The illusion of nonmediation in telecommunication: Voice intensity biases distance judgments to a communication partner

The illusion of nonmediation is an experience in mediated communication where individuals respond as if the medium is not there. It is frequently associated with advanced media technology, such as virtual environments and teleconference systems. In this paper, we investigate whether people experience an illusion of nonmediation during interactions as simple as making a phone call. In three experiments, participants were asked to listen to someone's voice on a mobile phone (Experiment 1) or through VoIP software (Experiment 2 and 3) before guessing the location of the person and indicating this location on a map. Results consistently demonstrated that louder voices were judged to be closer, as if the technical mediation was ignored. Combining the three experiments, a small-scale meta-analysis yielded an effect size estimate of d = 0.37 for the ‘louder-as-closer’ effect. Implications of the results and suggestions for future research are discussed.     

I need you closer to me: Effects of affiliation goals on perceptions of interpersonal distance

People's perceptions are often distorted in a way that aligns with their desires and goals. We argue that having a goal to affiliate changes the perception of interpersonal distance in a way that may help to fulfil this affiliation goal. As other people are goal‐relevant when having an affiliation goal, we expected that people with affiliation goals would estimate the distance between themselves and another person as smaller than people with no affiliation goals. In two studies, we manipulated affiliation goals by priming participants with affiliation or control words. Our main dependent variable was the estimated interpersonal distance between themselves and the experimenter. Results showed that participants primed with affiliation estimated the interpersonal distance as smaller compared with participants primed with control words. We did not obtain reliable differences between the affiliation and control conditions on other distance and height estimations. Our results suggest that having or not having affiliation goals influences people's perception of the distance between them and other people.     

When majority members exclude ethnic minorities: The impact of shame on the desire to object to immoral acts

In recent years, ethnic minorities have experienced an increase in acts of exclusion. In two studies, we demonstrated how ingroup members' felt shame about such immoral behavior explained their desire to pro‐socially object to this immorality by distancing from the perpetrating ingroup and by wanting to support the affected minorities. We showed how the desire to pro‐socially object varies as a function of national identification. As expected, nationally attached identifiers' felt shame for the immoral behavior was linked with greater willingness to pro‐socially object to it. The opposite pattern was found for nationally glorifying identifiers. In the second study, we found that anger directed at the ingroup partially explained the relationship between group‐based shame and the pro‐social desire to object. The results contribute to the literature on shame and pro‐social motivations by showing that distancing from the perpetrating ingroup can be considered as a pro‐social strategy rather than a defensive one.     

Dyadic Cross-Sectional Associations Between Negative Mood,Marital Idealization,and Relationship Quality

This study aimed to evaluate (a) dyadic associations between relationship quality (RQ) and both depressive and anxious mood (DM and AM), (b) reciprocity hypotheses of negative mood within dyadic interactions, and (c) mediational role of marital idealization between negative mood and relationship quality. Actor-partner interdependence models (APIMs) were performed using data from a sample of 198 dyads. Our results showed that (a) these two facets of negative mood did not have the same weight on RQ and that they had a gender-specific effects pattern, and (b) there was no support for the mood transmission hypothesis. Men's DM displayed direct and indirect (via marital idealization) actor as well as partner effects on RQ, whereas women's DM displayed only a direct actor effect on RQ. There were no significant direct actor effects of AM on RQ, meaning that this link is fully mediated by marital idealization. However, only women's AM showed such indirect effects on RQ.     

Reflecting on schadenfreude: serious consequences of a misfortune for which one is not responsible diminish previously expressed schadenfreude; the role of immorality appraisals and moral emotions

Participants (Study 1: N = 138, Study 2: N = 153) responded to a video in which a person suffered a mishap. The studies manipulated whether or not the person was responsible for the mishap and the degree to which the consequences were subsequently found to be serious. Results of Study 1 showed reduction in schadenfreude and more compassion for the victim in the serious condition due to appraisals that it was immoral to laugh about the misfortune. The stronger these appraisals and the stronger the initial schadenfreude, the stronger were moral emotions (guilt, shame, and regret) about initially expressed schadenfreude. Moral emotions and compassion fostered prosocial behavior. Study 2 extended these results by showing that seriousness of the consequences acted as a moderator for most of these findings with significant effects occurring in the serious condition only. Most reduction in schadenfreude occurred when the consequences were serious and when the person was less responsible for the misfortune. The studies extend past research by investigating schadenfreude and other emotions in a context that does not involve social comparison and where participants reflected on their initial expressions of schadenfreude.     

The Temporal Dynamics of Regularity Extraction in Non‐Human Primates

Extracting the regularities of our environment is one of our core cognitive abilities. To study the fine‐grained dynamics of the extraction of embedded regularities, a method combining the advantages of the artificial language paradigm (Saffran, Aslin, & Newport, 1996 ) and the serial response time task (Nissen & Bullemer, 1987 ) was used with a group of Guinea baboons (Papio papio) in a new automatic experimental device (Fagot & Bonté, 2010 ). After a series of random trials, monkeys were exposed to language‐like patterns. We found that the extraction of embedded patterns positioned at the end of larger patterns was faster than the extraction of initial embedded patterns. This result suggests that there is a learning advantage for the final element of a sequence that benefits from the contextual information provided by previous elements.