The perception of spontaneous and volitional laughter across 21 societies

Data available at https://dataverse.harvard.edu/ dataverse/laughterperception</p

The Effect of Type of Instruction on Expression of Children’s Knowledge: How Do Children See the Endocrine and Urinary System?

Children’s knowledge about human anatomy can be examined through several different ways. Making a drawing of the internal features of the human body has been frequently used in recent studies. However, there might be a serious difference in results obtained from a general instruction to students (What you think is inside your body) and specific (e.g. Draw bones that are inside your body) instruction. We examined relationships between these two types of instructions using drawings of the urinary and endocrine systems as the examples with pupils aged 10-14 years. An ANCOVA showed significant relationships between general and special instruction, but further comparison showed significant correlation only for urinary system. The level of students’ drawings significantly increases with previous knowledge about human anatomy and age. These findings suggest that relationships between two types of instructions strongly depend on the complexity of the organ system that children draw as well as their previous knowledge. We propose that drawings from general instructions are therefore appropriate especially for comparative studies. Special instructions are better for eliciting a deeper understanding of children knowledge about human anatomy

Tolerance of Frogs among High School Students: Influences of Disgust and Culture

WOS: 000378923000002Amphibians play an important role in the functioning of ecosystems and some of them inhabit human gardens where they can successfully reproduce. The decline of amphibian diversity worldwide suggests that people may play a crucial role in their survival. We conducted a cross-cultural study on high school students' tolerance of frogs in Chile, Slovakia, South Africa and Turkey (n = 655 high school students). We found that about 6 % of students reported active killing of frogs and 30 % reported moving frogs away from their home gardens. Pathogen disgust negatively correlated with frog tolerance suggesting that people who are more sensitive to pathogen conoting cues are less tolerant toward frogs. Tolerance of frogs in parents or other family members appears to significantly influence student tolerance of frogs. Females tended to show higher tolerance of frogs than males. This study highlights the importance of the emotion of disgust in human willingness to protect frogs from a cross-cultural perspective.[APVV-14-0070]; [VEGA 1/0104/16]JF was partly supported by grant APVV-14-0070. PP and PF were supported by grant VEGA 1/0104/16

Interest in Birds and its Relationship with Attitudes and Myths: A Cross-cultural Study in Countries with Different Levels of Economic Development

WOS: 000353305900020Birds are one of the most important species that can help protect biodiversity. Although birds are important beings for biodiversity and human existence, there is a relatively less quantity of research that has investigated the interest in and attitudes toward birds. This study aims to investigate the knowledge level of and attitudes toward birds among students in countries at different levels of economic development. To collect the data, a Bird Knowledge Questionnaire and a Bird Attitude Questionnaire were developed and used by the researchers in this study. These questionnaires were administered to a total of 852 students from different countries, including Colombia, Germany, Slovakia, and Turkey. The results obtained in this study showed that Colombian students had the highest interest in birds as compared to students in Slovakia, Turkey, and Germany. Girls had consistently higher interest in birds than boys in all countries, but there were no gender differences in the cognitive domain. Our research suggests that factual knowledge about birds is not a necessary prerequisite for interest in birds, but animal-related activities show strong associations with an interest in birds

Detecting affiliation in colaughter across 24 societies

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners' judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either established friends or recently acquainted strangers. In a sample of 966 participants from 24 societies, people reliably distinguished friends from strangers with an accuracy of 53-67%. Acoustic analyses of the individual laughter segments revealed that, across cultures, listeners' judgments were consistently predicted by voicing dynamics, suggesting perceptual sensitivity to emotionally triggered spontaneous production. Colaughter affords rapid and accurate appraisals of affiliation that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries, and may constitute a universal means of signaling cooperative relationships