Dominance and sex differences in nonverbal responses to differential eye contact

Sixteen male and 16 female subjects were divided into high- and low-dominant groups and assigned to one of two cohorts who either avoided eye contact or maintained a steady gaze. Starting 100 in. apart, subjects were asked to approach the cohort to the point where they felt most comfortable. Dependent measures were personal space, approach rate, reciprocal eye contact, and attitude toward cohort. It was found that high-dominant subjects showed increased proxemic behavior in responding to a direct gaze, while low-dominant subjects showed a decrease. Also men tend to use personal space and approach rate to signal dominance, while women use reciprocal eye contact. Finally, an exception was found to previous findings that positive attitudes are associated with high levels of eye contact. Low-dominant males, but no other groups, respond to direct gaze with a more negative attitude.     

Yes-no answering systems in young children

Across the world's languages two quite different systems are used in answering negative questions such as Aren't you going? In English the speaker answers yes or no depending on the speaker's intention about the matter (e.g., Yes, I am going, if the speaker intends to go). In Japanese, the speaker answers yes or no in agreement or disagreement with the literal statement of the question (e.g., No, I am going, if the speaker is going and thus disagrees with the literal form of the question). One purpose of this study was to see which of these linguistic systems is acquired earlier. The other was to see whether the two systems work independently in bilingual children. The data on positive and negative questions from English and Japanese monolingual children showed that the English system is easier to acquire and the data from Japanese-English bilingual children showed that they used the English system to answer Japanese negative questions. The results suggest that the English system is acquired earlier than the Japanese system and that the two systems interact in bilingual children. These results were discussed in terms of sentence verification models.