Communications Psychology最新文献

A growing share of human interactions now occurs online, where the expression and perception of emotions are often amplified and distorted. Yet, the interplay between different emotions and the extent to which they are driven by external stimuli or social feedback remains poorly understood. We calibrate a multivariate Hawkes self-exciting point process to model the temporal expression of six basic emotions in YouTube Live chats. This framework captures both temporal and cross-emotional dependencies while allowing us to disentangle the influence of video content (exogenous) from peer interactions (endogenous). We find that emotional expressions are up to four times more strongly driven by peer interaction than by video content. Positivity is more contagious, spreading three times more readily, whereas negativity is more memorable, lingering nearly twice as long. Moreover, we observe asymmetric cross-excitation, with negative emotions frequently triggering positive ones, a pattern consistent with trolling dynamics, but not the reverse. These findings highlight the central role of social interaction in shaping emotional dynamics online and the risks of emotional manipulation as human-chatbot interactions become increasingly realistic.

Regulating amusement is crucial in social contexts where expressing amusement may be inappropriate or disruptive. Yet little research has directly compared the effectiveness of different strategies for laughter regulation. Across three experiments, we examined how distraction, cognitive reappraisal, and expressive suppression affect laughter-related facial expressions and amusement ratings during exposure to jokes. Laughter regulation was operationalized by means of facial electromyography (fEMG) and subjective ratings of funniness as proxies for the expression and experience of amusement. In Experiments 1 and 2 (n = 40 each), distraction and expressive suppression most strongly reduced facial activity, whereas reappraisal produced smaller but consistent effects. However, only reappraisal reliably decreased funniness ratings, suggesting selective effects on the cognitive evaluation of humor. Experiment 3 (n = 41) introduced social laughter feedback and revealed that the presence of another's laughter impaired expression control and increased funniness ratings, indicating that social cues shape both emotional expression and experience. Together, these findings show how distinct emotion-regulation strategies modulate amusement and laughter expressions in response to humorous stimuli and highlight the contextual sensitivity of laughter regulation in socially dynamic settings.

Boredom is on the rise, indicating an urgent need to understand its nature and impact. While there is broad agreement on the negative affect associated with its experience, its typical level of arousal remains heavily contested. Therefore, we conducted a three-level random-effects meta-analysis on the boredom-arousal relation across multiple domains. This study was pre-registered via OSF on April 4th, 2024, and we provide the data, the coding manual, and the analysis code at https://osf.io/45zuh/ . The databases Web of Science, PsycInfo, PubMed, and ProQuest Dissertations & Theses Global were searched on the 27th of November, 2023. We included all quantitative correlational and experimental studies that targeted human, non-clinical participants and provided effect sizes on the boredom-arousal relation or information to calculate effect sizes. Overall, 214 effect sizes from 72 unique samples that comprised a total of 6570 participants fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Correlational evidence (i = 75 effect sizes) suggested that more intensely experienced boredom was related to reduced arousal, $\overline{r}$  = -.13, 95% CI [-.22, -.05]. Experimental evidence (i = 122 effect sizes) showed that boredom was associated with significantly lower arousal as compared to various control conditions; $\overline{d}$  = -0.40, 95% CI [-0.59, -0.22]. However, there was significant heterogeneity in effect sizes, and the relation between boredom and arousal was moderated by the type of boredom measure, the type of arousal measure, and the type of control group in experimental designs. Specifically, the relation was not significant when boredom measures included items that denoted mixed or high arousal, when arousal was assessed via heart rate variability, or when experimentally induced boredom was contrasted with a neutral control condition (e.g., waiting, doing nothing). The assessment of study quality, testing publication status as a moderator, as well as visually and quantitatively assessing funnel plot asymmetry indicated minor to no risk of bias. Implications for the theoretical conceptualization of boredom and future research are discussed. The authors received no external funding for this work.

Fairness is a fundamental social norm guiding human decision-making. Yet, much of our empirical understanding of fairness derives from controlled laboratory studies with homogeneous student samples, raising concerns about the ecological validity of experimental findings. Here, we tackle this challenge by introducing a citizen science, lab-in-the-field approach, embedding a classic fairness paradigm, the Ultimatum Game (UG), in a well-visited public space within a community: a museum. Over the course of 13 months, we recorded >18,672 decisions from a heterogeneous sample of volunteer members of the public. Each participant responded to four allocation offers from anonymous proposers (two generous, two selfish), with the option to view proposers' past behaviour (previously generous vs. selfish), before deciding whether to accept or reject each offer. Results closely replicated classic UG effects, with unfair offers frequently rejected, confirming the presence of inequality aversion beyond the laboratory. Notably, the majority of participants chose to sample proposer-history information, and those who did showed heightened sensitivity to fairness violations. Specifically, selfish offers from a proposer who had previously acted generously to others elicited the strongest rejection rates, demonstrating that judgements of unfairness are shaped by expectations which emerge from voluntary information sampling. Furthermore, the ecologically enriched design helped uncover temporal and demographic patterns, namely an association between time-of-day and information-seeking behaviour, and an increased willingness to accept unfairness across age. Methodologically, by situating a foundational experimental paradigm in a community venue, our approach aims to provide a scalable model for studying decision-making in ecologically enhanced contexts and a framework for research seeking to examine authentic behaviours beyond the laboratory, ultimately helping to deepen our understanding of the crucial norms that shape society.

The human capacity for facial mimicry plays a vital role in social bonding and emotional comprehension. This study investigates the role of facial mimicry in preference formation. To do so, One-hundred and six participants, comprising of fifty-three dyads engaged in a preference-based paradigm where in each trial participants had to listen and then choose between two movie synopses, while their facial muscle activity was recorded using wearable facial electromyography (EMG) electrodes. In the first part of the experiment, one participant read aloud the two synopses, and in the second part both participants listened to a pre-recorded actress. Our findings revealed that speaker-listener facial mimicry of muscles associated with positive emotions was linked with increased likelihood of selecting that synopsis. In addition, listener's choice was better predicted by speaker-listener's facial mimicry than by individuals' facial expressions alone. Notably, these results were maintained even when only smiling mimicry was measured with the pre-recorded actress, highlighting the robustness of this effect. Our findings reveal the central role facial mimicry plays in preference formation during social interaction.

Psychopathy is a personality construct characterized by boldness, disinhibition, insensitivity to others' suffering or distress, and persistent engagement in behaviors that harm others. These combined features suggest that highly psychopathic people may place much less subjective weight on others' outcomes relative to their own. We therefore assessed social discounting, which indexes how the subjective value of others' outcomes declines as a function of social distance, in a demographically diverse community sample of very-high psychopathy adults (above the 95th percentile of TriPM scorers; n = 288), as well as a sample of demographically similar controls (n = 427), who also reported antisocial and criminal behavior. Results show robust increases in social discounting as psychopathy increases (p < 0.001), and that reduced subjective valuation of others' outcomes partially mediates the group differences in antisocial behavior (p = 0.018). These insights emphasize the importance of understanding how psychopathic traits manifest in the community and underscore how diminished valuation of others' outcomes represents an important mechanism driving maladaptive behaviors.

Cancer-related cognitive impairment is common and distressing. Research has primarily focused on differences in mean-level performance on laboratory cognitive tasks, but recent work has investigated within-person fluctuations, or intraindividual variability (IIV), in performance on laboratory-based tasks. The present study of ambulatory cognitive assessments in daily life evaluated whether cancer survivors differed from a comparison sample in mean-level performance, IIV, and within-group heterogeneity, as well as change in mean performance and IIV across the study. Breast cancer survivors (N = 47, M_age = 52.9) and a comparison sample (N = 105, M_age = 51.8) completed intensive longitudinal design protocols involving smartphone-based cognitive assessments up to 5 times per day for 2 weeks to measure spatial working memory, working memory updating, and processing speed. Participants were female and in the United States. Bayesian mixed-effect location-scale models were conducted. Survivors had better mean-level performance on cognitive tasks, and both groups showed improvements across the study. Survivors showed greater IIV in processing speed and working memory updating, but there was no credible evidence for a difference in spatial working memory. IIV also changed across the study, such that both groups became less consistent in processing speed and working memory updating, and survivors became more consistent in spatial working memory. There was little evidence of group differences in within-group heterogeneity. Our findings indicate that IIV, as a potential marker of instability or sensitivity to contextual factors, may be an important index in the study of cancer-related cognitive impairment. These results highlight opportunities to use intensive longitudinal designs to consider indices beyond individual differences in mean-level performance.

Humans are prone to decision biases, which make behavior seemingly irrational. An important cause for decision biases is that the context in which decisions are made can later influence which choices humans prefer in new situations. Current computational models (e.g. relative value learning or range normalization) often require extensive environmental knowledge to explain these biases. Here, we tested the hypothesis that decision biases are mainly driven by a tendency to repeat context-specific actions. We implemented a series of nine value-based decision-making tasks on n = 351 male and female participants and reanalyzed six previously published datasets (n = 350 participants). We found that higher within-context repetition of an option was associated with biased choices including higher subjective valuation and lower uncertainty for repeated actions. Next, we used a hierarchical Bayesian reinforcement learning model based on two basic principles, learning by reward and action repetition and tested it on all datasets. Our results show that the combination of these two basic principles is sufficient to explain biased choices in stable environments. We demonstrate via extensive model comparison that our model outperforms all tested alternatives (implementations of value normalization and a goal centric account). These results provide insights into decision biases during value-based decision-making and suggest a parsimonious mechanism for understanding habit-like choice tendencies.