Nice or smart? Task relevance of self-characteristics moderates interpersonal projection

Two studies investigated the impact of trait relevance to a specific task on people's projection of their characteristics onto a cooperative partner. We either measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2) the relevance of a trait to a specific cooperative task. In both studies, participants first rated themselves on a list of traits. Then they imagined completing a cooperative task with an unknown partner. Finally, they rated the partner on the same list of traits. In Study 1, we found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings and the idiosyncratic measure of trait relevance. In Study 2, participants rated the self and the partner on competence and warmth traits while completing an intellectual or a social task. We found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings more on competence than on warmth in the intellectual task, but more on warmth than on competence in the social task. These results suggest that people project onto others in a way that maximizes their chances to succeed in cooperation.     

Effects of emotion concepts on perceptual memory for emotional expressions

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that explaining emotional expressions using specific emotion concepts at encoding biases perceptual memory for those expressions. In Experiment 1, participants viewed faces expressing blends of happiness and anger and created explanations of why the target people were expressing one of the two emotions, according to concepts provided by the experimenter. Later, participants attempted to identify the facial expressions in computer movies, in which the previously seen faces changed continuously from anger to happiness. Faces conceptualized in terms of anger were remembered as angrier than the same faces conceptualized in terms of happiness, regardless of whether the explanations were told aloud or imagined. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that explanation is necessary for the conceptual biases to emerge fully and extended the finding to anger-sad expressions, an emotion blend more common in real life.     

Task framing and perceived fit: The role of personality,task label,and partner involvement

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that individual differences in social connectedness moderate the association between task frame and perceptions of the task. In experiment 1, 75 participants completed an assessment of relational self-construal prior to engaging in an interview with a partner. Participants then received an explanation that the interview enhanced either relationship skills or occupational skills. Results indicated that high relationals perceived their partner more favorably when the task was framed as relational then when it was framed as occupational. In experiment 2, 185 participants completed self-construal and agreeableness assessments before completing an interview task with or without a partner. Participants then received relational or occupational explanations for the task. The results replicated the findings among high relationals, and also showed that agreeable individuals responded positively when they engaged in a relationally framed interview with a partner. Implications for person–environment fit theory are discussed.     

个体攻击性对愤怒表情类别知觉的影响

探讨了个体攻击性对愤怒表情加工中反应偏向和敏感性的影响。使用愤怒、恐惧原型生成表情连续体作为实验材料, 采用类别知觉实验范式考察了高、低攻击个体识别和辨别愤怒-恐惧连续体的类别转折点和斜率。结果发现, 与低攻击个体相比, 高攻击个体识别愤怒-恐惧连续体类别界线处的曲线斜率更大; 高攻击个体具有类别界线向恐惧一端偏移的倾向, 但并没有达到统计显著。这表明, 高攻击个体不存在敌意归因偏向, 而是对愤怒和恐惧表情的转变具有更高的敏感性。     

我会在谁面前舍弃利益?——博弈对象的能力与社会距离对名利博弈倾向的影响

通过构造虚拟的捐献情境及贸易情境,结合博弈任务,以大学生为被试探讨了名利博弈对象的能力和社会距离对名利博弈中博弈者的博弈行为倾向的影响。结果表明,在捐献情境下,被试在高能力的名利博弈对象面前比在低能力的名利博弈对象面前更倾向于做出接近自己半数报酬的捐献行为,牺牲利益以获取好名声。在贸易情境下存在名利博弈对象的能力与社会距离的交互作用,被试仅在面对低能力的名利博弈对象时会考虑社会距离因素,在社会距离近的名利博弈对象面前比在社会距离远的名利博弈对象面前提出更低的售价,牺牲自己的利益以获得好名声。研究结果初步证实名利博弈对象能力与社会距离对名利博弈具有重要影响以及个体在名利博弈中具有策略性。     

预期想象对拖延的影响:想象过程和想象结果的效应分离

摘要 为了考察预期想象对不同拖延水平个体拖延行为的影响,本研究采用一般拖延量表(General Procrastination Scale)选取高拖延被试和低拖延被试,要求被试在进行模拟现实的拖延任务之前分别对任务过程和任务结果进行预期想象,比较不同拖延水平的被试在预期想象作用下拖延行为的变化。结果表明：(1)在两组被试中,相比于无想象条件下的拖延行为,对任务过程的预期想象增强拖延行为,对任务结果的预期想象削弱拖延行为;(2)对任务不同成分的预期想象所引发的情绪与拖延行为的变化相关显著。这说明情绪和预期想象是影响拖延的重要因素,合理地操纵对任务不同成分的预期想象可以有效干预拖延行为。     

Perceiving emotions: Cueing social categorization processes and attentional control through facial expressions

Individuals spontaneously categorise other people on the basis of their gender, ethnicity and age. But what about the emotions they express? In two studies we tested the hypothesis that facial expressions are similar to other social categories in that they can function as contextual cues to control attention. In Experiment 1 we associated expressions of anger and happiness with specific proportions of congruent/incongruent flanker trials. We also created consistent and inconsistent category members within each of these two general contexts. The results demonstrated that participants exhibited a larger congruency effect when presented with faces in the emotional group associated with a high proportion of congruent trials. Notably, this effect transferred to inconsistent members of the group. In Experiment 2 we replicated the effects with faces depicting true and false smiles. Together these findings provide consistent evidence that individuals spontaneously utilise emotions to categorise others and that such categories determine the allocation of attentional control.     

社交焦虑个体对正性面孔刺激的解释偏差

本研究分别在短时（60ms）和长时（无时间限制）条件下呈现匹配的正性和中性面孔,要求高、低社交焦虑被试选择更具威胁性的面孔,以验证两者对正性刺激是否存在主观解释偏差,并考察该偏差产生于认知加工的哪一阶段。结果发现,长时条件下,高焦虑组选择正性面孔的比例显著高于低焦虑组;短时条件下无显著差异。提示高社交焦虑个体对正性刺激存在主观、外显的解释偏差,他们更倾向于对正性刺激做出消极解释,并且这种偏差产生于认知加工的后期。     

Get mad and get more than even: When and why anger expression is effective in negotiations

We hypothesized that anger expressions increase expressers’ ability to claim value in negotiations, but only when the recipients of these expressions have poor alternatives. This effect occurs because anger expression communicates toughness, and only recipients who have poor alternatives are affected by the toughness of their counterpart. In Experiment 1, participants read a scenario about a negotiator who either was angry or not. In Experiment 2, dyads negotiated face-to-face after one negotiator within each dyad was advised to show either anger or no emotion. In both studies, recipients of anger expressions who had poor alternatives conceded more. Experiment 2 also provided evidence that toughness ascribed to the expresser mediated the effect of anger expression on claiming value.     

Bursting with anxiety: adult social referencing in an interpersonal balloon analogue risk task (BART)

This study developed an interpersonal modification of the balloon analogue risk task (BART) to assess effects of a friend's real-time facial expressions on coparticipants' risk-taking. Twenty pairs of male friends and 20 pairs of female friends completed two counterbalanced versions of BART, one framed in terms of monetary gain, and the other framed in terms of avoiding loss. Each pair included a player who performed the task across both trials and a reference person in a separate cubicle connected via a soundless video link. In the suppression condition, reference persons were told to minimize facial expressions of anxiety as balloons inflated. In the expression condition, they were told to freely express anxiety. As predicted, players took greater risks and burst more balloons in the suppression condition, but only under the gain frame. Players' BART scores across both frames were also significantly negatively correlated with reference persons' scores on a questionnaire measure of dispositional expressivity (BEQ), confirming that other people's expressions can moderate one's own risk-taking.     

Social influence on metacognitive evaluations: The power of nonverbal cues

Metacognitive evaluations refer to the processes by which people assess their own cognitive operations with respect to their current goal. Little is known about whether this process is susceptible to social influence. Here we investigate whether nonverbal social signals spontaneously influence metacognitive evaluations. Participants performed a two-alternative forced-choice task, which was followed by a face randomly gazing towards or away from the response chosen by the participant. Participants then provided a metacognitive evaluation of their response by rating their confidence in their answer. In Experiment 1, the participants were told that the gaze direction was irrelevant to the task purpose and were advised to ignore it. The results revealed an effect of implicit social information on confidence ratings even though the gaze direction was random and therefore unreliable for task purposes. In addition, nonsocial cues (car) did not elicit this effect. In Experiment 2, the participants were led to believe that cue direction (face or car) reflected a previous participant's response to the same question—that is, the social information provided by the cue was made explicit, yet still objectively unreliable for the task. The results showed a similar social influence on confidence ratings, observed with both cues (car and face) but with an increased magnitude relative to Experiment 1. We additionally showed in Experiment 2 that social information impaired metacognitive accuracy. Together our results strongly suggest an involuntary susceptibility of metacognitive evaluations to nonverbal social information, even when it is implicit (Experiment 1) and unreliable (Experiments 1 and 2).     

Attentional biases for angry faces: Relationships to trait anger and anxiety

In two experiments selective attention to angry faces was investigated in relation to trait anger and anxiety. A pictorial emotional Stroop task comparing colour-naming latencies for neutral and angry faces was employed. In Experiment 1 using an unmasked task, individuals scoring high on trait anger showed an attentional bias for angry faces. In Experiment 2, unmasked and masked versions of the task were used. Individuals were selected on low and high trait anxiety, but there was no indication of a relation between attentional bias scores and anxiety. When individuals were subsequently reallocated to groups on the basis of trait anger scores, the high anger group showed an attentional bias for angry faces in the unmasked and the masked task. Results are discussed in relation to recent neurobiological findings from our laboratory, as reflecting an evolutionary-evolved, content-specific response to the facial expression of anger.     

Interoceptive sensitivity predicts sensitivity to the emotions of others

Some theories of emotion emphasise a close relationship between interoception and subjective experiences of emotion. In this study, we used facial expressions to examine whether interoceptive sensibility modulated emotional experience in a social context. Interoceptive sensibility was measured using the heartbeat detection task. To estimate individual emotional sensitivity, we made morphed photos that ranged between a neutral and an emotional facial expression (i.e., anger, sadness, disgust and happy). Recognition rates of particular emotions from these photos were calculated and considered as emotional sensitivity thresholds. Our results indicate that participants with accurate interoceptive awareness are sensitive to the emotions of others, especially for expressions of sadness and happy. We also found that false responses to sad faces were closely related with an individual's degree of social anxiety. These results suggest that interoceptive awareness modulates the intensity of the subjective experience of emotion and affects individual traits related to emotion processing.     

Social justifications for moral emotions: when reasons for disgust are less elaborated than for anger

In the present research, we tested the unreasoning disgust hypothesis: moral disgust, in particular in response to a violation of a bodily norm, is less likely than moral anger to be justified with cognitively elaborated reasons. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to explain why they felt anger and disgust toward pedophiles. Participants were more likely to invoke elaborated reasons, versus merely evaluative responses, when explaining their anger, versus disgust. Experiment 2 used a between-participants design; participants explained why they felt either anger or disgust toward seven groups that either violated a sexual or nonsexual norm. Again, elaborated reasons were less prevalent when explaining their disgust versus anger and, in particular, when explaining disgust toward a group that violated a sexual norm. Experiment 3 further established that these findings are due to a lower accessibility of elaborated reasons for bodily disgust, rather than inhibition in using them when provided. From these findings, it can be concluded that communicating external reasons for moral disgust at bodily violations is made more difficult due to the unavailability of those reasons to people.     

Social appraisal influences recognition of emotions

The notion of social appraisal emphasizes the importance of a social dimension in appraisal theories of emotion by proposing that the way an individual appraises an event is influenced by the way other individuals appraise and feel about the same event. This study directly tested this proposal by asking participants to recognize dynamic facial expressions of emotion (fear, happiness, or anger in Experiment 1; fear, happiness, anger, or neutral in Experiment 2) in a target face presented at the center of a screen while a contextual face, which appeared simultaneously in the periphery of the screen, expressed an emotion (fear, happiness, anger) or not (neutral) and either looked at the target face or not. We manipulated gaze direction to be able to distinguish between a mere contextual effect (gaze away from both the target face and the participant) and a specific social appraisal effect (gaze toward the target face). Results of both experiments provided evidence for a social appraisal effect in emotion recognition, which differed from the mere effect of contextual information: Whereas facial expressions were identical in both conditions, the direction of the gaze of the contextual face influenced emotion recognition. Social appraisal facilitated the recognition of anger, happiness, and fear when the contextual face expressed the same emotion. This facilitation was stronger than the mere contextual effect. Social appraisal also allowed better recognition of fear when the contextual face expressed anger and better recognition of anger when the contextual face expressed fear.     

Telling faces together: Learning new faces through exposure to multiple instances

We are usually able to recognize novel instances of familiar faces with little difficulty, yet recognition of unfamiliar faces can be dramatically impaired by natural within-person variability in appearance. In a card-sorting task for facial identity, different photos of the same unfamiliar face are often seen as different people. Here we report two card-sorting experiments in which we manipulate whether participants know the number of identities present. Without constraints, participants sort faces into many identities. However, when told the number of identities present, they are highly accurate. This minimal contextual information appears to support viewers in “telling faces together”. In Experiment 2 we show that exposure to within-person variability in the sorting task improves performance in a subsequent face-matching task. This appears to offer a fast route to learning generalizable representations of new faces.     

Identification of emotional facial expressions among behaviorally inhibited adolescents with lifetime anxiety disorders

The current study examined differences in emotion expression identification between adolescents characterised with behavioural inhibition (BI) in childhood with and without a lifetime history of anxiety disorder. Participants were originally assessed for BI during toddlerhood and for social reticence during childhood. During adolescence, participants returned to the laboratory and completed a facial emotion identification task and a clinical psychiatric interview. Results revealed that behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of anxiety disorder displayed a lower threshold for identifying fear relative to anger emotion expressions compared to non-anxious behaviorally inhibited adolescents and non-inhibited adolescents with or without anxiety. These findings were specific to behaviorally inhibited adolescents with a lifetime history of social anxiety disorder. Thus, adolescents with a history of both BI and anxiety, specifically social anxiety, are more likely to differ from other adolescents in their identification of fearful facial expressions. This offers further evidence that perturbations in the processing of emotional stimuli may underlie the aetiology of anxiety disorders.     

The automaticity of emotional face-context integration

Recent studies have demonstrated that context can dramatically influence the recognition of basic facial expressions, yet the nature of this phenomenon is largely unknown. In the present paper we begin to characterize the underlying process of face-context integration. Specifically, we examine whether it is a relatively controlled or automatic process. In Experiment 1 participants were motivated and instructed to avoid using the context while categorizing contextualized facial expression, or they were led to believe that the context was irrelevant. Nevertheless, they were unable to disregard the context, which exerted a strong effect on their emotion recognition. In Experiment 2, participants categorized contextualized facial expressions while engaged in a concurrent working memory task. Despite the load, the context exerted a strong influence on their recognition of facial expressions. These results suggest that facial expressions and their body contexts are integrated in an unintentional, uncontrollable, and relatively effortless manner.     

Depression impairs the ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions: Evidence from the Garner task

We assessed dysphoric and clinically distressed individuals' ability to ignore the emotional aspects of facial expressions using the Garner speeded‐classification task. Garner's paradigm tests the ability to selectively focus on a single relevant dimension while ignoring variations on other, irrelevant, ones. In the present task, the stimuli were faces of men and women expressing happy, angry, and neutral emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, dysphoric and nondysphoric participants performed the Garner task, focusing on gender and ignoring emotion (Experiment 1) and focusing on emotion and ignoring gender (Experiment 2). Results suggest that dysphoric individuals exhibited more difficulty ignoring the emotional dimension of social stimuli even under specific instructions to do so than nondysphoric individuals. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated these results in clinically distressed and nondistressed individuals. The results of Experiment 3 further suggested that depression was more closely associated with the inability to selectively ignore emotion than was social anxiety. Experiment 4 confirmed that this failure of selective attention was specific to processing emotional, and not gender features. The implications of these findings for cognitive and interpersonal theories of depression are discussed.     

Social anxiety and attentional biases: A top-down contribution?

Selective attention toward threatening facial expressions has been found to precipitate and maintain symptoms of social anxiety. However, the automaticity of this bias is under debate. In the present study, we aimed to test whether top-down (controlled) engagement and disengagement of attention toward threatening faces is associated with social anxiety. This was examined by testing the impact of a secondary working memory (WM) load on attentional biases. In a variation of the dot-probe task, participants’ attention was initially cued to the left or right of fixation before an upright face paired with an inverted face was presented (displaying a disgust or neutral expression), and participants responded to a subsequently presented probe. The task was performed under no-load, low-load (one-digit memory task), and high-load (six-digit memory task) conditions. Social anxiety was not found to be associated with delayed disengagement from threat. However, surprisingly, high social anxiety was associated with an engagement bias away from threat, whereas low social anxiety was associated with a bias toward threat. These results were unaffected by the WM load manipulation. This indicates that engagement with threatening facial expressions has minimal contributions from top-down mechanisms, since it is likely that orienting to facial expressions occurs relatively automatically.