Laughter exaggerates happy and sad faces depending on visual context

Laughter is an auditory stimulus that powerfully conveys positive emotion. We investigated how laughter influenced the visual perception of facial expressions. We presented a sound clip of laughter simultaneously with a happy, a neutral, or a sad schematic face. The emotional face was briefly presented either alone or among a crowd of neutral faces. We used a matching method to determine how laughter influenced the perceived intensity of the happy, neutral, and sad expressions. For a single face, laughter increased the perceived intensity of a happy expression. Surprisingly, for a crowd of faces, laughter produced an opposite effect, increasing the perceived intensity of a sad expression in a crowd. A follow-up experiment revealed that this contrast effect may have occurred because laughter made the neutral distractor faces appear slightly happy, thereby making the deviant sad expression stand out in contrast. A control experiment ruled out semantic mediation of the laughter effects. Our demonstration of the strong context dependence of laughter effects on facial expression perception encourages a reexamination of the previously demonstrated effects of prosody, speech content, and mood on face perception, as they may be similarly context dependent.     

Assistive/rehabilitation technology, disability, and service delivery models

The United Nation's Millennium Development Goals do not explicitly articulate a focus on disability; similar failures in the past resulted in research, policy, and practice that are not generalizable and did not meet the needs of persons with disabilities since they were developed for an "average" population. Academics and professionals in health and other disciplines should have a knowledge base in evidence-based practices that improve well-being and participation of people with disabilities through effective service delivery of assistive technology. Grounded by a theoretical framework that incorporates a multivariate perspective of disability that is acknowledged in the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and the World Health Organization's International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health, we present a review of models of assistive technology service delivery and call for future syntheses of the fragmented evidence base that would permit a comparative effectiveness approach to evaluation.     

Comparability of Self‐Reported Conscientiousness Across 21 Countries

In cross‐national studies, mean levels of self‐reported phenomena are often not congruent with more objective criteria. One prominent explanation for such findings is that people make self‐report judgements in relation to culture‐specific standards (often called the reference group effect), thereby undermining the cross‐cultural comparability of the judgements. We employed a simple method called anchoring vignettes in order to test whether people from 21 different countries have varying standards for Conscientiousness, a Big Five personality trait that has repeatedly shown unexpected nation‐level relationships with external criteria. Participants rated their own Conscientiousness and that of 30 hypothetical persons portrayed in short vignettes. The latter type of ratings was expected to reveal individual differences in standards of Conscientiousness. The vignettes were rated relatively similarly in all countries, suggesting no substantial culture‐related differences in standards for Conscientiousness. Controlling for the small differences in standards did not substantially change the rankings of countries on mean self‐ratings or the predictive validities of these rankings for objective criteria. These findings are not consistent with mean self‐rated Conscientiousness scores being influenced by culture‐specific standards. The technique of anchoring vignettes can be used in various types of studies to assess the potentially confounding effects of reference levels. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Salivary concentrations of cortisol and testosterone and prediction of performance in a professional triathlon competition

The aim of this study was to examine salivary cortisol and testosterone concentrations in professional male athletes during a short triathlon competition using non-invasive methods, and to determine whether these hormone concentrations could be accurate predictors of performance. Eight adult male athletes (age, mean ± SEM: 27.8 ± 3.2 years; body mass index: 21.66 ± 0.42) in a professional triathlon team volunteered to participate in this study. Saliva samples were taken on the competition day and 7 days after competition on a rest day. The performance of the athletes was assessed by their rank order in the competition. Salivary cortisol concentrations were greater on the competition day than on the rest day in the early morning, immediately after waking up, 30 min later, immediately before the start of the competition, and later in the evening. Testosterone concentrations were greater on the competition day in the morning and in the evening. The diurnal rhythm of both cortisol and testosterone concentrations was maintained on both days and the testosterone/cortisol ratio (T/C ratio) was similar between days. The performance of the athletes was positively correlated with salivary cortisol concentration in the early morning of the competition day, but was not correlated with testosterone concentrations at any of the time points. In conclusion, early morning salivary cortisol concentration, but not T/C ratio, could be used to predict performance in athletes during a professional triathlon competition.     

Remembering the best and worst of times: Memories for extreme outcomes bias risky decisions

When making decisions on the basis of past experiences, people must rely on their memories. Human memory has many well-known biases, including the tendency to better remember highly salient events. We propose an extreme-outcome rule, whereby this memory bias leads people to overweight the largest gains and largest losses, leading to more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. To test this rule, in two experiments, people repeatedly chose between fixed and risky options, where the risky option led equiprobably to more or less than did the fixed option. As was predicted, people were more risk seeking for relative gains than for relative losses. In subsequent memory tests, people tended to recall the extreme outcome first and also judged the extreme outcome as having occurred more frequently. Across individuals, risk preferences in the risky-choice task correlated with these memory biases. This extreme-outcome rule presents a novel mechanism through which memory influences decision making.     

Not using the obvious: desert ants, Melophorus bagoti, learn local vectors but not beacons in an arena

Many ant species travel large distances to find food, sometimes covering distances that are up to one million times their body length. Even when these foraging trips follow convoluted paths, the ants usually find their way back to their nest with precision (Wehner et al. in J Exp Biol 199:129–140, 1996). Ants have been shown to use both compass cues in the sky (pattern of polarised light) and landmarks on Earth to return to their nest. We present two experiments conducted on a solitary foraging ant: Melophorus bagoti in their natural habitat in the central Australian desert. Ants were trained and tested in situ. We tested foragers’ ability to exit a circular arena which provided an undifferentiated panorama. Artificial visual landmarks were located near a small exit. On tests in which path integration information was not available, foragers did not use artificial landmarks as beacons. Instead, they oriented in the learned exit direction, whether or not it pointed to the nest. We suggest that M. bagoti foragers learned a context-specific local vector when cued by the context of the circular arena. Our findings present the first evidence that M. bagoti foragers learn context-specific compass directions to chart their initial path home.     

Reorientation in diamond-shaped environments: encoding of features and angles in enclosures versus arrays by adult humans and pigeons (Columbia livia)

Although geometric reorientation has been extensively studied in numerous species, most research has been conducted in enclosed environments and has focused on use of the geometric property of relative wall length. The current studies investigated how angular information is used by adult humans and pigeons to orient and find a goal in enclosures or arrays that did not provide relative wall length information. In enclosed conditions, the angles formed a diamond shape connected by walls, whereas in array conditions, free-standing angles defined the diamond shape. Adult humans and pigeons were trained to locate two geometrically equivalent corners, either the 60° or 120° angles. Blue feature panels were located in the goal corners so that participants could use either the features or the local angular information to orient. Subsequent tests in manipulated environments isolated the individual cues from training or placed them in conflict with one another. In both enclosed and array environments, humans and pigeons were able to orient when either the angles or the features from training were removed. On conflict tests, female, but not male, adult humans weighted features more heavily than angular geometry. For pigeons, angles were weighted more heavily than features for birds that were trained to go to acute corners, but no difference in weighting was seen for birds trained to go to obtuse corners. These conflict test results were not affected by environment type. A subsequent test with pigeons ruled out an interpretation based on exclusive use of a principal axis rather than angle. Overall, the results indicate that, for both adult humans and pigeons, angular amplitude is a salient orientation cue in both enclosures and arrays of free-standing angles.     

Evolving Development: An Evolutionary Perspective on Development for an Interconnected World

The notion of development has been permeated by concepts and methods from positivistic science. As a result, many development initiatives are reductionistic, myopic, and with little or impact on the improvement of the quality of life and the sustainability of communities and societies. This article marks the beginning of a transdisciplinary inquiry among the authors, motivated by direct interest in the issue of development, per se, and in particular, Mexico's development. Our inquiry departs from and weaves together our various areas of expertise and experience, including: systems theory, general evolution theory, economic development, technology transfer, social innovation, sustainable development, environmental behavior, social systems design, and education. The article reviews the concept of development from an evolutionary and systemic perspective. It outlines the foundations of evolutionary development in terms of theory, philosophy, and methodology and provides a conceptual framework for future research aimed at the articulation of a practical model for evolutionary development.     

General or specific? The memory–experience gap for individuals diagnosed with a major depressive disorder or a social phobia diagnosis,and individuals without such diagnoses

ABSTRACT

Psychological treatment and assessment necessarily rely on patients’ recall. Yet several empirical studies have documented a gap between memory and real-life experience (i.e., memory–experience gap; MeG). We investigated and compared the MeG of sadness, social anxiety, happiness, and physical activity for participants diagnosed with a major depressive disorder (MDD), a social phobia (SP), and participants without such diagnoses (CG). The study included 118 participants diagnosed with a MDD, 47 with a SP, and 119 CG. Using event-sampling methods (ESM), participants were asked via smartphone to report their experiences throughout a week and then to recall those again retrospectively at the end of the study week. Results indicate significant differences in the MeG with respect to the experience that was salient to them (e.g., MDD group – sadness; SP group – social anxiety; CG group – happiness). Furthermore, all groups showed a MeG for physical activity and, the results indicate significant group differences in the magnitude of the MeGs.

This study demonstrated the presence of a MeG in individuals in a MDD, SP, and CG group and in positive and negative affective experiences. Differential patterns across the samples contribute to a better understanding of this gap and its implications.