Women recovering from social rejection: The effect of the person and the situation on a hormonal mechanism of affiliation

Rejection can motivate either affiliation or withdrawal. In order to study how personality and situational variables influence whether women will be motivated to affiliate versus withdraw, we manipulate social feedback (rejection vs. acceptance) and opportunity for face-to-face interaction (blocked vs. face-to-face) and measure the individual difference variables rejection sensitivity and social anxiety. We test how these variables affect endogenous progesterone and cortisol concentrations, which are presumed to signal motivational responses to rejection. We find that three-way interactions involving social feedback, opportunity for face-to-face interactions, and either social anxiety or rejection sensitivity significantly predict progesterone change, but not cortisol change. Both interactions are driven by sharp progesterone decreases for women high in social anxiety/rejection sensitivity who have been rejected and who have no opportunity to reaffiliate in a face-to-face interaction. This progesterone change may be a physiological marker of motivation for social avoidance following rejection for women who cannot reaffiliate and who are particularly socially anxious or sensitive to rejection

Global analysis of entrainment in dialogues

This paper performs a global analysis of entrainment between dyads in map-task dialogues in European Portuguese (EP), including 48 dialogues, between 24 speakers. Our main goals focus on the acoustic-prosodic similarities between speakers, namely if there are global entrainment cues displayed in the dialogues, if there are degrees of entrainment manifested in distinct sets of features shared amongst the speakers, if entrainment depends on the role of the speaker as either giver or follower, and also if speakers tend to entrain more with specific pairs regardless of the role. Results show global entrainment in almost all the dyads, but the degrees of entrainment (stronger within the same gender), and the role effects tend to be less striking than the interlocutors’ effect. Globally, speakers tend to be more similar to their own speech in other dialogues than to their partners. However, speakers are also more similar to their interlocutors than to speakers with whom they never spoke.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Alignment to the Actions of a Robot

Alignment is a phenomenon observed in human conversation: Dialog partners’ behavior converges in many respects. Such alignment has been proposed to be automatic and the basis for communicating successfully. Recent research on human–computer dialog promotes a mediated communicative design account of alignment according to which the extent of alignment is influenced by interlocutors’ beliefs about each other. Our work aims at adding to these findings in two ways. (a) Our work investigates alignment of manual actions, instead of lexical choice. (b) Participants interact with the iCub humanoid robot, instead of an artificial computer dialog system. Our results confirm that alignment also takes place in the domain of actions. We were not able to replicate the results of the original study in general in this setting, but in accordance with its findings, participants with a high questionnaire score for emotional stability and participants who are familiar with robots align their actions more to a robot they believe to be basic than to one they believe to be advanced. Regarding alignment over the course of an interaction, the extent of alignment seems to remain constant, when participants believe the robot to be advanced, but it increases over time, when participants believe the robot to be a basic version

You turn me cold: evidence for temperature contagion

Introduction During social interactions, our own physiological responses influence those of others. Synchronization of physiological (and behavioural) responses can facilitate emotional understanding and group coherence through inter-subjectivity. Here we investigate if observing cues indicating a change in another's body temperature results in a corresponding temperature change in the observer. Methods Thirty-six healthy participants (age; 22.9±3.1 yrs) each observed, then rated, eight purpose-made videos (3 min duration) that depicted actors with either their right or left hand in visibly warm (warm videos) or cold water (cold videos). Four control videos with the actors' hand in front of the water were also shown. Temperature of participant observers' right and left hands was concurrently measured using a thermistor within a Wheatstone bridge with a theoretical temperature sensitivity of <0.0001°C. Temperature data were analysed in a repeated measures ANOVA (temperature × actor's hand × observer's hand). Results Participants rated the videos showing hands immersed in cold water as being significantly cooler than hands immersed in warm water, F(1,34) = 256.67, p0.1). There was however no evidence of left-right mirroring of these temperature effects p>0.1). Sensitivity to temperature contagion was also predicted by inter-individual differences in self-report empathy. Conclusions We illustrate physiological contagion of temperature in healthy individuals, suggesting that empathetic understanding for primary low-level physiological challenges (as well as more complex emotions) are grounded in somatic simulation

Motor contagion: the contribution of trajectory and end-points

Increased involuntary arm movement deviation when observing an incongruent human arm movement has been interpreted as a strong indicator of motor contagion. Here, we examined the contribution of trajectory and end-point information on motor contagion by altering congruence between the stimulus and arm movement. Participants performed cyclical horizontal arm movements whilst simultaneously observing a stimulus representing human arm movement. The stimuli comprised congruent horizontal movements or vertical movements featuring incongruent trajectory and end-points. A novel, third, stimulus comprised curvilinear movements featuring congruent end-points, but an incongruent trajectory. In Experiment 1, our dependent variables indicated increased motor contagion when observing the vertical compared to horizontal movement stimulus. There was even greater motor contagion in the curvilinear stimulus condition indicating an additive effect of an incongruent trajectory comprising congruent end-points. In Experiment 2, this additive effect was also present when facing perpendicular to the display, and thus with end-points represented as a product of the movement rather than an external spatial reference. Together, these findings support the theory of event coding (Hommel et al., Behav Brain Sci 24:849–878, 2001), and the prediction that increased motor contagion takes place when observed and executed actions share common features (i.e., movement end-points)

Behavioral Priming: It's All in the Mind, but Whose Mind?

The perspective that behavior is often driven by unconscious determinants has become widespread in social psychology. Bargh, Chen, and Burrows' (1996) famous study, in which participants unwittingly exposed to the stereotype of age walked slower when exiting the laboratory, was instrumental in defining this perspective. Here, we present two experiments aimed at replicating the original study. Despite the use of automated timing methods and a larger sample, our first experiment failed to show priming. Our second experiment was aimed at manipulating the beliefs of the experimenters: Half were led to think that participants would walk slower when primed congruently, and the other half was led to expect the opposite. Strikingly, we obtained a walking speed effect, but only when experimenters believed participants would indeed walk slower. This suggests that both priming and experimenters' expectations are instrumental in explaining the walking speed effect. Further, debriefing was suggestive of awareness of the primes. We conclude that unconscious behavioral priming is real, while real, involves mechanisms different from those typically assumed to cause the effect

Mimicry of Food Intake: The Dynamic Interplay between Eating Companions

Numerous studies have shown that people adjust their intake directly to that of their eating companions; they eat more when others eat more, and less when others inhibit intake. A potential explanation for this modeling effect is that both eating companions' food intake becomes synchronized through processes of behavioral mimicry. No study, however, has tested whether behavioral mimicry can partially account for this modeling effect. To capture behavioral mimicry, real-time observations of dyads of young females having an evening meal were conducted. It was assessed whether mimicry depended on the time of the interaction and on the person who took the bite. A total of 70 young female dyads took part in the study, from which the total number of bites (N = 3,888) was used as unit of analyses. For each dyad, the total number of bites and the exact time at which each person took a bite were coded. Behavioral mimicry was operationalized as a bite taken within a fixed 5-second interval after the other person had taken a bite, whereas non-mimicked bites were defined as bites taken outside the 5-second interval. It was found that both women mimicked each other's eating behavior. They were more likely to take a bite of their meal in congruence with their eating companion rather than eating at their own pace. This behavioral mimicry was found to be more prominent at the beginning than at the end of the interaction. This study suggests that behavioral mimicry may partially account for social modeling of food intake

Unconscious Thinking, Feeling and Behavior Towards Products and Brands: Introduction to a Journal of Brand Management Special Issue

This introduction reviews the motivating forces behind this issue, exploring the role of nonconscious consumer behavior in branding environments. The article establishes a foundation of unconscious research in psychology and consumer behavior, and then provides an introduction to the four articles that follow. The article concludes with a call to adopt an inclusive interpretive-positivistic stance to the study of unconscious consumer-brand behavior, attitudes and beliefs

Sensitivity to differences in the motor origin of drawings:from human to robot

This study explores the idea that an observer is sensitive to differences in the static traces of drawings that are due to differences in motor origin. In particular, our aim was to test if an observer is able to discriminate between drawings made by a robot and by a human in the case where the drawings contain salient kinematic cues for discrimination and in the case where the drawings only contain more subtle kinematic cues. We hypothesized that participants would be able to correctly attribute the drawing to a human or a robot origin when salient kinematic cues are present. In addition, our study shows that observers are also able to detect the producer behind the drawings in the absence of these salient kinematic cues. The design was such that in the absence of salient kinematic cues, the drawings are visually very similar, i.e. only differing in subtle kinematic differences. Observers thus had to rely on these subtle kinematic differences in the line trajectories between drawings. However, not only motor origin (human versus robot) but also motor style (natural versus mechanic) plays a role in attributing a drawing to the correct producer, because participants scored less high when the human hand draws in a relatively mechanical way. Overall, this study suggests that observers are sensitive to subtle kinematic differences between visually similar marks in drawings that have a different motor origin. We offer some possible interpretations inspired by the idea of "motor resonance''