Sharing a moment
Christina Sagioglou & Tobias Greitemeyer
Computers in Human Behavior, June 2014, Pages 359–363
Abstract:
Facebook is the world’s most popular online social network and used by more than one billion people. In three studies, we explored the hypothesis that Facebook activity negatively affects people’s emotional state. A first study shows that the longer people are active on Facebook, the more negative is their mood afterwards. The second study provides causal evidence for this effect by showing that Facebook activity leads to a deterioration of mood compared to two different control conditions. Furthermore, it was demonstrated that this effect is mediated by a feeling of not having done anything meaningful. With such negative outcomes for its users, the question arises as to why so many people continue to use Facebook on a daily basis. A third study suggests that this may be because people commit an affective forecasting error in that they expect to feel better after using Facebook, whereas, in fact, they feel worse.
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Detecting Emotional Contagion in Massive Social Networks
Lorenzo Coviello et al.
PLoS ONE, March 2014
Abstract:
Happiness and other emotions spread between people in direct contact, but it is unclear whether massive online social networks also contribute to this spread. Here, we elaborate a novel method for measuring the contagion of emotional expression. With data from millions of Facebook users, we show that rainfall directly influences the emotional content of their status messages, and it also affects the status messages of friends in other cities who are not experiencing rainfall. For every one person affected directly, rainfall alters the emotional expression of about one to two other people, suggesting that online social networks may magnify the intensity of global emotional synchrony.
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The Girl Next Door: The Effect of Opposite Gender Friends on High School Achievement
Andrew Hill
University of South Carolina Working Paper, January 2014
Abstract:
Parents are concerned about the influence of friends during adolescence. Using the gender composition of schoolmates in an individual's close neighborhood as an instrument for the gender composition of an individual's self-reported friendship network, this paper finds that the share of opposite gender friends has a sizable negative effect on high school GPA. The effect is found across all subjects for students over the age of sixteen, but is limited to mathematics and science for younger students. Self-reported difficulties getting along with the teacher and paying attention in class are important mechanisms through which the effect operates.
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Kate Starbird et al.
University of Washington Working Paper, March 2014
Abstract:
The Boston Marathon bombing story unfolded on every possible carrier of information available in the spring of 2013, including Twitter. As information spread, it was filled with rumors (unsubstantiated information), and many of these rumors contained misinformation. Earlier studies have suggested that crowdsourced information flows can correct misinformation, and our research investigates this proposition. This exploratory research examines three rumors, later demonstrated to be false, that circulated on Twitter in the aftermath of the bombings. Our findings suggest that corrections to the misinformation emerge but are muted compared with the propagation of the misinformation. The similarities and differences we observe in the patterns of the misinformation and corrections contained within the stream over the days that followed the attacks suggest directions for possible research strategies to automatically detect misinformation.
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Are narcissists more accepting of others’ narcissistic traits?
William Hart & John Adams
Personality and Individual Differences, July 2014, Pages 163–167
Abstract:
Narcissists, relative to non-narcissists, seem to regard their own narcissistic traits (e.g., rudeness and arrogance) more positively and are more motivated to cultivate such traits. That said, should we expect narcissists to regard others’ narcissistic traits more positively too? In this study, participants (N = 463) completed a survey in which they responded on a measure of trait narcissism, rated the likeability of people who possessed various narcissistic traits (e.g., arrogant, rude, self-centered), and then indicated the extent to which they possessed the same narcissistic traits. Interestingly, narcissists – who are generally disagreeable and harsh individuals – rated others who possessed narcissistic traits more positively than non-narcissists. Furthermore, a mediation analysis revealed that this effect of narcissism on ratings was mediated by narcissists’ self-reports of possessing the narcissistic traits. Thus, this study provides initial evidence that narcissists are more accepting of others’ narcissistic traits, and this study has implications for understanding the interpersonal and intrapersonal consequences of narcissism.
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Bulent Turan et al.
Journal of Research in Personality, forthcoming
Abstract:
We hypothesized that an interpersonal trait approach would improve our understanding of the behavioral manifestations of basal testosterone. 85 male participants provided saliva samples for testosterone assay on two separate visits and completed the Interpersonal Adjective Scales, the Circumplex Scales of Interpersonal Values, and measures of attachment and loneliness. High testosterone was associated with a distinct interpersonal style that included: attachment-related avoidance, dominance, and disconnectedness (cold and distant from others). High testosterone was also associated with loneliness (marginally), and this relationship was mediated by attachment-related avoidance. These findings add to our understanding of the complex inter-relationships between hormones, personality, and social behavior. The clear circumplex structure revealed by testosterone’s associations describes its interpersonal nature and provides evidence for its construct validity as a biological marker of a dominant, cold, avoidant, and lonely interpersonal style. Despite high heritability of testosterone, targeting these traits could help ameliorate their physical and emotional consequences.
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The Architecture of Collective Intimacy: Masonic Friendships as a Model for Collective Attachments
Danny Kaplan
American Anthropologist, March 2014, Pages 81–93
Abstract:
Despite a growing recognition that interpersonal friendship informs wider forms of solidarity, there is little systematic analysis as to how community members extend the logic of friendship and intimacy to broader organizational and societal context. Masonic organizational practices provide a useful model for this inquiry. Drawing on an ethnographic study of contemporary Israeli Freemasonry, I examine the intersections of interpersonal, public, and collective intimacy in members’ ritual activities and everyday life. The juxtaposition of mundane sociability and Masonic sacred rituals serves to rescale the distance between interpersonal friendship and communal solidarity. As members take on the roles of citizen, bureaucrat, priest, and president concomitantly, they partly collapse the distinctions between personal and collective ties, between the familiar and the revered. These intersections of intimacy are offered as a programmatic research strategy to study how institutionalized patterns of sociability inform civic and national attachments.
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L. Tomova et al.
Psychoneuroendocrinology, May 2014, Pages 95–104
Abstract:
Stress is a ubiquitous challenge in society as we consistently interact with others under the influence of stress. Distinguishing self- from other-related mental representations plays an important role for social interactions, and is a prerequisite for crucial social skills such as action understanding, empathy, and mentalizing. Little is known, however, about the effects of stress on self-other distinction. We assessed how acute stress impacts self-other distinction in the perceptual-motor, the affective, and the cognitive domain, in a male and female sample. In all domains, the results show opposing effects of stress on the two genders: while women showed increases in self-other distinction, men showed decreases. Our findings suggest that women flexibly disambiguate self and other under stress, enabling accurate social responses, while men respond with increased egocentricity and less adaptive regulation. This has crucial implications for explaining gender differences in social skills such as empathy and prosociality.
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The animal nature of spontaneous human laughter
Gregory Bryant & Athena Aktipis
Evolution and Human Behavior, forthcoming
Abstract:
Laughter is a universally produced vocal signal that plays an important role in human social interaction. Researchers have distinguished between spontaneous and volitional laughter, but no empirical work has explored possible acoustic and perceptual differences. If spontaneous laughter is an honest signal of cooperative intent (e.g., derived from play breathing patterns), then the ability to mimic these sounds volitionally could have shaped perceptual systems to be attuned to aspects of spontaneous laughs that are harder to fake — features associated with phylogenetically older vocal control systems. We extracted spontaneous laughs from conversations between friends and volitional laughs elicited by instruction without other provocation. In three perception experiments we found that, 1) participants could distinguish between spontaneous and volitional laughter, 2) when laugh speed was increased (duration decreased 33% and pitch held constant), all laughs were judged as more “real,” with judgment accuracy increasing for spontaneous laughter and decreasing for volitional laughter, and 3) when the laughs were slowed down (duration increased 260% and pitch altered proportionally), participants could not distinguish spontaneous laughs from nonhuman vocalizations but could identify volitional laughs as human-made. These findings and acoustic data suggest that spontaneous and volitional laughs are produced by different vocal systems, and that spontaneous laughter might share features with nonhuman animal vocalizations that volitional laughter does not.
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Don’t stand so close to me: Psychopathy and the regulation of interpersonal distance
Joana Vieira & Abigail Marsh
Frontiers in Human Neuroscience, January 2014
Abstract:
Psychopathy is characterized by callous and unemotional personality traits, such as reduced empathy and remorse, and a tendency toward deviant interpersonal behaviors. It has been suggested that subtle behavioral cues in individuals with high levels of psychopathic traits may betray their personality during interpersonal interactions, but little research has addressed what these clues might be. In this study, we investigated whether psychopathic traits predict interpersonal distance preferences, which have been previously linked to amygdala functioning. 46 healthy participants performed a behavioral task in which the distance they preferred to maintain between themselves and an experimenter was measured across a series of trials. Psychopathic traits, including Coldheartedness, Fearless Dominance, and Self-centered Impulsivity were assessed using the Psychopathic Personality Inventory-Revised (Lilienfeld and Widows, 2005). Results demonstrated that Coldheartedness predicted preferred interpersonal distance, with more coldhearted participants preferring shorter distances. These findings suggest that interpersonal distance preferences may signal psychopathic traits, particularly callousness, supporting accounts of amygdala dysfunction in psychopathy.
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Racial and Ethnic Disparities in Social Engagement Among US Nursing Home Residents
Yue Li, & Xueya Cai
Medical Care, April 2014, Pages 314-321
Background: The numbers and proportions of racial and ethnic minorities have increased dramatically in US nursing homes in recent years. Concerns exist about whether nursing homes can serve appropriately the clinical and psychosocial needs of patients with increasingly diverse ethnic and cultural backgrounds. This study determined racial and ethnic disparities in social engagement among nursing home long-term residents.
Methods: We analyzed the 2008 national Minimum Data Set supplemented with the Online Survey, Certification, and Reporting File and the Area Resource File. We estimated multivariable logistic regressions to determine disparities and how disparities were explained by individual, facility, and geographic factors. Stratified analyses further determined persistent disparities within patient and facility subgroups.
Results: Compared with white residents (n=690,228), black (n=123,116), Hispanic (n=37,099), and other (n=17,568) residents showed lower social engagement, with overall scores (mean±SD) being 2.5±1.7, 2.2±1.6, 2.0±1.6, and 2.1±1.6, respectively. Disparities were partially explained by variations in individual, facility, and geographic covariates, but persisted after multivariable adjustments. Stratified analyses confirmed that disparities were similar in magnitude across patient and facility subgroups.
Conclusions: Although nursing home residents showed overall low social engagement levels, racial/ethnic minority residents were even less socially engaged than white residents. Efforts to address disparities in psychosocial well-being and quality of life of nursing home residents are warranted.
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The Canny Social Judge: Predicting Others’ Attitudes from Sparse Information
Jayati Sinha & Dhananjay Naykankuppam
Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
We demonstrate a phenomenon we term ‘The Canny Social Judge.’ Specifically, we demonstrate that individuals have a remarkable ability to predict the attitudes of others in a social group even though those attitudes were never shared. In Experiments 1 and 2, we document this phenomenon. In Experiment 3, we adopt an individual difference approach and find that empathic responding moderates this phenomenon – it is individuals who are good at empathic responding who appear particularly able to display the ‘canny social judge’ effect. In Experiment 4, using an experimental manipulation of empathy, we provide greater internal validity to our claim. Finally, in Experiment 5, we parse empathic processing into the component parts to delineate the process further. These data paint a picture of a highly socially aware organism.
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Um . . . Who Like Says You Know: Filler Word Use as a Function of Age, Gender, and Personality
Charlyn Laserna, Yi-Tai Seih & James Pennebaker
Journal of Language and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Filler words (I mean, you know, like, uh, um) are commonly used in spoken conversation. The authors analyzed these five filler words from transcripts recorded by a device called the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR), which sampled participants’ language use in daily conversations over several days. By examining filler words from 263 transcriptions of natural language from five separate studies, the current research sought to clarify the psychometric properties of filler words. An exploratory factor analysis extracted two factors from the five filler words: filled pauses (uh, um) and discourse markers (I mean, you know, like). Overall, filled pauses were used at comparable rates across genders and ages. Discourse markers, however, were more common among women, younger participants, and more conscientious people. These findings suggest that filler word use can be considered a potential social and personality marker.
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Facial Movements Strategically Camouflage Involuntary Social Signals of Face Morphology
Daniel Gill et al.
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
Animals use social camouflage as a tool of deceit to increase the likelihood of survival and reproduction. We tested whether humans can also strategically deploy transient facial movements to camouflage the default social traits conveyed by the phenotypic morphology of their faces. We used the responses of 12 observers to create models of the dynamic facial signals of dominance, trustworthiness, and attractiveness. We applied these dynamic models to facial morphologies differing on perceived dominance, trustworthiness, and attractiveness to create a set of dynamic faces; new observers rated each dynamic face according to the three social traits. We found that specific facial movements camouflage the social appearance of a face by modulating the features of phenotypic morphology. A comparison of these facial expressions with those similarly derived for facial emotions showed that social-trait expressions, rather than being simple one-to-one overgeneralizations of emotional expressions, are a distinct set of signals composed of movements from different emotions. Our generative face models represent novel psychophysical laws for social sciences; these laws predict the perception of social traits on the basis of dynamic face identities.