of this review article is to examine information on the five most commonly used measures of implicit attitudes: The Implicit Association Test (IAT), The Extrinsic Affective Simon Task (EAST), the Go/No-Go Association Task (GNAT), the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), and the Evaluative and Semantic Priming Tasks (Greenwald, et al., 1998; De Houwer, 2003; Nosek & Banaji, 2001; Payne et al., 2005). This article will review each instrument, their psychometrics external validity, internal validity, and examine how they measure implicit attitudes. In examining these measures, this article will highlight the role internalized cultural norms, classically conditioned defaults, and priming play in implicit attitudes. How do these roles affect the validity and usefulness of popular measures of implicit attitudes? The intention of this article is to compile a comprehensive and accessible research review on the measures and methodology associated with implicit attitudes, as well as the greater social implications of internalized cultural norms and the role society plays in creating and instilling those norms in individuals. Understanding implicit attitudes and their role in behavior can help society be more conscientious about the norms and conditioning inadvertently affecting individual attitudes and behavior.

Emotions have a powerful influence on memory formation. We know that aspects of memory, including how and where in the brain they are formed, can differ depending on the valence of the stimuli. It is theorized that emotional events and experiences tend to be remembered with greater clarity and detail in comparison to unemotional events or neutral experiences. Over the past decade there has been a growing interest in understanding the brain mechanisms associated with the formation of emotional memories. When emotionally arousing stimuli are encountered, the interpretation and significance of that emotional experience influences the neural activity and interactions of different memory regions within in brain. Research studies using fMRI data have been used to identify the neural correlates of emotional memory encoding. The majority of these fMRI studies have provided evidence that there is consistent functional interactions between the amygdala and prefrontal medial temporal lobe structures, which includes the hippocampus. These two systems appear to be responsible for the formation and storage of emotional memories. This meta-analysis aims to identify how emotion influences memory encoding and consolidation, and the brain regions that are associated with emotional memory formation. It also aims to distinguish the contributions of each identified region and structure. It is anticipated that this research and future research of emotional memory could provide insight regarding the neural structures that regulate emotions, which could aid in the development of more effective strategies for psychological interventions and treatments for individuals who have experienced emotionally traumatic events.

Social hierarchies are organizational structures established in human and non-human primate societies. These structures help provide a framework for the group’s survival by distributing responsibilities based on social rank. It is important, therefore, to understand how social rank affects decision-making. As previous research affirms, male viewer monkeys are willing to sacrifice a food reward to view a higher status conspecific. Additionally, a visual-paired comparison (VPC) task found that monkeys, as well as humans, show a preference for conspecific novel faces over their familiar counterparts. The goal of my study is to determine whether a rhesus macaque prioritizes social rank over novelty while performing a VPC task with stimuli of conspecific novel faces. For the VPC task, we generated multiple virtual social hierarchies among four individuals aligned along a strict linear social dominance designated as Alpha, Beta, Gamma, and Omega. Social rank prioritization will be quantitatively measured using eye movement of the viewer monkeys. We focus on two measurements in the VPC task: (1) errors of choosing the familiar over the novel and (2) reaction time when deciding between familiar and novel. If the subjects make more errors when the familiar monkey is dominant, we will conclude that the preference for looking at the dominant individual supersedes novelty preference. Also, if the reaction time is longer during error trials when the dominant familiar monkey is chosen over the subordinate novel monkey, we will conclude that the subject experiences a conflict between these two imperatives of allocating visual attention.