A neuroscience approach to social status perception and health

Abstract

Neuroimaging can provide useful insights into how we perceive social status and the consequences of social status for how we pay attention to and evaluate people. My research focuses on the ways that social status influences social cognition and health using a multi-method approach that includes neuroimaging, geolocation tracking, ecological momentary assessments (EMA), and physiological data. Drawing on my social neuroscience framework for the study of social status, one branch of my research examines how social status shapes our evaluations and how these evaluations intersect with attributes like race and gender. In a second branch of my research, I draw from my social neuroscience framework to explore the psychological and environmental mechanisms underlying the status-health gradient—the tendency for graded increases in health to track with increasing status. To illustrate this approach, I present findings from an ongoing project that uses geolocation tracking and EMA to predict smoking frequency from the interaction of intraday poverty exposure and negative mood states. To conclude, I discuss future directions in this project and other proposals for investigating the influences of status hierarchies on person perception and health.