The effect of facial expression and gaze direction on memory for unfamiliar faces

We report data from an experiment that investigated the influence of gaze direction and facial expression on face memory. Participants were shown a set of unfamiliar faces with either happy or angry facial expressions, which were either gazing straight ahead or had their gaze averted to one side. Memory for faces that were initially shown with angry expressions was found to be poorer when these faces had averted as opposed to direct gaze, whereas memory for individuals shown with happy faces was unaffected by gaze direction. We suggest that memory for another individual's face partly depends on an evaluation of the behavioural intention of that individual.     

An Empirical Test of the Relationship Between Employee Theft and Low Self-Control

Although Gottfredson and Hirschi (1987, 1990 Gottfredson , M. and T. Hirschi . 1990. A General Theory of Crime . Stanford , CA : Stanford University Press. [Google Scholar]) maintain that low self-control can account for white-collar/corporate offending, there have been few and inconclusive empirical tests in this area. One area of white-collar crime, in particular, which could benefit from an examination of the role of low self-control in predicting offending, is employee theft. Although employee theft is one of the more costly and pervasive crimes impacting the American economy each year, there has been very little research examining the role of individual characteristics and personality traits in predicting this type of deviant behavior. The current research is a preliminary attempt at integrating the two bodies of literature, employee theft and low self-control.     

The effect of facial expression and gaze direction on memory for unfamiliar faces

We report data from an experiment that investigated the influence of gaze direction and facial expression on face memory. Participants were shown a set of unfamiliar faces with either happy or angry facial expressions, which were either gazing straight ahead or had their gaze averted to one side. Memory for faces that were initially shown with angry expressions was found to be poorer when these faces had averted as opposed to direct gaze, whereas memory for individuals shown with happy faces was unaffected by gaze direction. We suggest that memory for another individual's face partly depends on an evaluation of the behavioural intention of that individual.     

Attention capture by faces

We report three experiments that investigate whether faces are capable of capturing attention when in competition with other non-face objects. In Experiment 1a participants took longer to decide that an array of objects contained a butterfly target when a face appeared as one of the distracting items than when the face did not appear in the array. This irrelevant face effect was eliminated when the items in the arrays were inverted in Experiment 1b ruling out an explanation based on some low-level image-based properties of the faces. Experiment 2 replicated and extended the results of Experiment 1a. Irrelevant faces once again interfered with search for butterflies but, when the roles of faces and butterflies were reversed, irrelevant butterflies no longer interfered with search for faces. This suggests that the irrelevant face effect is unlikely to have been caused by the relative novelty of the faces or arises because butterflies and faces were the only animate items in the arrays. We conclude that these experiments offer evidence of a stimulus-driven capture of attention by faces.     

Do the eyes have it? Cues to the direction of social attention

The face communicates an impressive amount of visual information. We use it to identify its owner, how they are feeling and to help us understand what they are saying. Models of face processing have considered how we extract such meaning from the face but have ignored another important signal - eye gaze. In this article we begin by reviewing evidence from recent neurophysiological studies that suggests that the eyes constitute a special stimulus in at least two senses. First, the structure of the eyes is such that it provides us with a particularly powerful signal to the direction of another person's gaze, and second, we may have evolved neural mechanisms devoted to gaze processing. As a result, gaze direction is analysed rapidly and automatically, and is able to trigger reflexive shifts of an observer's visual attention. However, understanding where another individual is directing their attention involves more than simply analysing their gaze direction. We go on to describe research with adult participants, children and non-human primates that suggests that other cues such as head orientation and pointing gestures make significant contributions to the computation of another's direction of attention.     

Configural processing in the perception of eye-gaze direction

Traditional accounts of gaze perception emphasise the geometric or configural cues present in the eye; the position of the iris in relation to the corner of the eye, for example. This kind of geometric account has been supported, in part, by findings that gaze judgments are impaired in faces rotated through 180 degrees, a manipulation known to disrupt the processing of relations between facial elements. However, studies involving this manipulation have confounded inversion of the face context with inversion of the eye region. The effects of inversion might therefore have been caused by a disruption of the computation of gaze direction from the eye region itself and/or a disruption of the influence that face context might exert on gaze processing. In the experiment reported here we independently manipulated eye orientation and the orientation of the face context, and measured participants' sensitivity to gaze direction. Performance was severely affected by inversion of the eyes, regardless of the orientation of the face, whereas face inversion had no significant effect on gaze sensitivity. Previous reports of a face-inversion effect on gaze perception can therefore be attributed to inversion of the eye region itself which, we suggest, disrupts some form of configural or relational processing that is normally involved in the computation of eye-gaze direction.     

Culture in the context of intercultural negotiation.

This study explores culture's effect on behaviors and outcomes in intercultural negotiation and examines how those effects are moderated by role. Eighty U.S. and international students took part in a previously developed negotiation task (Pruitt, 1981) and completed Hui and Triandis's (1986) individualism‐collectivism (INDCOL) scale. Negotiation interactions were coded for information sharing, offers, and distributive tactics. Findings show that a negotiation dyad's collectivism is positively associated with higher joint profit. The effects of culture on both communication behaviors and joint outcomes, however, differ by role of the negotiator. In particular, seller collectivism has larger and more consistent effects on communication behavior and joint profit than buyer collectivism. Results support a ‘culture in context’ perspective of negotiation that takes into account negotiator qualities, contextual and structural features of the negotiation, and mediating processes in addition to cultural values.