Journal of Nonverbal Behavior最新文献

Embracing has several positive health effects, such as lowering blood pressure and decreasing infection risk. However, its association with general life satisfaction and daily mood has not been researched in detail. Here, we used a smartphone-based ecological momentary assessment (EMA) approach to monitor the daily number of embraces and daily mood in a sample of 94 adults over the course of seven days. We found that embracing frequency differed slightly over the week, with embracing occurring more frequently on weekends than on weekdays. We also found that higher daily embracing frequencies were associated with better daily mood using multilevel modeling. Only singles benefitted from increases in average embracing regarding their life satisfaction, whereas individuals in a relationship were unaffected by their embracing tendencies. Although our results are strictly correlational and do not indicate any direction or causality, embraces may be important for daily mood and general life satisfaction, but their efficacy seems to depend on relationship status.

Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s10919-022-00411-8.

Skin-picking is a common behavior in the general population that generally serves emotion regulation (e.g., reduction of tension). However, recent research suggests it may also be associated with changes in tactile processing sensitivity. Along these lines, the present study examined whether the severity of skin-picking (SOSP) is related to discriminative and affective touch processing. A total of 160 participants (59 males, 101 females, mean age = 31 years) completed two tactile discrimination tests (two-point discrimination, surface texture discrimination), as well as a well-validated affective touch paradigm (delivery of soft/slow touch, which is found to be generally pleasant). A hierarchical regression analysis was carried out to investigate the association between SOSP, age, sex, and indicators of tactile sensitivity. Replicating previous findings, females reported higher SOSP. While the performance in the discrimination tests did not predict SOSP, affective touch processing was associated with SOSP. Participants with high SOSP reported an urge to pick their skin after being softly touched. This seems paradoxical since previous findings have suggested skin-picking may be carried out to manage negative affective states. Our findings add to the literature describing altered sensitivity and responsivity to specific tactile stimuli in individuals with excessive skin-picking.

The dual pathway model posits that spontaneous and volitional laughter are voiced using distinct production systems, and perceivers rely upon these system-related cues to make accurate judgments about relationship status. Yet, to our knowledge, no empirical work has examined whether raters can differentiate laughter directed at friends and romantic partners and the cues driving this accuracy. In Study 1, raters (N = 50), who listened to 52 segments of laughter, identified conversational partner (friend versus romantic partner) with greater than chance accuracy (M = 0.57) and rated laughs directed at friends to be more pleasant-sounding than laughs directed at romantic partners. Study 2, which involved 58 raters, revealed that prototypical friendship laughter sounded more spontaneous (e.g., natural) and less "vulnerable" (e.g., submissive) than prototypical romantic laughter. Study 3 replicated the findings of the first two studies using a large cross-cultural sample (N = 252). Implications for the importance of laughter as a subtle relational signal of affiliation are discussed.

The Media Bias Effect (MBE) represents the biasing influence of the nonverbal behavior of a TV interviewer on viewers' impressions of the interviewee. In the MBE experiment, participants view a 4-min made-up political interview in which they are exposed only to the nonverbal behavior of the actors. The interviewer is friendly toward the politician in one experimental condition and hostile in the other. The interviewee was a confederate filmed in the same studio, and his clips are identical in the two conditions. This experiment was used successfully in a series of studies in several countries (Babad and Peer in J Nonverbal Behav 34(1):57-78, 2010. 10.1007/s10919-009-0078-x) and was administered in the present research. The present investigation focused on the interviewer's source credibility and its persuasive influence. The viewers filled out questionnaires about their impressions of both the interviewer and the interviewee. A component of "interviewer's authority" was derived in PCA, with substantial variance in viewers' impressions of the interviewer. In our design, we preferred the conception of Epistemic Authority (Kruglanski et al. in Adv Exp Soc Psychol 37:345-392, 2005)-based on viewers' subjective perceptions for deriving authority status-to the conventional design of source credibility studies, where dimensions of authority are pre-determined as independent variables. The results demonstrated that viewers who perceived the interviewer as an effective leader demonstrated a clear MBE and were susceptible to his influencing bias, but no bias effect was found for viewers who did not perceive the interviewer as an effective leader. Thus, Epistemic Authority (source credibility) moderated the Media Bias Effect.

Interpersonal synchrony serves as a subtle, yet powerful bonding mechanism in social interactions. Problematically, the term 'synchrony' has been used to label a variety of distinct aspects of interpersonal coordination, such as postural similarities or movement activity entrainment. Accordingly, different algorithms have been suggested to quantify interpersonal synchrony. Yet, it remains unknown whether the different measures of synchrony represent correlated features of the same perceivable core phenomenon. The current study addresses this by comparing the suitability of a set of algorithms with respect to their association with observers' judgments of dyadic synchrony and leader-followership. One-hundred fifteen observers viewed computer animations of characters portraying the movements of real dyads who performed a repetitive motor task with instruction to move in unison. Animations were based on full-body motion capture data synchronously collected for both partners during the joint exercise. Results showed most synchrony measures significantly correlated with (a) perceived synchrony and (b) the perceived level of balance of leading/following by each dyad member. Phase synchrony and Pearson correlations were associated most strongly with the observer ratings. This might be typical for intentional, structured forms synchrony such as ritualized group activities. It remains open if these findings also apply to spontaneous forms of synchrony as, for instance, occurring in free-running conversations.

Physical attractiveness is a heuristic that is often used as an indicator of desirable traits. In two studies (N = 1254), we tested whether facial attractiveness leads to a selective bias in attributing moral character—which is paramount in person perception—over non-moral traits. We argue that because people are motivated to assess socially important traits quickly, these may be the traits that are most strongly biased by physical attractiveness. In Study 1, we found that people attributed more moral traits to attractive than unattractive people, an effect that was stronger than the tendency to attribute positive non-moral traits to attractive (vs. unattractive) people. In Study 2, we conceptually replicated the findings while matching traits on perceived warmth. The findings suggest that the Beauty-is-Good stereotype particularly skews in favor of the attribution of moral traits. As such, physical attractiveness biases the perceptions of others even more fundamentally than previously understood.