ORCID Profile
0000-0001-7014-6951
Current Organisation
University of Queensland
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In Research Link Australia (RLA), "Research Topics" refer to ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes. These topics are either sourced from ANZSRC FOR and SEO codes listed in researchers' related grants or generated by a large language model (LLM) based on their publications.
Psychology | Social and Community Psychology | Neurocognitive Patterns and Neural Networks | Biological psychology | Social psychology | Social and affective neuroscience | Psychophysiology | Social And Community Psychology | Decision Making | Developmental Psychology and Ageing
Expanding Knowledge in Psychology and Cognitive Sciences | Behavioural and cognitive sciences | Behaviour and Health | Ageing and Older People |
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 23-04-2015
DOI: 10.1111/POPS.12182
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 30-08-2012
DOI: 10.3758/S13414-012-0359-Z
Abstract: Faces convey a variety of socially relevant cues that have been shown to affect recognition, such as age, sex, and race, but few studies have examined the interactive effect of these cues. White participants of two distinct age groups were presented with faces that differed in race, age, and sex in a face recognition paradigm. Replicating the other-race effect, young participants recognized young own-race faces better than young other-race faces. However, recognition performance did not differ across old faces of different races (Experiments 1, 2A). In addition, participants showed an other-age effect, recognizing White young faces better than White old faces. Sex affected recognition performance only when age was not varied (Experiment 2B). Overall, older participants showed a similar recognition pattern (Experiment 3) as young participants, displaying an other-race effect for young, but not old, faces. However, they recognized young and old White faces on a similar level. These findings indicate that face cues interact to affect recognition performance such that age and sex information reliably modulate the effect of race cues. These results extend accounts of face recognition that explain recognition biases (such as the other-race effect) as a function of dichotomous ingroup/outgroup categorization, in that outgroup characteristics are not simply additive but interactively determine recognition performance.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 16-12-2016
DOI: 10.1111/JASP.12370
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 21-07-2020
Abstract: Evolutionary and neuroscientific approaches to intergroup bias have been highly generative, but research has yet to consider how these two approaches can build on each other. Here, we review neuroscientific methods findings on intergroup bias. We then review the emerging perspective that views intergroup bias as a psychological adaptation to pressures present in ancestral ecologies. We conclude by considering evidence that collectivist and in idualist cultures evolved in response to unique ecological threats. As such, members of each should be differentially susceptible to environmental cues connoting threats to pathogens. We then propose future directions for neuroscientific research that assesses intergroup bias from an evolutionary perspective. Consideration of cultural factors should enable improved understanding of intergroup bias, with proper consideration of how biology and psychology have adapted to the social environments faced in ancestral populations.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 31-07-2018
Abstract: Reciprocating others’ smiles is important for maintaining social connections as it both signals affiliative to others and also elicits affiliative reactions from others. Feelings of social exclusion may increase affiliative mimicry to improve affiliative bonds with others. In this study we examined whether social exclusion leads people to selectively mimic the facial expressions of more affiliative-looking smiles. Participants (N=48) first wrote about either a time they were excluded or a neutral event. They then classified a series of 20 smiling faces–half spontaneous enjoyment smiles and half posed smiles. Facial electromyography recorded muscle activity involved in smiling. Excluded participants distinguished the two smile types better than controls. Excluded participants also showed greater zygomaticus major (mouth smiling) activity toward enjoyment smiles compared to posed smiled control participants did not. Orbicularis oculi (eye crinkle) activity matched that of the smile type viewed, but did not vary by exclusion condition. Affiliative social regulation is discussed as a possible explanation for these effects.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 18-06-2019
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2018.1488243
Abstract: Crying is often considered to be a positive experience that benefits the crier, yet there is little empirical evidence to support this. Indeed, it seems that people hold a range of appraisals about their crying, and these are likely to influence the effects of crying on their emotional state. This paper reports on the development and psychometric validation of the Beliefs about Crying Scale (BACS), a new measure assessing beliefs about whether crying leads to positive or negative emotional outcomes in in idual and interpersonal contexts. Using 40 preliminary items drawn from a qualitative study, an exploratory factor analysis with 202 participants (50% female aged 18-84 years) yielded three subscales: Helpful Beliefs, Unhelpful-In idual Beliefs, and Unhelpful-Social Beliefs, explaining 60% of the variance in the data. Confirmatory factor analysis on the 14-item scale with 210 participants (71% female aged 17-48 years) showed a good fit to the three factors. The subscales showed differential relationships with measures of personality traits, crying proneness, emotion regulation and expressivity, and emotional identification (alexithymia). The BACS provides a nuanced understanding of beliefs about crying in different contexts and helps to explain why crying behaviour may not always represent positive emotion regulation for the crier.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 11-2019
DOI: 10.1016/J.JECP.2019.06.009
Abstract: This study examined children's moral concern for robots relative to living and nonliving entities. Children (4-10 years of age, N = 126) watched videos of six different entities having a box placed over them that was subsequently struck by a human hand. Children were subsequently asked to rate the moral worth of each agent relating to physical harm. Children afforded robotic entities less moral concern than living entities but afforded them more moral concern than nonliving entities, and these effects became more pronounced with age. Children's tendency to ascribe mental life to robotic and nonliving entities (but not living entities) predicted moral concern for these entities. However, when asked to make moral judgments relating to giving the agent away, children did not distinguish between nonliving and robotic agents and no age-related changes were identified. Moreover, the tendency to ascribe mental life was predictive of moral concern only for some agents but not others. Overall, the findings suggest that children consider robotic entities to occupy a middle moral ground between living and nonliving entities and that this effect is partly explained by the tendency to ascribe mental life to such agents. They also demonstrate that moral worth is a complex multifaceted concept that does not demonstrate a clear pattern across different ontological categories.
Publisher: Emerald
Date: 13-10-2022
DOI: 10.1108/APJML-12-2020-0897
Abstract: The paper aims to examine whether (1) deviation of design (i.e. objective design newness) is distinct to consumers' perception of design newness (i.e. subjective design newness) and (2) subjective design newness rather than objective design newness evokes the emotion of interest and enhances product evaluation. In total five sets of quasi-experiments were conducted on the natural manipulations of design newness. Specifically, the first four studies examine consumers' perception of design newness, feeling-of-interest and product evaluation toward old and new Apple's iOS (i.e., iPhone OS) icons when a new Apple's iOS is released. The fifth study generalized the findings to the new design of XiaoMi MiPhone. Across five quasi-experimental studies, the authors found that (1) consumers do not necessarily perceive an objectively new design to be subjectively new (2) subjective design newness, but not objective design newness, evokes interest and (3) interest, in turn, enhances product evaluation and behavioral intention toward an innovation. The current finding extended the current literature on design newness by demonstrating that subjective (vs objective) design newness provides a more holistic account of consumers' interest and positive product evaluation toward the innovations. The research showed that simply updating or altering the design of a product does not evoke consumers' perception of design newness and positive product evaluation. Instead, designer and managers must explore ways to evoke consumers' perception of novelty, complexity, unfamiliarity, atypicality and difference. Furthermore, the current finding demonstrated that subjective design newness can be used to evoke consumer interest and, therefore, result in positive purchase evaluation. The current research is the first to examine (1) the difference between objective and subjective design newness, (2) the emotional response toward design newness and (3) the emotion of interest as a mediator that explain the strong relationship between design newness and positive product evaluation.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 04-2021
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 08-11-2020
Abstract: Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7,007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful in idual elicits the intention to support, d = .49 [.43, .55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one’s group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 09-1998
Abstract: This experiment examined in idual differences in emotional responsivity by recording the startle eyeblink reflex while 57 college students viewed affect-laden pictures and then rated their pleasantness. All participants first completed measures of affect intensity, alexithymia, and depression. Startleprobes were some-times presented at 120, 300, 800, or 4,500 ms after slide onset. By 300 ns, blinks elicited during negative slides were larger than those elicited during positive ones. Negative slides were also rated as more unpleasant. Moreover, all three personality variables moderated either the valence ratings, startle modification, or both. High-affect intensity was associated with diminished modulation of startle, but more extreme ratings. Alexithymia had no effect on the startle measure, but high-alexithymia participants did show more moderate ratings. Depressed participants exhibited accelerated (120 ms) modulation of startle. The results suggest the importance of measuring both physiological responses and subjective feelings in the study of in idual differences in emotion.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 06-01-2021
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2019.1707514
Abstract: Alexithymia is characterised by a lack of words for emotional experiences and it has been implicated in deficits in emotion processing. Research in this area has typically focused on judgements of discrete emotions rather than of affect, which is a precursor to emotion construction. In the current study, higher alexithymia was predicted to be related to more neutral judgements of valence and arousal of music representing a range of emotions. Participants (
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 02-2023
DOI: 10.1037/LAW0000353
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-1996
DOI: 10.1111/J.1469-8986.1996.TB02365.X
Abstract: In previous research on modulation of the startle eyeblink reflex, emotional effects have been demonstrated only at late probe positions, whereas attentional effects have been found at both early and late positions but only when the prepulses were affectively neutral. In Experiment 1, participants viewed emotionally valenced pictures and were instructed to attend to the duration of half of the slides. Affective modulation of the startle eyeblink occurred at long lead intervals, but attentional modulation also occurred late. In Experiment 2, participants viewed the same slides used in Experiment 1 but were instructed to attend to the duration of only the positive or the negative slides. Affective modulation occurred at both early and late probe positions, whereas attentional effects occurred only following slide offset. Early (250 ms) affective modification of startle eyeblink has not been previously reported. These results suggest that the time courses of emotional and attentional modulation of startle are variable and can occur at both early and late startle probe positions, depending on task requirements.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 1997
DOI: 10.1207/S15327957PSPR0101_3
Abstract: We argue that recent work in connectionist modeling, in particular the parallel constraint satisfaction processes that are central to many of these models, has great importance for understanding issues of both historical and current concern for social psychologists. We first provide a brief description of connectionist modeling, with particular emphasis on parallel constraint satisfaction processes. Second, we examine the tremendous similarities between parallel constraint satisfaction processes and the Gestalt principles that were the foundation for much of modern social psychology. We propose that parallel constraint satisfaction processes provide a computational implementation of the principles of Gestalt psychology that were central to the work of such seminal social psychologists as Asch, Festinger, Heider, and Lewin. Third, we then describe how parallel constraint satisfaction processes have been applied to three areas that were key to the beginnings of modern social psychology and remain central today: impression formation and causal reasoning, cognitive consistency (balance and cognitive dissonance), and goal-directed behavior. We conclude by discussing implications of parallel constraint satisfaction principles for a number of broader issues in social psychology, such as the dynamics of social thought and the integration of social information within the narrow time frame of social interaction.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 03-2018
DOI: 10.1016/J.YHBEH.2018.01.009
Abstract: Oxytocin is a neuropeptide that plays a key role in social processing and there are several studies suggesting that intranasally administered oxytocin may enhance social cognitive abilities and visual attention in healthy and clinical groups. However, there are very few studies to date that have investigated the potential benefits of intranasal oxytocin (iOT) on older adults' social cognitive abilities. This is a surprising omission, because relative to their younger counterparts, older adults also exhibit a range of social cognitive difficulties and also show differences in the way they visually attend to social information. Therefore, we tested the effect of iOT (24 IU) versus a placebo spray on 59 older and 61 younger adults' social cognitive abilities and visual attention using a double-blind placebo-controlled within-groups design. While iOT provided no overall age-related benefit on social cognitive abilities, the key finding to emerge was that iOT improved ToM ability in both age-groups when the task had minimal contextual information, but not when the task had enriched contextual information. Interestingly, iOT had gender specific effects during a ToM task with minimal context. For males in both age-groups, iOT reduced gazing to the social aspects of the scenes (i.e., faces & bodies), and for females, iOT eliminated age differences in gaze patterns that were observed in the placebo condition. These effects on eye-gaze were not observed in a very similar ToM task that included more enriched contextual information. Overall, these findings highlight the interactive nature of iOT with task related factors (e.g., context), and are discussed in relation to the social salience hypothesis of oxytocin.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 24-07-2019
Abstract: Rape cases have a disproportionately high attrition rate and low conviction rate compared to other criminal offenses. Evaluations of a rape complainant’s credibility often determine whether a case progresses through the criminal justice system. Even though emotional demeanor is not related to witness honesty or accuracy, distressed rape complainants are perceived to be more credible than complainants who present with controlled affect. To understand the extent and robustness of the influence of emotional demeanor on credibility judgments of female adult rape complainants, we conducted a systematic review, meta-analysis and p-curve analysis of the experimental simulated decision-making literature on the influence of complainant emotional demeanor on complainant credibility. The meta-analysis included 20 studies with participants who were criminal justice professionals (e.g., police officers and judges), community members, and mock jurors (N = 3128). Results suggest that distressed demeanor significantly increased perceptions of complainant credibility, with a small to moderate effect size estimate. Importantly, the results of p-curve analysis suggest that reporting bias is not a likely explanation for the effect of emotional demeanor on rape complainant credibility. S le type (whether perceivers were criminal justice professionals or prospective jurors) and stimulus modality (whether perceivers read about or watched the complainant recount the alleged rape) were not found to moderate the effect size estimate. These results suggest that effective methods of reducing reliance on emotional demeanor to make credibility judgments about rape complainants should be investigated to make credibility assessments fairer and more accurate.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 10-2019
DOI: 10.1037/BUL0000206
Abstract: Rape cases have a disproportionately high attrition rate and low conviction rate compared with other criminal offenses. Evaluations of a rape complainant's credibility often determine whether a case progresses through the criminal justice system. Even though emotional demeanor is not related to witness honesty or accuracy, distressed rape complainants are perceived to be more credible than complainants who present with controlled affect. To understand the extent and robustness of the influence of emotional demeanor on credibility judgments of female adult rape complainants, we conducted a systematic review, meta-analysis, and p-curve analysis of the experimental simulated decision-making literature on the influence of complainant emotional demeanor on complainant credibility. The meta-analysis included 20 studies with participants who were criminal justice professionals (e.g., police officers and judges), community members, and mock jurors (N = 3128). Results suggest that distressed demeanor significantly increased perceptions of complainant credibility, with a small to moderate effect size estimate. Importantly, the results of p-curve analysis suggest that reporting bias is not a likely explanation for the effect of emotional demeanor on rape complainant credibility. S le type (whether perceivers were criminal justice professionals or prospective jurors) and stimulus modality (whether perceivers read about or watched the complainant recount the alleged rape) were not found to moderate the effect size estimate. These results suggest that effective methods of reducing reliance on emotional demeanor to make credibility judgments about rape complainants should be investigated to make credibility assessments fairer and more accurate. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher: Springer International Publishing
Date: 2020
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 25-09-2013
DOI: 10.1007/S40519-013-0067-2
Abstract: Emotions form an important part of stereotyping and prejudice, but little is known about how intergroup emotions are associated with anti-fat prejudice. This study examined the relation between negative intergroup emotions (disgust, contempt, and anger) and the stereotypes of obese people. A community s le (n = 380) and an undergraduate s le (n = 96) rated obese people on common obesity stereotypes (e.g., lazy, sloppy), and also indicated the extent to which they felt disgust, contempt, and anger toward obese people. In both s les, participants reported feeling more disgust and contempt than anger toward obese people. Furthermore, regression analyses indicated that disgust was a significant positive predictor of obesity stereotypes, but contempt and anger were not. Overall, these findings provide further evidence that disgust plays an important role in prejudice toward obese people.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 19-03-2015
DOI: 10.1002/BRB3.332
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 08-2022
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 11-05-2017
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2017.1325728
Abstract: There is accumulating evidence that disgust plays an important role in prejudice toward in iduals with obesity, but that research is primarily based on self-reported emotions. In four studies, we examined whether participants displayed a physiological marker of disgust (i.e. levator labii activity recorded using facial electromyography) in response to images of obese in iduals, and whether these responses corresponded with their self-reported disgust to those images. All four studies showed the predicted self-reported disgust response toward images of obese in iduals. Study 1 further showed that participants exhibited more levator activity to images of obese in iduals than to neutral images. However, Studies 2-4 failed to provide any evidence that the targets' body size affected levator responses. These findings suggest that disgust may operate at multiple levels, and that the disgust response to images of obese in iduals may be more of a cognitive-conceptual one than a physiological one.
Publisher: Frontiers Media SA
Date: 10-10-2019
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 27-02-2020
Abstract: Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and mainly human phenomenon. The persistence of this behavior throughout adulthood has fascinated and puzzled many researchers. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue that binds in iduals together and triggers social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were typically conducted only across Western participants, resulting in limited generalizability. The present study examines this effect across 36 countries spanning all populated continents, providing the most comprehensive investigation of the social effects of tearful crying to-date. Next to testing possible mediating factors, we also examine a number of moderating factors, including the crier’s gender and group membership, the situational valence (positive or negative situations), the social context (in private or public settings), the perceived appropriateness of crying, and trait empathy of the observer. The current work can inform theories on crying across the social sciences.
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 12-04-2006
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 07-03-2015
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-2016
DOI: 10.1016/J.AUSMJ.2016.11.005
Abstract: Consumers are known to show a paradoxical tendency to favour both familiar and novel marketing stimuli such as products and advertisements. However, an explanation for this paradox has yet to be proposed. This provides immense challenges for marketing practices that conventionally strive to build familiarity (e.g. building awareness, recognition, recall, and customer relationships). Using the emotion differentiation framework, this theoretical paper shows that this paradox is a result of two distinct emotions – liking and interest. Specifically, consumers like familiarity but are interested in novelty. This paper offers six empirical propositions to: (1) differentiate interest from liking (2) show that liking motivates consumers to favour familiarity whereas interest motivates consumers to prefer novelty (3) demonstrate that interest accounts for previously explained boundary conditions of the familiarity–liking effect and (4) provide insights to explain previous conflicting findings in the field of innovation, advertising, and consumer psychology research.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 10-2016
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 25-08-2023
Abstract: Empathy has the potential to bridge political ides. Here, we examine barriers to cross-party empathy and explore when and why these differ for liberals and conservatives. In four studies, U.S. and U.K. participants (Total N = 4,737) read hypothetical scenarios and extended less empathy to suffering political opponents than allies or neutral targets. These effects were strongly shown by liberals but were weaker among conservatives, such that conservatives consistently showed more empathy to liberals than liberals showed to conservatives. This asymmetry was partly explained by liberals’ harsher moral judgments of outgroup members (Studies 1-4) and the fact that liberals saw conservatives as more harmful than conservatives saw liberals (Studies 3-4). The asymmetry persisted across changes in the U.S. government and was not explained by perceptions of political power (Studies 3 and 4). Implications and future directions are discussed.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 11-2011
Publisher: Springer Science and Business Media LLC
Date: 16-01-2023
DOI: 10.1038/S41598-023-28098-X
Abstract: Cognitive load reduces both empathy and prosocial behaviour. However, studies demonstrating these effects have induced cognitive load in a temporally limited, artificial manner that fails to capture real-world cognitive load. Drawing from cognitive load theory, we investigated whether naturally occurring cognitive load from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic moderated the relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour (operationalised as support for public health measures). This large study in an Australian s le ( N = 600) identified negative relationships between pandemic fatigue, empathy for people vulnerable to COVID-19, and prosocial behaviour, and a positive relationship between empathy and prosocial behaviour. Additionally, we found that the negative effect of the pandemic on prosocial behaviour depended on empathy for vulnerable others, with pandemic fatigue’s effects lowest for those with the highest empathy. These findings highlight the interrelationships of cognitive load and empathy, and the potential value of eliciting empathy to ease the impact of real-world cognitive load on prosocial behaviour.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 23-02-2023
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 22-10-2020
Abstract: In this paper, we briefly review the large research literature on emotion in social psychology, and show how it is now firmly embedded in language and communication. As a springboard, we look at the history of emotion studies in JLSP. Then, we consider theory and methodology, and evaluate how standard and more recent methods of measurement have led to new ways of looking at the communication of emotion, including in real-life contexts. We conclude with suggestions for a research agenda that takes the study of emotion forward into the heartland of research in language and social psychology.
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 09-2022
DOI: 10.1037/EMO0000926
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 12-2003
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 03-2009
DOI: 10.1002/AB.20295
Abstract: This study investigated the desensitization to violence over a short period of time. Participants watched nine violent movie scenes and nine comedy scenes, and reported whether they enjoyed the violent or comedy scenes and whether they felt sympathetic toward the victim of violence. Using latent growth modeling, analyses were carried out to investigate how participants responded to the different scenes across time. The findings of this study suggested that repeated exposure to media violence reduces the psychological impact of media violence in the short term, therefore desensitizing viewers to media violence. As a result, viewers tended to feel less sympathetic toward the victims of violence and actually enjoy more the violence portrayed in the media. Additionally, desensitization to media violence was better represented by a curvilinear pattern, whereas desensitization to comedy scenes was better represented by a linear pattern. Finally, trait aggression was not related to the pattern of change over time, although significant effects were found for initial reports of enjoyment and sympathy.
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 05-06-2018
Abstract: Social robots will soon be a part of our everyday work and home lives. Roboticists have assumed that a more human-like appearance in robots will ensure pro-sociality and cooperation between robots and humans. Indeed, people more readily attribute human-like capacities and a perception of mind to such robots. In turn, people show greater empathy for human-like robots. However, a human-like design has also been linked to beliefs about the potential of robots to be evil and cause damage to humanity. The aim of this research was to further investigate these ambivalent emotional reactions. In two studies, participants viewed images of robots of varying human likeness that were also depicted as the main character in a sad situation. Participants rated their sympathy for the robot but also their perceptions of threat. Facial electromyography (EMG) was added in the second study to measure empathic facial responses. We predicted that human likeness would have effects on both empathy and threat responses. We also tested whether these effects would be moderated by social categorization and threat information. Study 1 (n = 201) manipulated the categorization of the robot through changes in the phrasing of the scenarios, whereas Study 2 (n = 120) manipulated threat information about robots by first presenting positive or negative news stories about robots. Consistent with previous research, more human-like robots elicited greater empathic and threat responses, both on self-report and EMG measures. Manipulations of social categorization and threat failed to moderate the effects of human likeness on the measures. These results have considerable implications for the existing human-robot interaction literature and could help inform social robot designs for the future.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 25-02-2014
DOI: 10.1080/02699931.2014.890563
Abstract: Successful human social interactions frequently rely on appropriate interpersonal empathy and eye contact. Here, we report a previously unseen relationship between trait empathy and eye-gaze patterns to affective facial features in video-based stimuli. Fifty-nine healthy adult participants had their eyes tracked while watching a three-minute long "sad" and "emotionally neutral" video. The video stimuli portrayed the head and shoulders of the same actor recounting a fictional personal event. Analyses revealed that the greater participants' trait emotional empathy, the more they fixated on the eye-region of the actor, regardless of the emotional valence of the video stimuli. Our findings provide the first empirical evidence of a relationship between empathic capacity and eye-gaze pattern to the most affective facial region (eyes).
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-07-2019
DOI: 10.1111/SPC3.12489
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 25-10-2017
Abstract: Victims of social exclusion are highly motivated to regain feelings of social connectedness.Some theories suggest that victims of exclusion should prefer inclusive or novel others and derogate the perpetrators of exclusion. Yet, no studies have explored the mechanisms that alter person preferences following exclusion. In two experiments we found that excluded people selectively evaluate ostracisers based on the ostracisers’ group membership. Excluded people who valued an ingroup membership evaluated ostracisers from that group more positively than includers from the same group. Ostracisers from an ingroup were also more positively evaluated than ostracisers from another group. These studies show that victims of exclusion do not universally devalue excluders. In fact, the findings indicate that exclusion endears victims to ingroup malefactors.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 07-2016
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 02-2019
Abstract: We examined two threats to belonging and related needs on Facebook: lurking (Study 1) and ostracism (Study 2). In Study 1, participants were either allowed or not allowed to share information on Facebook for 48 hours. Those who were not allowed to share information had lower levels of belonging and meaningful existence. In Study 2, participants engaged in a laboratory-based Facebook activity. Half of the profiles were set up so that participants would not receive any feedback on their status updates. Participants who did not receive feedback on their updates had lower levels of belonging, self-esteem, control, and meaningful existence. Together, these findings indicate that a lack of information sharing and feedback can threaten belonging needs.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 09-2012
DOI: 10.1016/J.BIOPSYCHO.2012.05.008
Abstract: Immersive virtual environment technology is increasingly used by psychologists as a tool for researching social influence in realistic, yet experimentally controllable, settings. The present study demonstrates the validity and reliability of facial electromyography as a marker of affect in immersive virtual environments and further shows that the mere presence of virtual humans is enough to elicit sociality effects on facial expressiveness. Participants viewed pleasant and unpleasant images in a virtual room either alone or with two virtual humans present. The patterns of smiling and frowning activity elicited by positive and negative stimuli in the virtual environment were the same as those found in laboratory settings. Moreover, when viewing positive stimuli, smiling activity was greater when two agents were present than in the alone condition. The results provide new psychophysiological evidence for the potency of social agents in immersive virtual environments.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 02-11-2017
Abstract: Older adults have difficulties in identifying most facial expressions of emotion. However, most aging studies have presented static photographs of intense expressions, whereas in everyday experience people see emotions that develop and change. The present study was designed to assess whether age-related difficulties with emotion recognition are reduced when more ecologically valid (i.e., dynamic) stimuli are used. We examined the effect of stimuli format (i.e., static vs. dynamic) on facial affect recognition in two separate studies that included independent s les and distinct stimuli sets. In addition to younger and older participants, a middle-aged group was included in Study 1 and eye gaze patterns were assessed in Study 2. Across both studies, older adults performed worse than younger adults on measures of facial affect recognition. In Study 1, older and-middle aged adults benefited from dynamic stimuli, but only when the emotional displays were subtle. Younger adults gazed more at the eye region of the face relative to older adults (Study 2), but dynamic presentation increased attention towards the eye region for younger adults only. Together, these studies provide important and novel insights into the specific circumstances in which older adults may be expected to experience difficulties in perceiving facial emotions.
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-04-2018
DOI: 10.1080/00224545.2018.1453467
Abstract: People occasionally choose to cut themselves off from their online social network by taking extended breaks from Facebook. This study investigated whether abstaining from Facebook reduces stress but also reduces subjective well-being because of the resulting social disconnection. Participants (138 active Facebook users) were assigned to either a condition in which they were instructed to give up Facebook for 5 days or continue to use Facebook as normal. Perceived stress and well-being, as well as salivary cortisol, were measured before and after the test period. Relative to those in the Facebook Normal condition, those in the No Facebook condition experienced lower levels of cortisol and life satisfaction. Our results suggest that the typical Facebook user may occasionally find the large amount of social information available to be taxing, and Facebook vacations could ameliorate this stress-at least in the short term.
Publisher: Elsevier BV
Date: 05-2013
DOI: 10.1016/J.NEUROPSYCHOLOGIA.2013.02.020
Abstract: Whether empathy depends on activation of the mirror neuron system is controversial. This study tested the relationship between cognitive empathy and motor activation during action observation through the sensorimotor system. EEG activity was recorded over the motor area while participants observed and then performed a task demonstrated by a model. Analyses revealed significant suppression in mu/alpha (8-12Hz) and beta (18-22Hz) EEG bands, indicative of sensorimotor activity, during both observed and executed actions. Crucially, participants rating higher in perspective taking as a measure of trait cognitive empathy showed significantly less beta suppression when observing actions. The direction of this relationship, contrary to studies involving induced emotional empathy, may reflect in idual differences in mentalizing and mirroring mechanisms to understand others' actions. Implications of these findings for the hypothesised empathy-mirror neuron system link are discussed.
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-2019
DOI: 10.1016/J.AUSMJ.2019.06.003
Abstract: Do consumers really like familiarity and therefore dislike novelty? This is a central question that has resonated through different fields of marketing and psychology. Past research has found that people heuristically associate familiarity to liking, but they also prefer novelty in certain motivational contexts. This paper presents three studies to show that novelty does not result in liking but instead, evokes interest—a similar but functionally different positive affective experience. Specifically, we show that people feel interested toward and therefore favour a product when it is subjectively perceived to be new or said to be new, even when the novel product is objectively identical to its counterpart. Novelty, however, was found to be unrelated to liking. These findings suggest that consumers’ paradoxical tendency to favour both familiarity and novelty is manifested in ways beyond a general emotional valence account. Specifically, familiarity appears to evoke liking whereas novelty appears to evoke interest.
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 24-02-2014
DOI: 10.1111/JASP.12243
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 02-01-2018
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 10-2020
DOI: 10.1037/EMO0000633
Abstract: This research tested the hypothesis that emotional crying facilitates coping and recovery, specifically through physiological changes that occur during crying. Female undergraduate students (N = 197) were randomly assigned to either a sad or neutral condition using short videos. Sad videos were selected for their extreme emotion elicitation. We predicted that compared to those who did not cry to the stimuli and those who were exposed to neutral videos, people who cried would (a) be able to withstand a stressful task for longer (b) show lower levels of cortisol following crying and exposure to the stressor and (c) have faster recovery (i.e., return to baseline levels of affect). The final groups consisted of the neutral group (n = 65), sad criers (n = 71), and sad noncriers (n = 61). After a 5-min baseline period, participants watched either the sad or neutral videos for 17 min and then completed a physical stressor (cold pressor test). Heart rate and respiration were continuously recorded, whereas salivary s les for cortisol were taken at 4 separate time points during testing. Analyses revealed no differences between the 3 groups in time withstanding the stressor or cortisol changes. Respiration rate, however, increased in the neutral group and noncriers while watching the videos, with criers' respiration remaining stable. Furthermore, heart rate was found to decelerate just before crying, with a return to baseline during the first crying period. These results suggest that crying may assist in generally maintaining biological homeostasis, perhaps consciously through self-soothing via purposeful breathing and unconsciously through regulation of heart rate. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher: Informa UK Limited
Date: 09-2013
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 13-09-2013
DOI: 10.1093/SCAN/NST134
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Date: 11-2004
DOI: 10.1111/J.0956-7976.2004.00746.X
Abstract: We investigated the relationship of implicit racial prejudice to discriminatory behavior. White university students chose the best of three applicants (two were White and one was Black) for a prestigious teaching fellowship. They then completed the Implicit Association Test (IAT), a measure of implicit racial bias. Three weeks later, participants completed a second implicit measure of racial bias by viewing photos of Whites and Blacks while facial electromyography (EMG) was recorded from sites corresponding to the muscles used in smiling and frowning. Analyses revealed that bias in cheek EMG activity was related to the race of the chosen applicant, whereas bias on the IAT was not. Motivations to control prejudiced reactions were not related to EMG activity or the race of the applicant chosen, but were related to IAT bias. The findings indicate that facial EMG can be used as an implicit measure of prejudice related to discrimination.
Publisher: Oxford University Press (OUP)
Date: 07-04-2017
DOI: 10.1093/SCAN/NSX050
Publisher: American Psychological Association (APA)
Date: 08-2019
DOI: 10.1037/PAG0000373
Abstract: Prior studies have shown that older adults perceive sadness differently relative to younger adults. However, the stimuli used to test older adults' perceptions of sadness have been limited by the fact that they have not included emotional tears-a salient emotional cue that has previously been shown to enhance perceptions of sadness in younger adults. This study reports three experiments that test whether the presence of tears differentially affects older and younger adults' perceptions of sadness. Experiment 1 was a laboratory-based experiment and also assessed facial mimicry responses using electromyography (EMG). Experiments 2 and 3 were conducted online. Across all three experiments, participants rated faces as showing greater sadness when tears were present compared to absent, and most critically, participant age did not moderate this effect-young and older adults responded equivalently to the presence of tears. Another finding to emerge across all experiments was that older faces were consistently rated as showing more sadness than younger faces, suggesting that there may be a bias toward attributing more sadness to people in older age. The facial EMG data showed that both age groups exhibited greater frowning (relative to smiling) responses when viewing the sad faces, but this effect was not moderated by the presence of tears. Taken together, the data from these three experiments show stability in terms of how younger and older adults respond to the presence of tears in both age groups, behavioral responses to sadness are equivalently enhanced. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).
Publisher: Wiley
Date: 30-01-2012
DOI: 10.1002/HBM.22044
Publisher: Center for Open Science
Date: 21-03-2018
Abstract: People occasionally choose to cut themselves off from their online social network by taking extended breaks from Facebook. This study investigated whether abstaining from Facebook reduces stress but also reduces subjective well-being because of the resulting social disconnection. Participants (138 active Facebook users) were assigned to either a condition in which they were instructed to give up Facebook for five days or continue to use Facebook as normal. Perceived stress and well-being, as well as salivary cortisol, were measured before and after the test period. Relative to those in the Facebook Normal condition, those in the No Facebook condition experienced lower levels of cortisol and life satisfaction. Our results suggest that the typical Facebook user may occasionally find the large amount of social information available taxing, and Facebook vacations could ameliorate this stress—at least in the short-term.
Location: United States of America
Start Date: 09-2023
End Date: 09-2026
Amount: $320,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 03-2013
End Date: 09-2016
Amount: $95,834.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 11-2020
End Date: 11-2025
Amount: $461,088.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 02-2013
End Date: 02-2017
Amount: $245,529.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded ActivityStart Date: 2009
End Date: 06-2013
Amount: $120,000.00
Funder: Australian Research Council
View Funded Activity