The other-species effect in human perceptions of sexual dimorphism using human and macaque faces

Humans are better able to discriminate among human faces than faces of other species. This difference in perceptual discrimination is known as the “other-species effect”. Models of perception have posited that the ultimate functional significance of the other-species effect is a higher discrimination capability within an organism's most familiar and salient stimulus set while attenuating the ability to discriminate amongst unfamiliar stimuli. Here, human participants made masculinity judgements of human and macaque faces manipulated based on either human or macaque sexual dimorphism. Humans were more accurate at identifying masculine/feminine faces in species-congruent than species-incongruent transforms in both human and macaque faces. We observed an other-species effect whereby accuracy (correctly judging masculinized faces as more masculine) was highest for own-species faces. We also found that both men and women were better at judging the sex-typicality of male faces than female faces, regardless of the species of the face or the species of the manipulation. Our findings demonstrate an other-species effect for the perception of sex-typicality among human raters.     

More Than Happy to Help? Customer‐Focused Emotion Management Strategies

This paper investigates the impact of customer service representative (CSR) customer‐focused emotion management strategies on expressed customer emotions, beyond the influences of emotional contagion. We propose that problem‐focused strategies (situation modification and cognitive change) are likely to reduce the intensity of negative customer emotions and increase the intensity of positive customer emotions, whereas emotion‐focused strategies (attentional deployment and modulating the emotional response) will have the opposite impact. Further, we propose that customer negative emotions will affect the choice of strategies CSRs employ. Based on evaluator ratings of recorded customer service calls (N= 228), our findings confirmed the positive effects of problem‐focused strategies and the negative effects of emotion‐focused strategies on customer‐expressed emotions. In addition, we found that initial customer emotions affected the strategy used by the CSR, whereby negative emotions expressed by the customer reduced the use of the most effective strategy and increased the use of the least effective strategy.     

Rethinking the Comparative Study of Religious Ethics

This essay describes the author's change of approach to the comparative study of religious ethics from the one contained in a book on the subject (with Sumner B. Twiss), published in 1978. The change resulted from interactions with Abdulaziz Sachedina, the noted scholar of Islam, demonstrating the importance of comparing different ethical systems in reference to global topics like human rights, particularly the right to freedom of conscience.     

Defeasibility And The Normative Grasp Of Context

In this article, we present an analysis of defeasible generalizations – generalizations which are essentially exception-laden, yet genuinely explanatory – in terms of various notions of privileged conditions. We argue that any plausible epistemology must make essential use of defeasible generalizations so understood. We also consider the epistemic significance of the sort of understanding of context that is required for understanding of explanatory defeasible generalizations on any topic.     

Statistical analyses of the resilience function

The extent to which distracting information influences decisions can be informative about the nature of the underlying cognitive and perceptual processes. In a recent paper, a response time-based measure for quantifying the degree of interference (or facilitation) from distracting information termed resilience was introduced. Despite using a statistical measure, the analysis was limited to qualitative comparisons between different model predictions. In this paper, we demonstrate how statistical procedures from workload capacity analysis can be applied to the new resilience functions. In particular, we present an approach to null-hypothesis testing of resilience functions and a method based on functional principal components analysis for analyzing differences in the functional form of the resilience functions across participants and conditions.     

Influences of children's and adolescents' action-control processes on school achievement, peer relationships, and coping with challenging life events

Self-regulation represents a core aspect of human functioning that influences positive development across the life span. This chapter focuses on the action-control model, a key facet of self-regulation during childhood and early adolescence. The authors discuss the development of action-control beliefs, paying particular attention to their relationship to indices of positive development. They then discuss how linking the action-control model with other theories of self-regulation can inform our understanding of self-regulation across the life span.     

Heterosexual romantic couples mate assortatively for facial symmetry, but not masculinity

Preferences for partners with symmetric and sex-typical faces are well documented and considered evidence for the good-genes theory of mate choice. However, it is unclear whether preferences for these traits drive the real-world selection of mates. In two samples of young heterosexual couples from the United Kingdom (Study 1) and the United States (Study 2), the authors found assortment for facial symmetry but not for sex typicality or independently rated attractiveness. Within-couple similarity in these traits did not predict relationship duration or quality, although female attractiveness and relationship duration were negatively correlated among couples in which the woman was the more attractive partner. The authors conclude that humans may mate assortatively on facial symmetry, but this remains just one of the many physical and nonphysical traits to which people likely attend when forming romantic partnerships. This is also the first evidence that preferences for symmetry transfer from the laboratory to a real-world setting.     

Accuracy in assessment of self-reported stress and a measure of health from static facial information

The human face is important for social communication and in attractiveness judgements. Previous studies indicate that several facial traits may be related to mental and physical health and there is some evidence that individuals are able to judge past health on the basis of facial appearance. The current study builds on this prior work, examining the relationship between static facial appearance and self-reported stress and health. Specifically, we examined (1) within and between individual stress (Study 1) by photographing the same participants at two times, once in a relatively stress free and once in a stressful time, and (2) between individual health (Studies 2A and 2B) by examining self-reported past number of colds as a measure of immune function. All studies demonstrated that individuals could judge the stress and physical health of others from static facial appearance alone at rates greater than chance. Such accuracy may reflect selection pressures to identify stress free and healthy social partners.