Acquisition of the algorithms of social life: a domain-based approach

A close look at sociality in DSM criteria

PURPOSE

The importance of sociality in psychology and psychotherapy is quite undisputed; however, this construct risks being underestimated in psychiatric nosography. The aim of the review was to assess the relevance of sociality in DSM 5 criteria.

METHOD

Sociality-laden criteria of 192 selected DSM categories have been identified through a textual grid. Second, the criteria have been classified into 6 categories, i.e., (1) Affiliation and Attachment (AA), (2) Social Communication (SC), (3) Perception and Understanding of Others (PUO), (4) Culture, (5) Clinical Significance Criterion (CSC) (6), and No Specific Construct (NSC).

RESULTS

13% of all mental disorders mention AA in their criteria. 8.8% of all mental disorders mention SC; 8.8% of all mental disorders mention PUO in their criteria. 15% of all mental disorders mention culture in their criteria (exclusively ex negativo though). 40% of mental disorders mention non-specific sociality (NSC) in their criteria. CSC is mentioned in 85% of mental disorders. Personality disorders have the highest "concentration" of sociality mentions throughout the DSM categories.

CONCLUSIONS

The overall results suggest that DSM criteria offer a confused account of sociality. We believe that the descriptive approach is the underlying reason. We suggest that in the long run a theory-laden approach to sociality, informed by evolutionary insights about motivations, could be of help.

Balancing listening and action is key to supportive parenting

Parents convey high-quality listening when they pay close attention and show acceptance and comprehension of what their child expresses. These behaviors are fundamental to supporting closeness and autonomy, increasing well-being, and fostering future self-disclosures. Whether and how parental listening is balanced with action may depend on the domain of interaction. When children and parents are exploring each other's perspectives or sharing, and when children are seeking comfort for worries or sadness (attachment), listening dominates. When parents are called to discipline or keep safe, listening helps inform parents' actions, but may need to be curtailed to ensure effective action. Models of parental listening and action represent a next step in the literature and inform research in self-determination theory and perceived parent responsiveness.

Association between negatively perceived parenting attitudes and dissociation: a cross-sectional study on the general population in Japan

Objectives

Many studies have reported that early traumatic experiences, mainly abuse, are associated with forming dangerous attachments and a contributing factor to dissociation. On the other hand, other studies have investigated the association of non-abusive nurturing and attachment styles with dissociation. The aim of this study is to determine the frequency of dissociative experiences in the general Japanese population and investigate the effects of "overprotection" and "lack of care" as nurturing styles and "abandonment anxiety" and "avoidance of intimacy" as attachment styles on dissociation.

Methods

A total of 1,042 residents aged 18 to 69 years were administered with the Dissociative Experiences Scale (DES), the Japanese version of the WHO-5 Well-Being Index (WHO-5-J), the Parental Bonding Instrument (PBI), and the Experiences in Close Relationships Inventory-the-generalized-other-version (ECR-GO). Hierarchical multiple regression analyses on the effects of "overprotection" and "care" as nurturing attitudes "abandonment anxiety" and "avoidance of intimacy" as attachment styles on dissociation (DES-NDI and DES-T) were conducted.

Results

Based on the findings of this study, "care" and "overprotection" as nurturing attitudes were shown to be a contributing factor to dissociation (DES-NDI and DES-T). "Avoidance of intimacy" as an attachment style was shown to contribute to pathological dissociation. On the other hand, the influence of attachment style on the relationship between nurturing style and dissociation was not determined.

Discussion

This study provided essential data on the distribution of dissociative experiences in the general Japanese population. It was indicated that nurturing style, particularly overprotection, may be linked to nonfunctional stress coping and interpersonal anxiety and could be a contributing factor to mental disorders, including dissociation. Furthermore, considering that the effect of nurturing styles on dissociation does not vary with attachment styles, the effect of nurturing styles on dissociation may be more profound.

The adaptiveness of fear (and other emotions) considered more broadly: Missed literature on the nature of emotions and its functions

We agree with Grossmann that fear often builds cooperative relationships. Yet he neglects much extant literature. Prior researchers have discussed how fear (and other emotions) build cooperative relationships, have questioned whether fear per se evolved to serve this purpose, and have emphasized that human cooperation takes many forms. Grossmann's theory would benefit from a wider consideration of this work.

Social aspects of collision avoidance: a detailed analysis of two-person groups and individual pedestrians

Pedestrian groups are commonly found in crowds but research on their social aspects is comparatively lacking. To fill that void in literature, we study the dynamics of collision avoidance between pedestrian groups (in particular dyads) and individual pedestrians in an ecological environment, focusing in particular on (i) how such avoidance depends on the group's social relation (e.g. colleagues, couples, friends or families) and (ii) its intensity of social interaction (indicated by conversation, gaze exchange, gestures etc). By analyzing relative collision avoidance in the "center of mass" frame, we were able to quantify how much groups and individuals avoid each other with respect to the aforementioned properties of the group. A mathematical representation using a potential energy function is proposed to model avoidance and it is shown to provide a fair approximation to the empirical observations. We also studied the probability that the individuals disrupt the group by "passing through it" (termed as intrusion). We analyzed the dependence of the parameters of the avoidance model and of the probability of intrusion on groups' social relation and intensity of interaction. We confirmed that the stronger social bonding or interaction intensity is, the more prominent collision avoidance turns out. We also confirmed that the probability of intrusion is a decreasing function of interaction intensity and strength of social bonding. Our results suggest that such variability should be accounted for in models and crowd management in general. Namely, public spaces with strongly bonded groups (e.g. a family-oriented amusement park) may require a different approach compared to public spaces with loosely bonded groups (e.g. a business-oriented trade fair).

Assessing the dominance behavioral system in early childhood using observational methods

BACKGROUND

The dominance behavioral system (DBS) is a biologically based system that underpins individual differences in motivation for dominance and power. However, little is known about the DBS in childhood. In order to make strong claims about the DBS's trait-like properties and predictive validity, a clearer understanding of its early development is required.

PARTICIPANTS AND PROCEDURE

In a pilot study aimed at developing a behavioral coding system for dominance, a key facet of the DBS, we collected and coded observational data from 58 children, assessed at ages 3 and 5-6. These data were examined in conjunction with measures of child temperament via observational measures, and symptoms of psychopathology.

RESULTS

Dominance was moderately stable in early childhood to a degree comparable to other early child temperament traits. Consistent with the study hypotheses, boys were more dominant than girls, and dominance was negatively associated with children's behavioral inhibition, effortful control, and internalizing symptoms.

CONCLUSIONS

These results provide initial support for the validity and developmental sensitivity of an objective coding system for assessing facets of the DBS in early childhood. Ultimately, the use of this coding system will facilitate future studies of how early DBS predicts psychological adjustment later in life.

A moral trade-off system produces intuitive judgments that are rational and coherent and strike a balance between conflicting moral values

How does the mind make moral judgments when the only way to satisfy one moral value is to neglect another? Moral dilemmas posed a recurrent adaptive problem for ancestral hominins, whose cooperative social life created multiple responsibilities to others. For many dilemmas, striking a balance between two conflicting values (a compromise judgment) would have promoted fitness better than neglecting one value to fully satisfy the other (an extreme judgment). We propose that natural selection favored the evolution of a cognitive system designed for making trade-offs between conflicting moral values. Its nonconscious computations respond to dilemmas by constructing "rightness functions": temporary representations specific to the situation at hand. A rightness function represents, in compact form, an ordering of all the solutions that the mind can conceive of (whether feasible or not) in terms of moral rightness. An optimizing algorithm selects, among the feasible solutions, one with the highest level of rightness. The moral trade-off system hypothesis makes various novel predictions: People make compromise judgments, judgments respond to incentives, judgments respect the axioms of rational choice, and judgments respond coherently to morally relevant variables (such as willingness, fairness, and reciprocity). We successfully tested these predictions using a new trolley-like dilemma. This dilemma has two original features: It admits both extreme and compromise judgments, and it allows incentives-in this case, the human cost of saving lives-to be varied systematically. No other existing model predicts the experimental results, which contradict an influential dual-process model.

Multi-Level Transformer-Based Social Relation Recognition

Social relationships refer to the connections that exist between people and indicate how people interact in society. The effective recognition of social relationships is conducive to further understanding human behavioral patterns and thus can be vital for more complex social intelligent systems, such as interactive robots and health self-management systems. The existing works about social relation recognition (SRR) focus on extracting features on different scales but lack a comprehensive mechanism to orchestrate various features which show different degrees of importance. In this paper, we propose a new SRR framework, namely Multi-level Transformer-Based Social Relation Recognition (MT-SRR), for better orchestrating features on different scales. Specifically, a vision transformer (ViT) is firstly employed as a feature extraction module for its advantage in exploiting global features. An intra-relation transformer (Intra-TRM) is then introduced to dynamically fuse the extracted features to generate more rational social relation representations. Next, an inter-relation transformer (Inter-TRM) is adopted to further enhance the social relation representations by attentionally utilizing the logical constraints among relationships. In addition, a new margin related to inter-class similarity and a sample number are added to alleviate the challenges of a data imbalance. Extensive experiments demonstrate that MT-SRR can better fuse features on different scales as well as ameliorate the bad effect caused by a data imbalance. The results on the benchmark datasets show that our proposed model outperforms the state-of-the-art methods with significant improvement.

Social Context-aware Person Search in Videos via Multi-modal Cues

Person search has long been treated as a crucial and challenging task to support deeper insight in personalized summarization and personality discovery. Traditional methods, e.g., person re-identification and face recognition techniques, which profile video characters based on visual information, are often limited by relatively fixed poses or small variation of viewpoints and suffer from more realistic scenes with high motion complexity (e.g., movies). At the same time, long videos such as movies often have logical story lines and are composed of continuously developmental plots. In this situation, different persons usually meet on a specific occasion, in which informative social cues are performed. We notice that these social cues could semantically profile their personality and benefit person search task in two aspects. First, persons with certain relationships usually co-occur in short intervals; in case one of them is easier to be identified, the social relation cues extracted from their co-occurrences could further benefit the identification for the harder ones. Second, social relations could reveal the association between certain scenes and characters (e.g., classmate relationship may only exist among students), which could narrow down candidates into certain persons with a specific relationship. In this way, high-level social relation cues could improve the effectiveness of person search. Along this line, in this article, we propose a social context-aware framework, which fuses visual and social contexts to profile persons in more semantic perspectives and better deal with person search task in complex scenarios. Specifically, we first segment videos into several independent scene units and abstract out social contexts within these scene units. Then, we construct inner-personal links through a graph formulation operation for each scene unit, in which both visual cues and relation cues are considered. Finally, we perform a relation-aware label propagation to identify characters’ occurrences, combining low-level semantic cues (i.e., visual cues) and high-level semantic cues (i.e., relation cues) to further enhance the accuracy. Experiments on real-world datasets validate that our solution outperforms several competitive baselines.

Avoiding Crowded Places During COVID-19: Common Sense or a Complex Strategic Decision?

Introduction: Following a period of strict lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic, most countries introduced policies in which citizens were expected to avoid crowded places using common sense, as advised by the WHO. We argue that the ambiguity in the recommendation to “avoid crowded places” implicitly forces individuals to make a complex strategic decision.

Methods: Using a Dutch representative sample of 1,048 participants [42% male, mean age=43.78years (SD=12.53), we examine the effect of context on the decision to visit a hypothetical recreational hotspot under the policy recommendation to “avoid crowded places.” We randomize four levels of context on the crowdedness “on the streets” (no context, low, medium, and high context). Subsequently, participants are asked to estimate the percentage of others going out in the same situation. Finally, we assess the impact of a selection of personal characteristics on the likelihood of visiting a crowded place.

Results: Respondents are proportionally more likely to go in a low context and high context, compared to no context (diff=0.121, p<0.000, and diff=0.034, p<0.05, respectively) and middle context (diff=0.125, p<0.000, and diff=0.037, p<0.05, respectively). Low context information also decreases the expectation of others going out (−2.63%, z=4.68, p<0.000). High context information increases the expected percentage of others going out (significant only for medium to high context; 2.94%, z=7.34, p<0.001). Furthermore, we show that education, age, and health and risk attitude are all predictive of the likelihood to visit a crowded place, notwithstanding the context.

Discussion: Although there is a strong inclination to avoid crowded places during the COVID-19 pandemic (81%), we find two context-driven exceptions: when people expect to avoid crowded spots (in the “low” context, i.e., strategical decision-making) and when people expect others to go (social influence). The freedom provided by ambiguous public policy is implicitly asking more from the population than it initially seems. “Use your common sense” is often the accompanied advice, but our results show that more and better information concerning the context is essential to enable us to make an optimal decision for ourselves, and for society.

Toward understanding the functions of peer influence: A summary and synthesis of recent empirical research

Compelling evidence demonstrates that peer influence is a pervasive force during adolescence, one that shapes adaptive and maladaptive attitudes and behaviors. This literature review focuses on factors that make adolescence a period of special vulnerability to peer influence. Herein, we advance the Influence-Compatibility Model, which integrates converging views about early adolescence as a period of increased conformity with evidence that peer influence functions to increase affiliate similarity. Together, these developmental forces smooth the establishment of friendships and integration into the peer group, promote interpersonal and intragroup compatibility, and eliminate differences that might result in social exclusion.

How social relationships shape moral wrongness judgments

Judgments of whether an action is morally wrong depend on who is involved and the nature of their relationship. But how, when, and why social relationships shape moral judgments is not well understood. We provide evidence to address these questions, measuring cooperative expectations and moral wrongness judgments in the context of common social relationships such as romantic partners, housemates, and siblings. In a pre-registered study of 423 U.S. participants nationally representative for age, race, and gender, we show that people normatively expect different relationships to serve cooperative functions of care, hierarchy, reciprocity, and mating to varying degrees. In a second pre-registered study of 1,320 U.S. participants, these relationship-specific cooperative expectations (i.e., relational norms) enable highly precise out-of-sample predictions about the perceived moral wrongness of actions in the context of particular relationships. In this work, we show that this 'relational norms' model better predicts patterns of moral wrongness judgments across relationships than alternative models based on genetic relatedness, social closeness, or interdependence, demonstrating how the perceived morality of actions depends not only on the actions themselves, but also on the relational context in which those actions occur.

Psychometric Analysis of a Postulated Set of Evolved Human Motives

Many different general systems of human motives have been postulated in the psychological literature. However, as yet, no consensus on which motives should be nominated, nor how many there are, has emerged. Recently, we deduced the existence of a number of motives using a logical argument derived from evolutionary theory; that humans have evolved an independent psychological "engine" to respond to each kind of evolutionary problem set by a dimension of the human niche, or life-way. Here, we confirm the existence of 14 out of 15 of these postulated motives using factor analysis on a web-based sample of 500 respondents from the UK: Lust, Hunger, Fear, Disgust, Attract, Love, Nurture, Hoard, Create, Affiliate, Status, Justice, Curiosity, and Play. The items which loaded most strongly for each factor confirmed the expected core value of each motive. Comfort did not emerge, perhaps because it is more about satisfying specific physiological requirements than a cluster of activities linked semantically by the concept of attaining "comfort." We believe this analysis can form the foundation of a scale for use in applied psychological work ranging from personality testing to personnel selection to public health program design.

Patrolling the boundaries of social domains: Neural activations to violations of expectations for romantic and work relationships

According to the social domains hypothesis, we reduce the information-processing demands of complex social cues by classifying them into a limited number of domains, each with distinct sets of expectations. This requires rapid identification of violations of the boundaries between social domains. We hypothesized that these violations are likely to be associated with neural activation of the salience system. Using fMRI we compared responses of 20 adults to expected and unexpected everyday social scenarios in personal and work interactions. The vignettes exemplified different kinds of scenarios presented in the work setting, i.e., task-focused scenarios which are expected at work and scenarios with a personal focus, which are unexpected at work. The key contrast between task and personal focussed scenarios presented in the work setting was associated with fronto-insular activation. Perceived inappropriateness of the unexpected scenarios, and shorter response time to judgment of inappropriateness were also associated with fronto-insular activation, after controlling for unpleasantness. This study indicates specific neural responses to violations of expectations in different social situations. Our findings suggest that the fronto-insular region is implicated in rapid detection of behaviors that cross the boundaries of social domains, which are hypothesized to be necessary for efficient social information processing.

Co-occurring risk and protective factors and regulatory behavior of infants living in low-income homes

Early self-regulation is a foundation for lifelong wellness and can be shaped by the interplay among several vital exposures. In this study, we examined the emergence of reliable profiles based upon exposure to risk and protective factors in infancy, determined if sociodemographic resources predict profile membership, and determined if these profiles predict early regulatory behaviors in a sample of infants reared in low-income homes. Data were collected from a sample of primarily Black or White mother-infant dyads living in low-income homes in the Midwest (n = 222) during the infants' first year of life (mean maternal age at enrollment: 26.29 years; range 18-43 years). Exposures included mother-infant interactions; father support; maternal depression, stress, and self-efficacy; home environment; food security; and breastfeeding duration. Sociodemographic resources included poverty status; economic hardship; maternal education, employment, and age; parental marital status; and infant race and sex. Infant regulatory behaviors were measured with the Infant Behavior Questionnaire-Revised Very Short Form effortful control subscale (mean age 11 months; range 8.5-14.3 months). Latent profile analysis was used to profile infants by risk and protective exposures. Regression was used to differentiate profiles by sociodemographic resources and to predict infant regulatory behavior from profiles. Three profiles emerged: low father support, good maternal mental health, and poor maternal mental health. A married mother, less economic hardship, and working mothers predicted infant exposure to good maternal mental health. Infant regulatory behavior was best when the infant was exposed to the good maternal mental health profile. Implications for future research are discussed.

Interpersonal Decentering and Interpersonal Problems: Testing the Multi-Method Utility of Person-Situation Interactions in Thematic Apperception Tests

Mature interpersonal decentering is a form of social cognitive role-taking involving reflective thought about one's interpersonal relationships. Previous research examining main effects for persons, card situation content, story content, and person-card interactions found more mature decentering in stories about heterosexual romantic-pull Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) cards (HRC) as compared with stories about nonromantic cards (NRC). To see whether differences in means corresponded to differential criterion validity, this multi-method study examined Inventory of Interpersonal Problems circumplex (IIP-C) scores associated with young adults' decentering maturity and deficits, comparing correlations with IIP-C scores of decentering scores calculated from HRC versus NRC. Similarly, to test the effect of story content, IIP-C scores were correlated with decentering scores calculated from stories having romantic versus nonromantic story content. Using circumplex statistical tests, decentering deficits were associated with domineering/vindictive interpersonal problems, and mature decentering with nonassertive/exploitable problems. Men who reported more exploitable problems decentered more maturely across all situations. Women who decentered more maturely in response to HRC reported more socially avoidant problems, whereas those who decentered more maturely to NRC reported more exploitable problems. Results for romantic versus nonromantic story content were largely uninterpretable (did not meet circumplexity assumption). Findings might assist clinicians' card selection.

Annual Research Review: Social relationships and the immune system during development

A child's social relationships serve critical functions during development. The interface between a child's social world and their immune system, particularly innate immunity, which helped children survive in the face of infections, nutritional scarcity, and violence throughout human history, is the focus of this Annual Research Review. This article reviews the state of research on social relationships and innate immune inflammation during childhood. Warmth and rejection in childhood social relationships, as well as physical trauma and unpredictable social environments, were not consistently related to circulating inflammatory markers such as interleukin-6 and C-reactive protein during childhood. Instead, links between social environments and inflammation were observed in studies that focus on children with greater background risk factors, such as low family socioeconomic status, family history of mood disorders, or presence of chronic interpersonal stressors combined with acute episodic stressors. In addition, studies on worse childhood social environments and greater inflammation in adulthood were more consistent. Warmth and rejection in the social environment may be related to sensitivity of immune cells to the anti-inflammatory actions of glucocorticoids, though this is primarily observed in adolescent women at risk for depression. Additional mechanistic evidence suggests that greater warmth and less rejection are related to processes that regulate inflammation, including greater expression of the glucocorticoid receptor gene and lower expression of genes that are responsive to the pro-inflammatory transcription factor NF-kappa B. The article concludes by discussing implications of the interface between a child's social relationships and inflammation for mental health and other recent (on evolutionary timescales) health threats, as well as recommendations for future research, and recommendations for researchers interested in integrating inflammatory measures in developmental research.

The Arousal Effect of Exclusionary and Inclusionary Situations on Social Affiliation Motivation and Its Subsequent Influence on Prosocial Behavior

Given the negative costs of exclusion and the relevance of belongingness for humans, the experience of exclusion influences social affiliation motivation, which in turn is a relevant predictor of prosocial behavior. Skin conductance is a typical measure of the arousal elicited by emotions. Hence, we argued that both inclusion and exclusion will increase skin conductance level due to the increase of either positive affect or anger affects, respectively. Moreover, we argued that emotional arousal is also related to social affiliation motivation and prosocial behavior. A total of 48 students were randomly allocated to either an inclusionary or exclusionary condition and their skin conductance levels were recorded during an experiment in which they completed an online questionnaire and played the game “Cyberball.” Results indicated that (a) individuals who perceived high exclusion felt angrier than individuals perceiving high inclusion, who feel positive affect; (b) no differences were evidenced in terms of skin conductance between exclusion and inclusion situations; (c) over-aroused individuals were less motivated to affiliate; and (d) individuals with lower affiliation motivation behaved in a less prosocial way. The results were congruent to the argument that behaving prosocially may be a way to gain the desired affiliation.

Are friends electric? The benefits and risks of human-robot relationships

Social robots that can interact and communicate with people are growing in popularity for use at home and in customer-service, education, and healthcare settings. Although growing evidence suggests that co-operative and emotionally aligned social robots could benefit users across the lifespan, controversy continues about the ethical implications of these devices and their potential harms. In this perspective, we explore this balance between benefit and risk through the lens of human-robot relationships. We review the definitions and purposes of social robots, explore their philosophical and psychological status, and relate research on human-human and human-animal relationships to the emerging literature on human-robot relationships. Advocating a relational rather than essentialist view, we consider the balance of benefits and harms that can arise from different types of relationship with social robots and conclude by considering the role of researchers in understanding the ethical and societal impacts of social robotics.

Social Exchange Styles: Measurement, Validation, and Application

Drawing on evolutionary psychology, social exchange styles were conceptualized in terms of two dimensions of individual differences in approaching exchange relationships: Benefit–seeking and cost–vigilance. In Study 1, a principal components analysis of the Social Exchange Styles Questionnaire (SESQ) in 156 undergraduates confirmed the presence of two dimensions that were very similar to the expected dimensions: Equitable alliance building (EAB) and vigilant alliance management (VAM). The SESQ scales showed good internal consistency and construct validity. Multiple regressions confirmed that social exchange styles were distinct from other personality variables. In Study 2, multilevel modelling conducted on 45 small work groups demonstrated that EAB positively predicted members’ subjective performance, while VAM positively predicted objective performance. Theoretical questions and future research directions are discussed. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Interpersonal perception and interpersonal spin

INTRODUCTION

Interpersonal spin is an indicator of intraindividual variability in social behavior. Spin is positively related to Neuroticism and is maladaptive, with well-documented deleterious effects on social functioning. The perceptual processes associated with spin and how spin emerges are less well-understood. The present research examines the interpersonal perception of individuals with higher spin and tests whether these perceptual processes explain the association of spin with Neuroticism.

METHOD

267 students participated in a 20-day event contingent recording procedure, reporting on social interactions via mobile application. Participants' perceptions of others' behavior, their own affect, and their own behavior were measured within and across interactions.

RESULTS

We examined the affective and behavioral responses of individuals with higher spin to perceptions of others' behaviors. Individuals with higher spin showed greater affective and behavioral reactivity to perceptions of others' communal (agreeable-quarrelsome) behavior. Neuroticism predicted greater affective reactivity (i.e., steeper slopes between event-level perceived communion and negative affect), which in turn predicted higher spin.

CONCLUSIONS

Individuals with higher spin may have an interpersonal style characterized by greater reactivity to perceptions of others' communal behavior. These individuals' behavioral lability may reflect underlying emotional dysregulation. These processes may ultimately interfere with the formation and maintenance of social bonds.

Does pregnancy make women more cautious and calm? The impact of pregnancy on risk decision-making

During pregnancy, a variety of psychological and physical changes occur in women, which may have different impacts on risk decision-making involving different processes systems. Based on the dual-process theories of decision-making, using the Columbia Card Task (CCT) as the experimental paradigm, which can trigger deliberative versus affective decision-makings respectively, this study recruited 240 pregnant women and non-pregnant women aged 20-40 as the experimental group and control group respectively, investigated how pregnancy impacted on women’s risk decision-making, as well as the possible roles played by a series of psychological factors (impulsivity; sensation seeking; emotional state) and physiological factors (gestational age; human Chorionic Gonadotropin, hCG; progesterone) in the above process. The results were as follows: (a) Compared with non-pregnant women, pregnant women tended to choose fewer cards, indicating a higher risk aversion consistent with a more conservative strategy, both in cold and hot CCTs; in both cold and hot CCTs, compared with pregnant women in the second trimester of pregnancy, pregnant women in the first and the third trimesters of pregnancy had a higher risk aversion tendency. (b) Pregnant women had lower levels of all dimensions of sensation seeking than did non-pregnant women, pregnant women in the third trimester of pregnancy had lower levels of Disinhibition (DIS) and Boredom Susceptibility (BS) of sensation seeking than pregnant women in the first and the second trimesters of pregnancy, but there was no significant difference in levels of emotional state or impulsivity between pregnant woman and non-pregnant women. (c) DIS of sensation seeking played a fully mediating role in the impact of pregnancy on hot CCT performance. (d) Both hCG and progesterone levels were negatively correlated with pregnant women’s hot CCT performances. (e) Positive emotion played a partial mediating role in the effect of progesterone on hot CCT performance of pregnant women.

Interpersonal Decentering and Person-Situation Interaction in the Thematic Apperception Test: Is It all in the Cards? What's the Story?

Assessors using storytelling assessment techniques have debated the relative importance of picture imagery (card pull) versus story content for interpreting clients' stories. This study used generalizability theory to compare sources of variance in scores for Feffer's Interpersonal Decentering as a function of persons, cards, raters, or interactions. Representing situational activation of mature role-taking (mentalizing of interpersonal processes), decentering activity should differ across interpersonal situations according to the social role norms involved, resulting in more variance due to card pull than for previously studied scoring systems. Decentering scores from stories told to heterosexual romantic-pull pictures were compared with those for other pictures and with scores from romantic versus nonromantic stories to identify score variance explained by card pull and story content. Considering cards as analogs for life situations, person-card interaction explained more decentering variance (53.7%) than did other effects. Heterosexual romantic-pull pictures stimulated more mature decentering than others; story content did not explain significant variance. Women told more mature decentering stories to heterosexual romantic-pull pictures than to other pictures, and more so than men did. Finding strong person-card interaction illuminates typically low internal consistency for content-based scoring systems. Recommendations for clinicians include implications for card selection and story content interpretation.

Narrative theory III: Evolutionary narratives addressing mating motives change discounting and tobacco valuation

Relationships between discounting and addictive behaviors have both state- and trait-based components. Evolutionarily driven motives may trigger risk-taking behaviors, and narratives might be used to alter the temporal window of reward valuation. The current investigation-in 2 separate studies-sought to understand the basic effects of narratives on smoking behavior by examining the effect of mating narratives on the discounting rates of cigarette smokers. Using data collected online, Study 1 (N = 132) assessed the within-individual effect of a mating narrative describing a long-term romantic relationship on rates of discounting after being randomly assigned to 1 of 2 narratives (romance or control) and Study 2 (N = 273) assessed the between-individual effect of 2 mating narratives (1 describing a long-term romantic relationship and 1 describing a short-term sexual encounter) on rates of discounting, craving, and cigarette valuation after being randomly assigned to 1 of 3 motivational narratives (romance, sex, or control). Reading the romance narrative decreased rates of discounting (i.e., increased preference for larger delayed rewards), compared to a control narrative (Studies 1 and 2). In contrast, reading the sexual narrative increased discounting (i.e., decreased preference for larger delayed rewards). Moreover, the romance narrative significantly decreased craving of cigarettes while the sexual narrative increased cigarette valuation (Study 2). These findings suggest that mating narratives may be useful in manipulating the temporal window of reward valuation, relevant for altering demand and craving, and may show potential as a component of future behavioral addiction interventions. Given the small effect sizes, replicating the study in future research will be beneficial. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Who are “we” and why are we cooperating? Insights from social psychology

Tomasello argues in the target article that a sense of moral obligation emerges from the creation of a collaborative “we” motivating us to fulfill our cooperative duties. We suggest that “we” takes many forms, entailing different obligations, depending on the type (and underlying functions) of the relationship(s) in question. We sketch a framework of such types, functions, and obligations to guide future research in our commentary.

Intrinsic group behaviour II: On the dependence of triad spatial dynamics on social and personal features; and on the effect of social interaction on small group dynamics

In a follow-up to our work on the dependence of walking dyad dynamics on intrinsic properties of the group, we now analyse how these properties affect groups of three people (triads), taking also in consideration the effect of social interaction on the dynamical properties of the group. We show that there is a strong parallel between triads and dyads. Work-oriented groups are faster and walk at a larger distance between them than leisure-oriented ones, while the latter move in a less ordered way. Such differences are present also when colleagues are contrasted with friends and families; nevertheless the similarity between friend and colleague behaviour is greater than the one between family and colleague behaviour. Male triads walk faster than triads including females, males keep a larger distance than females, and same gender groups are more ordered than mixed ones. Groups including tall people walk faster, while those with elderly or children walk at a slower pace. Groups including children move in a less ordered fashion. Results concerning relation and gender are particularly strong, and we investigated whether they hold also when other properties are kept fixed. While this is clearly true for relation, patterns relating gender often resulted to be diminished. For instance, the velocity difference due to gender is reduced if we compare only triads in the colleague relation. The effects on group dynamics due to intrinsic properties are present regardless of social interaction, but socially interacting groups are found to walk in a more ordered way. This has an opposite effect on the space occupied by non-interacting dyads and triads, since loss of structure makes dyads larger, but causes triads to lose their characteristic V formation and walk in a line (i.e., occupying more space in the direction of movement but less space in the orthogonal one).

Identification of social relation within pedestrian dyads

This study focuses on social pedestrian groups in public spaces and makes an effort to identify the type of social relation between the group members. As a first step for this identification problem, we focus on dyads (i.e. 2 people groups). Moreover, as a mutually exclusive categorization of social relations, we consider the domain-based approach of Bugental, which precisely corresponds to social relations of colleagues, couples, friends and families, and identify each dyad with one of those relations. For this purpose, we use anonymized trajectory data and derive a set of observables thereof, namely, inter-personal distance, group velocity, velocity difference and height difference. Subsequently, we use the probability density functions (pdf) of these observables as a tool to understand the nature of the relation between pedestrians. To that end, we propose different ways of using the pdfs. Namely, we introduce a probabilistic Bayesian approach and contrast it to a functional metric one and evaluate the performance of both methods with appropriate assessment measures. This study stands out as the first attempt to automatically recognize social relation between pedestrian groups. Additionally, in doing that it uses completely anonymous data and proves that social relation is still possible to recognize with a good accuracy without invading privacy. In particular, our findings indicate that significant recognition rates can be attained for certain categories and with certain methods. Specifically, we show that a very good recognition rate is achieved in distinguishing colleagues from leisure-oriented dyads (families, couples and friends), whereas the distinction between the leisure-oriented dyads results to be inherently harder, but still possible at reasonable rates, in particular if families are restricted to parent-child groups. In general, we establish that the Bayesian method outperforms the functional metric one due, probably, to the difficulty of the latter to learn observable pdfs from individual trajectories.

Differential associations between interpersonal variables and quality-of-life in a sample of college students

PURPOSE

Humans are fundamentally social beings, and the relationships we form with others are crucial for our well-being. Research across a variety of domains has established the association between a variety of interpersonal factors and health outcomes, including quality-of-life. However, there is a need for a more integrative, holistic analysis of these variables and how they relate to one another.

METHODS

Undergraduate students (n = 1456) from four universities across the United States completed self-report measures of their quality-of-life and a variety of interpersonal factors identified as important predictors across the literature. We examined zero-order correlations between these measures and quality-of-life, estimated a path model to look at unique variance accounted for by each, and finally used network analysis to examine the network of direct and indirect associations among these variables and quality-of-life.

RESULTS

Loneliness had the strongest association with quality-of-life across all analyses. When examining the unique association between quality-of-life and each interpersonal variable, six remained statistically significant: loneliness, social support, social connectedness, emotional intelligence, intimacy with one's romantic partner, and empathic concern. These results were supported by the network model, which found direct associations between quality-of-life and these six variables as well as indirect associations with all other interpersonal variables in the model.

CONCLUSIONS

Results from this research suggest that interpersonal factors in general, and loneliness in particular, are strongly associated with quality-of-life. Future research is needed to establish the direction of these effects and examine for whom these findings are generalizable.

Can an online curriculum improve the daily socio-emotional lives of middle-aged adults exposed to childhood Trauma?

One pathway linking experiences of childhood trauma to poorer mental and physical health in midlife are disruptions in daily socio-emotional regulation. However, there is a dearth of effective and accessible treatments that meet the needs of trauma-exposed individuals and their communities. Through a randomized controlled trial, this research examines whether an online social intelligence training (SIT) program improves social-emotional regulation compared to an attention-control (AC) condition. During the pre- and post-test phases of the study, participants (N = 230) completed online surveys for 14-days that included measures of social connectedness, emotional awareness, and perspective-taking. In the SIT condition, multi-level analyses revealed significant increases in daily levels of "in-tune" social interactions, emotional awareness, and perspective-taking, and attenuated within-person changes in social engagement on stressful and uplifting days. Participants who reported greater childhood trauma exhibited the strongest increases in daily social engagement and emotional awareness, suggesting that program benefits were largest for those reporting greater exposure to trauma in childhood. Our findings shed light on the potential reversibility of socio-emotional mechanisms linking childhood trauma to poorer mental and physical health in midlife, and support the utility of widely accessible, low-cost intervention methods for individuals and communities.

Parsing profiles of temperamental reactivity and differential routes to delay of gratification: A person-based approach

Informed by a developmental psychopathology perspective, the present study applied a person-based approach to examine whether associations between early sociocontextual experiences (e.g., socioeconomic factors and maternal discipline practices) and preschool-age children's delay of gratification vary across profiles of children's temperamental reactivity. In addition, the study examined the direct and mediating role of children's set shifting in associations with delay of gratification within each profile. The sample consisted of 160 socioeconomically and ethnically diverse mothers and their 5-year-old children drawn from a longitudinal study of mother-child relationships. Latent profile analyses identified three profiles of temperamental reactivity distinguished by sensitivity to reward and punishment and negative affectivity. Multigroup analysis revealed maternal sensitive discipline (observed during a parent-child compliance task) at age 3.5 predicted longer delay of gratification at age 5 in the punishment reactivity/negative affectivity group. Maternal inductive reasoning discipline at age 3.5 predicted longer delay in the low temperamental reactivity group. For children with the reward reactivity/negative affectivity profile, higher family income at age 3.5 predicted longer delay of gratification at age 5, which was mediated by children's set shifting. Findings underscore the utility of person-based approaches for delineating differential developmental routes toward children's delay of gratification.

What Modern Sports Competitions Can Tell Us About Human Nature

To fully understand human behavior, it seems inevitable to approach it from an evolutionary perspective. However, much of human behavior has been overwritten by culture and society, thus allowing little insight into how it might have evolved amid natural and sexual selection. Here, I argue that sports competitions, although a cultural phenomenon in themselves, strip away many of the cultural layers and reveal more primary, rudimentary aspects of human behavior. Fortunately, because they are ubiquitous, meticulously recorded, and often quantified in great detail, sports competitions provide a plethora of usable data. In this article I provide an evolutionary account of the cross-cultural existence and popularity of sports by reviewing evidence of four functional hypotheses that regard the omnipresence of sports as a by-product of fitness-related adaptations (skill acquisition and development, status seeking, courtship display, and coalition formation). Then I outline how the growing body of sports data and documentation can be exploited for increasing our understanding of human nature (e.g., on conflict and cooperation, lateral preferences, territoriality, and nonverbal communication). The article concludes by giving guidelines for future cross-disciplinary research to advance the understanding of how evolution has shaped human behavior.

The Virtual Personalities Neural Network Model: Neurobiological Underpinnings

The Virtual Personalities Model is a motive-based neural network model that provides both a psychological model and a computational implementation that explicates the dynamics and often large within-person variability in behavior that arises over time. At the same time the same model can produce -- across many virtual personalities - between subject variability in behavior that when factor analyzed yields familiar personality structure (e.g., the Big-5). First, we describe our personality model and its implementation as a neural network model. Second, we focus on detailing the neurobiological underpinnings of this model. Third, we examine the learning mechanisms, and their biological substrates, as ways that the model gets "wired up", discussing Pavlovian and instrumental conditioning, Pavlovian to instrumental transfer (PIT), and habits. Finally, we describe the dynamics of how initial differences in propensities (e.g., dopamine functioning), wiring differences due to experience, and other factors could operate together to develop and change personality over time, and how this might be empirically examined. Thus, our goal is to contribute to the rising chorus of voices seeking a more precise neurobiologically-based science of the complex dynamics underlying personality.

Investigations of a reproductive processing advantage in memory

Previous work has shown that processing words for their survival value improves memory. If this survival processing effect reflects an evolutionary adaptation in memory, processing words for their reproductive value should also improve memory. Across three experiments, participants rated words for their relevance in reproductive scenarios. In Experiment 1, participants rated adjectives (traits) for their relevance in finding a mate, evaluating a coworker, or in terms of their pleasantness. Mate processing produced better memory than pleasantness ratings, but not coworker processing. In Experiment 2, participants rated traits for their relevance in detecting sexual or emotional infidelity. Neither processing condition produced better memory compared to pleasantness ratings, but there were several unpredicted interactions involving participant sex and jealousy responses. In Experiment 3, participants rated gifts for their appropriateness in a romantic date or a housewarming party, or in terms of their pleasantness. Date processing and housewarming processing both improved recall compared to pleasantness rating, but date processing and housewarming processing did not produce differences compared to each other. Overall, the current study demonstrates very little evidence of a reproductive processing effect, and nothing approaching the magnitude of previous work on the survival processing effect.

Are perceptions of fairness relationship-specific? The case of noblesse oblige

Research in experimental economics suggests that decision making in strategic interactions is often guided by a concern for fairness. However, experimental economics studies routinely place participants of equal social status and no prior social history in anonymous interactions, a context that would tend to foster the adoption of an egalitarian fairness norm. Extensive research in anthropology (Fiske, 1991) and psychology (Bugental, 2000) suggests that social norms, including fairness norms, are relationship-specific, raising doubts about whether the concern for egalitarian fairness observed in the experimental economics literature would generalize to a wider range of social relations. In this paper we focus on an alternative social norm characteristic of hierarchical relationships: noblesse oblige—the obligation of high-ranking individuals to act honorably and beneficently towards subordinates. In a series of five experiments, we show that the norm of noblesse oblige predicts tolerance of free riding better than individual self-interest does.

New Frontiers in Heart Rate Variability and Social Coherence Research: Techniques, Technologies, and Implications for Improving Group Dynamics and Outcomes

Concepts embraced by the term coherence have been identified as central to fields such as quantum physics, physiology, and social science. There are different types of coherence, although the term always implies a harmonious relationship, correlations and connections between the various parts of a system. A specific measure derived from heart rate variability (HRV) provides a measure of physiological coherence. Another type of coherence, social coherence, relates to the harmonious alignment between couples or pairs, family units, small groups, or larger organizations in which a network of relationships exists among individuals who share common interests and objectives. A high degree of social coherence is reflected by stable and harmonious relationships, which allows for the efficient flow and utilization of energy and communication required for optimal collective cohesion and action. Social coherence requires that group members are attuned and are emotionally connected with each other, and that the group’s emotional energy is organized and regulated by the group as a whole. A number of studies are reviewed which have explored various types of synchronization in infants, pairs and groups, indicating that feelings of cooperation, trust, compassion and increased prosocial behaviors depends largely on the establishment of a spontaneous synchronization of various physiological rhythms between individuals. This article discusses a new application using HRV monitoring in social coherence research and the importance of physiological synchronization in group developmental processes and dynamics. Building on the extensive body of research showing that providing feedback of HRV coherence level at the individual level can improve self-regulation, we suggest the following hypotheses: (1) providing feedback of individual and collective HRV coherence and the degree of heart rhythm synchronization will increase group coherence, and heart rhythm synchronization among group members. (2) Training in techniques to increase group coherence and heart rhythm synchronization will correlate with increased prosocial behaviors, such as kindness and cooperation among individuals, improved communication, and decreases in social discord and adversarial interactions. (3) Biomagnetic fields produced by the heart may be a primary mechanism in mediating HRV synchronization among group members. Data supporting each of the hypothesis is discussed.

The Development of Altruism with Special Reference to Human Relationships: A 10-Stage Theory

All human relationships involve some form of cost and benefit and altruism forms the foundation upon which human relationships are built. In this paper, a taxonomy of human relationships in terms of altruism was constructed. In the proposed taxonomy, human relationships are categorized into three major groups: primary group, secondary group, and tertiary group. The primary group consists of members that are very closely related to each other either by genetic relatedness (e.g., parents, siblings, and cousins) or social relatedness (e.g., mate and close friends) or both. The secondary group consists of members that are socially related but also less closely related with each other (e.g., people of the same political or religious group, teachers, mentors, acquaintances, neighbors, working colleagues, and strangers). Lastly, the tertiary group consists of members of other species. A 10-stage theory of altruism with special reference to human relationships is proposed. The affective, cognitive, and relationship aspects of each stage are delineated in details. There are two developmental principles of altruism. The first principle states that the development of altruism follows the 10-stage theory and moves from Stage 1: Egoism toward the higher stages of altruism slowly. The second developmental principle states that the taxonomy of human relationships is valid at any stage of altruism development. In other words, people at any stage of altruism are more altruistic toward their kin and mate, and then close friends, extended family members, and so on. They are least altruistic toward enemies and members of non-human species. In summary, the proposed developmental principle of altruism and human relationships is logical and robust. It is formulated based on the major developmental and social psychological theories. The theory has the potential in providing a useful framework for future studies on the development and evolution of human relationships.

Adaptive Memory: Remembering Potential Mates

According to the adaptive memory perspective, memory should function more efficiently in fitness-relevant domains. The current work explored whether there is a mnemonic tuning in a fundamental domain for human evolution: reproduction. In two experiments, female participants assessed how desirable potential male candidates (represented by a face and a short descriptor) would be in the context of a long-term mating relationship or in the context of a long-term work relationship. Then, after a short distractor task, participants performed a recognition task for the faces and a source memory task. Finally, they were asked to recall the descriptors presented during encoding. Experiment 1 used a between-subjects design, whereas Experiment 2 employed a within-subject design. In both experiments, participants remembered the faces best when they were encoded in the mating condition. Also, in Experiment 1, source memory performance was better in the mating condition than in the working condition with the reverse being true for free recall of the descriptors. The latter difference was not observed in Experiment 2. These results suggest a potential mnemonic tuning for the faces of potential mate partners.