Is False Belief Skin-Deep? The Agent's Eye Status Influences Infants' Reasoning in Belief-Inducing Situations

Two experiments were conducted to determine if infants attribute false beliefs to others when tested with the violation-of-expectancy procedure. In Experiment 1, the false-belief task was administered to 14- and 18-month-old infants. The procedure was identical to the one used by Onishi and Baillargeon (2005 Onishi , K. H. , & Baillargeon , R. ( 2005 ). Do 15-month-old infants understand false beliefs? Science , 308 , 255 – 258 . doi: 10.1126/science.1107621 [Crossref], [PubMed], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]), except that two transparent boxes replaced the opaque boxes. Results revealed that infants looked longer when the agent searched in the empty box, a pattern of looking time opposite to the one typically observed with opaque boxes. It is, however, unclear whether infants' behavior was simply guided by their own visual access to the toy's location visible through the transparent box. To test this alternative explanation, Experiment 2 was conducted with 14- and 18-month-old infants. Infants were administered the same modified nonverbal false-belief task with transparent boxes, except that the agent wore a blindfold during the test phase. Contrary to Experiment 1, results revealed that infants were not surprised when the agent searched in either of the two transparent boxes and therefore appeared to treat her as ignorant. These findings demonstrate that infants' psychological reasoning system is more rigid than later forms when predicting an agent's future actions.     

Frame-differencing methods for measuring bodily synchrony in conversation

The study of interpersonal synchrony examines how interacting individuals grow to have similar behavior, cognition, and emotion in time. Many of the established methods of analyzing interpersonal synchrony are costly and time-consuming; the study of bodily synchrony has been especially laborious, traditionally requiring researchers to hand-code movement frame by frame. Because of this, researchers have been searching for more efficient alternatives for decades. Recently, some researchers (e.g., Nagaoka & Komori (IEICE Transactions on Information and Systems, 91(6), 1634–1640, 2008); Ramseyer & Tschacher, 2008) have applied computer science and computer vision techniques to create frame-differencing methods (FDMs) to simplify analyses. In this article, we provide a detailed presentation of one such FDM, created by modifying and adding to existing FDMs. The FDM that we present requires little programming experience or specialized equipment: Only a few lines of MATLAB code are required to execute an automated analysis of interpersonal synchrony. We provide sample code and demonstrate its use with an analysis of brief, friendly conversations; using linear mixed-effects models, the measure of interpersonal synchrony was found to be significantly predicted by time lag (p < .001) and by the interaction between time lag and measures of interpersonal liking (p < .001). This pattern of results fits with existing literature on synchrony. We discuss the current limitations and future directions for FDMs, including their use as part of a larger methodology for capturing and analyzing multimodal interaction.     

Long-term gaze cueing effects: Evidence for retrieval of prior states of attention from memory

When people observe other individuals shift gaze to a particular location, the observer's attention automatically and rapidly shifts to the same location. Initial studies provided evidence in support of the idea that such gaze-evoked shifts of attention were transient, no longer being observed after about 1000 ms. However, in contrast to the idea that gaze shifts of attention are transitory, the current work suggests that under certain conditions long-term gaze cueing effects can be detected over a period of 3 minutes. We propose that attention states that are activated when encoding an object such as a face can be retrieved from memory when the face is re-encountered some minutes later.     

The roles of leader emotion management and team conflict for team members' personal initiative: A multilevel perspective

Employees' personal initiative (i.e., their active and future-oriented engagement at work) is of high relevance to organizations that strive for innovation and competitiveness. To better understand its drivers and diminishers, the present study refers to Affective Events Theory and examines the impact of leader emotion management, team conflict, and affective well-being on personal initiative. Data from 300 members of 59 work teams in Germany were gathered from multiple sources at three points in time over the course of 2 weeks. Multilevel analyses indicated that leader emotion management positively affected team members' personal initiative and that this effect was mediated by team members' affective well-being. Data also revealed a contrasting negative indirect effect of task conflict within the team on team members' personal initiative via team members' affective well-being. The study's results suggest that the improvement of leaders' emotion management as well as the establishment of work conditions and experiences that foster affective well-being should be seriously considered by organizations wishing to facilitate personal initiative in team settings.     

Relational aggression in college students: Examining the roles of social anxiety and empathy

This study examined the unique contributions of social anxiety and empathy to relational aggression in 300 19–to–25–year–old (M=21.25; SD=1.32) male (n=97) and female (n=203) college students using hierarchical linear regression analysis. The interactive relations between gender and social anxiety, and between gender and empathy, were also assessed. In addition to the gender and overt aggression covariates, fear of negative evaluation and perspective taking were unique predictors of relational aggression. Males, students who were more overtly aggressive, and those who reported greater fear of negative evaluation were more relationally aggressive than were peers. Students with higher levels of perspective taking reported using less relational aggression than did peers. A gender x empathetic concern interaction indicated that for males only, lower levels of empathetic concern were associated with higher levels of relational aggression. Results are discussed within a social information‐processing perspective. Aggr. Behav. 29:430–439, 2003. © 2003 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Effects of Accountability on Rating Behavior and Rater Accuracy

We tested whether improvements in rater accuracy on a performance-appraisal task attributed to rater accountability could be explained by variance in rater behavior. Data from Mero and Motowidlo (1995) were used initially to test whether observed improvements in rater accuracy could be explained by rating process behaviors of attending to relevant subordinate performance and taking better notes to record that performance. Results showed that both behaviors were correlated with accuracy and that these behaviors partially mediated the relationship between accountability and improved decision quality for participants who were held accountable for their rating decision and did not have any preconceived information about that rating from their supervisor. We then tested this process model on a new sample of participants and found that attentiveness and notetaking mediated the relationship between accountability and accuracy.