Heterogeneity of long-history migration predicts emotion recognition accuracy

Recent work (Rychlowska et al., 2015) demonstrated the power of a relatively new cultural dimension, historical heterogeneity, in predicting cultural differences in the endorsement of emotion expression norms. Historical heterogeneity describes the number of source countries that have contributed to a country's present-day population over the last 500 years. People in cultures originating from a large number of source countries may have historically benefited from greater and clearer emotional expressivity, because they lacked a common language and well-established social norms. We therefore hypothesized that in addition to endorsing more expressive display rules, individuals from heterogeneous cultures will also produce facial expressions that are easier to recognize by people from other cultures. By reanalyzing cross-cultural emotion recognition data from 92 papers and 82 cultures, we show that emotion expressions of people from heterogeneous cultures are more easily recognized by observers from other cultures than are the expressions produced in homogeneous cultures. Heterogeneity influences expression recognition rates alongside the individualism-collectivism of the perceivers' culture, as more individualistic cultures were more accurate in emotion judgments than collectivistic cultures. This work reveals the present-day behavioral consequences of long-term historical migration patterns and demonstrates the predictive power of historical heterogeneity

Social and acoustic determinants of perceived laughter intensity

Existing research links subjective judgments of perceived laughter intensity with features such as duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency, and voicing. We examine these associations in a new database of social laughs produced in situations inducing amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. We also test the extent to which listeners’ judgments of laughter intensity vary as a function of the social situation in which laughs were produced

Functional smiles: tools for love, sympathy, and war

The smile is the most frequent facial expression, but not all smiles are equal. A social functional account holds that smiles of reward, affiliation, and dominance resolve basic social tasks, including rewarding behavior, social bonding, and hierarchy negotiation. Here we explore facial expression patterns associated with the three smiles. We modeled the expressions using a data-driven approach and showed that reward smiles are symmetrical and accompanied by eyebrow raising, affiliative smiles involve lip pressing, and asymmetrical dominance smiles contain nose wrinkling and upper lip raising. A Bayesian classifier analysis and a detection task revealed that the three smile types are highly distinct facial expressions. Finally, social judgments made by a separate participant group showed that the different smile type models convey different social messages. Our results provide the first detailed description of the physical form and social messages conveyed by the three functional smiles, documenting the versatility of these facial expressions

Social and acoustic determinants of perceived laughter intensity

Existing research links subjective judgments of perceived laughter intensity with features such as duration, amplitude, fundamental frequency, and voicing. We examine these associations in a new database of social laughs produced in situations inducing amusement, embarrassment, and schadenfreude. We also test the extent to which listeners’ judgments of laughter intensity vary as a function of the social situation in which laughs were produced

Facial Mimicry and Social Context Affect Smile Interpretation

Theoretical accounts and extant research suggest that people use various sources of information, including sensorimotor simulation and social context, while judging emotional displays. However, the evidence on how those factors can interplay is limited. The present research tested whether social context information has a greater impact on perceivers’ smile judgments when mimicry is experimentally restricted. In Study 1, participants watched images of affiliative smiles presented with verbal descriptions of situations associated with happiness or politeness. Half the participants could freely move their faces while rating the extent to which the smiles communicated affiliation, whereas for the other half mimicry was restricted via a pen-in-mouth procedure. As predicted, smiles were perceived as more affiliative when the social context was polite than when it was happy. Importantly, the effect of context information was significantly larger among participants who could not freely mimic the facial expressions. In Study 2 we replicated this finding using a different set of stimuli, manipulating context in a within-subjects design, and controlling for empathy and mood. Together, the findings demonstrate that mimicry importantly modulates the impact of social context information on smile perception

An epidemic context elicits more prosocial decision-making in an intergroup social dilemma

Societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic have the quality of a social dilemma, in that they compel people to choose between acting in their own interests or the interests of a larger collective. Empirical evidence shows that the choices people make in a social dilemma are influenced by how this decision is framed. In four studies, we examined how context of an epidemic influences resource allocation decisions in a nested social dilemma task, where participants share resources between themselves, their subgroup, and a larger collective. Participants consistently allocated more resources to the collective in the context of the Ebola epidemic than in the context of a neighborhood improvement project, and these choices were strongly associated with prescriptive social norms. Together, the findings provide an experimental demonstration that the context of a quickly spreading disease encourages people to act more prosocially

Altering facial movements abolishes neural mirroring of facial expressions

People tend to automatically imitate others’ facial expressions of emotion. That reaction, termed “facial mimicry” has been linked to sensorimotor simulation—a process in which the observer’s brain recreates and mirrors the emotional experience of the other person, potentially enabling empathy and deep, motivated processing of social signals. However, the neural mechanisms that underlie sensorimotor simulation remain unclear. This study tests how interfering with facial mimicry by asking participants to hold a pen in their mouth influences the activity of the human mirror neuron system, indexed by the desynchronization of the EEG mu rhythm. This response arises from sensorimotor brain areas during observed and executed movements and has been linked with empathy. We recorded EEG during passive viewing of dynamic facial expressions of anger, fear, and happiness, as well as nonbiological moving objects. We examine mu desynchronization under conditions of free versus altered facial mimicry and show that desynchronization is present when adult participants can freely move but not when their facial movements are inhibited. Our findings highlight the importance of motor activity and facial expression in emotion communication. They also have important implications for behaviors that involve occupying or hiding the lower part of the face

Man continues to climb Gunung Rajah despite brush with death

Bentong: Despite being struck by lightning while hiking up Gunung Rajah 11 years ago, Muhammad Sobri Zainal continues to help hikers climb the mountai

Beyond actions: Reparatory effects of regret in intergroup trust games

Intergroup trust is vital for cooperation and societal well-being, but is harder to establish than interpersonal trust. We investigate whether expressions of negative emotions, in particular regret, following economic decisions can shape intergroup trust. In each of three studies participants were members of a group playing a two-round trust game with another group. In the first round, they observed an outgroup member who acted fairly or unfairly towards the ingroup and then expressed positive (i.e., happiness) or negative (i.e., regret, unhappiness) emotions about this behavior. In the second round, participants played with another outgroup member. Emotions displayed by the outgroup representative following unfair behavior in round 1 influenced participants' allocations in round 2, which were higher following regret and unhappiness than following positive emotions. Thus, emotions expressed by one outgroup member affected interactions with other members who had not communicated emotions. Findings of Study 3 revealed that these effects were driven by regret increasing intergroup trust, rather than by happiness decreasing it. Moreover, participants' allocations were predicted by their perceptions of the extent to which the outgroup representative wished to change her behavior. Together, the findings reveal that regret expressions influence intergroup trust by attenuating the detrimental effects of unfair behavior