Touch attitudes in cross‐sex friendships: We're just friends

Results from this survey indicated that within heterosexual cross‐sex friendships, perceptions of friendship intimacy for females were more strongly tied to their positive attitudes toward: enacting and receiving more touch, enacting and receiving more safe haven (e.g., caretaking) touch, and perceiving touch as more sexually arousing, when compared to males. Females were more motivated not to touch their cross‐sex friends in public regardless of intimacy perceptions and did not positively perceive safe haven touch if they did not have a romantic partner. It is argued that males' and females' attitudes toward touch in cross‐sex friendships diverge due to evolved differences related to parental investment and the manner in which they are socialized to perceive their roles in cross‐sex friendships.     

“COME TO THINK OF IT…”

In Phase 1 of this study, communicators responded truthfully or deceptively to positive or negative interrogative probes. In Phase 2, the interviews were shown, at four levels of probe exposure, to observers who rated the communicators' eracity. In Phase 3, verbal and nonverbal cues were correlated with actual and perceived deception. Although exposure level had no effect on detection accuracy, liars and trulhtellers exposed to negative interrogative probes were judged more truthful than those exposed to positive probes. Analysis of the verbal and nonverbal cues revealed that none of the nonverbal cues relied on as indicators of deception were related to actual deception, and only one of the verbal cues (verbal content) was related to actual message veracity. Implications of these findings and suggestions for future research are offered.