Modeling Socially Desirable Responding and Its Effects

The impact of socially desirable responding or faking on noncognitive assessments remains an issue of strong debate. One of the main reasons for the controversy is the lack of a statistical method to model such response sets. This article introduces a new way to model faking based on the assumption that faking occurs due to an interaction between person and situation. The technique combines a control group design with structural equation modeling and allows a separation of trait and faking variance. The model is introduced and tested in an example. The results confirm a causal nfluence of faking on means and covariance structure of a Big 5 questionnaire. Both effects can be reversed by the proposed model. Finally, a real-life criterion was implemented and predicted by both variance sources. In this example, it was the trait but not the faking variance that was predictive. Implications for research and practice are discussed

Genetic analysis of cognitive failures (CFQ); A study of Dutch adolescent twins and their parents

A substantial part of the inter-individual variation in everyday cognitive failures in memory, perception and motor control can be attributed to genetic factors. Cognitive failures were assessed with the Cognitive Failures Questionnaire (Broadbent, Cooper, FitzGerald and Parkes, 1982) in a large sample of Dutch adolescent twin pairs and their biological parents. The heritability for CFQ scores was around 50 per cent. There was no association between CFQ scores and age or educational level. Both in the parental generation (aged 46 years on average) and in the o€spring generation (aged 17.7 years on average) women had somewhat higher mean CFQ scores than men. There were no sex di€erences in heritabilities. The part of the variance that could not be attributed to genetic factors was best explained by environmental in¯uences unique to the individual. There was no evidence for the in¯uence of shared environment on CFQ scores. CFQ scores of husband and wife were correlated (r ˆ 0.22) and this association was modeled as phenotypic assortment. The correlations between parents and o€spring were somewhat lower than the correlations between dizygotic twins. Under a model with equal heritabilities in parents and o€spring, there was some evidence that the genetic factors that in¯uence cognitive failures in the two generations are partly di€erent. # 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd

Pupil dilation as an implicit measure of appetitive Pavlovian learning

Appetitive Pavlovian conditioning is a learning mechanism of fundamental biological and pathophysiological significance. Nonetheless, its exploration in humans remains sparse, which is partly attributed to the lack of an established psychophysiological parameter that aptly represents conditioned responding. This study evaluated pupil diameter and other ocular response measures (gaze dwelling time, blink duration and count) as indices of conditioning. Additionally, a learning model was used to infer participants' learning progress on the basis of their pupil dilation. Twenty-nine healthy volunteers completed an appetitive differential delay conditioning paradigm with a primary reward, while the ocular response measures along with other psychophysiological (heart rate, electrodermal activity, postauricular and eyeblink reflex) and behavioral (ratings, contingency awareness) parameters were obtained to examine the relation among different measures. A significantly stronger increase in pupil diameter, longer gaze duration and shorter eyeblink duration was observed in response to the reward-predicting cue compared to the control cue. The Pearce-Hall attention model best predicted the trial-by-trial pupil diameter. This conditioned response was corroborated by a pronounced heart rate deceleration to the reward-predicting cue, while no conditioning effect was observed in the electrodermal activity or startle responses. There was no discernible correlation between the psychophysiological response measures. These results highlight the potential value of ocular response measures as sensitive indices for representing appetitive conditioning

Facial Attractiveness

Facial attractiveness has important social consequences. Despite a widespread belief that beauty cannot be defined, in fact, there is considerable agreement across individuals and cultures on what is found attractive. By considering that attraction and mate choice are critical components of evolutionary selection, we can better understand the importance of beauty. There are many traits that are linked to facial attractiveness in humans and each may in some way impart benefits to individuals who act on their preferences. If a trait is reliably associated with some benefit to the perceiver, then we would expect individuals in a population to find that trait attractive. Such an approach has highlighted face traits such as age, health, symmetry, and averageness, which are proposed to be associated with benefits and so associated with facial attractiveness. This view may postulate that some traits will be universally attractive; however, this does not preclude variation. Indeed, it would be surprising if there existed a template of a perfect face that was not affected by experience, environment, context, or the specific needs of an individual. Research on facial attractiveness has documented how various face traits are associated with attractiveness and various factors that impact on an individual's judgments of facial attractiveness. Overall, facial attractiveness is complex, both in the number of traits that determine attraction and in the large number of factors that can alter attraction to particular faces. A fuller understanding of facial beauty will come with an understanding of how these various factors interact with each other

Deep Impression: Audiovisual Deep Residual Networks for Multimodal Apparent Personality Trait Recognition

Here, we develop an audiovisual deep residual network for multimodal apparent personality trait recognition. The network is trained end-to-end for predicting the Big Five personality traits of people from their videos. That is, the network does not require any feature engineering or visual analysis such as face detection, face landmark alignment or facial expression recognition. Recently, the network won the third place in the ChaLearn First Impressions Challenge with a test accuracy of 0.9109

Who Believes in the Giant Skeleton Myth? An Examination of Individual Difference Correlates

This study examined individual difference correlates of belief in a narrative about the discovery of giant skeletal remains that contravenes mainstream scientific explanations. A total of 364 participants from Central Europe completed a survey that asked them to rate their agreement with a short excerpt describing the giant skeleton myth. Participants also completed measures of the Big Five personality factors, New Age orientation, anti-scientific attitudes, superstitious beliefs, and religiosity. Results showed that women, as compared with men, and respondents with lower educational qualifications were significantly more likely to believe in the giant skeleton myth, although effect sizes were small. Correlational analysis showed that stronger belief in the giant skeleton myth was significantly associated with greater anti-scientific attitudes, stronger New Age orientation, greater religiosity, stronger superstitious beliefs, lower Openness to Experience scores, and higher Neuroticism scores. However, a multiple regression showed that the only significant predictors of belief in myth were Openness, New Age orientation, and anti-scientific attitudes. These results are discussed in relation to the potential negative consequences of belief in myths

Predicting emotions and meta-emotions at the movies

Audiences are attracted to dramas and horror movies even though negative and ambivalent emotions are likely to be experienced. Research into the seemingly paradoxical enjoyment of this kind of media entertainment has typically focused on gender- and genre-specific needs and viewing motivations. Extending this line of research, the authors focus the role of the need for affect as a more general, gender- and genre-independent predictor of individual differences in the experience of emotions and meta-emotions (i.e., evaluative thoughts and feelings about one’s emotions). The article discusses a field study of moviegoers who attended the regular screening of a drama or a horror film. Results support the assumption that individuals high in need for affect experience higher levels of negative and ambivalent emotions and evaluate their emotions more positively on the level of meta-emotions. Controlling for the Big Five personality factors does not alter these effects. The results are discussed within an extended meta-emotion framework

Combining Deep Facial and Ambient Features for First Impression Estimation

14th European Conference on Computer Vision (ECCV) -- OCT 08-16, 2016 -- Amsterdam, NETHERLANDSFirst impressions influence the behavior of people towards a newly encountered person or a human-like agent. Apart from the physical characteristics of the encountered face, the emotional expressions displayed on it, as well as ambient information affect these impressions. In this work, we propose an approach to predict the first impressions people will have for a given video depicting a face within a context. We employ pre-trained Deep Convolutional Neural Networks to extract facial expressions, as well as ambient information. After video modeling, visual features that represent facial expression and scene are combined and fed to a Kernel Extreme Learning Machine regressor. The proposed system is evaluated on the ChaLearn Challenge Dataset on First Impression Recognition, where the classification target is the Big Five personality trait labels for each video. Our system achieved an accuracy of 90.94% on the sequestered test set, 0.36% points below the top system in the competition

How do you say ‘hello’? Personality impressions from brief novel voices

On hearing a novel voice, listeners readily form personality impressions of that speaker. Accurate or not, these impressions are known to affect subsequent interactions; yet the underlying psychological and acoustical bases remain poorly understood. Furthermore, hitherto studies have focussed on extended speech as opposed to analysing the instantaneous impressions we obtain from first experience. In this paper, through a mass online rating experiment, 320 participants rated 64 sub-second vocal utterances of the word ‘hello’ on one of 10 personality traits. We show that: (1) personality judgements of brief utterances from unfamiliar speakers are consistent across listeners; (2) a two-dimensional ‘social voice space’ with axes mapping Valence (Trust, Likeability) and Dominance, each driven by differing combinations of vocal acoustics, adequately summarises ratings in both male and female voices; and (3) a positive combination of Valence and Dominance results in increased perceived male vocal Attractiveness, whereas perceived female vocal Attractiveness is largely controlled by increasing Valence. Results are discussed in relation to the rapid evaluation of personality and, in turn, the intent of others, as being driven by survival mechanisms via approach or avoidance behaviours. These findings provide empirical bases for predicting personality impressions from acoustical analyses of short utterances and for generating desired personality impressions in artificial voices