When Sharing a Laugh Means Sharing More: Testing the Role of Shared Laughter on Short-Term Interpersonal Consequences

Laughter is a common social behavior. Yet when, why, and how laughter may cause positive relationship change is largely unexamined, empirically. The current studies focus on shared laughter (i.e., when), drawing from theory in relationship science to emphasize the importance of conceptualizing laughter as situated within the dyadic context (i.e., why). Specifically, these studies target untested possible short-term outcomes from social interactions involving shared laughter: positive emotions, negative emotions, and perceived similarity. In turn, each are tested as possible mechanisms through which shared laughter promotes more global relationship well-being (i.e., how). A series of online and laboratory studies provide correlational and causal support for the hypothesis that shared laughter promotes relationship well-being, with increased perceptions of similarity most consistently driving this effect. Discussion focuses on the importance of considering the behavior of laughter itself, as situated within the social context, when making predictions about laughter’s relevance for social life.     

Do infants express discrete emotions? Adult judgments of facial,vocal, and body actions

Adult judges were presented with videotape segments showing an infant displaying facial configurations hypothesized to express discomfort/pain, anger, or sadness according to differential emotions theory (Izard, Dougherty, & Hembree, 1983). The segments also included the infant's nonfacial behavior and aspects of the situational context. Judges rated the segments using a set of emotion terms or a set of activity terms. Results showed that judges perceived the discomfort/pain and anger segments as involving one or more negative emotions not predicted by differential emotions theory. The sadness segments were perceived as involving relatively little emotion overall. Body activity accompanying the discomfort/pain and anger configurations was judged to be more jerky and active than body activity accompanying the sadness configurations. The sadness segments were accompanied by relatively little body movement overall. The results thus fail to conform to the predictions of differential emotions theory but provide information that may contribute to the development of a theory of infant expressive behavior.This article is based on the second author's master's thesis. The authors thank Dennis Ross for his expert assistance in the data analyses.     

Religiosity and Perceived Future Ascetic Deviance and Delinquency among Mormon Adolescents: Testing the "This-Worldly" Supernatural Sanctions Thesis

Previous religiosity-delinquency research primarily explores hellfire belief and aspects of religious social bonding. Both hellfire belief and religious social bonding have been hypothesized to reduce delinquency. Borrowing from classical deterrence theory, there are strong theoretical reasons for believing that an additional dimension of religiosity—namely, belief in "this-worldly" supernatural sanctions (i.e., belief that God rewards and punishes in this life)—may also be inversely related to adolescent delinquency. This dimension of religiosity has not been explored in past empirical research. This article addresses this lack by specifically testing whether belief in this-worldly supernatural sanctions is related to subjectively perceived future ascetic deviance and delinquency among a sample of 1,393 adolescent members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (i.e., the Mormons). Logistic regression results indicate that, along with religious social bonding, belief in this-worldly supernatural sanctions has an independent effect on perceived future ascetic deviance (e.g., alcohol, tobacco, and marijuana use) and perceived future delinquency (e.g., property and personal offenses) when controlling for relevant demographic and theoretical variables.     

Exploring the influence of the attachment organizations of novice therapists on their delivery of emotionally focused therapy for couples

Clinicians' own internal resources for understanding relationships--that is, their attachment organizations--have been found to influence the process and outcome of treatment. The current study addressed whether the attachment organizations of novice couple and family therapists were associated with couples' experiences of their therapists, therapeutic alliance, session impact, and emotionally focused couple therapy (EFT) fidelity (i.e., especially as related to targeting and working with attachment needs and overt and underlying emotions). Novice couple and family therapists delivered EFT, an attachment-based approach, to couples in a simulated session and an embedded multicase study design guided a cross-case analysis. Findings indicated that secure therapists, when compared to their insecure peers, were more competent at working with attachment needs, as well as the overt and underlying emotions of their clients. Secure therapists perceived themselves as being more skilled in emotion regulation, which may have contributed to their abilities to remain attuned to their clients' attachment needs and emotional expression, even in the face of emotional arousal in session. Couples of insecure therapists also reported greater alliance splits. Future research is needed to further explore the dyadic influences of both therapists' and clients' attachment organizations, as well as the training and supervision practices these findings implicate.     

Social support and employee well-being: the conditioning effect of perceived patterns of supportive exchange

Seeking to explain divergent empirical findings regarding the direct effect of social support on well-being, the authors posit that the pattern of supportive exchange (i.e., reciprocal, under-, or over-reciprocating) determines the impact of receiving support on well-being. Findings generated on the basis of longitudinal data collected from a sample of older blue-collar workers support the authors' predictions, indicating that receiving emotional support is associated with enhanced well-being when the pattern of supportive exchange is perceived by an individual as being reciprocal (support received equals support given), with this association being weaker when the exchange of support is perceived as being under-reciprocating (support given exceeds support received). Moreover, receiving support was found to adversely affect well-being when the pattern of exchange was perceived as being over-reciprocating (support received exceeds support given). Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Trust in humans and robots: Economically similar but emotionally different

Trust-based interactions with robots are increasingly common in the marketplace, workplace, on the road, and in the home. However, a valid concern is that people may not trust robots as they do humans. While trust in fellow humans has been studied extensively, little is known about how people extend trust to robots. Here we compare trust-based investments and self-reported emotions from across three nearly identical economic games: human-human trust games, human-robot trust games, and human-robot trust games where the robot decision impacts another human. Robots in our experiment mimic humans: they are programmed to make reciprocity decisions based on previously observed behaviors by humans in analogous situations. We find that people invest similarly in humans and robots. By contrast the social emotions (i.e., gratitude, anger, pride, guilt) elicited by the interactions (but not the non-social emotions) differed across human and robot trust games. Emotional reactions depended on the trust game interaction, and how another person was affected.     

Emotional crisis communication

Organizational crises are usually highly emotional experiences for both organizations and stakeholders. Hence, crisis situations often result in emotionally charged communication between the two parties. Despite the attention of organizations and scholars to the emotions of stakeholders during crises, little is known about the effects of the emotions communicated by organizations on corporate reputations. Through the use of vignettes, this experiment reveals that besides crisis-response strategy (diminish vs. rebuild), the communicated emotion (i.e., shame and regret) has a positive effect on corporate reputation. Mediation analyses showed that this effect of communicated emotion could be explained by the public's (negative) affective as well as cognitive responses (i.e., account acceptance). This study confirms that emotional signals embedded in crisis responses may affect corporate reputations by reducing feelings of anger and by increasing the acceptance of the organizational message. In doing so, this study provides a starting point for further exploration of the effectiveness of other emotions in crisis communication.     

On the exhaustiveness of truncation and dropping strategies in many-to-many matching markets

We consider two-sided many-to-many matching markets in which each worker may work for multiple firms and each firm may hire multiple workers. We study individual and group manipulations in centralized markets that employ (pairwise) stable mechanisms and that require participants to submit rank order lists of agents on the other side of the market. We are interested in simple preference manipulations that have been reported and studied in empirical and theoretical work: truncation strategies, which are the lists obtained by removing a tail of least preferred partners from a preference list, and the more general dropping strategies, which are the lists obtained by only removing partners from a preference list (i.e., no reshuffling). We study when truncation/dropping strategies are exhaustive for a group of agents on the same side of the market, i.e., when each match resulting from preference manipulations can be replicated or improved upon by some truncation/dropping strategies. We prove that for each stable mechanism, dropping strategies are exhaustive for each group of agents on the same side of the market (Theorem 1), i.e., independently of the quotas. Then, we show that for each stable mechanism, truncation strategies are exhaustive for each agent with quota 1 (Theorem 2). Finally, we show that this result cannot be extended neither to individual manipulations when the agent’s quota is larger than 1 (even when all other agents’ quotas equal 1—Example 1), nor to group manipulations (even when all quotas equal 1—Example 2).     

Information search,coherence effects,and their interplay in legal decision making

Legal judgments require one to make sense of a complex set of typically contradicting pieces of information that can easily be interpreted in a biased manner. This systematic judgment bias can be caused by biased information search (i.e., confirmatory search) as well as biased information processing (i.e., coherence effects) in which the interpretation of information is changed to fit the emerging favored option. In four studies, we investigate the complex interplay between both kinds of influences. Participants completed three legal cases in which they could freely search for information. We manipulated between subjects whether systematic search was possible or not and measured the assessment of each selected piece of information. In line with previous studies, we observe strong coherence effects in each study, in that the evidence interpretation strongly depended on the current tendency towards acquittal or conviction. In contrast to our expectation, however, people searched for information that was contrary to their current belief in the given case (i.e., disconfirmatory information search). We also observed a trend towards an interaction between both factors, in that coherence effects were slightly stronger for neutral and pro-guilty evidence when systematic information search was possible. Our results underline an unconscious striving for coherence when making complex judgments that is not easily corrected.     

Formal and Informal Social Controls of Employee Deviance*

Using the phenomenon of deviance by employees against the rules of the formal work organization as the behavior of interest, the differential saliences of both formal (i.e., management) and informal (i.e., co-worker) sanction severity are empirically compared. As hypothesized, the perceived threat of informal sanctions by one's fellow co-workers explains both property deviance and production deviance far better than the perceived severity of the more formal responses initiated by management. Further, if the two forms of social control are causally ordered, we find that management actions to constrain deviant employees do have an effect, albeit indirect, in that formal sanctions operate on deviance indirectly by shaping the informal sanctions.     

Over-emoting and perceptions of sincerity: Effects of nuanced displays of emotions and chosen words on credibility perceptions during a crisis

This study focuses on understanding how words and discrete facial emotions influence credibility perceptions of both prepared statements and spontaneous question and answer sessions. We build on and extend existing theoretical work concerning crises communication and discrete emotions. Using a press conference simulation, spokesperson video recordings were analyzed using automated face-emotion recognition software (FaceReader™) to characterize discrete emotions. A crisis-message-strategy trained dictionary for Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC) was used to characterize message content. Our results indicate that spokespeople can control their verbal messages better in prepared statements than in more spontaneous settings, but their facial emotions are quite similar in both settings. Only three discrete emotions are related to credibility perceptions: anger, sadness, and surprise, but sadness and surprise are not universally viewed positively or negatively. Expressing too much emotion, or over-emoting, is problematic. Expressing more anger in the Q&A, which we refer to as reactive anger, is perceived negatively, and when spokespeople emote a low amount of sadness and use a high amount of words expressing sincerity they are viewed as having the most credible messages.     

The Role of Emotional Intelligence During an Emotionally Difficult Decision-Making Task

Emotional intelligence (EI) can be defined as the ability to understand, perceive, and manage emotions. However, there is little research investigating how EI influences decision-making during emotionally difficult situations. We hypothesized that higher EI would correlate with greater utilization of socially relevant facial cues during emotional decision-making. Sixty-two 18–45 year olds completed a decision-making task simulating an airport security screening during a credible terrorist threat. Participants viewed a series of facial photographs of potential passengers (white men and women) and selected which passengers to detain for further interrogation. The face photographs were previously rated for a set of character traits (e.g., aggression) by independent judges. Participants completed measures of trait (self-perceived) and ability (performance-based) EI and cognitive intelligence (IQ). With higher ability EI, participants were more likely to detain only individuals judged to be particularly high in negative traits (e.g., “aggression”) and especially low in positive traits (e.g., “trustworthy”), suggesting greater acuity in decision choices. These associations were driven primarily by the facilitating and understanding branches of EI (i.e., the ability to generate and use emotion to facilitate decision making, and the ability to understand factors that generate and modify emotions). No association between trait EI or IQ and detainment decisions was found. Findings suggest that individuals with higher ability EI were more likely to utilize the available but limited social information (i.e., facial features) when completing an emotional decision-making task than those with lower EI. These findings have implications for real-life situations involving similarly difficult emotional decision-making processes.     

Managing the Emotions of Others

Although research has focused on how individuals manage their own emotions, little attention has been paid to how individuals manage the emotions of other people. Here, I describe several techniques of interpersonal emotion-management, drawing from observations of a psychodrama-based encounter group which deliberately manipulated its members' feelings. Analysis reveals a number of strategies (e.g., group enactments, provocations, comforting) which, when used sequentially, produced first emotional loss of control in the individual and then positive emotion. Group solidarity was sometimes affected by these interpersonal emotion-management techniques as well. Some techniques may be similar to those used in military training and cult group recruitment, although further research attention is needed in these arenas. Other settings in which members play upon the emotions of others should be examined to identify other interpersonal techniques and the sequencing of strategies which produce desired individual and group outcomes.     

When being overpaid makes me feel good about myself: It depends on how the other feels

The present research examined whether the emotions of others (i.e., disappointment versus happiness with respect to a received outcome) influence own self-esteem when being overpaid. Results from two experiments demonstrated that participants reported higher performance self-esteem when the other expressed happiness rather than disappointment. This effect was only found in the condition where one was overpaid relative to the condition where one did not yet know one’s own outcome. In the second experimental study we further found that this interaction between the emotion of the other and the distribution situation only emerged among participants low (relative to high) in personal need for structure. Implications with respect to the relationship between overpayment and self-esteem and the interpersonal effects of emotions in this process are discussed.     

Linguistic and developmental influences on superordinate facial configuration categorization in infancy

Humans perceive emotions in terms of categories, such as “happiness,” “sadness,” and “anger.” To learn these complex conceptual emotion categories, humans must first be able to perceive regularities in expressive behaviors (e.g., facial configurations) across individuals. Recent research suggests that infants spontaneously form “basic-level” categories of facial configurations (e.g., happy vs. fear), but not “superordinate” categories of facial configurations (e.g., positive vs. negative). The current studies further explore how infant age and language impact superordinate categorization of facial configurations associated with different negative emotions. Across all experiments, infants were habituated to one person displaying facial configurations associated with anger and disgust. While 10-month-olds formed a category of person identity (Experiment 1), 14-month-olds formed a category that included negative facial configurations displayed by the same person (Experiment 2). However, neither age formed the hypothesized superordinate category of negative valence. When a verbal label (“toma”) was added to each of the habituation events (Experiment 3), 10-month-olds formed a category similar to 14-month-olds in Experiment 2. These findings intersect a larger conversation about the nature and development of children's emotion categories and highlight the importance of considering developmental processes, such as language learning and attentional/memory development, in the design and interpretation of infant categorization studies.     

Reducing child aggression through sports intervention: The role of self-control skills and emotions

This study examined how sports intervention may reduce aggressive behaviors in children (Grades 3–6), focusing on the relations between acquisition of self-control skills (SCSs) and aggressive behavior through the mediation of thoughts (i.e., hostility) and emotions (i.e., positive and negative). In a sample of 649 Israeli children, 50% were assigned to an experimental group and the remainder to a waitlisted control group. As hypothesized, children in the experimental group reported significantly larger gains in SCSs and significantly larger decreases in physical aggression, hostile thoughts, and negative emotions. Results of structural equation modeling suggested that SCS gains were linked to changes in hostile thoughts, as mediated by changes in both positive and negative emotions. In addition, changes in hostile thoughts were linked to changes in physical aggression through the mediation of changes in anger. Among girls, changes in SCSs were linked directly to changes in physical aggression (with no indirect effect), whereas among boys, changes in SCSs were linked indirectly to changes in physical aggression, through changes in positive and negative emotions. Findings contribute to understanding of possible mechanisms underlying the associations between children's self-control and aggression, with particular implications for the roles of positive and negative emotions.     

Why is dishonesty difficult to mitigate? The interaction between descriptive norm and monetary incentive

We examine whether changes in perceived norm of dishonesty can offset the effects of changes in benefit from the dishonest action. We find partial support for the hypothesis in laboratory experiments on lying behavior in a cheap-talk sender-receiver game, conducted in two countries. In the experiments, we vary benefit from lying and shift senders’ norm perception by providing them information on lying from prior sessions. The findings suggest that senders adjust their perceived norm as expected, but they respond to norm in a somewhat self-serving manner. Specifically, when benefit from lying is lowered but senders are induced to believe in a higher norm of lying, they lie significantly more than when norm is not intervened. However, when benefit from lying is raised, our intervention to shift perceived norm of lying downward succeeds in altering senders’ belief as intended, but does not lower lying significantly. The results can be conceived as an indirect evidence of the challenge in curbing dishonesty by reducing private pecuniary gains in a society with a culture of dishonesty, while suggesting that even societies with history of low dishonesty may succumb to dishonesty when pecuniary incentives for dishonesty rise.     

Social Contacts and the Economic Performance of Immigrants: A Panel Study of Immigrants in Germany

Using data from the German Socio‐Economic Panel, we examined the impact of social contacts on immigrant occupational status and income. In addition to general social contacts, we also analyzed the effects of bonding (i.e., co‐ethnic) and bridging (i.e., inter‐ethnic) ties on economic outcomes. Results show that general social contacts have a positive effect on the occupational status and, in particular, annual income of immigrants. We also find that bridging ties with Germans lead to higher occupational status, but not to increased income. These effects remain visible even when social contacts are measured (at least) 1 year prior to the economic outcomes, as well as when earlier investments in German human capital are considered. Finally, we show that co‐ethnic concentration in the region of residence weakly affects economic returns to German language proficiency and schooling.     

Parental Socialization and Financial Capability Among Chinese Adolescents in Hong Kong

The financial capability of adolescents is important because it establishes cognitive and behavioral patterns that enable them to manage their financial resources in later life. Analyzing the data collected in a sample of 946 adolescent Chinese students from Hong Kong (55.7% female, mean age?=?14.5, range 12–18 years), the present study found parental socialization (i.e., direct parental teaching and parental financial norms) influenced adolescents’ financial behavior through via financial learning outcomes (i.e., subjective financial knowledge, adoption of modeled parental financial behavior, and objective financial knowledge) and financial attitudinal variables (i.e., perceived behavioral control and financial attitude). The findings suggest parents should intentionally teach financial knowledge, and convey clear and positive financial norms to adolescents.     

Family Loyalty and Adolescent Problem Behavior: The Validity of the Family Group Effect

Erratum . Journal of Law and Society Volume 32 Issue 3 The present study examined the relation between perceived justice and trust within family relationships and adolescent internalizing and externalizing problem behavior. Data were gathered from the father, the mother, and two of their adolescent children in 288 families. The social relations model was used to assess perceived justice and trust at the family level and the individual level. Adolescent internalizing and externalizing problem behavior turned out to be best predicted at the family level. Adolescents from families with less just or trustworthy climates showed more of these problem behaviors. Also associations between adolescent problem behavior and individual characteristics of the adolescents were found: adolescents who were generally viewed as less just/trustworthy were reported to have more problems. Our findings suggest that processes at different levels of family functioning (i.e., individual, whole‐family) should be taken into account when investigating associations between family characteristics and children's outcomes.