Alcohol as social lubricant.

This study examines how consuming alcohol differentially affects the communicative behavior and perceptions of high and low social self‐esteem (SSE) women as they engage in a brief interaction with a flirtatious male. Alcohol myopia theory proposes that alcohol affects behavior when it blocks a person's normal inhibitions about enacting a behavior. It was predicted that low SSE women would be more inhibited when talking to a flirtatious male than would high SSE women and, therefore administration of a social self‐esteem measure and random assignment to an alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverage condition, participants (N=50) talked with an attractive, flirtatious male confederate. Low SSE women were less anxious and self‐disclosed more when drinking than when sober, whereas high SSE women were not significantly affected by alcohol consumption. The discussion highlights the complex and often contradictory effects of alcohol consumption on social interaction.     

(Implicitly) judging a book by its cover: the power of pride and shame expressions in shaping judgments of social status

How do we decide who merits social status? According to functionalist theories of emotion, the nonverbal expressions of pride and shame play a key role, functioning as automatically perceived status signals. In this view, observers automatically make status inferences about expressers on the basis of these expressions, even when contradictory contextual information about the expressers' status is available. In four studies, the authors tested whether implicit and explicit status perceptions are influenced by pride and shame expressions even when these expressions' status-related messages are contradicted by contextual information. Results indicate that emotion expressions powerfully influence implicit and explicit status inferences, at times neutralizing or even overriding situational knowledge. These findings demonstrate the irrepressible communicative power of emotion displays and indicate that status judgments can be informed as much (and often more) by automatic responses to nonverbal expressions of emotion as by rational, contextually bound knowledge.     

The effects of violent video games on aggression.

Violent content video games such as Mortal Kombat and Doom have become very popular among children and adolescents, causing great concern for parents, teachers, and policy makers. This study cumulates findings across existing empirical research on the effects of violent video games to estimate overall effect size and discern important trends and moderating variables. Results suggest there is a smaller effect of violent video games on aggression than has been found with television violence on aggression. This effect is positively associated with type of game violence and negatively related to time spent playing the games. Directions for future programmatic research on video games are outlined.