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  Nick Rule

Former Graduate Student Assistant Professor University of Toronto

rule@psych.utoronto.ca

Department of Psychology
University of Toronto
100 St. George Street
Toronto, Ontario
M5S 3G3

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. Beginning July 1, 2010 I will be Assistant Professor of psychology at the University of Toronto.


Recent Publications

  • 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.

  • 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. [PDF]

  • 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. [PDF]

  • 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. [PDF]

  • 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. [PDF]

  • 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.

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

  • 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.

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

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., Adams, R. B., Jr., Ozono, H., Nakashima, S., Yoshikawa, S., & Watabe, M. (2010). Polling the face: Prediction and consensus across cultures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 98, 1-15. [PDF]

  • 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. (2010). Cross-cultural reading the mind in the eyes: An fMRI investigation. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience. [PDF]

  • Pauker, K., Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2010). Ambiguity and social perception. In E. Balcetis & D. Lassiter (Eds.) Social Psychology of Visual Perception (pp. 13-29). New York: Psychology Press.

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., & Adams, R. B., Jr., (2009). Personality in perspective: Judgmental consistency across orientations of the face. Perception, 38, 1688-1699. [PDF]

  • Rule, N. O., Ambady, N., & Hallett, K. C. (2009). Female sexual orientation is perceived accurately, rapidly, and automatically from the face and its features. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 45, 1245-1251. [PDF]

  • Rule, N. O., & Ambady, N. (2009). She’s got the look: Inferences from female chief executive officers’ faces predict their success. Sex Roles, 61, 644-652. [PDF]

  • 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., & Ambady, N. (2010). Power and dominance: Sensitivity and tuning across cultures. Talk presented as part of the symposium Cultural ladders: Causes and consequences of social hierarchy depend on national and regional culture at the 11th annual meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, Las Vegas, NV.

  • 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, Tampa, FL.

  • 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.