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  Nick Rule

Graduate student

Tufts University
Psychology Department
490 Boston Ave.
Medford, MA 02155

About me
 I received an A.B. from Dartmouth College in 2004 where I double-majored in psychology and linguistics. My research has two primary themes: the study of perceptually ambiguous groups and the accuracy of social perception (see representative publications below). I take a social cognitive neuroscience approach in addressing both lines of work and am particularly interested in diverse methodological and statistical approaches to testing and understanding human behavior. I am currently supported by a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship and my work has been featured in numerous media outlets, including Time, The Economist, USA Today, The Chronicle of Higher Education, ScienceNOW, The Atlantic, The Times (London), The Globe and Mail, The Boston Globe, Scientific American, Details, and the fictional Fox TV show Lie to Me.


Recent Publications

  • Rule, N. O., Freeman, J. B., Moran, J. M., Gabrieli, J. D. E., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Ambady, N. (in press). Voting behavior is reflected in amygdala response across cultures. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.

  • Rule, N. O., Garrett, J. V., & Ambady, N. (in press). Places and faces: Geographic environment influences the ingroup memory advantage. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

  • Adams, R. B. Jr., Franklin, R. G. Jr., Rule, N. O., Freeman, J. B., Kveraga, K., Hadjikhani, N., Yoshikawa, S., & Ambady, N. (in press). Culture, gaze, and the neural processing of fear expressions. Social, Cognitive, and Affective Neuroscience.

  • Freeman, J. B., Rule, N. O., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Ambady, N. (in press). The neural basis of categorical face perception: Graded representations of face gender in fusiform and orbitofrontal cortices. Cerebral Cortex.

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., & Adams, R. B., Jr., (in press). Personality in perspective: Judgmental consistency across orientations of the face. Perception.

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Jr., Ozono, H., Nakashima, S., Yoshikawa, S., & Watabe, M. (in press). Polling the face: Prediction and consensus across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., & Hallett, K. C. (in press). Female sexual orientation is perceived accurately, rapidly, and automatically from the face and its features. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology.

  • Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (in press). She’s got the look: Inferences from female chief executive officers’ faces predict their success. Sex Roles.

  • Freeman, J. B., Schiller, D., Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (in press). The neural origins of superficial and individuated judgments about ingroup and outgroup members. Human Brain Mapping.

  • Rule, N. O., Freeman, J. B., & Ambady, N. (in press). Brain and behavior in cultural context: Insights from cognition, perception, and emotion. In S. Han & E. Poeppel (Eds.), Culture and Identity: Neural frames of social cognition. New York: Springer.

  • Ambady, N., Freeman, J. B., Rule, N. O. (in press). Culture and the neural substrates of behavior, perception, and cognition. In J. Decety & J. Cacioppo (Eds.), The Handbook of Social Neuroscience. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

  • Freeman, J. B., Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (in press). The cultural neuroscience of social perception. Progress in Brain Research.

  • Pauker, K., Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (In press). Ambiguity and social perception. In E. Balcetis & D. Lassiter (Eds.) Social Psychology of Visual Perception.

  • Adams, R. B., Jr., Rule, N. O., Franklin, R. G., Jr., Wang, E. J., Stevenson, M. T., Yoshikawa, S., Nomura, M., Soto, W., Kveraga, K., & Ambady, N. (in press). Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes: An fMRI investigation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience.

  • Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2010). Democrats and Republicans can be differentiated by their faces. PLoS ONE, 5(1): e8733. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0008733. [HTML]

  • Rule, N. O., Macrae, C. N., & Ambady, N. (2009). Ambiguous group membership is extracted automatically from faces. Psychological Science, 20, 441-443. [PDF]

  • Freeman, J. B., Rule, N. O., Adams, R. B., & Ambady, N. (2009). Culture shapes a mesolimbic response to signals of dominance and subordination that associates with behavior. NeuroImage, 47, 353-359. [PDF]

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Macrae, C. N. (2008). Accuracy and awareness in the perception and categorization of male sexual orientation. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 95, 1019-1028.  [PDF]

  • Freeman, J. B., Ambady, N., Rule, N. O., & Johnson, K. L. (2008). Will a category cue attract you? Motor output reveals dynamic competition across person construal. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 137, 673-690. [PDF]

  • Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2008). Brief exposures: Male sexual orientation is accurately perceived at 50 ms. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 44, 1100-1105. [PDF]

  • Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2008). The face of success: Inferences from chief executive officers' appearance predict company profits. Psychological Science, 19, 109-111. [PDF]

  • Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2008). First impressions: Peeking at the neural underpinnings. In N. Ambady & J. Skowronski (Ed.'s). First Impressions (pp. 35-56). New York: Guilford.

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Macrae, C. N. (2007). Us and them: Memory advantages in perceptually ambiguous groups. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14, 687-692 [PDF].

Recent Talks

  • Rule, N. O., Moran, J. M., Freeman, J. B., Whitfield-Gabrieli, S., Gabrieli, J. D. E., & Ambady, N. (2009). Amygdala response reflects the accuracy of first impressions. Paper presented at the 3rd annual meeting of the Social Affective Neuroscience Society, New York, NY.

  • Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N., (2009). Successful snap judgments: Accurate and predictive first impressions from the face. Talk presented as part of the symposium Oh snap! The mental mechanics and accuracy of snap judgments based on physical appearance at the 10th annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology.

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Jr., Ozono, H., Nakashima, S., Yoshikawa, S., & Watabe, M. (2008). Cultural values predict electoral success in the U.S. and Japan. Paper presented as part of the symposium Political Social Psychology (Chair: Nicholas O. Rule) at the Eastern Psychological Association’s annual conference, Boston, MA.

  • Rule, N. O., Schmid, A., Adams, R. B., Jr., Wang, E., & Ambady, N. (2007). A tale of two cultures: First impressions and the brain. Paper presented as part of the symposium "Cultural neuroscience: Culture, neural activation, and perceptions of music, self, and others" at the 19th annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, Washington, D.C.

  • Rule, N. O., Adams, R. B., Jr., & Ambady, N. (2006). Subtle social stigmas. Paper presented as part of the symposium "The social perception of stigma" at the 18th annual meeting of the Association for Psychological Science, New York, NY.