An epidemic context elicits more prosocial decision-making in an intergroup social dilemma.

Societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic have the quality of a social dilemma, in that they compel people to choose between acting in their own interests or the interests of a larger collective. Empirical evidence shows that the choices people make in a social dilemma are influenced by how this decision is framed. In four studies, we examined how context of an epidemic influences resource allocation decisions in a nested social dilemma task, where participants share resources between themselves, their subgroup, and a larger collective. Participants consistently allocated more resources to the collective in the context of the Ebola epidemic than in the context of a neighborhood improvement project, and these choices were strongly associated with prescriptive social norms. Together, the findings provide an experimental demonstration that the context of a quickly spreading disease encourages people to act more prosocially.

Atypical Facial Expressivity in Young Children with Problematic Peer Relationships.

Peer problems are frequently associated with difficulties in recognizing and appraising the emotions of others. It has been argued that facial responsiveness to others' emotions-or motor empathy-is a precursor of emotion processing and affective empathy. Although mimicry impairments have been observed in studies of young people with conduct problems, to our knowledge no study has examined facial responsiveness to others' expressions in young children and examined how this relates to peer relationship problems. Four- to 7-year-old children (n = 91) with or without teacher-reported peer relationship problems (Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire) viewed three dynamic film clips depicting a sad, happy, or scared child, while their spontaneous facial emotional responses were assessed using iMotions software that codes the movement of facial muscles. Children displayed facial expressivity that was congruent with the emotional expressions in the clips. Groups with and without peer problems did not differ in their responses to seeing a happy child. However, children with peer problems exhibited reduced or atypical facial emotional responses to the negative emotional clips. Decreased or atypical facial expressivity to negative emotions was also associated with severity of peer problems; atypical facial responsivity to sadness and reduced facial responsivity to fear predicted peer problems independently of one another. We conclude that reduced or atypical facial expressiveness in response to other children's dynamic facial expressions is associated with problematic peer relations in young children. The implications for early identification and interventions to support prosocial development are discussed.

Commentary on "how emotions, relationships, and culture constitute each other: advances in social functionalist theory" by Keltner, Sauter, Tracy, Wetchler, and Cowen.

This paper is a commentary on the paper by Keltner and colleagues (this issue). Although Keltner at al.'s expanded version of a social functionalist theory of emotion is a welcome addition to theoretical thinking about the relation between emotion and social life, I argue that their paper accords too much importance to the ways in which emotion is shaped by the relational needs of the individual, and too little to the cultural context in which relationships take place.

Dominance, reward, and affiliation smiles modulate the meaning of uncooperative or untrustworthy behaviour.

We investigated the effects of different types of smiles on the perception of uncooperative or untrustworthy behaviour. In five studies, participants assigned to one group played an economic game with a representative of another group. In an initial round, the representative acted uncooperatively by favouring their group and then displayed a dominance, reward, or affiliation smile. Participants rated the motives of the representative and played a second round of the game with a different member of the same outgroup. Following uncooperative or untrustworthy behaviour, affiliation smiles communicated less positivity and superiority, and a greater desire to both repair the relationship between groups and change the uncooperative decision than reward or dominance smiles. Perceptions of a desire to repair the relationship and to change the decision were associated with trust and cooperation in a subsequent round of the game. Together, these findings show that smiles that are subtly different in their morphology can convey different messages and highlight the importance of these expressions in influencing the perceptions of others' intentions.

Subjective status and perceived legitimacy across countries.

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower status, but there is variation across people and countries. The association between subjective status and perceived legitimacy was never negative at any levels of eight moderator variables, although the positive association was sometimes reduced. Although not always consistent with hypotheses, group identification, self-esteem, and beliefs in social mobility were all associated with perceived legitimacy among people who have low subjective status. These findings enrich our understanding of the relationship between social status and legitimacy.

The Roles of Social Value Orientation and Anticipated Emotions in Intergroup Resource Allocation Decisions.

How individuals divide resources between themselves and another person is influenced both by their social value orientation (SVO) and the emotions they expect to feel when dividing resources (anticipated emotions). Research has also shown that individuals favor members of their own group (ingroup) over individuals from other groups (outgroup) when allocating resources. The Malaysian multi-ethnic population is a highly relevant context to study the combined effects of intergroup relations and SVO on anticipated emotions and resource allocation. The current studies recruited Malaysian participants to examine whether anticipated emotions and allocation behavior are influenced by the ethnic identity of the person receiving the allocation. Participants completed an SVO measure and rated how they would feel if they were to share resources equally or unequally. They then made allocations between themselves and an ingroup or outgroup member in an economic game. There was no evidence of ingroup favoritism in anticipated emotions and allocation behavior. This may have been due to impression management, social desirability concerns, and/or the use of a population with socially liberal attitudes. The results nevertheless provide support for the notion that anticipated emotions play a key role in resource allocation decisions.

The importance of (shared) human values for containing the COVID-19 pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic poses an exceptional challenge for humanity. Because public behaviour is key to curbing the pandemic at an early stage, it is important for social psychological researchers to use their knowledge to promote behaviours that help manage the crisis. Here, we identify human values as particularly important in driving both behavioural compliance to government guidelines and promoting prosocial behaviours to alleviate the strains arising from a prolonged pandemic. Existing evidence demonstrates the importance of human values, and the extent to which they are shared by fellow citizens, for tackling the COVID-19 crisis. Individuals who attach higher importance to self-transcendence (e.g., responsibility) and conservation (e.g., security) values are likely to be more compliant with COVID-19 behavioural guidelines and to help others who are struggling with the crisis. Further, believing that fellow citizens share one's values has been found to elicit a sense of connectedness that may be crucial in promoting collective efforts to contain the pandemic. The abstract nature of values, and cross-cultural agreement on their importance, suggests that they are ideally suited to developing and tailoring effective, global interventions to combat this pandemic.

Socioeconomic status and the structure of the self-concept.

Individuals have a myriad of potential identities that they can use to define who they are, yet little research has investigated which types of identities people tend to prioritize within their self-concepts, and how this may vary across individuals. We analyse data from two large UK social surveys (Ns = 16,966 and 44,903) that assessed the importance respondents attached to various identities within their self-concepts, and find that social class plays a crucial role. Our results show that respondents attached high importance to identities that are indicative of their social class (income, education, and professional), and at least as much importance as they gave to identities more commonly studied by psychologists (such as ethnicity, nationality, or gender). Furthermore, respondents' objective social class was one of the strongest predictors of the importance they attached to different types of identities: Higher class respondents placed greater importance on identities that are indicative of their social class, but less importance on identities based on basic demographics, chosen communities, or their sociocultural orientation. Our results suggest that social class plays an important role in structuring the self-concept, and that researchers should pay more attention to the importance of social class to self and identity processes.

A new way to look at the data: Similarities between groups of people are large and important.

Most published research focuses on describing differences, while neglecting similarities that are arguably at least as interesting and important. In Study 1, we modified and extended prior procedures for describing similarities and demonstrate the importance of this exercise by examining similarities between groups on 22 social variables (e.g., moral attitudes, human values, and trust) within 6 commonly used social categories: gender, age, education, income, nation of residence, and religious denomination (N = 86,272). On average, the amount of similarity between 2 groups (e.g., high vs. low educated or different countries) was greater than 90%. Even large effect sizes revealed more similarities than differences between groups. Studies 2-5 demonstrated the importance of presenting information about similarity in research reports. Compared with the typical presentation of differences (e.g., barplots with confidence intervals), similarity information led to more accurate lay perceptions and to more positive attitudes toward an outgroup. Barplots with a restricted y-axis led to a gross underestimation of similarities (i.e., a gross overestimation of the differences), and information about similarities was rated as more comprehensible. Overall, the presentation of similarity information achieves more balanced scientific communication and may help address the file drawer problem. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Intergroup emotional exchange: Ingroup guilt and outgroup anger increase resource allocation in trust games.

Intergroup exchanges are an integral part of social life but are compromised when one group pursues its interests at another group's expense. The present research investigates whether expressing emotion can mitigate the negative consequences of such actions. We examine how emotions communicated by either an ingroup or outgroup member following an ingroup member's breach of trust affect other ingroup members' feelings of guilt and pride, and subsequent allocation of resources. In both studies, groups of participants played a two-round trust game with another group. In round one, they observed a member of their own group failing to reciprocate a trusting move by the outgroup. In Study 1 (N = 85), an outgroup member then communicated anger or disappointment, whereas in Study 2 (N = 164), an ingroup member then communicated happiness or guilt. Comparisons with no-emotion control conditions revealed that expressions of outgroup anger and ingroup guilt increased participants' allocations to an outgroup member in round two. The effect of an outgroup member's anger expression was mediated by participants' diminished feelings of pride about the ingroup action, whereas the effect of an ingroup member's guilt expression was mediated by participants' own feelings of guilt. Taken together, these findings support a social appraisal approach and highlight the roles that pride and guilt can play in shaping intergroup resource allocations. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

Cross-Cultural Differences and Similarities in Human Value Instantiation.

Previous research found that the within-country variability of human values (e.g., equality and helpfulness) clearly outweighs between-country variability. Across three countries (Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom), the present research tested in student samples whether between-nation differences reside more in the behaviors used to concretely instantiate (i.e., exemplify or understand) values than in their importance as abstract ideals. In Study 1 (N = 630), we found several meaningful between-country differences in the behaviors that were used to concretely instantiate values, alongside high within-country variability. In Study 2 (N = 677), we found that participants were able to match instantiations back to the values from which they were derived, even if the behavior instantiations were spontaneously produced only by participants from another country or were created by us. Together, these results support the hypothesis that people in different nations can differ in the behaviors that are seen as typical as instantiations of values, while holding similar ideas about the abstract meaning of the values and their importance.

The psychology of social class: How socioeconomic status impacts thought, feelings, and behaviour.

Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle-class counterparts, lower/working-class individuals are less likely to define themselves in terms of their socioeconomic status and are more likely to have interdependent self-concepts; they are also more inclined to explain social events in situational terms, as a result of having a lower sense of personal control. Working-class people score higher on measures of empathy and are more likely to help others in distress. The widely held view that working-class individuals are more prejudiced towards immigrants and ethnic minorities is shown to be a function of economic threat, in that highly educated people also express prejudice towards these groups when the latter are described as highly educated and therefore pose an economic threat. The fact that middle-class norms of independence prevail in universities and prestigious workplaces makes working-class people less likely to apply for positions in such institutions, less likely to be selected and less likely to stay if selected. In other words, social class differences in identity, cognition, feelings, and behaviour make it less likely that working-class individuals can benefit from educational and occupational opportunities to improve their material circumstances. This means that redistributive policies are needed to break the cycle of deprivation that limits opportunities and threatens social cohesion.

Oxytocin increases attention to the eyes and selectively enhances self-reported affective empathy for fear.

Oxytocin (OXT) has previously been implicated in a range of prosocial behaviors such as trust and emotion recognition. Nevertheless, recent studies have questioned the evidence for this link. In addition, there has been relatively little conclusive research on the effect of OXT on empathic ability and such studies as there are have not examined the mechanisms through which OXT might affect empathy, or whether OXT selectively facilitates empathy for specific emotions. In the current study, we used eye-tracking to assess attention to socially relevant information while participants viewed dynamic, empathy-inducing video clips, in which protagonists expressed sadness, happiness, pain or fear. In a double-blind, within-subjects, randomized control trial, 40 healthy male participants received 24 IU intranasal OXT or placebo in two identical experimental sessions, separated by a 2-week interval. OXT led to an increase in time spent fixating upon the eye-region of the protagonist's face across emotions. OXT also selectively enhanced self-reported affective empathy for fear, but did not affect cognitive or affective empathy for other emotions. Nevertheless, there was no positive relationship between eye-gaze patterns and affective empathy, suggesting that although OXT influences eye-gaze and may enhance affective empathy for fear, these two systems are independent. Future studies need to further examine the effect of OXT on eye-gaze to fully ascertain whether this can explain the improvements in emotional behavior.

Group norms, intergroup resource allocation, and social reasoning among children and adolescents.

Cooperation is a fundamental drive of moral behavior from infancy, yet competitive intergroup contexts can exert a significant influence on resource allocation behavior in childhood. The present study explored how ingroup and outgroup norms of competition and cooperation influenced the allocation of resources between groups among children and adolescents, along with how they reasoned about these allocations. Ingroup norms combined, for the first time, with outgroup norms were manipulated to examine their effect on the development of intergroup resource allocation. Participants aged 8 to 16 years (n = 229) were told that their ingroup and the outgroup held either a competitive or cooperative norm about how they should behave in an arts competition. They then allocated tokens for expenditure in the competition between the 2 teams, and provided social reasoning to justify their chosen allocations. Results showed a negative outgroup norm of competition led to significantly more ingroup bias when the ingroup also held a competitive rather than a cooperative norm. In contrast, a positive outgroup norm of cooperation did not result in significantly less ingroup bias when the ingroup also held a cooperative norm. Additionally, adolescents, unlike children who allocated equally were more likely to make reference to fair competition, a form of moral reasoning, in the competitive compared with the cooperative ingroup norm condition. This study showed that children and adolescents considered both ingroup and outgroup norms simultaneously when making intergroup resource allocations, but that only adolescents varied their reasoning to justify these allocation in line with group norms. (PsycINFO Database Record

Hypopituitarism is associated with lower oxytocin concentrations and reduced empathic ability.

PURPOSE: Central diabetes insipidus is characterised by arginine vasopressin deficiency. Oxytocin is structurally related to vasopressin and is synthesised in the same hypothalamic nuclei, thus we hypothesised that patients with acquired central diabetes insipidus and anterior hypopituitarism would display an oxytocin deficiency. Moreover, psychological research has demonstrated that oxytocin influences social and emotional behaviours, particularly empathic behaviour. We therefore further hypothesised that central diabetes insipidus patients would perform worse on empathy-related tasks, compared to age-matched and gender-matched clinical control (clinical control-isolated anterior hypopituitarism) and healthy control groups. METHOD: Fifty-six participants (age 46.54 ± 16.30 yrs; central diabetes insipidus: n = 20, 8 males; clinical control: n = 15, 6 males; healthy control: n = 20, 7 males) provided two saliva samples which were analysed for oxytocin and completed two empathy tasks. RESULTS: Hypopituitary patients (both central diabetes insipidus and clinical control groups) had significantly lower oxytocin concentrations compared to healthy control participants. Hypopituitary patients also performed significantly worse on both the reading the mind in the eyes task and the facial expression recognition task compared to healthy control participants. Regression analyses further revealed that central diabetes insipidus patients' oxytocin concentrations significantly predicted their performance on easy items of the reading the mind in the eyes task. CONCLUSIONS: Hypopituitarism may therefore be associated with reduced oxytocin concentrations and impaired empathic ability. While further studies are needed to replicate these findings, our data suggest that oxytocin replacement may offer a therapeutic approach to improve psychological well-being in patients with hypopituitarism.

Oxytocin modulates third-party sanctioning of selfish and generous behavior within and between groups.

Human groups function because members trust each other and reciprocate cooperative contributions, and reward others' cooperation and punish their non-cooperation. Here we examined the possibility that such third-party punishment and reward of others' trust and reciprocation is modulated by oxytocin, a neuropeptide generally involved in social bonding and in-group (but not out-group) serving behavior. Healthy males and females (N=100) self-administered a placebo or 24 IU of oxytocin in a randomized, double-blind, between-subjects design. Participants were asked to indicate (incentivized, costly) their level of reward or punishment for in-group (outgroup) investors donating generously or fairly to in-group (outgroup) trustees, who back-transferred generously, fairly or selfishly. Punishment (reward) was higher for selfish (generous) investments and back-transfers when (i) investors were in-group rather than outgroup, and (ii) trustees were in-group rather than outgroup, especially when (iii) participants received oxytocin rather than placebo. It follows, first, that oxytocin leads individuals to ignore out-groups as long as out-group behavior is not relevant to the in-group and, second, that oxytocin contributes to creating and enforcing in-group norms of cooperation and trust.

Oxytocin Reduces Face Processing Time but Leaves Recognition Accuracy and Eye-Gaze Unaffected.

OBJECTIVES: Previous studies have found that oxytocin (OXT) can improve the recognition of emotional facial expressions; it has been proposed that this effect is mediated by an increase in attention to the eye-region of faces. Nevertheless, evidence in support of this claim is inconsistent, and few studies have directly tested the effect of oxytocin on emotion recognition via altered eye-gaze Methods: In a double-blind, within-subjects, randomized control experiment, 40 healthy male participants received 24 IU intranasal OXT and placebo in two identical experimental sessions separated by a 2-week interval. Visual attention to the eye-region was assessed on both occasions while participants completed a static facial emotion recognition task using medium intensity facial expressions. RESULTS: Although OXT had no effect on emotion recognition accuracy, recognition performance was improved because face processing was faster across emotions under the influence of OXT. This effect was marginally significant (p<.06). Consistent with a previous study using dynamic stimuli, OXT had no effect on eye-gaze patterns when viewing static emotional faces and this was not related to recognition accuracy or face processing time. CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest that OXT-induced enhanced facial emotion recognition is not necessarily mediated by an increase in attention to the eye-region of faces, as previously assumed. We discuss several methodological issues which may explain discrepant findings and suggest the effect of OXT on visual attention may differ depending on task requirements. (JINS, 2017, 23, 23-33).

"Fury, us": Anger as a basis for new group self-categories.

We tested the hypothesis that shared emotions, notably anger, influence the formation of new self-categories. We first measured participants' (N = 89) emotional reactions to a proposal to make university assessment tougher before providing feedback about the reactions of eight other co-present individuals. This feedback always contained information about the other individuals' attitudes to the proposals (four opposed and four not opposed) and in the experimental condition emotion information (of those opposed, two were angry, two were sad). Participants self-categorised more with, and preferred to work with, angry rather than sad targets, but only when participants' own anger was high. These findings support the idea that emotions are a potent determinant of self-categorisation, even in the absence of existing, available self-categories.

Salivary Oxytocin Concentrations in Males following Intranasal Administration of Oxytocin: A Double-Blind, Cross-Over Study.

The use of intranasal oxytocin (OT) in research has become increasingly important over the past decade. Although researchers have acknowledged a need for further investigation of the physiological effects of intranasal administration, few studies have actually done so. In the present double-blind cross-over study we investigated the longevity of a single 24 IU dose of intranasal OT measured in saliva in 40 healthy adult males. Salivary OT concentrations were significantly higher in the OT condition, compared to placebo. This significant difference lasted until the end of testing, approximately 108 minutes after administration, and peaked at 30 minutes. Results showed significant individual differences in response to intranasal OT administration. To our knowledge this is the largest and first all-male within-subjects design study to demonstrate the impact of intranasal OT on salivary OT concentrations. The results are consistent with previous research in suggesting that salivary OT is a valid matrix for OT measurement. The results also suggest that the post-administration 'wait-time' prior to starting experimental tasks could be reduced to 30 minutes, from the 45 minutes typically used, thereby enabling testing during peak OT concentrations. Further research is needed to ascertain whether OT concentrations after intranasal administration follow similar patterns in females, and different age groups.