Selection for universal facial emotion

Facial expression is heralded as a communication system common to all human populations, and thus is generally accepted as a biologically based, universal behavior. Happiness, sadness, fear, anger, surprise, and disgust are universally recognized and produced emotions, and communication of these states is deemed essential in order to navigate the social environment. It is puzzling, however, how individuals are capable of producing similar facial expressions when facial musculature is known to vary greatly among individuals. Here, the authors show that although some facial muscles are not present in all individuals, and often exhibit great asymmetry (larger or absent on one side), the facial muscles that are essential in order to produce the universal facial expressions exhibited 100% occurrence and showed minimal gross asymmetry in 18 cadavers. This explains how universal facial expression production is achieved, implies that facial muscles have been selected for essential nonverbal communicative function, and yet also accommodate individual variation.     

Free associations and dominance ratings of homophones for young and older adults.

Homophones are words that share phonology but differ in meaning and spelling (e.g., beach, beech). This article presents the results of normative surveys that asked young and older adults to free associate to and rate the dominance of 197 homophones. Although norms exist for young adults on word familiarity and frequency for homophones, these results supplement the literature by (1) reporting the four most frequent responses to visually presented homophones for both young and older adults, and (2) reporting young and older adults' ratings of homophone dominance. Results indicated that young and older adults gave the same first response to 67% of the homophones and rated homophone dominance similarly on 60% of the homophone sets. These results identify a subset of homophones that are preferable for research with young and older adults because of age-related equivalence in free association and dominance ratings. These norms can be downloaded from the Psychonomic Society's Web archive, www.psychonomic.org/archive/.     

How do holidays influence relationship processes and outcomes? Examining the instigating and catalytic effects of Valentine's Day

Might Valentine's Day, despite its marketing as a holiday to enhance romantic relationships, paradoxically facilitate their demise? Because Valentine's Day provides a useful opportunity for exploring the potential influences of recurring culture‐wide events on relationships, we asked college students in romantic relationships about relationship stability, quality, beliefs, and processes, both 1 week prior to and 1 week after Valentine's Day. As predicted, those participating during the time period straddling Valentine's Day were more likely to break up than were those participating in comparison time periods. This increase in relationship dissolution appeared attributable to the catalyzing effect that Valentine's Day had on moderately strong and weak relationships already on a downward trajectory: These relationships were particularly likely to dissolve during the Valentine's Day period. We view this research as a useful illustration of how to conceptualize and empirically investigate the effects of holidays and other cultural events on relationship dynamics and outcomes.     

What and How of North American Lutheran Preaching

Abstract : This article suggests that an emphasis on how to preach, evidenced in the New Homiletic, can assist preachers in struggling with questions of what to preach. The narrative model of “problem”→“solution”→“what now?” has potential homiletical ties to Law (2^nd use)→ Gospel→ Law (3^rd use) theology. Since preaching 3^rd use of the Law can lead to a kind of works righteousness for hearers of such sermons, strategies are offered for dealing with preaching challenge. Preachers can put challenge before their hearers as a noun rather than as a verb; they can preach challenge as identification or questioning rather than as something hearers must do of their own accord.     

Diverse groups and information sharing: The effects of congruent ties

The impact of congruence between social and knowledge ties on performance in diverse groups was examined. Congruence occurs when group members who are socially tied share the same information and a stranger has any unique information. Incongruence occurs when group members who are socially tied possess different information, and one of them shares information with a stranger. In Experiment 1, three-person groups with congruent social and knowledge ties utilized information more effectively, reported more effective group processes, and outperformed groups with incongruent ties. Experiment 2, which involved four-person groups, examined the role of congruence in groups with either a single minority information holder or two equal-sized subgroups. Congruent groups again outperformed incongruent groups, but this was only true when groups had a minority information holder. There was no difference in the performance of congruent and incongruent groups that had equal-sized subgroups. The implications of these findings for analyses of group composition and decision-making are discussed.     

Transfer of training emotionally biased interpretations

Non‐anxious college students first performed a semantic‐judgement task that was designed to train either threat‐related or threat‐unrelated interpretations of threat‐ambiguous homographs (e.g. mug). Next they performed an ostensibly separate transfer task of constructing personal mental images for single words, in a series that included new, threat‐ambiguous homographs. In two experiments, the number of threat‐related interpretations in the transfer task significantly increased following threat‐related experience during the training phase, compared to other training conditions. We conclude that interpretive biases typically shown by anxious people can be established in non‐anxious students in ways that generalize to novel tasks and materials. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Adults' understanding of inversion concepts: how does performance on addition and subtraction inversion problems compare to performance on multiplication and division inversion problems?

Problems of the form a + b - b have been used to assess conceptual understanding of the relationship between addition and subtraction. No study has investigated the same relationship between multiplication and division on problems of the form d x e / e. In both types of inversion problems, no calculation is required if the inverse relationship between the operations is understood. Adult participants solved addition/subtraction and multiplication/division inversion (e.g., 9 x 22 / 22) and standard (e.g., 2 + 27 - 28) problems. Participants started to use the inversion strategy earlier and more frequently on addition/subtraction problems. Participants took longer to solve both types of multiplication/division problems. Overall, conceptual understanding of the relationship between multiplication and division was not as strong as that between addition and subtraction. One explanation for this difference in performance is that the operation of division is more weakly represented and understood than the other operations and that this weakness affects performance on problems of the form d x e / e.     

Differences in self-reported work ethic across three career stages

Miller and Woehr’s Multidimensional Work Ethic Profile (as described in Miller, Woehr, & Hudspeth, 2002) was used to examine differences in work ethic across career stages. Participants in the trial stage scored significantly higher on the hard work and delay of gratification dimensions, but participants in the stabilization and maintenance stages scored higher on the morality, wasted time, and leisure dimensions. No significant differences were found for centrality or self-reliance. The results provide evidence of the importance of studying work ethic across the lifespan and of the multidimensional nature of the work ethic construct.