Togetherness
Children Conform to the Behavior of Peers; Other Great Apes Stick With What They Know
Daniel Haun, Yvonne Rekers & Michael Tomasello
Psychological Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
All primates learn things from conspecifics socially, but it is not clear whether they conform to the behavior of these conspecifics — if conformity is defined as overriding individually acquired behavioral tendencies in order to copy peers’ behavior. In the current study, chimpanzees, orangutans, and 2-year-old human children individually acquired a problem-solving strategy. They then watched several conspecific peers demonstrate an alternative strategy. The children switched to this new, socially demonstrated strategy in roughly half of all instances, whereas the other two great-ape species almost never adjusted their behavior to the majority’s. In a follow-up study, children switched much more when the peer demonstrators were still present than when they were absent, which suggests that their conformity arose at least in part from social motivations. These results demonstrate an important difference between the social learning of humans and great apes, a difference that might help to account for differences in human and nonhuman cultures.
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Human Faces Are Slower than Chimpanzee Faces
Anne Burrows et al.
PLoS ONE, October 2014
Background: While humans (like other primates) communicate with facial expressions, the evolution of speech added a new function to the facial muscles (facial expression muscles). The evolution of speech required the development of a coordinated action between visual (movement of the lips) and auditory signals in a rhythmic fashion to produce “visemes” (visual movements of the lips that correspond to specific sounds). Visemes depend upon facial muscles to regulate shape of the lips, which themselves act as speech articulators. This movement necessitates a more controlled, sustained muscle contraction than that produced during spontaneous facial expressions which occur rapidly and last only a short period of time. Recently, it was found that human tongue musculature contains a higher proportion of slow-twitch myosin fibers than in rhesus macaques, which is related to the slower, more controlled movements of the human tongue in the production of speech. Are there similar unique, evolutionary physiologic biases found in human facial musculature related to the evolution of speech?
Methodology/Prinicipal Findings: Using myosin immunohistochemistry, we tested the hypothesis that human facial musculature has a higher percentage of slow-twitch myosin fibers relative to chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) and rhesus macaques (Macaca mulatta). We sampled the orbicularis oris and zygomaticus major muscles from three cadavers of each species and compared proportions of fiber-types. Results confirmed our hypothesis: humans had the highest proportion of slow-twitch myosin fibers while chimpanzees had the highest proportion of fast-twitch fibers.
Conclusions/significance: These findings demonstrate that the human face is slower than that of rhesus macaques and our closest living relative, the chimpanzee. They also support the assertion that human facial musculature and speech co-evolved. Further, these results suggest a unique set of evolutionary selective pressures on human facial musculature to slow down while the function of this muscle group diverged from that of other primates.
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Narcissism and Emotional Contagion: Do Narcissists “Catch” the Emotions of Others?
Anna Czarna et al.
Social Psychological and Personality Science, forthcoming
Abstract:
In this research, we investigated the association between narcissism and one central aspect of empathy, susceptibility to emotional contagion (the transfer of emotional states from one person to another). In a laboratory study (N = 101), we detected a negative link between narcissism and emotional contagion in response to experimentally induced positive affect. In an online study (N = 195), narcissism was negatively linked to experimentally induced emotional contagion regardless of valence. These findings indicate that individuals with high narcissism levels are apparently less prone to emotional contagion than individuals lower in narcissism. Hence, narcissists are less likely to “catch the emotions” of others. Furthermore, by comparing experimental assessments of susceptibility to emotional contagion with subjective self-reports, we were able to study self-insight. Across both samples, self-insight was generally low, and individual differences in self-insight were unrelated to narcissism.
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Automatic Personality Assessment Through Social Media Language
Gregory Park et al.
Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, forthcoming
Abstract:
Language use is a psychologically rich, stable individual difference with well-established correlations to personality. We describe a method for assessing personality using an open-vocabulary analysis of language from social media. We compiled the written language from 66,732 Facebook users and their questionnaire-based self-reported Big Five personality traits, and then we built a predictive model of personality based on their language. We used this model to predict the 5 personality factors in a separate sample of 4,824 Facebook users, examining (a) convergence with self-reports of personality at the domain- and facet-level; (b) discriminant validity between predictions of distinct traits; (c) agreement with informant reports of personality; (d) patterns of correlations with external criteria (e.g., number of friends, political attitudes, impulsiveness); and (e) test–retest reliability over 6-month intervals. Results indicated that language-based assessments can constitute valid personality measures: they agreed with self-reports and informant reports of personality, added incremental validity over informant reports, adequately discriminated between traits, exhibited patterns of correlations with external criteria similar to those found with self-reported personality, and were stable over 6-month intervals. Analysis of predictive language can provide rich portraits of the mental life associated with traits. This approach can complement and extend traditional methods, providing researchers with an additional measure that can quickly and cheaply assess large groups of participants with minimal burden.
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Adolescent Neighborhood Quality Predicts Adult dACC Response to Social Exclusion
Marlen Gonzalez et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Neuroimaging studies using the social-exclusion paradigm Cyberball indicate increased dACC and right insula activity as a function of exclusion. However, comparatively less work has been done on how social status factors may moderate this finding. The current study used the Cyberball paradigm with 85 (45 female) socio-economically diverse participants from a larger longitudinal sample. We tested whether neighborhood quality during adolescence would predict subsequent neural responding to social exclusion in young adulthood. Given previous behavioral studies indicating greater social vigilance and negative evaluation as a function of lower status, we expected that lower adolescent neighborhood quality would predict greater dACC activity during exclusion at young adulthood. Our findings indicate that young adults who lived in low-quality neighborhoods in adolescence showed greater dACC activity to social exclusion than those who lived in higher-quality neighborhoods. Lower neighborhood quality also predicted greater prefrontal activation in the superior frontal gyrus, dorsal medial prefrontal cortext, and the middle frontal gyrus, possibly indicating greater regulatory effort. Finally, this effect was not driven by subsequent ratings of distress during exclusion. In sum, adolescent neighborhood quality appears to potentiate neural responses to social exclusion in young adulthood, effects that are independent of felt distress.
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Predictability of Extreme Events in Social Media
José Miotto & Eduardo Altmann
PLoS ONE, November 2014
Abstract:
It is part of our daily social-media experience that seemingly ordinary items (videos, news, publications, etc.) unexpectedly gain an enormous amount of attention. Here we investigate how unexpected these extreme events are. We propose a method that, given some information on the items, quantifies the predictability of events, i.e., the potential of identifying in advance the most successful items. Applying this method to different data, ranging from views in YouTube videos to posts in Usenet discussion groups, we invariantly find that the predictability increases for the most extreme events. This indicates that, despite the inherently stochastic collective dynamics of users, efficient prediction is possible for the most successful items.
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OXTR Polymorphism Predicts Social Relationships through its Effects on Social Temperament
Kasey Creswell et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Humans have a fundamental need for strong interpersonal bonds, yet individuals differ appreciably in their degree of social integration. That these differences are also substantially heritable has spurred interest in biological mechanisms underlying the quality and quantity of individuals' social relationships. We propose that polymorphic variation in the oxytocin receptor gene (OXTR) associates with complex social behaviors and social network composition through intermediate effects on negative affectivity and the psychological processing of socially-relevant information. We tested a hypothesized social cascade from the molecular level (OXTR variation) to the social environment, through negative affectivity and inhibited sociality, in a sample of 1,295 men and women of European American (N=1081) and African American (N=214) ancestry. Compared to European Americans having any T allele of rs1042778, individuals homozygous for the alternate G allele reported significantly lower levels of negative affectivity and inhibited sociality, which in turn predicted significantly higher levels of social support and a larger/more diverse social network. Moreover, the effect of rs1042778 variation on social support was fully accounted for by associated differences in negative affectivity and inhibited sociality. Results replicated in the African American sample. Findings suggest that OXTR variation modulates levels of social support via proximal impacts on individual temperament.
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Friends With Each Other but Strangers to You: Source Relationship Softens Ostracism’s Blow
Nicole Iannone et al.
Group Dynamics, forthcoming
Abstract:
This study explored how the relationship between sources of ostracism, whether they are friends or strangers to each other, influences the targeted person’s reactions to ostracism. Participants interacted with 2 confederates who indicated that they were friends or strangers with each other. Participants were then ostracized or included by the confederates in Cyberball. The results indicated that being ostracized by 2 people who were strangers to each other made participants feel worse than being ostracized by 2 people who were friends with each other. Additionally, participants felt best being included by 2 people who were strangers to each other. These findings may have occurred as a result of differential expectations for inclusion and exclusion from 2 people who are friends, rather than strangers, to each other.
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The Long Goodbye: A Test of Grief as a Social Signal
Tania Reynolds et al.
Evolutionary Behavioral Sciences, forthcoming
Abstract:
The human grief response has perplexed researchers. Grief is costly, leading to painful and potentially deleterious symptoms. Yet, it is a human universal. We argue that grief functions as a hard-to-fake signal of underlying capacities to form strong social bonds. If so, those who grieve more intensively than others should be perceived as higher quality social partners. We tested this hypothesis in 4 studies. High grievers were rated as nicer, more loyal, and more trustworthy than low grievers. High grievers were also expected to cooperate in a prisoner’s dilemma more than low grievers. Last, high grievers were chosen as a trusted social partner more than another individual who expressed sadness for lost material items, indicating that grief may be a specific display of distress that is particularly informative to potential social partners. These results support a signaling theory of grief and are discussed in that context.
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Autistic empathy toward autistic others
Hidetsugu Komeda et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
Individuals with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) are thought to lack self-awareness and to experience difficulty empathising with others. Although these deficits have been demonstrated in previous studies, most of the target stimuli were constructed for typically developing (TD) individuals. We employed judgment tasks capable of indexing self-relevant processing in individuals with and without ASD. Fourteen Japanese males and one Japanese female with high-functioning ASD (17–41 years of age) and 13 Japanese males and two TD Japanese females (22–40 years of age), all of whom were matched for age and full and verbal intelligence quotient scores with the ASD participants, were enrolled in this study. The results demonstrated that the ventromedial prefrontal cortex was significantly activated in individuals with ASD in response to autistic characters and in TD individuals in response to non-autistic characters. Whereas the frontal-posterior network between the ventromedial prefrontal cortex and superior temporal gyrus participated in the processing of non-autistic characters in TD individuals, an alternative network was involved when individuals with ASD processed autistic characters. This suggests an atypical form of empathy in individuals with ASD toward others with ASD.
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Elana Buch
Medical Anthropology Quarterly, forthcoming
Abstract:
By tracing the transformations of troubling exchanges in paid home care, this article examines how differently positioned individuals strive to build caring relations within potentially restrictive regimes of care. In paid home care in Chicago, older adults and their workers regularly participate in exchanges of money, time, and material goods. These gifts play a crucial role in building good care relationships that sustain participants’ moral personhood. Amid widespread concern about vulnerable elders, home care agencies compete in a crowded marketplace by prohibiting these exchanges, even as they depend on them to strengthen relationships. Supervisors thus exercise discretion, sometimes reclassifying gift exchanges as punishable thefts. In this context, the commodification of care did not lead to the actual elimination of gift relations, but rather transformed gift relations into a suspicious and troublesome source of value.
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Attachment-security priming attenuates amygdala activation to social and linguistic threat
Luke Norman et al.
Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience, forthcoming
Abstract:
A predominant expectation that social relationships with others are safe (a secure attachment-style), has been linked with reduced threat-related amygdala activation. Experimental priming of mental representations of attachment security can modulate neural responding, but the effects of attachment-security priming on threat-related amygdala activation remains untested. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), the present study examined the effects of trait and primed attachment security on amygdala reactivity to threatening stimuli in an emotional faces and a linguistic dot-probe task in forty-two healthy participants. Trait attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance were positively correlated with amygdala activation to threatening faces in the control group, but not in the attachment primed group. Furthermore, participants who received attachment-security priming showed attenuated amygdala activation in both the emotional faces and dot-probe tasks. The current findings demonstrate that variation in state and trait attachment security modulates amygdala reactivity to threat. These findings support the potential use of attachment security-boosting methods as interventions and suggest a neural mechanism for the protective effect of social bonds in anxiety disorders.
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Why We Think We Can't Dance: Theory of Mind and Children's Desire to Perform
Lan Nguyen Chaplin & Michael Norton
Child Development, forthcoming
Abstract:
Theory of mind (ToM) allows children to achieve success in the social world by understanding others' minds. A study with 3- to 12-year-olds, however, demonstrates that gains in ToM are linked to decreases in children's desire to engage in performative behaviors associated with health and well-being, such as singing and dancing. One hundred and fifty-nine middle-class children from diverse backgrounds in a Northeastern U.S. metropolitan area completed the study in 2011. The development of ToM is associated with decreases in self-esteem, which in turn predicts decreases in children's willingness to perform. This shift away from performance begins at age 4 (when ToM begins to develop), years before children enter puberty.
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Tell Me the Gossip: The Self-Evaluative Function of Receiving Gossip About Others
Elena Martinescu, Onne Janssen & Bernard Nijstad
Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, December 2014, Pages 1668-1680
Abstract:
We investigate the self-evaluative function of competence-related gossip for individuals who receive it. Using the Self-Concept Enhancing Tactician (SCENT) model, we propose that individuals use evaluative information about others (i.e., gossip) to improve, promote, and protect themselves. Results of a critical incident study and an experimental study showed that positive gossip had higher self-improvement value than negative gossip, whereas negative gossip had higher self-promotion value and raised higher self-protection concerns than positive gossip. Self-promotion mediated the relationship between gossip valence and pride, while self-protection mediated the relationship between gossip valence and fear, although the latter mediated relationship emerged for receivers with mastery goals rather than performance goals. These results suggest that gossip serves self-evaluative functions for gossip receivers and triggers self-conscious emotions.