Frei, A., Erenay, N., Dittmann, V. & Graf, M. (2005). Paedophilia on the internet: A study of 33 convicted offenders in the Canton of Lucerne. Swiss Medical Weekly, 135, 488-494.

Background: The connection between the consumption of pornography and “contact-crimes” is unclear. The Internet has facilitated the mass consumption of pornography in general and specifically illegal pornography such as child pornography. In 1999, the owners of “Landslide Production Inc.”, an international provider of child-pornography in the USA were arrested and the credit-card-numbers of their clients were put at the disposal of the law enforcement agencies of the countries concerned.
Methods: Roughly 1300 Swiss citizens were subsequently arrested in the course of the nationwide action “Genesis”. In the canton of Lucerne33 men were identified. The police-files of these men were screened for psychosocial, criminological and psychosexual data.
Results: Most of these middle-aged men held comparatively elevated professional positions, only ten were married, eleven had never had an intimate relationship to a woman, and only thirteen of them had children. Only one of them had a relevant criminal record. The level of abuse depicted in the illegal material was high, all but one consumed pornography from other fields of sexual deviation. The personal statements of the offenders in general were hardly reliable, in three cases, however, the diagnosis of sexual deviation could be established from the files. The estimated time some of the offenders must have spent online in order to retrieve the material allows the diagnosis of Pathological Internet-Use.
Conclusions: Deviant sexual fantasies seem to be widespread also among men otherwise not registered for any offences. The consumption of even particularly disgusting material may not be a specific risk factor for “contact” crimes.

http://www.smw.ch/docs/pdf200x/2005/33/smw-11095.pdf

I’m not sure what category this would be placed in – maybe “paedophilia” and “Internet Use” under Social Psychology?

Urry, H.L., van Reekum, C.M., Johnstone, T., Kalin, N.H., Thurow, M.E., Schaefer, H.S., Jackson, C.A., Frye, C.J., Greischar, L.L., Alexander, A.L., & Davidson, R.J. (2006). Amygdala and ventromedial prefrontal cortex are inversely coupled during regulation of negative affect and predict the diurnal pattern of cortisol secretion among older adults. Journal of Neuroscience, 26, 4415-4425.

Among younger adults, the ability to willfully regulate negative affect, enabling effective responses to stressful experiences, engages regions of prefrontal cortex (PFC) and the amygdala. Because regions of PFC and the amygdala are known to influence the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis, here we test whether PFC and amygdala responses during emotion regulation predict the diurnal pattern of salivary cortisol secretion. We also test whether PFC and amygdala regions are engaged during emotion regulation in older (62- to 64-year-old) rather than younger individuals. We measured brain activity using functional magnetic resonance imaging as participants regulated (increased or decreased) their affective responses or attended to negative picture stimuli. We also collected saliva samples for 1 week at home for cortisol assay. Consistent with previous work in younger samples, increasing negative affect resulted in ventral lateral, dorsolateral, and dorsomedial regions of PFC and amygdala activation. In contrast to previous work, decreasing negative affect did not produce the predicted robust pattern of higher PFC and lower amygdala activation. Individuals demonstrating the predicted effect (decrease

Ryff, C.D., Love, G.D., Urry, H.L., Muller, D.H., Rosenkranz, M.A., Friedman, E., Davidson, R.J., & Singer, B. (2006). Psychological well-being and ill-being: Do they have distinct or mirrored biological correlates? Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 75, 85-95.

Background: Increasingly, researchers attend to both positive and negative aspects of mental health. Such dis-
tinctions call for clarifi cation of whether psychological well-being and ill-being comprise opposite ends of a bi-
polar continuum, or are best construed as separate, independent dimensions of mental health. Biology can help resolve this query – bipolarity predicts ‘mirrored’ biological correlates (i.e. well-being and ill-being correlate similarly with biomarkers, but show opposite directional signs), whereas independence predicts ‘distinct’
biological correlates (i.e. well-being and ill-being have different biological signatures). Methods: Multiple as-
pects of psychological well-being (eudaimonic, hedonic) and ill-being (depression, anxiety, anger) were assessed
in a sample of aging women (n = 135, mean age = 74) on whom diverse neuroendocrine (salivary cortisol, epi-
nephrine, norepinephrine, DHEA-S) and cardiovascular factors (weight, waist-hip ratio, systolic and diastolic
blood pressure, HDL cholesterol, total/HDL cholesterol, glycosylated hemoglobin) were also measured. Results:
Measures of psychological well-being and ill-being were signifi cantly linked with numerous biomarkers, with
some associations being more strongly evident for respondents aged 75+. Outcomes for seven biomarkers
supported the distinct hypothesis, while findings for only two biomarkers supported the mirrored hypothesis.
Conclusion : This research adds to the growing literature on how psychological well-being and mental maladjust-
ment are instantiated in biology. Population-based in-quiries and challenge studies constitute important future
directions.

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Urry, H. L., Nitschke, J. B., Dolski, I., Jackson, D. C., Dalton, K. M., Mueller, C. J., Rosenkranz, M. A., Ryff, C. D., Singer, B. H., & Davidson, R. J. (2004). Making a life worth living: Neural correlates of well-being. Psychological Science, 15, 367-372.

Despite the vast literature that has implicated asymmetric activation of the prefrontal cortex in approach-with-drawal motivation and emotion, no published reports have directly explored the neural correlates of well-being. Eighty-four right-handed adults (ages 57–60) completed self-report measures of eudaimonic well-being, hedonic well-being, and positive affect prior to resting electroencephalography. As hypothesized, greater left than right superior frontal activation was associated with higher levels of both forms of well-being. Hemisphere-specific analyses documented the importance of goal-directed approach tendencies beyond those captured by approach-related positive affect for eudaimonic but not for hedonic well-being. Appropriately engaging sources of appetitive motivation, characteristic of higher left than right baseline levels of pre-frontal activation, may encourage the experience of well-being.

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Jackson, D.C., Mueller, C., Dolski, I., Dalton, K., Nitschke, J.B., Urry, H.L., Rosenkranz, M.A., Ryff, C., Singer, B., & Davidson, R.J. (2003). Now you feel it, now you don’t: Frontal EEG asymmetry and individual differences in emotion regulation. Psychological Science 14, 612-617.

Recent theoretical accounts of emotion regulation assign an important role in this process to the prefrontal cortex, yet there is little relevant data available to support this hypothesis. The current study assessed the relation between individual differences in asymmetric prefrontal activation and an objective measure of uninstructed emotion regulation. Forty-seven participants 57 to 60 years old viewed emotionally arousing and neutral visual stimuli while eye-blink startle data were collected. Startle probes were also presented after picture presentation to capture the persistence or attenuation of affect following the offset of an emotional stimulus. Subjects with greater relative left-sided anterior activation in scalp-recorded brain electrical signals displayed attenuated startle magnitude after the offset of negative stimuli. This relation between resting frontal activation and recovery following an aversive event supports the idea of a frontally mediated mechanism involved in one form of automatic emotion regulation.

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Allen, J. J. B., Urry, H. L., Hitt, S. K., Coan, J. A. (2004). The stability of resting frontal electroencephalographic asymmetry in depression. Psychophysiology, 41, 269-280.

Although resting frontal electroencephalographic (EEG) alpha asymmetry has been shown to be a stable measure over time in nonclinical populations, its reliability and stability in clinically depressed individuals has not been fully
investigated. The internal consistency and test–retest stability of resting EEG alpha (8–13 Hz) asymmetry were examined in 30 women diagnosed with major depression at 4-week intervals for 8 or 16 weeks. Asymmetry scores
generally displayed good internal consistency and exhibited modest stability over the 8- and 16-week assessment
intervals. Changes in asymmetry scores over this interval were not significantly related to changes in clinical state.
These findings suggest that resting EEG alpha asymmetry can be reliably assessed in clinically depressed populations. Furthermore, intraclass correlation stability estimates suggest that although some traitlike aspects of alpha asymmetry exist in depressed individuals, there is also evidence of changes in asymmetry across assessment occasions that are not closely linked to changes in depressive severity.

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Kashdan, T. B., & McKnight, P. E. (2010). The darker side of social anxiety: When aggressive impulsivity prevails over shy inhibition. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19, 47-50.

The majority of definitions, research studies, and treatment programs that focus on social anxiety characterize the prototypical person with the disorder as shy, submissive, inhibited, and risk averse. This stereotype, however, has been challenged recently. Specifically, a subset of people with social anxiety who are aggressive, impulsive novelty seekers deviate from that prototype. People with this atypical profile show greater functional impairment and are less likely to complete or fare well in treatment compared with inhibited socially anxious people. The difference between these two groups of people with social anxiety cannot be explained by the severity, type, or number of social fears, nor by co-occurring anxiety and mood disorders. Conclusions about the nature, course, and treatment of social anxiety may be compromised by not attending to diverse behaviors and self-regulatory styles. These concerns may be compounded in neurobiological and clinical studies of people with social anxiety problems that rely on smaller samples to make claims about brain patterns and the efficacy of particular treatments.

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Kashdan, T. B., & Rottenberg, J. (2010). Psychological flexibility as a fundamental aspect of health. Clinical Psychology Review, 30, 865-878.

Traditionally, positive emotions and thoughts, strengths, and the satisfaction of basic psychological needs for belonging, competence, and autonomy have been seen as the cornerstones of psychological health. Without disputing their importance, these foci fail to capture many of the fluctuating, conflicting forces that are readily apparent when people navigate the environment and social world. In this paper, we review literature to offer evidence for the prominence of psychological flexibility in understanding psychological health. Thus far, the importance of psychological flexibility has been obscured by the isolation and disconnection of research conducted on this topic. Psychological flexibility spans a wide range of human abilities to: recognize and adapt to various situational demands; shift mindsets or behavioral repertoires when these strategies compromise personal or social functioning; maintain balance among important life domains; and be aware, open, and committed to behaviors that are congruent with deeply held values. In many forms of psychopathology, these flexibility processes are absent. In hopes of creating a more coherent understanding, we synthesize work in emotion regulation, mindfulness and acceptance, social and personality psychology, and neuropsychology. Basic research findings provide insight into the nature, correlates, and consequences of psychological flexibility and applied research provides details on promising interventions. Throughout, we emphasize dynamic approaches that might capture this fluid construct in the real-world.

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Kashdan, T. B., Ferssizidis, P., Collins, R. L., & Muraven, M. (2010). Emotion differentiation as resilience against excessive alcohol use: An ecological momentary assessment in underage social drinkers. Psychological Science, 21, 1341-1347.

Some people are adept at using discrete emotion categories (anxious, angry, sad) to capture their felt experience; other people merely communicate how good or bad they feel. We theorized that people who are better at describing their emotions might be less likely to self-medicate with alcohol. During a 3-week period, 106 underage social drinkers used handheld computers to self-monitor alcohol intake. From participants’ reported experiences during random prompts, we created an individual difference measure of emotion differentiation. Results from a 30-day timeline follow-back revealed that people with intense negative emotions consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions and less reliant on global descriptions. Results from ecological momentary assessment procedures revealed that people with intense negative emotions prior to drinking episodes consumed less alcohol if they were better at describing emotions. These findings provide support for a novel methodology and dimension for understanding the influence of emotions on substance-use patterns.

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McCullough, M. E., Kimeldorf, M. B., & Cohen, A. D. (2008). An adaptation for altruism? The social causes, social effects, and social evolution of gratitude. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 17, 281-284.

ABSTRACT—People feel grateful when they have benefited from someone’s costly, intentional, voluntary effort on
their behalf. Experiencing gratitude motivates beneficiaries to repay their benefactors and to extend generosity
to third parties. Expressions of gratitude also reinforce benefactors for their generosity. These social features
distinguish gratitude from related emotions such as happiness and feelings of indebtedness. Evolutionary theories
propose that gratitude is an adaptation for reciprocal altruism (the sequential exchange of costly benefits between
nonrelatives) and, perhaps, upstream reciprocity (a pay-it-forward style distribution of an unearned benefit to a
third party after one has received a benefit from another benefactor). Gratitude therefore may have played a
unique role in human social evolution. Robert Trivers, have apprehended the importance of gratitude
for creating and sustaining positive social relations (Bartlett & DeSteno, 2006; Harpham, 2004; McCullough, Kilpatrick, Emmons, & Larson, 2001). Oddly, though, psychological science largely neglected gratitude until the 21st century. Fortunately, recent research has explored gratitude’s distinct social causes and effects. These studies may help to shed light on gratitude’s evolutionary history.

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Bono, G. & McCullough M. E. (2006). Positive responses to benefit and harm: Bringing forgiveness and gratitude into cognitive psychotherapy. Journal of Cognitive Psychotherapy, 20, 147-158.

Forgiveness and gratitude represent positive psychological responses to interpersonal harms and benefits that individuals have experienced. In the present article we first provide a brief review of the research that has shown forgiveness and gratitude to be related to various measures of physical and psychological well-being. We then review the empirical findings regarding the cognitive and affective substrates of forgiveness and gratitude. We also offer a selective review of some of the interventions that appear to be effective in encouraging forgiveness
and gratitude. To conclude, we suggest some ways in which the insights from the basic research on promoting forgiveness and gratitude might be meaningfully integrated into cognitive psychotherapy.

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Polak, E., & McCullough, M. E. (2006). Is gratitude an alternative to materialism? Journal of Happiness Studies, 7, 343-360.

ABSTRACT. Materialistic strivings have been implicated as a cause of unhappiness. Gratitude, on the other hand – both in its manifestations as a chronic affective trait and as a more temporary emotional experience – may be
a cause of happiness. In the present paper we review the empirical research on the relationships among materialism, gratitude, and well-being. We present new correlational data on the gratitude–materialism relationship and propose that gratitude may have the potential to reduce materialistic strivings and consequently diminish the negative effects of materialistic strivings on psy- chological well-being. We conclude with some recommendations for future research on the relationships among gratitude, materialism, and well-being.

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McCullough, M. E., Tsang, J., & Emmons, R. A. (2004). Gratitude in intermediate affective terrain: Links of grateful moods to individual differences and daily emotional experience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 86, 295-309.

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Kendler, K., Liu, X., Gardner, C. O., McCullough, M. E., & Prescott, C. A. (2003). Dimensions of religiosity and their relationship to lifetime psychiatric and substance abuse disorders. American Journal of Psychiatry, 160, 496-503.

Objective: The role of religion in mental illness remains understudied. Most prior investigations of this relationship have used measures of religiosity that do not reflect its complexity and/or have examined a small number of psychiatric outcomes. This study used data from a general population sample to clarify the dimensions of religiosity and the relationships of these dimensions to risk for lifetime psychiatric and substance use disorders. Method: Responses to 78 items assessing various aspects of broadly defined religiosity were obtained from 2,616 male and female twins from a general population registry. The association between the resulting religiosity dimensions and the lifetime risk for nine disorders assessed at personal interview was evaluated by logistic regression. Of these disorders, five were internalizing (major depression, phobias, generalized anxiety disorder, panic disorder, and bulimia nervosa), and four were externalizing (nicotine dependence, alcohol dependence, drug abuse or dependence, and adult antisocial behavior). Results: Seven factors were identified: general religiosity, social religiosity, involved God, forgiveness, God as judge, unvengefulness, and thankfulness. Two factors were associated with reduced risk for both internalizing and externalizing disorders (social religiosity and thankfulness), four factors with reduced risk for externalizing disorders only (general religiosity, involved God, forgiveness, and God as judge), and one factor with reduced risk for internalizing disorders only (unvengefulness). Conclusions: Religiosity is a complex, multidimensional construct with substantial associations with lifetime psychopathology. Some dimensions of religiosity are related to reduced risk specifically for internalizing disorders, and others to reduced risk specifically for externalizing disorders, while still others are less specific in their associations. These results do not address the nature of the causal link between religiosity and risk for illness.

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McCullough, M. E., Kilpatrick, S. D., Emmons, R. A., & Larson, D. B. (2001). Is gratitude a moral affect? Psychological Bulletin, 127, 249-266.

Williams, L. E., Huang, J. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2000). The scaffolded mind: Higher mental processes are grounded in early experience of the physical world. European Journal of Social Psychology. 39, 1257–1267.

It has long been a staple of psychological theory that early life experiences significantly shape the adult’s understanding of and reactions to the social world. Here we consider how early concept development along with evolved motives operating early in life can come to exert a passive, unconscious influence on the human adult’s higher-order goal pursuits, judgments, and actions. In particular, we focus on concepts and goal structures specialized for interacting with the physical environment (e.g., distance cues, temperature, cleanliness, and self-protection), which emerge early and automatically as a natural part of human development and evolution. It is proposed that via the process of scaffolding, these early sensorimotor experiences serve as the foundation for the later development of more abstract concepts and goals. Experiments using priming methodologies reveal the extent to which these early concepts serve as the analogical basis for more abstract psychological concepts, such that we come easily and naturally to speak of close relationships, warm personalities, moral purity, and psychological pain. Taken together, this research demonstrates the extent to which such foundational concepts are capable of influencing people’s information processing, affective judgments, and goal pursuit, oftentimes outside of their intention or awareness.

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Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Keeping one’s distance: The influence of spatial distance cues on affect and evaluation. Psychological Science, 19, 302-308.

Current conceptualizations of psychological distance (e.g., construal-level theory) refer to the degree of overlap between the self and some other person, place, or point in time. We propose a complementary view in which
perceptual and motor representations of physical distance influence people’s thoughts and feelings without reference to the self, extending research and theory on the effects of distance into domains where construal-level theory is silent. Across four experiments, participants were primed with either spatial closeness or spatial distance by plotting an assigned set of points on a Cartesian coordinate plane. Compared with the closeness prime, the distance prime produced greater enjoyment of media depicting embarrassment (Study 1), less emotional distress from violent media (Study 2), lower estimates of the number of calories in unhealthy food (Study 3), and weaker reports of emo- tional attachments to family members and hometowns (Study 4). These results support a broader conceptualization of distance-mediated effects on judgment and affect.

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Williams, L. E., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Experiencing physical warmth promotes interpersonal warmth. Science, 322, 606-607.

“Warmth” is the most powerful personality trait in social judgment, and attachment theorists have stressed the importance of warm physical contact with caregivers during infancy for healthy relationships in adulthood. Intriguingly, recent research in humans points to the involvement of the insula in the processing of both physical temperature and interpersonal warmth (trust) information. Accordingly, we hypothesized that experiences of physical warmth (or coldness) would increase feelings of interpersonal warmth (or coldness), without the person’s awareness of this influence. In study 1, participants who briefly held a cup of hot (versus iced) coffee judged a target person as having a “warmer” personality (generous, caring); in study 2, participants holding a hot (versus cold) therapeutic pad were more likely to choose a gift for a friend instead of for themselves.

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Huang, J. Y., & Bargh, J. A. (2008). Peak of desire: Activating the mating goal changes life-stage preferences across living kinds. Psychological Science, 19, 573-578.

In three studies, we explored the existence of an evolved sensitivity to the peak that would be consistent with the evolutionary origins of many basic human preferences. Activating the evolved motive of mating activates related adaptive mechanisms, including a general sensitivity to cues of growth and decay associated with determining mate value in human courtship. These studies show that priming the mating goal also activates an evaluative bias that influences how people evaluate cues of growth. Specifically, living kinds that are immature or past their prime are devalued, whereas living kinds that are at their peak become increasingly valued. Study 1 establishes this goal-driven effect for human stimuli indirectly related to the mating goal. Studies 2 and 3 establish that the evaluative bias produced by the activated mating goal extends to living kinds, but not artifacts.

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Harris, J. L., Bargh, J. A., & Brownell, K. D. (2009). Priming effects of television food advertising on eating behavior. Health Psychology, 28, 404-413.

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Fitzsimons, G. M., & Bargh, J. A. (2003). Thinking of you: Nonconscious pursuit of interpersonal goals associated with relationship partners. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 84, 148-164.

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Bargh, J. A., & Morsella, E. (2008). The unconscious mind. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 73-79.

The unconscious mind is still viewed by many psychological scientists as the shadow of a ‘‘real’’ conscious mind, though there now exists substantial evidence that the unconscious is not identifiably less flexible, complex, controlling, deliberative, or action-oriented than is its counterpart. This ‘‘conscious-centric’’ bias is due in
part to the operational definition within cognitive psychology that equates unconscious with subliminal. We re-
view the evidence challenging this restricted view of the unconscious emerging from contemporary social cognition
research, which has traditionally defined the unconscious in terms of its unintentional nature; this research has
demonstrated the existence of several independent unconscious behavioral guidance systems: perceptual, evaluative, and motivational. From this perspective, it is concluded that in both phylogeny and ontogeny, actions of
an unconscious mind precede the arrival of a conscious mind—that action precedes reflection.

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Bargh, J. A., Gollwitzer, P. M., Lee-Chai, A. Y., Barndollar, K., & Troetschel, R. (2001). The automated will: Nonconscious activation and pursuit of behavioral goals. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 1014-1027.

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Bargh, J. A., Chen, M., & Burrows, L. (1996). Automaticity of social behavior: Direct effects of trait construct and stereotype activation on action. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 230-244.

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Bargh, J. A., & Chartrand, T. L. (1999). The unbearable automaticity of being. American Psychologist, 54, 462-479.

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Bargh, J. A. (2006). What have we been priming all these years? On the development, mechanisms, and ecology of nonconscious social behavior. European Journal of Social Psychology, 36, 147-168.

Priming or nonconscious activation of social knowledge structures has produced a plethora of rather amazing findings over the past 25 years: priming a single social concept such as aggressive can have multiple effects across a wide array of psychological systems, such as perception, motivation, behavior, and evaluation. But we may have reached childhood’s end, so to speak, and need now to move on to research questions such as how these multiple effects of single primes occur (the generation problem); next, how these multiple simultaneous priming influences in the environment get distilled into nonconscious social action that has to happen serially, in real time (the reduction problem). It is suggested that models of complex conceptual structures (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980), language use in real-life conversational settings (Clark, 1996), and speech production (Dell, 1986) might hold the key for solving these two important ‘second-generation’ research problems.

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Berkowitz, L, & LePage, A. (1967). Weapons as Aggression-Eliciting Stimuli. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7, 202-207.

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Zimbardo, P. (2004). A Situationist Perspective on the Psychology of Evil: Understanding how Good People are Transformed into Perpetrators. In Miller, A. G. (Ed.) pp 21-50, The Social Psychology of Good and Evil, New York: Guilford.

I endorse a situationist perspective on the ways in which anti-social behavior by individuals, and of violence sanctioned by nations, is best understood, treated and prevented. This view has both influenced and been informed by a body of social psychological research and theory. It contrasts with the traditional dispositional perspective to explaining the whys of evil behavior. The search for internal determinants of anti-social behavior locates evil within individual predispositions – genetic “bad seeds,” personality traits, pathological risk factors, and other organismic variables. The situationist approach is to the dispositional as public health models of disease are to medical models. It follows basic principles of Lewinian theory that propel situational determinants of behavior to a foreground well beyond being merely extenuating background circumstances. Unique to this situationist approach is using experimental laboratory and field research as demonstrations of vital phenomena that other approaches only analyze verbally or rely on archival or correlational data for answers. The basic paradigm to be presented illustrates the relative ease with which “ordinary,” good men and women are induced into behaving in evil ways by turning on or off one or another social situational variable.

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Eagly, A, & Steffen, V. J. (1986). Gender and Aggressive Behavior: A Meta-analytic Review of the Social Psychological Literature. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 309-330.

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Berkowitz, L. (1989). The Frustration-Aggression Hypothesis: An Examination and Reformulation. Psychological Bulletin, 106, 59-73.

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Niemiec, C. P., Brown, K. W., Kashdan, T. B., Cozzolino, P. J., Breen, W., Levesque, C., & Ryan, R. M. (2010). Being present in the face of existential threat: The role of trait mindfulness in reducing defensive responses to mortality salience. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99, 344-365.

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Aron, A., Steele, J., Kashdan, T.B., & Perez, M. (2006). When similars don’t attract: Tests of a prediction from the self-expansion model. Personal Relationships, 13, 387-396.

This study tested the hypothesis from the self-expansion model that the usual effect of greater attraction to a similar (vs. dissimilar) stranger will be reduced or reversed when a person is given information that a relationship would be likely to develop (i.e., that they would be very likely to get along) with the other person. The study employed the ‘‘bogus stranger’’ paradigm and focused on similarity/dissimilarity of interests in the context of attraction to a same-gender other. The effect for similarity under conditions in which no information is given about relationship likelihood replicated the usual pattern of greater attraction to similars. However, as predicted, a significant similarity by information interaction demonstrated that this effect was significantly reduced (and slightly reversed) when participants had been given information that the partner will like self. In analyses for each gender separately, both of these effects were significant only for men, suggesting that the focus on interest similarity may have been less relevant for women.

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Kashdan, T. B., Uswatte, G., & Julian, T. (2006). Gratitude and hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in Vietnam War veterans. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44, 177-199.

Little information exists on the contribution of psychological strengths to well-being in persons with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Data from other populations suggest that gratitude, defined as the positive experience of thankfulness for being the recipient of personal benefits, may have salutary effects on everyday functioning. We investigated whether dispositional gratitude predicted daily hedonic and eudaimonic well-being in combat veterans with and without PTSD.We also examined associations between daily gratitude and daily well-being across time. Veterans with PTSD, compared to those without PTSD, exhibited significantly lower dispositional gratitude; no differences were found on daily gratitude. Dispositional gratitude predicted greater daily positive affect, percentage of pleasant days over the assessment period, daily intrinsically motivating activity, and daily self-esteem over and above effects attributable to PTSD severity and dispositional negative and positive affect in the PTSD group but not the non-PTSD group. Daily gratitude was uniquely associated with each dimension of daily well-being in both groups. Although preliminary, these results provide support for the further investigation of gratitude in trauma survivors.

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Kashdan, T. B., Julian, T., Merritt , K., & Uswatte, G. (2006). Social anxiety and posttraumatic stress in combat veterans: Relations to well-being and character strengths. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44, 561-583.

There are few studies examining the relationship between psychopathology and positive experiences and traits. Although initial studies suggest persons with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) are at increased risk for excessive social anxiety, there have been no studies to date evaluating how these conditions might interact to affect positive experiences and traits. Using self-report scales, informant ratings, and experience sampling methodologies, we examined the association of social anxiety with well-being and character strengths in veterans with and without PTSD. Controlling for PTSD and trait negative affect, social anxiety was negatively related to global ratings of well-being and character strengths. Social anxiety also accounted for incremental variance in day-to-day well-being (i.e., daily affect balance, percentage of pleasant days, positive social activity, self-esteem, gratitude) over a 14-day assessment period. Although veterans with PTSD reported lower levels of global and daily well-being and character strengths than veterans without PTSD, a diagnosis of PTSD failed to exhibit unique relationships with these constructs. Building on a growing body of work, these data suggest that social anxiety is uniquely associated with disturbances in positive experiences, events, and traits. Our findings support the value of directly addressing social anxiety in the study and treatment of PTSD.

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Kashdan, T. B., & Steger, M. (2006). Expanding the topography of social anxiety: An experience sampling assessment of positive emotions and events, and emotion suppression. Psychological Science, 17, 120-128.

The relation between social anxiety and hedonic activity remains poorly understood. From a self-regulatory
perspective, we hypothesized that socially anxious individuals experience diminished positive experiences
and events on days when they are unable to manage socially anxious feelings adequately. In this 21-day experience-sampling study, we constructed daily measures of social anxiety and emotion regulation. Greater dispositional social anxiety was associated with less positive affect and fewer positive events in everyday life. Among individuals defined as socially anxious from their scores on a global self-report measure of social anxiety, the number of positive events was lowest on days when they both were more socially anxious and tended to suppress emotions and highest on days when they were less socially anxious and more accepting of emotional experiences. Irrespective of dispositional social anxiety, participants reported the most intense positive emotions on the days when they were both least socially anxious and most accepting of emotional experiences. Possible clinical implications are discussed.

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Kashdan, T.B., & Breen, W.E. (2007). Materialism and diminished well-being: Experiential avoidance as a mediating mechanism. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 26, 521-539.

Being preoccupied with the pursuit of money, wealth, and material possessions arguably fails as a strategy to increase pleasure and meaning in life. However, little is known about the mechanisms that explain the inverse relation between materialism and well-being. The current study tested the hypothesis that experiential avoidance mediates associations between materialistic values and diminished emotional well-being, meaning in life, self-determination, and gratitude. Results indicated that people with stronger materialistic values reported more negative emotions and less relatedness, autonomy, competence, gratitude, and meaning in life. As expected, experiential avoidance fully mediated all associations between materialistic values and each dimension of well-being. Emotional disturbances such as social anxiety and depressive symptoms failed to account for these findings after accounting for shared variance with experiential avoidance. The results are discussed in the context of alternative, more fulfilling routes to well-being.

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Kashdan, T. B. & Yuen, M. (2007). Whether highly curious students thrive academically depends on the learning environment of their school: A study of Hong Kong adolescents. Motivation and Emotion, 31, 260-270.

The present study tested whether the perceived academic values of a school moderate whether highly curious students thrive academically. We investigated the interactive effects of curiosity and school quality on academic success for 484 Hong Kong high school students. Chinese versions of the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory, Subjective Happiness Scale, and Rosenberg Self-Esteem scales were administered and shown to have acceptable measurement properties. We obtained Hong Kong Certificate of Education Examination (HKCEE) scores (national achievement tests) from participating schools. Results yielded Trait Curiosity · Perceived School Quality interactions in predicting HKCEE scores and school grades. Adolescents with greater trait curiosity in more challenging schools had the greatest academic success; adolescents with greater trait curiosity in less challenging schools had the least academic success. Findings were not attributable to subjective happiness or self-esteem and alternative models involving these positive attributes were not supported. Results suggest that the benefits of curiosity are activated by student beliefs that the school environment supports their values about growth and learning; these benefits can be disabled by perceived person-environment mismatches.

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Kashdan, T. B. & Steger, M. F. (2007). Curiosity and pathways to well-being and meaning in life: Traits, states, and everyday behaviors. Motivation and Emotion, 31, 159-173.

This study examined curiosity as a mechanism for achieving and maintaining high levels of well-being
and meaning in life. Of primary interest was whether people high in trait curiosity derive greater well-being on
days when they are more curious. We also tested whether trait and daily curiosity led to greater, sustainable wellbeing. Predictions were tested using trait measures and 21 daily diary reports from 97 college students. We found that on days when they are more curious, people high in trait curiosity reported more frequent growth-oriented behaviors, and greater presence of meaning, search for meaning, and life satisfaction. Greater trait curiosity and greater curiosity on a given day also predicted greater persistence of meaning in life from one day into the next. People with greater trait curiosity reported more frequent hedonistic events but they were associated with less pleasure compared to the experiences of people with less trait curiosity. The benefits of hedonistic events did not last beyond the day of their occurrence. As evidence of construct specificity, curiosity effects were not attributable to Big Five personality traits or daily positive or negative mood. Our results provide support for curiosity as an ingredient in the development of well-being and meaning in life. The pattern of findings casts doubt on some distinctions drawn between eudaimonia and hedonic well-being traditions.

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Kashdan, T. B., & Roberts, J. E. (2004). Trait and state curiosity in the genesis of intimacy: Differentiation from related constructs. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23, 792-816.

We examined the roles of curiosity, social anxiety, and positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) in the development of interpersonal closeness. A reciprocal self–disclosure task was used wherein participants and trained confederates asked and answered questions escalating in personal and emotional depth (mimicking closeness–development). Relationships between curiosity and relationship outcomes were examined using regression analyses. Controlling for trait measures of social anxiety, PA, and NA, trait curiosity predicted greater partner ratings of attraction and closeness. Social anxiety moderated the relationship between trait curiosity and self–ratings of attraction such that curiosity was associated with greater attraction among those low in social anxiety compared to those high in social anxiety. In contrast, trait PA was related to greater self–ratings of attraction but had no relationship with partners’ ratings. Trait curiosity predicted positive relationship outcomes as a function of state curiosity generated during the interaction, even after controlling for state PA.

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Murphy, D., & Stich, S. (2000). Darwin in the madhouse: evolutionary psychology and the classification of mental disorders. In P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (Eds.), Evolution and the human mind: Modularity, language and meta-cognition (pp. 62–92). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Recent years have witnessed a ground swell of interest in the application of evolutionary theory to issues in psychopathology (Nesse & Williams 1995, Stevens & Price 1996, McGuire & Troisi 1998). Much of this work has been aimed at finding adaptationist explanations for a variety of mental disorders ranging from phobias to
depression to schizophrenia. There has, however, been relatively little discussion of the implications that the theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists might have for the classification of mental disorders. This is the theme we propose to explore. We’ll begin, in Section 1, by providing a brief overview of the account of the mind advanced by evolutionary psychologists. In Section 2 we’ll explain why issues of taxonomy are important and why the dominant approach to the classification of mental disorders is radically and alarmingly unsatisfactory. We will also indicate why we think an alternative approach, based on theories in evolutionary psychology, is particularly promising. In Section 3 we’ll try to illustrate some of the virtues of the evolutionary psychological approach to classification. The discussion in Section 3 will highlight a quite fundamental distinction between those disorders that arise from the malfunction of a component of the mind and those that can be traced to the fact that our minds must now function in environments that are very different from the environments in which they evolved. This mismatch between the current and ancestral environments can, we maintain, give rise to serious mental disorders despite the fact that, in one important sense, there is nothing at all wrong with the people suffering the disorder. Their minds are functioning exactly as Mother Nature intended them to. In Section 4, we’ll give a brief overview of
some of the ways in which the sorts of malfunctions catalogued in Section 3 might arise, and sketch two rather different strategies for incorporating this etiologically information in a system for classifying mental disorders. Finally, in Section 5, we will explain why an evolutionary approach may lead to a quite radical revision in the classification of certain conditions. From an evolutionary perspective, we will argue, some of the disorders
recognized in standard manuals like DSM-IV may turn out not to be disorders at all. The people who have these conditions don’t have problems; they just cause problems!

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Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Orientations to happiness and life satisfaction: The full life versus the empty life. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 25–41.

Different orientations to happiness and their association with life satisfaction were investigated with 845 adults responding to Internet surveys. We measured life satisfaction and the endorsement of three different ways to be happy through pleasure, through engagement, and through meaning. Each of these three orientations individually predicted life satisfaction. People simultaneously low on all three orientations reported especially low life satisfaction. These findings point the way toward a distinction between the full life and the empty life.

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Kashdan, T. B. (2007). Social anxiety spectrum and diminished positive experiences: Theoretical synthesis and meta-analysis. Clinical Psychology Review, 27, 348-365.

Until recently, there has been limited recognition that diminished positive psychological experiences are important to understanding the nature of social anxiety. Meta-analytic techniques were used to evaluate the strength, consistency, and construct specificity of relations between the social anxiety spectrum with positive affect and curiosity. The social anxiety spectrum had significant inverse relations with positive affect (r=.36; 95% CI: .31 to .40) and curiosity (r=.24; 95% CI: .20 to – .28). Relations between social anxiety and positive affect were stronger in studies sampling from clinical populations. Specificity findings (e.g., statistically controlling for depressive symptoms and disorders) further confirmed negative associations with positive affect (r=.21; 95% CI: .16 to .26) and curiosity (r=.21; 95% CI: .08 to .32). The literature on social rank, selfpresentation concerns, self-regulatory resources, and experiential avoidance is reviewed and integrated to elaborate a framework of how, why, and when social anxiety may be inversely related to positive experiences. The specificity of theory and data to social interaction anxiety is supported by an examination of existing work on social performance/observation fears and other anxiety conditions. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of diminished positive psychological experiences in understanding excessive social anxiety.

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Kashdan, T. B., Biswas-Diener, R., & King, L. A. (2008). Reconsidering happiness: The costs of distinguishing between hedonics and eudaimonia. Journal of Positive Psychology, 3, 219-233.

In recent years, well-being researchers have distinguished between eudaimonic happiness (e.g., meaning and
purpose; taking part in activities that allow for the actualization of one’s skills, talents, and potential) and
hedonic happiness (e.g., high frequencies of positive affect, low frequencies of negative affect, and evaluating life
as satisfying). Unfortunately, this distinction (rooted in philosophy) does not necessarily translate well to science.
Among the problems of drawing too sharp a line between ‘types of happiness’ is the fact that eudaimonia is not
well-defined and lacks consistent measurement. Moreover, empirical evidence currently suggests that hedonic and
eudaimonic well-being overlap conceptually, and may represent psychological mechanisms that operate together.
In this article, we outline the problems and costs of distinguishing between two types of happiness, and provide
detailed recommendations for a research program on well-being with greater scientific precision.

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Silvia, P. J., & Kashdan, T. B. (2009). Interesting things and curious people: Exploration and engagement as transient states and enduring strengths. Social Psychology and Personality Compass, 3, 785-797.

Curiosity, interest, and intrinsic motivation are critical to the development of competence, knowledge, and expertise. Without a mechanism of intrinsic motivation, people would rarely explore new things, learn for its own sake, or engage with uncertain tasks despite feelings of confusion and anxiety. This article explores two sides of interest: momentary feelings (the emotion of interest) and enduring traits (the character strength of curiosity). Recent theories in emotion psychology can explain why and when people experience feelings of interest; recent research has illuminated the role of curiosity in cultivating knowledge, meaning in life, close relationships, and
physical and mental resilience. The problem for future research – and for social and personality psychology more generally – is how to bridge the dynamics of everyday experience with stable, lifespan aspects of personality.

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Kashdan, T.B., & McKnight, P.E. (2009). Origins of purpose in life: Refining our understanding of a life well lived. Psychological Topics, 18, 303-316.

Purpose can be characterized as a central, self-organizing life aim. Central in that when present, purpose is a predominant theme of a person’s identity. Self-organizing in that it provides a framework for systematic behavior patterns in everyday life. As a life aim, a purpose generates continual goals and targets for efforts to be devoted. A purpose provides a bedrock foundation that allows a person to be more resilient to obstacles, stress, and strain. In this paper, we outline a theoretical model of purpose development. Besides outlining various essential ingredients to creating a purpose in life, we describe three broad pathways. The first process is proactive involving effort over time and only resulting in a purpose after gradual refinement and clarification. The second process is reactive involving a transformative life event where a purpose arises and adds clarity to the person’s life. The third process is social learning – involving the formation of purpose through observation, imitation, and modeling. Our aim is to stimulate more research on this higher-level construct in the architecture of personality.

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McKnight, P. E., & Kashdan, T. B. (2009). Purpose in life as a system that creates and sustains health and well-being: An integrative, testable theory. Review of General Psychology, 13, 242-251.

Purpose—a cognitive process that defines life goals and provides personal meaning—may help explain disparate empirical social science findings. Devoting effort and making progress toward life goals provides a significant, renewable source of engagement and meaning. Purpose offers a testable, causal system that synthesizes outcomes including life expectancy, satisfaction, and mental and physical health. These outcomes may be explained best by considering the motivation of the individual—a motivation that comes from having a purpose. We provide a detailed definition with specific hypotheses derived from a synthesis of relevant findings from social, behavioral, biological, and cognitive literatures. To illustrate the uniqueness of the purpose model, we compared purpose with competing contemporary models that offer similar predictions. Addressing the structural features unique to purpose opens opportunities to build upon existing causal models of “how and why” health and well-being develop and change over time.

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Kashdan, T. B., Mishra, A., Breen, W. E., & Froh, J. J. (2009). Gender differences in gratitude: Examining appraisals, narratives, the willingness to express emotions, and changes in psychological needs. Journal of Personality, 77, 691-730.

Previous work suggests women might possess an advantage over men in experiencing and benefiting from gratitude. We examined whether women perceive and react to gratitude differently than men. In Study 1, women, compared with men, evaluated gratitude expression to be less complex, uncertain, conflicting, and more interesting and exciting. In Study 2, college students and older adults described and evaluated a recent episode when they received a gift.Women, compared with men, reported less burden and obligation and greater gratitude. Upon gift receipt, older men reported the least positive affect when their benefactors were men. In Studies 2 and 3, women endorsed higher trait gratitude compared with men. In Study 3, over 3 months, women with greater gratitude were more likely to satisfy needs to belong and feel autonomous; gratitude had the opposite effect in men. The willingness to openly express emotions partially mediated gender differences, and effects could not be attributed to global trait affect. Results demonstrated that men were less likely to feel and express gratitude, made more critical evaluations of gratitude, and derived fewer benefits. Implications for the study and therapeutic enhancement of gratitude are discussed.

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Kashdan, T.B., Breen, W.E., & Julian, T. (2010). Everyday strivings in combat veterans with posttraumatic stress disorder: Problems arise when avoidance and emotion regulation dominate. Behavior Therapy, 41, 350-363.

This research investigated whether combat veterans’ daily strivings are related to the presence of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and well-being. Veterans created a list of their most important strivings, which were content-analyzed for emotion regulation and approach or avoidance themes. It was hypothesized that veterans pursuing strivings with themes of emotion regulation or avoidance experience deleterious consequences compared with other veterans. For all veterans, devoting finite time and energy in daily life to regulating emotions was associated with less purpose, meaning, and joy compared with other strivings. Veterans with PTSD endorsed more strivings related to emotion regulation and devoted considerable effort to emotion regulation and avoidance strivings. Yet, these efforts failed to translate into any discernible benefits; veterans without PTSD derived greater joy and meaning from strivings focusing on approac- oriented behavior and themes other than emotion regulation. The presence of PTSD and a high rate of emotion regulation strivings led to the lowest global well-being and daily self-esteem during a 14-day assessment period. The presence of PTSD and a high rate of avoidance strivings also led to lower emotional well-being. Results indicate that strivings devoted to regulating emotions or avoidance efforts influence the mental health of veterans with and without PTSD. Studying personality at different levels of
analysis—traits, strivings, and life narratives—allows for a fine-grained understanding of emotional disorders.

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Kashdan, T.B., Pelham, W.E., Lang, A.R., Hoza, B., Jacob, R.G., Jennings, J.R., Blumenthal, J. D., & Gnagy, E.M. (2002). Hope and optimism as human strengths in parents of children with externalizing disorders: Stress is in the eye of the beholder. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 21, 441-468.

We examined hope as a potential resiliency factor for the daily strains of raising children with disruptive behavior disorders. In light of the motivational component of hope theory, initiating and sustaining effort toward goals (i.e., agency) , we were interested in hope’s relation to constructs addressing self-esteem, familial functioning,
and stress. Two hundred, fifty-two parents of children with externalizing disorders completed self-report questionnaires. Significant associations were found among hope and parental and familial functioning indices (e.g., warm and nurturing parenting styles, cohesive and active family environment, adaptive coping strategies). Considering their conceptual overlap, we tested the unique predictive power of hope and optimistic attributions on indices of psychological functioning. Separate regressions indicated that hope significantly predicted psychological
functioning beyond what was accounted for by social desirability, the severity of child symptoms, and optimistic attributions. Hope agency compared to hope pathways (i.e., perceived ability to generate strategies to obtain goals) accounted for the vast amount of variance in regression models. In contrast, optimistic attributions
failed to predict any of the variables of interest. Treatment and prevention strategies are suggested with an integrated focus on both the disruptive behaviors of children and parental character traits.

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Bandura, A. Ross, D., & Ross, S. A. (1961). Transmission of Aggressions through Imitation of Aggressive Models. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 63, 575-582.

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Anderson, C. A. & Bushman, B. J. (2002). Human Aggression. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 27-51.

Research on human aggression has progressed to a point at which a unifying framework is needed. Major domain-limited theories of aggression include cognitive neoassociation, social learning, social interaction, script, and excitation transfer theories. Using the general aggression model (GAM), this review posits cognition, affect, and arousal to mediate the effects of situational and personological variables on aggression. The review also organizes recent theories of the development and persistence of aggressive personality. Personality is conceptualized as a set of stable knowledge structures that individuals use to interpret events in their social world and to guide their behavior. In addition to organizing what is already known about human aggression, this review, using the GAM framework, also serves the heuristic function of suggesting what research is needed to fill in theoretical gaps and can be used to create and test interventions for reducing aggression.

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Anderson, C. A., Berkowitz, Donnerstein, E., Huesmann, L. R., Johnson, J. D., Linz, D., Malamuth, N. M., & Wartella, E. (2003). The Influence of Media Violence on Youth. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4, 81-110.

Research on violent television and films, video games, and music reveals unequivocal evidence that media violence increases the likelihood of aggressive and violent behavior in both immediate and long-term contexts. The effects appear larger for milder than for more severe forms of aggression, but the effects on severe forms of violence are also substantial (r .13 to .32) when compared with effects of other violence risk factors or medical effects deemed important by the medical community (e.g., effect of aspirin on heart attacks).

The research base is large; diverse in methods, samples, and media genres; and consistent in overall findings. The evidence is clearest within the most extensively researched domain, television and film violence. The growing body of video-game research yields essentially the same conclusions. Short-term exposure increases the likelihood of physically and verbally aggressive behavior, aggressive thoughts, and aggressive emotions. Recent large-scale longitudinal studies provide converging evidence linking frequent exposure to violent media in childhood with aggression later in life, including physical assaults and spouse abuse. Because extremely violent criminal behaviors (e.g., forcible rape, aggravated assault, homicide) are rare, new longitudinal studies with larger samples are needed to estimate accurately how much habitual childhood exposure to media violence increases the risk for extreme violence.

Well-supported theory delineates why and when exposure to media violence increases aggression and violence. Media violence produces short-term increases by priming existing aggressive scripts and cognitions, increasing physiological arousal, and triggering an automatic tendency to imitate observed behaviors. Media violence produces long-term effects via several types of learning processes leading to the acquisition of lasting (and automatically accessible) aggressive scripts, interpretational schemas, and aggression-supporting beliefs about social behavior, and by reducing individuals’ normal negative emotional responses to violence (i.e., desensitization).

Certain characteristics of viewers (e.g., identification with aggressive characters), social environments (e.g., parental influences), and media content (e.g., attractiveness of the perpetrator) can influence the degree to which media violence affects aggression, but there are some inconsistencies in research results. This research also suggests some avenues for preventive intervention (e.g., parental supervision, interpretation, and control of children’s media use). However, extant research on moderators suggests that no one is wholly immune to the effects of media violence.

Recent surveys reveal an extensive presence of violence in modern media. Furthermore, many children and youth spend an inordinate amount of time consuming violent media. Although it is clear that reducing exposure to media violence will reduce aggression and violence, it is less clear what sorts of interventions will produce a reduction in exposure. The sparse research literature suggests that counterattitudinal and parental-mediation interventions are likely to yield beneficial effects, but that media literacy interventions by them selves are unsuccessful.

Though the scientific debate over whether media violence increases aggression and violence is essentially over, several critical tasks remain. Additional laboratory and field studies are needed for a better understanding of underlying psychological processes, which eventually should lead to more effective interventions. Large-scale longitudinal studies would help specify the magnitude of media-violence effects on the most severe types of violence. Meeting the larger societal challenge of providing children and youth with a much healthier media diet
may prove to be more difficult and costly, especially if the scientific, news, public policy, and entertainment communities fail to educate the general public about the real risks of media-violence exposure to children and youth.

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Simon, H. A. (1990). A Mechanism for Social Selection and Successful Altruism. Science, 250, 1665-1668.

Within the framework of neo-Darwinism, with its focus on fitness, it has been hard to account for altruism, behavior that reduces the fitness of the altruist but increases average fitness in society. Many population biologists argue that, except for altruism to close relatives, human behavior that appears to be altruistic amounts to reciprocal altruism, behavior undertaken with an expectation of reciprocation, hence incurring no net cost to fitness. Herein is proposed a simple and robust mechanism, based on human docility and bounded rationality, that can account for the evolutionary success of genuinely altruistic behavior. Because docility-receptivity to social influence-contributes greatly to fitness in the human species, it will be positively selected. As a consequence, society can impose a “tax” on the gross benefits gained by individuals from docility by inducing docile individuals to engage in altruistic behaviors. Limits on rationality in the face of environmental complexity prevent the individual from avoiding this “tax.” An upper bound is imposed on altruism by the condition that there must remain a net fitness advantage for docile behavior after the cost to the individual of altruism has been deducted.

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Becker, G. (1976). Altruism, Egoism, and Genetic Fitness: Economics and Sociobiology. Journal of Economic Literature, 14, 817-26.

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Piliavin, J. A. & Charng, H. (1990). Altruism: A Review of Recent Theory and Research. Annual Review of Sociology, 16, 27-65.

The literature on altruism in social psychology, and to a lesser degree in sociology, economics, political behavior and sociobiology since the early 1980’s is reviewed. The authors take the position that in all of these areas, there appears to be a “paradigm shift” away from the earlier position that behavior that appears to be altruistic must, under closer scrutiny, be revealed as reflecting egoistic motives. Rather, theory and data now being advanced are more compatible with the view that true altruism—acting with the goal of benefitting another—does exist and is a part of human nature.

Research in social psychology during the 80’s had a decreased emphasis on situational determinants of helping. Rather, it has focussed mainly on the following topics: the existence and nature of the altruistic personality, the debate concerning the nature of the motivation underlying helping behavior, and the nature of the process of the development of altruism in children and adults. During this time there has also been considerable theoretical and empirical work on possible biological bases for altruism, and on the evolutionary processes by which these might have developed. Within economics, politics, and sociology, the issues of behavior in social dilemmas, the provision of public goods, private and corporate philanthropy, and voluntarism (including donation of time, money, and physical parts of the self) are discussed.

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Penner, L. A., Dovidio, J. F., Piliavin, J. A., & Schroeder, D. A. (2005). Prosocial Behavior: Multilevel Perspectives. Annual Review of Psychology, 56, 365-92.

Current research on prosocial behavior covers a broad and diverse range of phenomena. We argue that this large research literature can be best organized and understood from a multilevel perspective. We identify three levels of analysis of prosocial behavior: (a) the “meso” level—the study of helper-recipient dyads in the context of a specific situation; (b) the micro level—the study of the origins of prosocial tendencies and the sources of variation in these tendencies; and (c) the macro level—the study of prosocial actions that occur within the context of groups and large organizations. We present research at each level and discuss similarities and differences across levels. Finally, we consider ways in which theory and research at these three levels of analysis might be combined in future intra- and interdisciplinary research on prosocial behavior.

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Levine, R. V., Martinez, T. S., Brase, G., & Sorenson, K. (1994). Helping in 36 U.S. Cities. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67, 69-82.

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Latane, B., & Darley, J. M. (1969). Bystander ‘Apathy.’ American Scientist, 57, 244-68.

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Darley, J. M. & Latane, B. (1968). Bystander Intervention in Emergencies: Diffusion of Responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 377-83.

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Eagly, A., & Crowley, M. (1986). Gender and Helping Behavior: A Meta-analytic View of the Social Psychological Literature. Psychological Bulletin, 100, 283–308.

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Crocker, J., & Wolfe, C. T. (2001). Contingencies of Self-Worth. Psychological Review, 108, 593-623.

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Crocker, J., & Major, B. (1989). Social Stigma and Self-Esteem: The Self-Protective Properties of Stigma. Psychological Review, 96, 608-30.

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Howard, J. A. (2000). Social Psychology of Identities. Annual Review of Sociology, 26, 367-93.

In this chapter I review the social psychological underpinnings of identity, emphasizing social cognitive and symbolic interactionist perspectives and research, and I turn then to key themes of current work on identity-social psychological, sociological, and interdisciplinary. I emphasize the social bases of identity, particularly identities based on ethnicity, race, sexuality, gender, class, age, and (dis)ability, both separately and as they intersect. I also take up identities based on space, both geographic and virtual. I discuss struggles over identities, organized by social inequalities, nationalisms, and social movements. I conclude by discussing postmodernist conceptions of identities as fluid, multidimensional, personalized social constructions that reflect sociohistorical contexts, approaches remarkably consistent with recent empirical social psychological research, and I argue explicitly for a politicized social psychology of identities that brings together the structures of everyday lives and the sociocultural realities in which those lives are lived

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Hogg, M. A., Terry, D. J., & White, K. M. (1995). A Tale of Two Theories: A Critical Comparison of Identity Theory with Social Identity Theory. Social Psychology Quarterly, 58, 255-269.

Identity theory and social identity theory are two remarkably similar perspectives on the dynamic mediation of the socially constructed self between individual behavior and social structure. Yet there is almost no systematic communication between these two perspectivies; they occupy parallel bur separate universes. This article describes both theories, summarizes their similarities, critically discusses their differences and outlines some research directions. Against a background of metatheoretical similarity, we find marked differences in terms of 1) level of analysis, 2) the role of intergroup behavior, 3) the relationship between roles and groups, and 4) salience of social context and identity. Differences can be traced largely to the microsociological roots of identity theory and the psychological roots of social identity theory. Identiy theory may be more effective in dealing with chronic identities and with interpersonal social interaction, while social identity theory may be more useful in exploring intergroup dimensions and in specifying the sociocognitive generative details of identity dynamics.

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Higgins, E. T. (1987). Self-Discrepancy: A Theory Relating Self and Affect. Psychological Review, 94, 319-340.

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Festinger, L. (1954). A Theory of Social Comparison Processes. Human Relations, 7, 117-140.

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Baumeister, R. (1987). How the Self became a Problem: A Psychological Review of Historical Research. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 163-76.

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Zajonc, R. B. (1968). The Attitudinal Effects of Mere Exposure. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 9, 1-27.

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Buss, D. M. & Barnes, M. L. (1986). Preferences in Human Mate Selection. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50, 559-570.

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Berscheid, E. (1994). Interpersonal Relationships. Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 79-129.

Since Clark & Reis’ (1988) review of the relationship domain, the field has experienced phenomenal growth. Relationship scholars now must monitor an increasing number of journals in which relationship theory and research is published as well as the growing number of books and conferences devoted to relationship work. They also must be sensitive to the methodological and analytical techniques the study of interpersonal relationships requires because of the temporal nature of relationships, the dependency of dyadic observations, and the dichotomous nature of important outcome variables…

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Postmes, T., Spears, R., & Cihangir, S. (2001). Quality of Decision Making and Group Norms. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 918-30.

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Pettigrew, T. (1998). Intergroup Contact Theory. Annual Review of Psychology, 49, 65-85.

Allport specified four conditions for optimal intergroup contact: equal group status within the situation, common goals, intergroup cooperation and authority support. Varied research supports the hypothesis, but four problems remain. 1. A selection bias limits cross-sectional studies, since prejudiced people avoid intergroup contact. Yet research finds that the positive effects of cross-group friendship are larger than those of the bias. 2. Writers overburden the hypothesis with facilitating, but not essential, conditions. 3. The hypothesis fails to address process. The chapter proposes four processes: learning about the outgroup, changed behavior, affective ties, and ingroup reappraisal. 4. The hypothesis does not specify how the effects generalize to other situations, the outgroup or uninvolved outgroups. Acting sequentially, three strategies enhance generalization-decategorization, salient categorization, and recategorization. Finally, both individual differences and societal norms shape intergroup contact effects. The chapter outlines a longitudinal intergroup contact theory. It distinguishes between essential and facilitating factors, and emphasizes different outcomes for different stages of contact.

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Kerr, N. L. & Tindale, R. S. (2004). Group Performance and Decision Making. Annual Review of Psychology, 55, 623-55.

Theory and research on small group performance and decision making is reviewed. Recent trends in group performance research have found that process gains as well as losses are possible, and both are frequently explained by situational and procedural contexts that differentially affect motivation and resource coordination. Research has continued on classic topics (e.g., brainstorming, group goal setting, stress, and group performance) and relatively new areas (e.g., collective induction). Group decision making research has focused on preference combination for continuous response distributions and group information processing. New approaches (e.g., group-level signal detection) and traditional topics (e.g., groupthink) are discussed. New directions, such as nonlinear dynamic systems, evolutionary adaptation, and technological advances, should keep small group research vigorous well into the future.

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Janis, I. L. (1971). Groupthink among Policy Makers. In Sanford, N., & Comstock, C. (Eds.) Sanctions for Evil (pp. 71-89). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

I have been studying a series of notorious decisions made by government leaders, including major fiascos such as the Vietnam escalation decisions of the Lyndon B. Johnson administration, the Bay of Pigs invasion plan of the John F. Kennedy administration, and the Korean Crisis decision of the Harry Truman administration, which unintentionally provoked Red China to enter the war. In addition, I have examined some fiascos by European governments, such as the policy of appeasement carried out by Neville Chamberlain and his inner cabinet during the late 1930s—a policy which turned over to the Nazis the populations and military resources of Austria, Czechoslovakia, and other small countries of Europe. In all these instances, the decision-making groups took little account of some of the major consequences of their actions, including the moral and humanitarian
implications.

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Hewstone, M., Rubin, M., & Willlis, H. (2002). Intergroup Bias. Annual Review of Psychology, 53, 575-604.

This chapter reviews the extensive literature on bias in favor of in-groups at the expense of out-groups. We focus on five issues and identify areas for future research: (a) measurement and conceptual issues (especially in-group favoritism vs. out-group derogation, and explicit vs. implicit measures of bias); (b) modern theories of bias highlighting motivational explanations (social identity, optimal distinctiveness, uncertainty reduction, social dominance, terror management); (c) key moderators of bias, especially those that exacerbate bias (identification, group size, status and power, threat, positive-negative asymmetry, personality and individual differences); (d) reduction of bias (individual vs. intergroup approaches, especially models of social categorization); and (e) the link between intergroup bias and more corrosive forms of social hostility.

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Bond, R., & Smith, P. B. (1996). Culture and Conformity: A Meta-analysis of Studies Using Asch’s (1952, 1956) Line Judgment Task. Psychological Bulletin, 119, 111-37.

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Asch, S. E. (1955). Opinions and Social Pressure. Scientific American, 193, 31-35.

That social influences shape every person’s practices, judgments and beliefs is a truism to which anyone will readily assent. A child masters his “native” dialect down to the finest nuances; a member of a tribe of cannibals accepts cannibalism as altogether fitting and proper. All the social sciences take their departure from the observation of the
profound effects that groups exert on their members. For psychologists, group pressure upon the minds of individuals raises a host of questions they would like to investigate in detail.

How, and to what extent, do social forces constrain people’s opinions and attitudes? This question is especially pertinent in our day. The same epoch that has witnessed the unprecedented technical extension of communication has also brought into existence the deliberate manipulation of opinion and the “engineering of consent.” There are many good reasons why, as citizens and as scientists, we should be concerned with studying the ways in which human beings form their opinions and the role that social conditions play.

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Slater, M. D. (1999). Integrating Application of Media Effects, Persuasion, and Behavior Change Theories to Communication Campaigns: A Stage-of-Change Framework. Health Communication, 11, 335-354.

A central problem in the planning of communication campaigns to change health behaviors is how to identify and apply appropriate communication, persuasion, and behavior change theories to overcome obstacles to behavior change. The stages-of-change model (Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross, 1992) provides a framework for integrating theories of media effects, such as agenda setting and multistep flow; theories of persuasion, such as the elaboration likelihood model and protection motivation theory; and theories of behavior change, such as the theory of reasoned action, social cognitive theory, and attitude accessibility, for communication campaign purposes. Implications for audience segmentation, selection of objectives, campaign strategy, and message design are discussed.

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Wood, W. (2000). Attitude Change: Persuasion and Social Influence. Annual Review of Psychology, 51, 539-70.

This chapter reviews empirical and theoretical developments in research on social influence and message-based persuasion. The review emphasizes research published during the period from 1996-1998. Across these literatures, three central motives have been identified that generate attitude change and resistance. These involve concerns with the self, with others and the rewards/punishments they can provide, and with a valid understanding of reality. The motives have implications for information processing and for attitude change in public and private contexts. Motives in persuasion also have been investigated in research on attitude functions and cognitive dissonance theory. In addition, the chapter reviews the relatively unique aspects of each literature: In persuasion, it considers the cognitive and affective mechanisms underlying attitude change, especially dual-mode processing models, recipients’ affective reactions, and biased processing. In social influence, the chapter considers how attitudes are embedded in social relations, including social identity theory and majority/minority group influence.

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Petty, R. E. & Cacioppo, J. T. (1986). The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion. Advances in Experimental Social Psychology, 19 124-205.

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Barber, J. S. (2001). Ideational Influences on the Transition to Parenthood: Attitudes towards Childbearing and Competing Alternatives. Social Psychology Quarterly, 64, 101-27.

In this paper I propose an expansion of the theory of planned behavior that considers how attitudes toward competing behaviors affect a focal behavior. Specifically, I explore how attitudes toward childbearing and the competing behaviors of educational attainment, career development, and consumer spending affect childbearing behavior. The empirical analyses use data from an eight-wave longitudinal study of mother-child pairs, the Intergenerational Panel Study of Parents and Children. The results indicate that positive attitudes toward children and childbearing increase rates of marital childbearing, while positive attitudes toward careers and luxury goods reduce rates of premarital childbearing. I conclude that theories and models of the attitude-behavior relationship should be expanded to include attitudes toward competing behaviors, and that social scientists who study childbearing behavior would benefit from greater emphasis on social psychological explanations of behavior.

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LaPiere, R.T. (1934). Attitudes vs. Actions. Social Forces, 13, 230-237.

By definition, a social attitude is a behavior pattern, anticipatory set or tendency, predisposition to specific adjustment to designated social situations, or, more simply, a conditioned response to social stimuli1. Terminological usage differs, but students who have concerned themselves with attitudes apparently agree that they are acquired out of social experience and provide the individual organism with some degree of preparation to adjust, in a well-defined way, to certain types of social situations if and when these situations arise. It would seem, therefore, that the totality of the social attitudes of a single individual would include all his socially acquired personality which is involved in the making of adjustments to other human beings.

But by derivation social attitudes are seldom more than a verbal response to a symbolic situation. For the conventional method of measuring social attitudes is to ask questions (usually in writing) which demand a verbal adjustment . . .

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Festinger, L., & Carlsmith, J. M. (1959). Cognitive Consequences of Forced Compliance. Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 58, 203-210.

What happens to a person’s private opinion if he is forced to do or say something contrary to that opinion? Only recently has there been any experimental work related to this question. Two studies reported by Janis and King (1954; 1956) clearly showed that, at least under some conditions, the private opinion changes so as to bring it into closer correspondence with the overt behavior the person was forced to perform. Specifically, they showed that if a person is forced to improvise a speech supporting a point of view with which he disagrees, his private opinion moves toward the position advocated in the speech. The observed opinion change is greater than for persons who only hear the speech or for persons who read a prepared speech with emphasis solely on execution and manner of delivery The authors of these two studies explain their results mainly in terms of mental rehearsal and thinking up new arguments. In this way, they propose, the person who is forced to improvise a speech convinces himself. They present some evidence, which is not altogether conclusive, in support of this explanation. We will have more to say concerning this explanation in discussing the results of our experiment.

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Ajzen, I. (2001). Nature and Operation of Attitudes. Annual Review of Psychology, 52, 27-58.

This survey of attitude theory and research published between 1996 and 1999 covers the conceptualization of attitude, attitude formation and activation, attitude structure and function, and the attitude-behavior relation. Research regarding the expectancy-value model of attitude is considered, as are the roles of accessible beliefs and affective versus cognitive processes in the formation of attitudes. The survey reviews research on attitude strength and its antecedents and consequences, and covers progress made on the assessment of attitudinal ambivalence and its effects. Also considered is research on automatic attitude activation, attitude functions, and the relation of attitudes to broader values. A large number of studies dealt with the relation between attitudes and behavior. Research revealing additional moderators of this relation is reviewed, as are theory and research on the link between intentions and actions. Most work in this context was devoted to issues raised by the theories of reasoned action and planned behavior. The present review highlights the nature of perceived behavioral control, the relative importance of attitudes and subjective norms, the utility of adding more predictors, and the roles of prior behavior and habit.

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Ajzen, I. (1991). The Theory of Planned Behavior. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 50, 179-211.

Research dealing with various aspects of the theory of planned behavior (Ajzen, 1985 and Ajzen, 1987) is reviewed, and some unresolved issues are discussed. In broad terms, the theory is found to be well supported by empirical evidence. Intentions to perform behaviors of different kinds can be predicted with high accuracy from attitudes toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control; and these intentions, together with perceptions of behavioral control, account for considerable variance in actual behavior. Attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control are shown to be related to appropriate sets of salient behavioral, normative, and control beliefs about the behavior, but the exact nature of these relations is still uncertain. Expectancy-value formulations are found to be only partly successful in dealing with these relations. Optimal rescaling of expectancy and value measures is offered as a means of dealing with measurement limitations. Finally, inclusion of past behavior in the prediction equation is shown to provide a means of testing the theory’s sufficiency, another issue that remains unresolved. The limited available evidence concerning this question shows that the theory is predicting behavior quite well in comparison to the ceiling imposed by behavioral reliability.

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Dion, K., Berscheid, E., & Walster, E. (1972). What is Beautiful is Good. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 24, 285-90.

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Gilbert, D, T. & Malone, P. S. (1995). The Correspondence Bias. Psychological Bulletin 117, 21-38.

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Freeman, L, C. (1992). Filling in the Blanks: A Theory of Cognitive Categories and the Structure of Social Affiliation. Social Psychology Quarterly 55, 118-127.

This paper shows that people are aware of who is affiliated with whom in their immediate social world. Their perceptions of the patterning of affiliation, however, do not correspond to the patterning actually displayed by interacting humans. Affiliation is not categorical; perceptions of affiliation are, however. On the basis of experimental evidence about errors in learning simple social structures, a theory that accounts for this discrepancy is proposed. This theory suggests that people impose a categorical form on noncategorical affiliation patterns by a process of filling in the blanks in their experience.

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Tversky, A, & Kahneman, D. (1974). Judgments under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases. Science 185, 1124-1131.

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Morgan, D. L. & Schwalbe, M. L. (1990). Mind and Self in Society: Linking Social Structure and Social Cognition. Social Psychology Quarterly 53, 148-64.

Recent developments in social cognition could enhance sociological social psychologists’ understanding of the mind as both a social product and a social force; yet this work in social cognition has received little attention. Conversely, social cognition has not fulfilled its promise to show what is truly social about cognition. We argue that more attention to social cognition on the part of sociologists would be beneficial to both fields, as would more attention to social structure on the part of those working in social cognition

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Tourangeau, R. (2004). Survey Research and Societal Change. Annual Review of Psychology 55, 775-801.

Surveys reflect societal change in a way that few other research tools do. Over the past two decades, three developments have transformed surveys. First, survey organizations have adopted new methods for selecting telephone samples; these new methods were made possible by the creation of large databases that include all listed telephone numbers in the United States. A second development has been the widespread decline in response rates for all types of surveys. In the face of this problem, survey researchers have developed new theories of nonresponse that build on the persuasion literature in social psychology. Finally, surveys have adopted many new methods of data collection; the new modes reflect technological developments in computing and the emergence of the Internet. Research has spawned several theories that examine how characteristics of the data collection method shape the answers obtained. Rapid change in survey methods is likely to continue in the coming years.

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Baron, R. M. & Kenny, D. A. (1986). The Moderator-Mediator Variable Distinction in Social Psychological Research: Conceptual, Strategic, and Statistical Considerations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 51, 1173-1182.

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Tebes, J, K. (2000). External Validity and Scientific Psychology. American Psychologist. 55(12), 1508-1509.

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Sears, D. O. (1986). College Sophomores in the Laboratory: Influences of a Narrow Data Base on Psychology’s View of Human Nature. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 51. 515-30.

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Stolte, J. F., Fine, G. A., & Cook, K. S. (2001). Sociological Miniaturism: Seeing the Big through the Small in Social Psychology. Annual Review of Sociology, 27, 387-413.

The distinctive contribution of sociological social psychology can be referred to as sociological miniaturism, a way of interpreting social processes and institutions that is microsociological more than it is psychological. We argue that social psychology of this variety permits the examination of large-scale social issues by means of investigation of small-scale social situations. The power of this approach to social life is that it permits recognition of the dense texture of everyday life, permits sociologists to understand more fully a substantive domain, and permits interpretive control. In the chapter we provide examples of this approach from two quite distinct theoretical orientations: symbolic interactionism and social exchange theory. We discuss the ways in which the study of two substantive topics, social power and collective identity, using these perspectives can be informed by closer collaboration between theorists within sociological social psychology. In the end it is our hope that pursuing such integrative theoretical and methodological efforts will produce a more complete understanding of important social phenomena. We offer sociological miniaturism as a promising vehicle for advancing the earlier call for greater mutual appreciation of and rapprochement between diverse lines of social psychological work in sociology.

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Simon, H. A. (1990). Invariants of Human Behavior. Annual Review of Psychology, 41, 1-19.

The fundamental goal of science is to find invariants, such as conservation ofmass and energy and the speed of light in physics. In much of science theinvariants are neither as general nor as “invariant” as these classical laws. Forinstance, the isotopes of the elements have atomic weights that are nearly integral multiples of the weight of hydrogen. Some inheritable traits of plantsand animals observe the classical 1-2-1 ratio of Mendel. The number offamiliar information chunks that can be held in short-term memory is approx-imately seven. It takes about 30 seconds to memorize an unpronouncable three-consonant nonsense syllable, but only about nine seconds to memorize a three-letter word.

Much biological knowledge is extremely specific, for biology rests on thediversity of millions of species of plants and animals, and most of itsinvariants apply only to single species. Because of inter-species molecular differences, even the important general laws (e.g. the laws of photosynthesis)vary in detail from one species to another (and sometimes among differentindividuals in a single species). Only at the most abstract and qualitative levelcan one find many general strict invariants in biology.Moreover, some of the most important invariants in science are not quan-titative at all, but are what Allen Newell and I (1976) have called “lawsqualitative structure.” For example, the germ theory of disease, surely one ofPasteur’s major contributions to biology, says only something like: “If you observe pathology, look for a microorganism it might be causing the symp-toms.” Similarly, modem molecular genetics stems from the approximately correct generalization that inheritance of traits is governed by the arrangementof long helical sequences of the four DNA nucleotides.

Finally, in biological (including human) realms, systems change adaptivelyover time. Simple change is not the problem, for Newton showed how we canwrite invariant laws as differential equations that describe the eternal move-ments of the heavens. But with adaptative change, which is as much governedby a system’s environment as by its internal constitution, it becomes moredifficult to identify true invariants. As a result, evolutionary biology has arather different flavor from physics, chemistry, or even molecular biology.In establishing aspirations for psychology it is useful to keep all of these models of science in mind.

Psychology does not much resemble classical mechanics, nor should it aim to do so. Its laws are, and will be, limited inrange and generality and will be mainly qualitative. Its invariants are and willbe of the kinds that are appropriate to adaptive systems. Its success must bemeasured not by how closely it resembles physics but by how well it describesand explains human behavior.On another occasion (Simon 1979a) I have considered the form a sciencemust take in order to explain the behavior of an adaptive, hence of anartificial, system. By “artificial” I mean a system that is what it is onlybecause it has responded to the shaping forces of an environment to which itmust adapt in order to survive. Adaptation may be quite unconscious andunintended, as in Darwinian evolution, or it may contain large components ofconscious intention, as in much human learning and problem solving.

Taking the artificiality of human behavior as my central theme, I shouldlike to consider its implications for psychology. Moreover, since Homosapiens shares some important psychological invariants with certain nonbio-logical systems–the computers I shall want to make frequent reference tothem also. One could even say that my account will cover the topic of humanand computer psychology.

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Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1992). The man who mistook his wife for a chattel. In J. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind (pp. 289-322). New York: Oxford University Press.

Men take a proprietary view of women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity. In this chapter, we (a) argue that sexually proprietary male psychologies are evolved solutions to the adaptive problems of male reproductive competition and potential misdirection of paternal investments in species with mistakable paternity; (b) describe the complex interrelated design of mating and paternal decision rules in some well-studied avian examples; (c) consider the peculiarities of the human species in this context; (d) characterize some features of human male sexual proprietariness, contrasting men’s versus women’s perspectives and actions; and (e) review some of the diverse consequences and manifestations of this ubiquitous male mindset.

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Tooby, J., & Cosmides, L. (1990). On the universality of human nature and the uniqueness of the individual: The role of genetics and adaptation. Journal of Personality, 58, 17-68.

The concept of a universal human nature, based on a species-typical collection of complex psychological adaptations, is defended as valid, despite the existence of substantial genetic variation that makes each human genetically and biochemically unique. These apparently contradictory facts can be reconciled by considering that (a) complex adaptations necessarily require many genes to regulate their development, and (b) sexual recombination makes it improbable that all the necessary genes for a complex adaptation would be together at once in the same individual, if genes coding for complex adaptations varied substantially between individuals. Selection, interacting with sexual recombination, tends to impose relative uniformity at the functional level in complex adaptive designs, suggesting that most heritable psychological differences are not themselves likely to be complex psychological adaptations. Instead, they are mostly evolutionary by-products, such as concomitants of parasite-driven selection for biochemical individuality. An evolutionary approach to psychological variation reconceptualizes traits as either the output of species-typical, adaptively designed development and psychological mechanisms, or as the result of genetic noise creating perturbations in these mechanisms.

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Tooby, J. (1982). Pathogens, polymorphism, and the evolution of sex. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 97, 557-576.

For short-lived pathogens, adaptation to one host genotype is negatively correlated with adaptation to others when host genotypes are sufficiently differentiated. This may provide an adaptive basis for sexual recombination, which lowers cross-genotypic correlations among offspring and other kin, and thereby interferes with pathogenic transmission, multiplication, and adaptation. Such pathogen-host interactions lead to generalized frequency-dependent selection for allozymic diversity. The ecological and life-historical correlates of parthenogenesis, inbreeding, chromosome number, and polymorphism are consistent with this hypothesis.

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Singh, D. (1993). Adaptive significance of female physical attractiveness: Role of waist-to-hip ratio. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 65, 293-307.

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Shackelford, T. K., Buss, D. M., & Peters, J. (2000). Wife killing: Risk to women as a function of age. Violence and Victims, 15, 273-282.

Younger women, relative to older women, incur elevated risk of uxoricide-being murdered by their husbands. Some evolutionary theorists attribute this pattern to men’s evolved sexual proprietariness, which inclines them to use violence to control women, especially those high in reproductive value. Other evolutionary theorists propose an evolved homicide module for wife killing. An alternative to both explanations is that young women experience elevated uxoricide risk as an incidental byproduct of marriage to younger men who commit the majority of acts of violence. We used a sample of 13,670 uxoricides to test these alternative explanations. Findings show that (a) reproductive-age women incur an elevated risk of uxoricide relative to older women; (b) younger men are overrepresented among uxoricide perpetrators; and (c) younger women, even when married to older men, still incur excess risk of uxoricide. Discussion examines competing explanations for uxoricide in light of these findings.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Goetz, A. T. (2004). Men’s sexual coercion in intimate relationships: Development and initial validation of the Sexual Coercion in Intimate Relationships Scale. Violence and Victims, 19, 541-556.

We report the development and initial validation of the Sexual Coercion in Intimate Relationships Scale (SCIRS), a measure designed to assess the prevalence and severity of sexual coercion in committed intimate relationships. We review existing measures of sexual coercion and discuss their limitations, describe the identification of the SCIRS items, perform a principal components analysis and describe the resulting three components, and present evidence for the convergent and discriminative validity of the SCIRS. Because sexual coercion in intimate relationships often takes the form of subtle tactics, the SCIRS items assess communicative tactics such as hinting and subtle manipulations in addition to tactics such as the use of physical force. The SCIRS provides researchers and clinicians with a valid, reliable, and comprehensive measure with which to study the dynamics of sexual coercion in intimate relationships.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Goetz, A. T. (2006). Comparative evolutionary psychology of sperm competition. Journal of Comparative Psychology, 120, 139-146.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Goetz, A. T. (2007). Adaptation to sperm competition in humans. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 16, 47-50.

With the recognition, afforded by recent evolutionary science, that female infidelity was a recurrent feature of modern humans’ evolutionary history has come the development of a unique area in the study of human mating: sperm competition. A form of male-male postcopulatory competition, sperm competition occurs when the sperm of two or more males concurrently occupy the reproductive tract of a female and compete to fertilize her ova. Males must compete for mates, but if two or more males have copulated with a female within a sufficiently short period of time, sperm will compete for fertilizations. Psychological, behavioral, physiological, and anatomical evidence indicates that men have evolved solutions to combat the adaptive problem of sperm competition, but research has only just begun to uncover these adaptations.

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Scarr, S., & McCartney, K. (1983). How people make their own environments: A theory of genotype –> environment effects. Child Development, 54, 424-435.

We propose a theory of development in which experience is directed by genotypes. Genotypic differences are proposed to affect phenotypic differences, both directly and through experience, via 3 kinds of genotype leads to environment effects: a passive kind, through environments provided by biologically related parents; an evocative kind, through responses elicited by individuals from others; and an active kind, through the selection of different environments by different people. The theory adapts the 3 kinds of genotype-environment correlations proposed by Plomin, DeFries, and Loehlin in a developmental model that is used to explain results from studies of deprivation, intervention, twins, and families.

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Sadalla, E. K., & Kenrick, D. T. (1987). Dominance and heterosexual attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 52, 730-738.

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Rushton, J.P. (1988). Race differences in behaviour: A review and evolutionary analysis. Personality and Individual Differences, 9(6), 1009-1024.

Racial differences exist on numerous heritable behaviour traits such that Caucasoids fall between Mongoloids and Negroids. Across samples, ages, and time periods, this pattern is observed on estimates made of brain size and intelligence (cranial CAPACITY=1448, 1408, 1334 cm3., brain WEIGHT=1351, 1336, 1286 g; IQ SCORES=107, 100, 85); maturation rate (age to walk alone, age of puberty, age of death); personality and temperament (activity level, anxiety, sociability); sexual restraint (gamete production, intercourse frequency, size of genitalia); and social organization (marital stability, mental health, law abidingness). These observations may be explained in part in terms of gene-culture coevolutionarily based r/K reproductive strategies.

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Posner, M.I. (1994). Attention: The mechanisms of consciousness. Procedures of the National Academy of Science, 91, 7398-7403.

A number of recent papers and books discuss theoretical efforts toward a scientific understanding of consciousness. Progress in imaging networks of brain areas active when people perform simple tasks may provide a useful empirical background for distinguishing conscious and unconscious informations processing. Attention networks include those involved in orienting to sensory stimuli, activating ideas from memory, and maintaining the alert state. This paper reviews recent finding in relation to classical issues in the study of attention and anatomical and physical theories of the nature of consciousness.

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Platt, J. (1964). Strong inference. Science, 146, 347-353.

Scientists these days tend to keep up a polite fiction that all science is equal. Except for the work of the misguided
opponent whose arguments we happen to be refuting at the time, we speak as though every scientist’s field and
methods of study are as good as every other scientist’s, and perhaps a little better. This keeps us all cordial when it
comes to recommending each other for government grants. But I think anyone who looks at the matter closely will agree that some fields of science are moving forward very much faster than others, perhaps by an order of magnitude, if numbers could be put on such estimates. The discoveries leap from the headlines–and they are
real advances in complex and difficult subjects, like molecular biology and high-energy physics. As Alvin Weinberg
says1, “Hardly a month goes by without a stunning success in molecular biology being reported in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.” Why should there be such rapid advances in some fields and not in others?

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Perusse, D. (1993). Cultural and reproductive success in industrial societies: Testing the relationship at the proximate and ultimate levels. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 16, 267-284.

The fundamental postulate of sociobiology is that individuals exploit favorable environments to increase their genetic representation in the next generation. The data on fertility differentials among contemporary humans are not cotvietent with this postulate. Given the importance of Homo sapiens as an animal species in the natural world today, these data constitute particularly challenging and interesting problem for both human sociobiology and sociobiology as a whole.

The first part of this paper reviews the evidence showing an inverse relationship between reproductive fitness and “endowment” (i.e. wealth, success, and measured aptitudes) in contemporary, urbanized societies. It is shown that a positive relationship is observed only for those cohorts who bore their children during a unique period of rising fertility, 1935–1960, and that these cohorts are most often cited by sociobiologists as supporting the central postulate of sociobiology. Cohorts preceding and following these show the characteristic inverse relationship between endowment and fertility. The second section reviews the existing so-ciobiological models of this inverse relationship, namely, those of Barkow, Burley, and Irons, as well as more informal responses among sociobiologists to the persistent violation of sociobiology’s central postulate, such as those of Alexander and Dawkins. The third section asks whether the goals of sociobiology, given the violation of its fundamental postulate by contemporary human societies, might not be better thought of as applied rather than descriptive, with respect to these societies. A proper answer to this question begins with the measurement of the pace and direction of natural selection within modern human populations, as compared to other sources of change. The vast preponderance of the shifts in human trait distributions, including the IQ distribution, appears to be due to environmental rather than genetic change. However, there remains the question of just how elastic these distributions are in the absence of reinforcing genetic change.

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MacDonald, K. (1992). Warmth as a developmental construct: An evolutionary analysis. Child Development, 63, 753-773.

This paper provides an evolutionary account of the human affectional system as indexed by the construct of warmth. It is argued that although warmth and security of attachment are often closely intertwined in actual relationships, warmth must be distinguished from security of attachment. Warmth is conceptualized as a reward system which evolved to facilitate cohesive family relationships and paternal investment in children

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Lopreato, J., & Yu, Mei-yu. (1988). Human fertility and fitness optimization. Ethology and Sociobiology , 9, 269-289.

Census and other survey data from across the world reveal major differences in fertility rates between the more economically developed and the less economically developed societies. The former are significantly more likely than the latter to feature families of two children or fewer. Multiple regression analysis shows that, among various indicators of “modernization,” three (female level of education, female gainful employment, and proportion of physicians in the population) account for 71% of the variation in family size; all three variables have strongly significant, direct, and negative effects on fertility. The paper hypothesizes about the possible evolution of a reproductive psychology toward the two-child family and seeks to explain highly depressed rates of reproduction by reference to both ultimate and proximate factors. In some highly developed countries, zero-child and one-child rates of fertility represent together up to 40% of all ever-married women. The findings stress the importance of systematic research toward establishing the proximate factors that are most likely to facilitate or impede fitness optimization—the importance, that is, of surrounding the optimization principle with the logic and ancillary propositions that will give it a greater and more directive reach.

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Langlois, J. H., Roggman, L. A. and Musselman, L. (1994). What is average and what is not average about attractive faces. Psychological Science, 5, 214-220.

We reported in this journal (Langlois & Roggman, 1990) findings showing that attractive faces are those that represent the mathematical average of faces in a population These findings were intriguing because they provided a parsimonious definition of facial attractiveness and because they supported explanations of attractiveness from the point of view of both evolutionary and cognitive-prototype theory Since our 1990 report, several alternative explanations of our findings have been offered In this article, we show that none of these alternatives explains our results adequately

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Langlois, J. H., & Roggman, L. A. (1990). Attractive faces are only average. Psychological Science, 1, 115-121.

Scientists and philosophers have searched for centuries for a parsimonious answer to the question of what constitutes beauty. We approached this problem from both an evolutionary and information-processing rationale and predicted that faces representing the average value of the population would be consistently judged as attractive. To evaluate this hypothesis, we digitized samples of male and female faces, mathematically averaged them, and had adults judge the attractiveness of both the individual faces and the computer-generated composite images. Both male (three samples) and female (three samples) composite faces were judged as more attractive than almost all the individual faces comprising the composites. A strong linear trend also revealed that the composite faces became more attractive as more faces were entered. These data showing that attractive faces are only average are consistent with evolutionary pressures that favor characteristics close to the mean of the population and with cognitive processes that favor prototypical category members.

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Kenrick, D. T., & Keefe, R. C. (1992). Age preferences in mates reflect sex differences in reproductive strategies. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 15, 75-133.

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Hamilton, W.D. (1963). The evolution of altruistic behavior. American Naturalist, 97, 354-356.

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Hamilton, W.D. (1964). The evolution of social behavior. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1-52.

For several years the study of social behavior has been undergoing a revolution with far-reaching consequences for the social and biological sciences. Partly responsible are three recent changes in the attitudes of evolutionary biologists. First was growing acceptance of the evidence that the potency of natural selection is overwhelmingly concentrated at levels no higher than that of the individual. Second was revival of the comparative method, especially as applied to behavior and life histories. Third was spread of the realization that not only are all aspects of structure and function of organisms to be understood solely as products of selection, but because of their
peculiarly direct relationship to the forces of selection, behavior and life history phenomena, long neglected by the evolutionists, may be among the most predictable of all phenotypic attributes.

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Haig, D. (1993). Genetic conflicts in human pregnancy. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 68 (4), 495-527.

Pregnancy has commonly been viewed as a cooperative interaction between a mother and her fetus. The effects of natural selection on genes expressed in fetuses, however, may be opposed by the effects of natural selection on genes expressed in mothers. In this sense, a genetic conflict can be said to exist between maternal and fetal genes. Fetal genes will be selected to increase the transfer of nutrients to their fetus, and maternal genes will be selected to limit transfers in excess of Soma maternal optimum. Thus a process of evolutionary escalation is predicted in which fetal actions are opposed by maternal countermeasures. The phenomenon of genomic imprinting means that a similar conflict exists within fetal cells between genes that are expressed when maternally derived, and genes that are expressed when paternally derived. During implantation, fetally derived cells (trophoblast) invade the maternal endometrium and remodel the endometrial spiral arteries into low-resistance vessels that are unable to constrict. This invasion has three consequences. First, the fetus gains direct access to its mother’s arterial blood. Therefore, a mother cannot reduce the nutrient content of blood reaching the placenta without reducing the nutrient supply to her own tissues. Second, the volume of blood reaching the placenta becomes largely independent of control by the local maternal vasculature. Third, the placenta is able to release hormones and other substances directly into the maternal circulation. Placental hormones, including human chorionic gonadotropin (hCG) and human placental lactogen (hPL), are predicted to manipulate maternal physiology for fetal benefit. For example, hPL is proposed to act on maternal prolactin receptors to increase maternal resistance to insulin. If unopposed, the effect of hPL would be to maintain higher blood glucose levels for longer periods after meals. This action, however, is countered by increased maternal production of insulin. Gestational diabetes develops if the mother is unable to mount an adequate response to fetal manipulation. Similarly, fetal genes are Predicted to enhance the flow of maternal blood through the placenta by increasing maternal blood pressure. Preeclampsia can be interpreted as an attempt by a poorly nourished fetus to increase its supply of nutrients by increasing the resistance of its mother’s peripheral circulation.

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Gould, S. J., and Eldredge, N. (1993). Punctuated equilibrium comes of age. Nature, 366, 223-227.

The intense controversies that surrounded the youth of punctuated equilibrium have helped it mature to a useful extension of evolutionary theory. As a complement to phyletic gradualism, its most important implications remain the recognition of stasis as a meaningful and predominant pattern within the history of species, and in the recasting of macroevolution as the differential success of certain species (and their descendants) within clades.

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Gilbert, D. (1991). How mental systems believe. American Psychologist, 46 (2), 107-119.

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Gangestad, S. W. and Buss, D. M. (1993). Pathogen prevalence and human mate preferences. Ethology and Sociobiology, 14, 89-96.

Members of host species in pathogen-host coevolutionary races may be selected to choose mates who possess features of physical appearance associated with pathogen resistance. Human data from 29 cultures indicate that people in geographical areas carrying relatively greater prevalences of pathogens value a mate’s physical attractiveness more than people in areas with relatively little pathogen incidence. The relationship between pathogen prevalence and the value people place on physical attractiveness remained strong even after potential confounds such as distance from the equator, geographical region, and average income were statistically controlled for. Discussion focuses on potential limitations of the data, alternative explanations for the findings, and the nature of adaptions to the problems posed by pathogen prevalence.

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Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (1990). Toward an evolutionary history of female sociosexual variation. Journal of Personality, 58, 69-96.

Considerable progress has been made in behavioral genetics toward providing theoretical accounts of individual differences One theoretical task, however, has been largely neglected—that of constructing evolutionary accounts of behaviorally relevant genetic variance We attempt to address this task with respect to the genetic variance underlying sociosexuality, that is, the differences in the implicit prerequisites (in terms of time, attachment, commitment, etc) to entering a sexual relationship Specifically, we argue that genetic variance on this trait for females could have been maintained through frequency-dependent selection In our evolutionary past, restricted females-those who require relatively more time, attachment, and commitment-could have benefited through paternal investment in their offspring Unrestricted females—those who require relatively less time, attachment, and commitment—could have benefited through the quality of their mate’s genes passed on to their sons Moreover, the value of these alternate „strategies” could have been frequency-dependent One prediction that follows from this evolutionary history is tested and supported in three studies Those females genetically predisposed to be unrestricted are found to produce relatively more sons than females predisposed to be restricted Additional predictions are offered and alternative accounts are discussed

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Emlen, S.T. (1995). An evolutionary theory of the family. Procedures of The National Academy of Science, 92, 8092-8099.

An evolutionary framework for viewing the formation, the stability, the organizational structure, and the social dynamics of biological families is developed. This framework is based upon three conceptual pillars: ecological constraints theory, inclusive fitness theory, and reproductive skew theory. I offer a set of 15 predictions pertaining to living within family groups. The logic of each is discussed, and empirical evidence from family-living vertebrates is summarized. I argue that knowledge of four basic parameters, (i) genetic relatedness, (ii) social dominance, (iii) the benefits of group living, and (iv) the probable success of independent reproduction, can explain many aspects of family life in birds and mammals. I suggest that this evolutionary perspective will provide insights into understanding human family systems as well.

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Eldredge, N. and Gould, S. J. (1972). Punctuated equilibria: An alternative to phyletic gradualism. In: T. J. M. Schopf (Ed.). Models in Paleobiology. San Francisco: Freeman, pp 82-115.

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Cosmides, L. and Tooby, J. (1992). Cognitive adaptations for social exchange. In: J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides and J. Tooby (Eds.), The Adapted Mind. New York: Oxford University Press, 163-228.

“Is it not reasonable to anticipate that our understanding of the human mind would be aided greatly by knowing the purpose for which it was designed? ” GEORGE C. WILLIAMS

The human mind is the most complex natural phenomenon humans have yet encountered, and Darwin’s gift to those who wish to understand it is a knowledge of the process that created it and gave it its distinctive organization: evolution. Because we know that the human mind is the product of the evolutionary process, we know something vitally illuminating: that, aside from those properties acquired by chance, the mind consists of a set of adaptations, designed to solve the long-standing adaptive problems humans encountered as hunter-gatherers. Such a view is uncontroversial to most behavioral scientists when applied to topics such as vision or balance. Yet adaptationist approaches to human psychology are considered radical–or even transparently false-when applied to most other areas of human thought and action, especially social behavior. Nevertheless, the logic of the adaptationist postion is completely general, and a dispassionate evaluation of its implications leads to the expectation that humans should have evolved a constellation of cognitive adaptations to social life. Our
ancestors have been members of social groups and engaging in social interactions for millions and probably tens of millions of years. To behave adaptively, they not only needed to construct a spatial map of the objects disclosed to them by their retinas, but a social map of the persons, relationships, motives, interactions, emotions, and inten-
tions that made up their social world.

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Cavalli-Sforza, L. (1991). Genes, peoples and languages. Scientific American, 104-110.

The genetic history of a group of populations is usually analyzed by reconstructing a tree of their origins. Reliability of the reconstruction depends on the validity of the hypothesis that genetic differentiation of the populations is mostly due to population fissions followed by independent evolution. If necessary, adjustment for major population admixtures can be made. Dating the fissions requires comparisons with paleoanthropological and paleontological dates, which are few and uncertain. A method of absolute genetic dating recently introduced uses mutation rates as molecular clocks; it was applied to human evolution using microsatellites, which have a sufficiently high mutation rate. Results are comparable with those of other methods and agree with a recent expansion of modern humans from Africa. An alternative method of analysis, useful when there is adequate geographic coverage of regions, is the geographic study of frequencies of alleles or haplotypes. As in the case of trees, it is necessary to summarize data from many loci for conclusions to be acceptable. Results must be independent from the loci used. Multivariate analyses like principal components or multidimensional scaling reveal a number of hidden patterns and evaluate their relative importance. Most patterns found in the analysis of human living populations are likely to be consequences of demographic expansions, determined by technological developments affecting food availability, transportation, or military power. During such expansions, both genes and languages are spread to potentially vast areas. In principle, this tends to create a correlation between the respective evolutionary trees. The correlation is usually positive and often remarkably high. It can be decreased or hidden by phenomena of language replacement and also of gene replacement, usually partial, due to gene flow.

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Cavalli-Sforza, L. L., Piazza, A., Menozzi, P., and Mountain, J. (1988). Reconstruction of human evolution: Bringing together genetic, archaeological, and linguistic data. Procedures of The National Academy of Science, 85, 6002-6006.

The genetic information for this work came from a very large collection of gene frequencies for “classical” (non-DNA) polymorphisms of the world aborigines. The data were grouped in 42 populations studied for 120 alleles. The reconstruction of human evolutionary history thus generated was checked with statistical techniques such as “boot-strapping”. It changes some earlier conclusions and is in agreement with more recent ones, including published and unpublished DNA-marker results. The first split in the phylogenetic tree separates Africans from non-Africans, and the second separates two major clusters, one corresponding to Caucasoids, East Asians, Arctic populations, and American natives, and the other to Southeast Asians (mainland and insular), Pacific islanders, and New Guineans and Australians. Average genetic distances between the most important clusters are proportional to archaeological separation times. Linguistic families correspond to groups of populations with very few, easily understood overlaps, and their origin can be given a time frame. Linguistic superfamilies show remarkable correspondence with the two major clusters, indicating considerable parallelism between genetic and linguistic evolution. The latest step in language development may have been an important factor determining the rapid expansion that followed the appearance of modern humans and the demise of Neanderthals.

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Buss, D. M. (1988). The evolution of human intrasexual competition: Tactics of mate attraction. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 661-628.

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Bouchard, T. J., Lykken, D. T., McGue, M., Segal, N. L., and Tellegen, A. (1990). Sources of Human psychological differences: The Minnesota study of twins reared apart. Science, 250, 223-228.

Since 1979, a continuing study of monozygotic and dizygotic twins, separated in infancy and reared apart, has subjected more than 100 sets of reared-apart twins or triplets to a week of intensive psychological and physiological assessment. Like the prior, smaller studies of monozygotic twins reared apart, about 70% of the variance in IQ was found to be associated with genetic variation. On multiple measures of personality and temperament, occupational and leisure-time interests, and social attitudes, monozygotic twins reared apart are about as similar as are monozygotic twins reared together. These findings extend and support those from numerous other twin, family, and adoption studies. It is a plausible hypothesis that genetic differences affect psychological differences largely indirectly, by influencing the effective environment of the developing child. This evidence for the strong heritability of most psychological traits, sensibly construed, does not detract from the value or importance of parenting, education, and other propaedeutic interventions.

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Bereczkei, T. & Dunbar, R. I. M. (1997). Female-biased reproductive strategies in two Gipsy populations. The Royal Society Proceedings 264, 17-22.

Hungarian Gypsy populations invest more heavily in daughters than in sons compared to co-resident Hungarians, in conformity with the predictions of the Trivers–Willard hypothesis. These effects are shown for four different measures of parental investment (sex ratio at birth, frequency of abortion, duration of breast-feeding and length of education). Opportunities for hypergamy into the wealthier Hungarian population appears to be one factor causing Gypsies to prefer daughters over sons. We show that differential investment by sex of offspring is directly related to the fitness pay-offs that accrue for each population through both sexes of offspring.

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Wallace, A. R. (1855). On the Law Which Has Regulated the Introduction of New Species. Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 26, 184-196.

Every naturalist who has turned his attention to the issue of geographical distribution of animals and plants must have been interested in the singular facts which it presents. Many of these facts are entirely different from what one would expect, and so far, have been considered very curious, but quite inexplicáveis.2 Today, none of the explanations attempted from the time of Linnaeus is considered quite satisfactory, none of which provided a sufficient cause to explain the known facts at the time and comprehensive enough to include all the new facts that since then have been daily acrescentados.3 In recent years, however, a great light has been shed on the subject by geological investigations, showing that the present state of the Earth, and bodies that currently inhabit, it is only the latest stage of a long and uninterrupted series of changes suffered by it, thus trying to explain and account for its present condition with no reference to these changes (as has frequently been done) must lead to conclusions very imperfect and errôneas.4

Full text in the first note on this article (click the title above to view the notes…)

Pinker, S., & Bloom, P. (1990). Natural Language and Natural Selection. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 13, 707-784.

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every tenet of Darwinian theory — that it shows no genetic variation, could not exist in any intermediate forms, confers no selective advantage, and would require more evolutionary time and genomic space than is available. We examine these arguments and show that they depend on inaccurate assumptions about biology or language or both. Evolutionary theory offers clear criteria for when a trait should be attributed to natural selection: complex design for some function, and the absence of alternative processes capable of explaining such complexity. Human language meets this criterion: grammar is a complex mechanism tailored to the transmission of propositional structures through a serial interface. Autonomous and arbitrary grammatical phenomena have been offered as counterexamples to the position that language is
an adaptation, but this reasoning is unsound: communication protocols depend on arbitrary conventions that are adaptive as long as they are shared. Consequently, language acquisition in the child should systematically differ from language evolution in the species and attempts to analogize them are misleading. Reviewing other arguments and data, we conclude that there is every reason to believe that a specialization for grammar evolved by a conventional neo-Darwinian process.

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Nettle, D. (2006). The evolution of personality variation in humans and other animals. American Psychologist 61, 622-31.

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Lieberman, D., Tooby, J. & Cosmides, L. (2007). The architecture of human kin detection. Nature, 445, 727-731.

Evolved mechanisms for assessing genetic relatedness have been found in many species, but their existence in humans has been a matter of controversy. Here we report three converging lines of evidence, drawn from siblings, that support the hypothesis that kin detection mechanisms exist in humans. These operate by computing, for each familiar individual, a unitary regulatory variable (the kinship index) that corresponds to a pairwise estimate of genetic relatedness between self and other. The cues that the system uses were identified by quantitatively matching individual exposure to potential cues of relatedness to variation in three outputs relevant to the system’s evolved functions: sibling altruism, aversion to personally engaging in sibling incest, and moral opposition to third party sibling incest. As predicted, the kin detection system uses two distinct, ancestrally valid cues to compute relatedness: the familiar other’s perinatal association with the individual’s biological mother, and duration of sibling coresidence.

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Haselton, M. G., Mortezaie, M., Pillsworth, E. G., Bleske-Recheck, A. E., & Frederick, D. A. (2007). Ovulation and human female ornamentation: Near ovulation, women dress to impress. Hormones and Behavior, 51, 40-45.

Humans differ from many other primates in the apparent absence of obvious advertisements of fertility within the ovulatory cycle. However, recent studies demonstrate increases in women’s sexual motivation near ovulation, raising the question of whether human ovulation could be marked by observable changes in overt behavior. Using a sample of 30 partnered women photographed at high and low fertility cycle phases, we show that readily-observable behaviors – self-grooming and ornamentation through attractive choice of dress – increase during the fertile phase of the ovulatory cycle. At above-chance levels, 42 judges selected photographs of women in their fertile (59.5%) rather than luteal phase (40.5%) as “trying to look more attractive.” Moreover, the closer women were to ovulation when photographed in the fertile window, the more frequently their fertile photograph was chosen. Although an emerging literature indicates a variety of changes in women across the cycle, the ornamentation effect is striking in both its magnitude and its status as an overt behavioral difference that can be easily observed by others. It may help explain the previously documented finding that men’s mate retention efforts increase as their partners approach ovulation.

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Haselton M. G. & Buss, D. M. (2000). Error management theory: A new perspective on biases in cross-sex mind reading. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 78, 81-91.

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Haley, K. J. & Fessler, D. M. T. (2005). Nobodyís watching? Subtle cues affect generosity in an anonymous economic game. Evolution and Human Behavior 26(3), 245-256.

Models indicate that opportunities for reputation formation can play an important role in sustaining cooperation and prosocial behavior. Results from experimental economic games support this conclusion, as manipulating reputational opportunities affects prosocial behavior. Noting that some prosocial behavior remains even in anonymous noniterated games, some investigators argue that humans possess a propensity for prosociality independent of reputation management. However, decision-making processes often employ both explicit propositional knowledge and intuitive or affective judgments elicited by tacit cues. Manipulating game parameters alters explicit information employed in overt strategizing but leaves intact cues that may affect intuitive judgments relevant to reputation formation. To explore how subtle cues of observability impact prosocial behavior, we
conducted five dictator games, manipulating both auditory cues of the presence of others (via the use of sound-deadening earmuffs) and visual cues (via the presentation of stylized eyespots). Although earmuffs appeared to reduce generosity, this effect was not significant. However, as predicted, eyespots substantially increased generosity, despite no differences in actual anonymity; when using a computer displaying eyespots, almost twice as many participants gave money to their partners compared with the controls. Investigations of prosocial behavior must consider both overt information about game parameters and subtle cues influencing intuitive judgments.

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Frederick, D. A. & Haselton, M. G. (2007). Why is muscularity sexy? Tests of the fitness-indicator hypothesis. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 33, 1167-1183.

Evolutionary scientists propose that exaggerated secondary sexual characteristics are cues of genes that increase offspring viability or reproductive success. In six studies the hypothesis that muscularity is one such cue is tested. As predicted, women rate muscular men as sexier, more physically dominant and volatile, and less committed to their mates than nonmuscular men. Consistent with the inverted-U hypothesis of masculine traits, men with moderate muscularity are rated most attractive. Consistent with past research on fitness cues, across two measures, women indicate that their most recent short-term sex partners were more muscular than their other sex partners (ds = .36, .47). Across three studies, when controlling for other characteristics (e.g., body fat), muscular men rate their bodies as sexier to women (partial rs = .49-.62) and report more lifetime sex partners (partial rs = .20-.27), short-term partners (partial rs = .25-.28), and more affairs with mated women (partial r = .28).

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Daly, M. & Wilson, M. (1988). Evolutionary social psychology and family homicide. Science 242, 519-524

Homicide is an extreme manifestation of interpersonal conflict with minimal reporting bias and can thus be used as a conflict “assay.” Evolutionary models of social motives predict that genetic relationship will be associated with mitigation of conflict, and various analyses of homicide data support this prediction. Most “family” homicides are spousal homicides, fueled by male sexual proprietariness. In the case of parent-offspring conflict, an evolutionary model predicts variations in the risk of violence as a function of the ages, sexes, and other characteristics of protagonists, and these predictions are upheld in tests with data on infanticides, parricides, and filicides.

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This study uses self-report measures completed by one hundred and twenty three (123) undergraduate technology students to investigate the validity of Peterson and Seligman’s (2004) classification system of 24 character strengths embodied in six core virtues. Using exploratory factor analyses we found, that an exact convergence of the character strengths was explicitly absent with the six-virtues. In our study, a five-factor solution was more comprehensive and well representing the resultant factor loadings upon analyzing the data which is further compared to a similar empirical study available for analyzing structural dynamics. In this paper, we have discussed the five-factor solution and renamed the dimensions to show a legitimate picture of the classification system, which requires further justification, and in addition, advocates reanalysis and reinterpretation of the originally propounded values in action (VIA) classification as a recommendation for future research.

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Zahavi, A. (1975). Mate selection: a selection for a handicap. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 53, 205–214.

It is suggested that characters which develop through mate preference confer handicaps on the selected individuals in their survival. These handicaps are of use to the selecting sex since they test the quality of the mate. The size of characters selected in this way serve as marks of quality. The understanding that a handicap, which tests for quality, can evolve as a consequence of its advantage to the individual, may provide an explanation for many puzzling evolutionary problems. Such an interpretation may provide an alternative to other hypotheses which assumed complicated selective mechanisms, such as group selection or kin selection, which do not act directly on the individual.

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Wilson, M., & Daly, M. (1996). Male sexual proprietariness and violence against wives. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 5, 2–7.

There is a cross-culturally ubiquitous connection between men’s sexual possessiveness and men’s violence…

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Wilson, E. O. (1975). Sociobiology: The new synthesis. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Chapter 27 PDF – Man: From sociobiology to sociology.

Wilson, D. S., & Sober, E. (1994). Reintroducing group selection to the human behavioral sciences. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 17, 585–654.

In both biology and the human sciences, social groups are sometimes treated as adaptive units whose organization cannot be reduced to individual interactions. This group-level view is opposed by a more individualistic one that treats social organization as a byproduct of self-interest. According to biologists, group-level adaptations can evolve only by a process of natural selection at the group level. Most biologists rejected group selection as an important evolutionary force during the 1960s and 1970 but a positive literature began to grow during the 1970s and is rapidly expanding today. We review this recent literature and its implications for human evolutionary biology. We show that the rejection of group selection was based on a misplaced emphasis on genes as «replicators» which is in fact irrelevant to the question of whether groups can be like individuals in their functional organization. The fundamental question is whether social groups and other higher-level entities can be «vehicles» of selection. When this elementary fact is recognized, group selection emerges as an important force in nature and what seem to be competing theories, such as kin selection and reciprocity, reappear as special cases of group selection. The result is a unified theory of natural selection that operates on a nested hierarchy of units. The vehicle-based theory makes it clear that group selection is an important force to consider in human evolution. Humans can facultatively span the full range from self-interested individuals to «organs» of group-level «organisms.» Human behavior not only reflects the balance between levels of selection but it can also alter the balance through the construction of social structures that have the effect of reducing fitness differences within groups, concentrating natural selection (and functional organization) at the group level. These social structures and the cognitive abilities that produce them allow group selection to be important even among large groups of unrelated individuals

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Waynforth, D. (1998). Fluctuating asymmetry and human male life-history traits in rural Belize. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 265B, 1497–1501.

Fluctuating asymmetry (FA), used as a measure of phenotypic quality, has proven to be a useful predictor of human life-history variation, but nothing is known about its effects in humans living in higher fecundity and mortality conditions, typical before industrialization and the demographic transition. In this research, I analyse data on male life histories for a relatively isolated population in rural Belize. Some of the 56 subjects practise subsistence-level slash-and-burn farming, and others are involved in the cash economy. Fecundity levels are quite high in this population, with men over the age of 40 averaging over eight children. Low FA successfully predicted lower morbidity and more offspring fathered, and was marginally associated with a lower age at first reproduction and more lifetime sex partners. These results indicate that FA may be important in predicting human performance in fecundity and morbidity in predemographic transition conditions.

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Trivers, R. L. (1972). Parental investment and sexual selection. In B. Campbell (Ed.), Sexual selection and the descent of man: 1871–1971 (pp. 136–179). Chicago: Aldine.

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Thornhill, R., Gangestad, S. W., & Comer, R. (1995). Human female orgasm and mate fluctuating asymmetry. Animal Behavior, 50, 1601–1615.

Human, Homo sapiens, female orgasm is not necessary for conception; hence it seems reasonable to hypothesize that orgasm is an adaptation for manipulating the outcome of sperm competition resulting from facultative polyandry. If heritable differences in male viability existed in the evolutionary past, selection could have favoured female adaptations (e.g. orgasm) that biased sperm competition in favour of males possessing heritable fitness indicators. Accumulating evidence suggests that low fluctuating asymmetry is a sexually selected male feature in a variety of species, including humans, possibly because it is a marker of genetic quality. Based on these notions, the proportion of a woman’s copulations associated with orgasm is predicted to be associated with her partner’s fluctuating asymmetry. A questionnaire study of 86 sexually active heterosexual couples supported this prediction. Women with partners possessing low fluctuating asymmetry and their partners reported significantly more copulatory female orgasms that were reported by women with partners possessing high fluctuating asymmetry and their partners, even with many potential confounding variables controlled. The findings are used to examine hypotheses for female orgasm other than selective sperm retention.

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Thornhill, R., & Gangestad, S. W. (1999). The scent of symmetry: A human sex phremone that signals fitness? Evolution and human behavior, 20, 175–201.

A previous study by the authors showed that the body scent of men who have greater body bilateral symmetry is rated as more attractive by normally ovulating (non-pill-using) women during the period of highest fertility based on day within the menstrual cycle. Women in low-fertility phases of the cycle and women using hormone-based contraceptives do not show this pattern. The current study replicated these findings with a larger sample and statistically controlled for men’s hygiene and other factors that were not controlled in the first study. The current study also examined women’s scent attractiveness to men and found no evidence that men prefer the scent of symmetric women. We propose that the scent of symmetry is an honest signal of phenotypic and genetic quality in the human male, and chemical candidates are discussed. In both sexes, facial attractiveness (as judged from photos) appears to predict body scent attractiveness to the opposite sex. Women’s preference for the scent associated with men’s facial attractiveness is greatest when their fertility is highest across the menstrual cycle. The results overall suggest that women have an evolved preference for sires with good genes.

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Shackelford, T. K., & Larsen, R. J. (1997). Facial asymmetry as an indicator of psychological, emotional,and physiological distress. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 456–466.

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Rikowski, A., & Grammar, K. (1999). Human body odour, symmetry and attractiveness. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 266B, 869–874.

Several studies have found body and facial symmetry as well as attractiveness to be human mate choice criteria. These characteristics are presumed to signal developmental stability. Human body odour has been shown to influence female mate choice depending on the immune system, but the question of whether smell could signal general mate quality, as do other cues, was not addressed in previous studies. We compared ratings of body odour, attractiveness, and measurements of facial and body asymmetry of 16 male and 19 female subjects. Subjects wore a T-shirt for three consecutive nights under controlled conditions. Opposite-sex raters judged the odour of the T-shirts and another group evaluated portraits of the subjects for attractiveness. We measured seven bilateral traits of the subject’s body to assess body asymmetry. Facial asymmetry was examined by distance measurements of portrait photographs. The results showed a significant positive correlation between facial attractiveness and sexiness of body odour for female subjects. We found positive relationships between body odour and attractiveness and negative ones between smell and body asymmetry for males only if female odour raters were in the most fertile phase of their menstrual cycle. The outcomes are discussed in the light of different male and female reproductive strategies.

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Rhodes, G., Zebrowitz, L. A., Clark, A., Kalick, M., Hightower, A., & McKay, R. (2001). Do facial averageness and symmetry signal health? Evolution and Human Behavior, 22, 31–47.

We investigated whether the attractive facial traits of averageness and symmetry signal health, examining two aspects of signalling: whether these traits are perceived as healthy, and whether they provide accurate health information. In Study 1, we used morphing techniques to alter the averageness and symmetry of individual faces. Increases in both traits increased perceived health, and perceived health correlated negatively with rated distinctiveness (a converse measure of averageness) and positively with rated symmetry of the images. In Study 2, we examined whether these traits signal real, as well as perceived, health, in a sample of individuals for whom health scores, based on detailed medical records, were available. Perceived health correlated negatively with distinctiveness and asymmetry, replicating Study 1. Facial distinctiveness ratings of 17-year-olds were associated with poor childhood health in males, and poor current and adolescent health in females, although the last association was only marginally significant. Facial asymmetry of 17-year-olds was not associated with actual health. We discuss the implications of these results for a good genes account of facial preferences.

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Nesse, R. M., & Berridge, K. C. (1997). Psychoactive drug use in evolutionary perspective. Science, 278, 63–66.

Pure psychoactive drugs and direct routes of administration are evolutionarily novel features of our environment. They are inherently pathogenic because they bypass adaptive information processing systems and act directly on ancient brain mechanisms that control emotion and behavior. Drugs that induce positive emotions give a false signal of a fitness benefit. This signal hijacks incentive mechanisms of liking and wanting, and can result in continued use of drugs that no longer bring pleasure. Drugs that block negative emotions can impair useful defenses, although there are several reasons why their use is often safe nonetheless. A deeper understanding of the evolutionary origins and functions of the emotions and their neural mechanisms is needed as a basis for decisions about the use of psychoactive drugs.

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Murphy, D., & Stich, S. (2000). Darwin in the madhouse: evolutionary psychology and the classification of mental disorders. In P. Carruthers & A. Chamberlain (Eds.), Evolution and the human mind: Modularity, language and meta-cognition (pp. 62–92). Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Recent years have witnessed a ground swell of interest in the application of evolutionary theory to issues in psychopathology (Nesse & Williams 1995, Stevens & Price 1996, McGuire & Troisi 1998). Much of this work has been aimed at finding adaptationist explanations for a variety of mental disorders ranging from phobias to depression to schizophrenia. There has, however, been relatively little discussion of the implications that the theories proposed by evolutionary psychologists might have for the classification of mental disorders. This is the theme we propose to explore. We’ll begin, in Section 1, by providing a brief overview of the account of the mind advanced by evolutionary psychologists. In Section 2 we’ll explain why issues of taxonomy are important and why the dominant approach to the classification of mental disorders is radically and alarmingly unsatisfactory. We will also indicate why we think an alternative approach, based on theories in evolutionary psychology, is particularly promising. In Section 3 we’ll try to illustrate some of the virtues of the evolutionary psychological approach to classification. The discussion in Section 3 will highlight a quite fundamental distinction between those disorders that arise from the malfunction of a component of the mind and those that can be traced to the fact that our minds must now function in environments that are very different from the environments in which they evolved. This
mis-match between the current and ancestral environments can, we maintain, give rise to serious mental disorders despite the fact that, in one important sense, there is nothing at all wrong with the people suffering the disorder. Their minds are functioning exactly as Mother Nature intended them to. In Section 4, we’ll give a brief overview of
some of the ways in which the sorts of malfunctions catalogued in Section 3 might arise, and sketch two rather different strategies for incorporating this etiologically information in a system for classifying mental disorders. Finally, in Section 5, we will explain why an evolutionary approach may lead to a quite radical revision in the classification of certain conditions. From an evolutionary perspective, we will argue, some of the disorders
recognized in standard manuals like DSM-IV may turn out not to be disorders at all. The people who have these conditions don’t have problems; they just cause problems!

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Moller, A. P., & Thornhill, R. (1998). Male parental care, differential parental investment by females and sexual selection. Animal Behavior, 55, 1507–1515.

Males play a variable parental role in reproduction, ranging from no male parental care to extensive male care. Females may acquire either direct or indirect fitness benefits from their mate choice, and direct fitness benefits include male parental care. Theoreticians have traditionally emphasized direct fitness benefits to females in species with extensive male parental care. We review the literature and show extensive variation in the patterns of male care, related to the attractiveness of males to females. At one extreme of this continuum, females invest differentially in parental care, investing more when paired with attractive males. The costs of female parental care and other aspects of parental investment may be balanced by benefits in terms of more attractive sons and/or more viable offspring. At the other extreme, in species with extensive direct fitness benefits, males with preferred sexual phenotypes provide the largest relative share of parental care. A comparative study of birds revealed that the extent of the differential female parental investment was directly related to the frequency of extra-pair paternity. Since extra-pair paternity may arise mainly as a consequence of female choice for indirect fitness benefits, this result supports our prediction that differential parental investment is prevalent in species where females benefit indirectly from their mate choice. The consequences for sexual selection theory of these patterns of male care in relation to male attractiveness are emphasized.

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Moller, A. P., Barbosa, A., Cuervo, J. J., de Lope, F., Merino, S., & Saino, N. (1998). Sexual selection and tail streamers in the barn swallow. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 265B, 409–414.

The functional significance of elongated, narrow tips of the tail feathers of certain birds, so-called tail streamers, has recently been discussed from an aerodynamic point of view, and the effects of sexual selection on such traits have been questioned. We review our long-term field studies using observational and experimental approaches to investigate natural and sexual selection in the barn swallow, Hirundo rustica, which has sexually size-dimorphic outermost tail feathers. Experimental manipulation of the length of the outermost tail feathers has demonstrated sexual selection advantages of tail elongation and disadvantages of tail shortening, with opposite effects for natural selection in terms of foraging efficiency, haematocrit and survival. These findings are contrary to the prediction of a general deterioration from both shortening and elongation, if the tail trait was determined solely by its effects on aerodynamic efficiency and flight manoeuvrability. Patterns of sexual selection in manipulated birds conform with patterns in unmanipulated birds, and selection differentials for different components of sexual selection in manipulated birds are strongly positively correlated with differentials in unmanipulated birds. Age and sex differences in tail length, and geographical patterns of sexual size dimorphism, are also consistent with sexual selection theory, but inconsistent with a purely natural selection advantage of long outermost tail feathers in male barn swallows.

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Miller, G. F. (1999). Evolution of music through sexual selection. In N. L. Wallin, M. Bjoern, & S. Brown (Eds.), The origins of music. Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

In The descent of man, and Selection in relation to sex, Darwin (1871) devoted ten pages to bird song and six pages to human music, viewing both as outcomes of an evolutionary process called sexual selection. Darwin’s idea that most bird song functions as a courtship display to attract sexual mates has been fully supported by biological research (e.g. Catchpole & Slater, 1995), but his idea that human music evolved to serve the same function have been strangely neglected. Although there has been much written about the origins of human music (e.g. Blacking, 1987; Dissanayake, 1988, 1992; Knight, 1991; Rousseau, 1966; Storr, 1992; Tiger, 1992), very few theorists have taken a serious adaptationist approach to the question. Those who have, have usually searched in vain for music’s survival benefits for the individual or the group, overlooking Darwin’s compelling argument that music’s benefits were primarily reproductive, and best explained by the same sexual selection processes that shaped bird song. This chapter has the simple goal of reviving Darwin’s original suggestions that human music must be studied as a biological adaptation, and that music was shaped by sexual selection to function mostly as a courtship display to attract sexual partners. Fortunately, after a century of obscurity, Darwin’s theory of sexual selection itself has already undergone a renaissance in biology over the last two decades, so biology offers many new insights about courtship adaptations, which will be applied here to human music.

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Mealey, L. (1995). The sociobiology of sociopathy. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 18, 523–599.

Sociopaths are “outstanding” members of society in two senses: politically, they draw our attention because of the inordinate amount of crime they commit, and psychologically, they hold our fascination because most ofus cannot fathom the cold, detached way they repeatedly harm and manipulate others. Proximate explanations from behavior genetics, child development, personality theory, learning theory, and social psychology describe a complex interaction of genetic and physiological risk factors with demographic and micro environmental variables that predispose a portion of the population to chronic antisocial behavior. More recent, evolutionary and game theoretic models have tried to present an ultimate explanation of sociopathy as the expression of a frequency-dependent life strategy which is selected, in dynamic equilibrium, in response to certain varying environmental circumstances. This paper tries to integrate the proximate, developmental models with the ultimate, evolutionary ones, suggesting that two developmentally different etiologies of sociopathy emerge from two different evolutionary mechanisms. Social strategies for minimizing the incidence of sociopathic behavior in modern society should consider the two different etiologies and the factors that contribute to them.

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Marks, I. M., & Nesse, R. M. (1994). Fear and fitness: An evolutionary analysis of anxiety disorders. Ethology and Sociobiology, 15, 247–261.

This article reviews the evolutionary origins and functions of the capacity for anxiety, and relevant clinical and research issues. Normal anxiety is an emotion that helps organisms defend against a wide variety of threats. There is a general capacity for normal defensive arousal, and subtypes of normal anxiety protect against particular kinds of threats. These normal subtypes correspond somewhat to mild forms of various anxiety disorders. Anxiety disorders arise from dysregulation of normal defensive responses, raising the possibility of a hypophobic disorder (too little anxiety). If a drug were discovered that abolished all defensive anxiety, it could do harm as well as good. Factors that have shaped anxiety-regulation mechanisms can explain prepotent and prepared tendencies to associate anxiety more quickly with certain cues than with others. These tendencies lead to excess fear of largely archaic dangers, like snakes, and too little fear of new threats, like cars. An understanding of the evolutionary origins, functions, and mechanisms of anxiety suggests new questions about anxiety disorders.

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Lovejoy, O. C. (1988). The evolution of human walking. Scientific American, 259, 118–125.

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Lovejoy, O. C. (1981). The origins of man. Science, 211, 341–349.

Five characters separate man from other hominoids—a large neocortex, bipedality, reduced anterior dentition with molar dominance, material culture, and unique sexual and reproductive behavior. Evidence provided by the fossil record, primate behavior, and demographic analysis shows that the traditional view that early human evolution was a direct consequence of brain expansion and material culture is incorrect, and that the unique sexual and reproductive behavior of man may be the sine qua non of human origin.

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Lloyd, J. E. (1979). Mating behavior and natural selection. The Florida Entomologist, 62, 17–34.

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Lewontin, R. C. (1998). The evolution of cognition. In D. Scarborough & S. Sternberg (Eds.), An invitation to cognitive science: Methods, models, and conceptual issues (pp. 107–132). Cambridge, MA: MITPress.

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Leary, M. R., Tambor, E. S., Terdal, S. K., & Downs, D. L. (1995). Self-esteem as an interpersonal monitor: The sociometer hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 518–530.

Five studies tested hypotheses derived from the sociometer model of self-esteem according to which the self-esteem system monitors others’ reactions and alerts the individual to the possibility of social exclusion. Study 1 showed that the effects of events on participants’ state self-esteem paralleled their assumptions about whether such events would lead others to accept or reject them. In Study 2, participants’ ratings of how included they felt in a real social situation correlated highly with their self-esteem feelings. In Studies 3 and 4, social exclusion caused decreases in self-esteem when respondents were excluded from a group for personal reasons, but not when exclusion was random, but this effect was not mediated by self-presentation. Study 5 showed that trait self-esteem correlated highly with the degree to which respondents generally felt included versus excluded by other people. Overall, results provided converging evidence for the sociometer model

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Kenrick, D. T., Sadalla, E. K., Groth, G., & Trost, M. R. (1990). Evolution, traits, and the stages of human courtship: Qualifying the parental investment model. Journal of Personality, 58, 97–116.

Individual differences are explicitly connected to social interaction in Darwin’s notion of sexual selection Traits that increase the probability of successful reproduction will tend to increase in frequency This process operates partly through differential choice, by one sex, of certain traits in the other According to the parental investment model, females frequently have more stringent criteria for the traits they will accept in a mate because they have a relatively larger investment in each offspring Because human mating arrangements often involve a substantial commitment of resources by the male, it is necessary to invoke a distinction between the selectivity involved during casual mating opportunities and the selectivity exercised when choosing a long-term partner Ninety-three undergraduate men and women rated their minimum criteria on 24 partner characteristics at four levels of commitment In line with an unqualified parental investment model, females were more selective overall, particularly on status-linked variables In line with a qualified parental investment model, males’ trait preferences depended upon the anticipated investment in the relationship Males had lower requirements for a sexual partner than did females, but were nearly as selective as females when considenng requirements for a long-term partner

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Kempenaers, B., Lanctot, R. B., & Robertson, R. J. (1998). Certainty of paternity and paternal investment in eastern blue birds and tree swallows. Animal Behavior, 55, 845–860.

Extra-pair paternity is common in many socially monogamous passerine birds with biparental care. Thus, males often invest in offspring to which they are not related. Models of optimal parental investment predict that, under certain assumptions, males should lower their investment in response to reduced certainty of paternity. We attempted to reduce certainty of paternity experimentally in two species, the eastern bluebird, Sialia sialis, and the tree swallow, Tachycineta bicolor, by temporarily removing fertile females on two mornings during egg laying. In both species, experimental males usually attempted to copulate with the female immediately after her reappearance, suggesting that they experienced the absence of their mate as a threat to their paternity. Experimental males copulated at a significantly higher rate than control males. However, contrary to the prediction of the model, experimental males did not invest less than control males in their offspring. There was no difference between experimental and control nests in the proportion of male feeds, male and female feeding rates, nestling growth and nestling condition and size at age 14 days. We argue that females might have restored the males’ confidence in paternity after the experiment by soliciting or accepting copulations. Alternatively, males may not reduce their effort, because the fitness costs to their own offspring may outweigh the benefits for the males, at least in populations where females cannot fully compensate for reduced male investment.

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Hamilton, W. D. (1964). The genetical evolution of social behavior: I. Journal of Theoretical Biology, 7, 1–16.

A genetical mathematical model is described which allows for interactions between relatives on one another’s fitness. Making use of Wright’s Coefficient of Relationship as the measure of the proportion of replica genes in a relative, a quantity is found which incorporates the maximizing property of Darwinian fitness. This quantity is named “inclusive fitness”. Species following the model should tend to evolve behaviour such that each organism appears to be attempting to maximize its inclusive fitness. This implies a limited restraint on selfish competitive behaviour and possibility of limited self-sacrifices.

Special cases of the model are used to show (a) that selection in the social situations newly covered tends to be slower than classical selection, (b) how in populations of rather non-dispersive organisms the model may apply to genes affecting dispersion, and (c) how it may apply approximately to competition between relatives, for example, within sibships. Some artificialities of the model are discussed.

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Haig, B. D., & Durrant, R. (2000). Theory evaluation in evolutionary psychology. Psychological Inquiry, 11, 34–38.

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Gross, M. R. (1996). Alternative reproductive strategies and tactics: Diversity within sexes. Trends in Ecology and Evolution, 11, 92–98.

Not all members of a sex behave in the same way. Frequency- and status-dependent selection have given rise to many alternative reproductive phenotypes within the sexes. The evolution and proximate control of these alternatives are only beginning to be understood. Although game theory has provided a theoretical framework, the concept of the mixed strategy has not been realized in nature, and alternative strategies are very rare. Recent findings suggest that almost all alternative reproductive phenotypes within the sexes are due to alternative tactics within a conditional strategy, and, as such, while the average fitnesses of the alternative phenotypes are unequal, the strategy is favoured in evolution. Proximate mechanisms that underlie alternative phenotypes may have many similarities with those operating between the sexes.

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Greiling, H., & Buss, D. M. (2000). Women’s sexual strategies: The hidden dimension of extra-pair mating. Personality and Individual Differences, 28, 929–963.

Most evolutionary theories of human mating have focused on the adaptive benefits of short-term mating for men. Men cannot pursue a strategy of short-term mating, however, without willing women. Existing empirical evidence suggests that some women engage in short-term mating some of the time and probably have done so recurrently over human evolutionary history. The current studies tested hypotheses about the potential benefits women might derive from engaging in one type of short-term mating — extra-pair liaisons — and the contexts in which they do so. These include resource hypotheses (e.g. immediate resource accrual), genetic hypotheses (e.g. having genetically diverse offspring), mate switching hypotheses (e.g. acquiring a better mate), mate skill acquisition hypotheses (e.g. mate preference clarification) and mate manipulation hypotheses (e.g. deterring a partner’s future infidelity). These hypotheses were tested by examining the perceived likelihood that women would receive particular benefits through a short-term extra-pair mating (Study 1); the perceived magnitude of benefits if received (Study 2); the contexts in which women engage in short-term extra-pair mating (Study 3); and individual differences among women in proclivity to pursue short-term matings in their perceptions of benefits (Study 4). Most strongly supported across all four studies were the mate switching and resource acquisition hypotheses. Discussion focuses on the distinction between functions and beneficial effects of short-term mating, limitations of the current studies and the consequences of women’s short-term mating strategies for the broader matrix of human mating.

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Gould, S. J., & Lewontin, R. C. (1979). The spandrels of San Marco and the Panglossian paradigm: Acritique of the adaptationist programme. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 205B, 581–598.

An adaptationist programme has dominated evolutionary thought in England and the United States during the past 40 years. It is based on faith in the power of natural selection as an optimizing agent. It proceeds by breaking an oragnism into unitary ‘traits’ and proposing an adaptive story for each considered separately. Trade-offs among competing selective demands exert the only brake upon perfection; non-optimality is thereby rendered as a result of adaptation as well. We criticize this approach and attempt to reassert a competing notion (long popular in continental Europe) that organisms must be analysed as integrated wholes, with Baupläne so constrained by phyletic heritage, pathways of development and general architecture that the constraints themselves become more interesting and more important in delimiting pathways of change than the selective force that may mediate change when it occurs. We fault the adaptationist programme for its failure to distinguish current utility from reasons for origin (male tyrannosaurs may have used their diminutive front legs to titillate female partners, but this will not explain why they got so small); for its unwillingness to consider alternatives to adaptive stories; for its reliance upon plausibility alone as a criterion for accepting speculative tales; and for its failure to consider adequately such competing themes as random fixation of alleles, production of non-adaptive structures by developmental correlation with selected features (allometry, pleiotropy, material compensation, mechanically forced correlation), the separability of adaptation and selection, multiple adaptive peaks, and current utility as an epiphenomenon of non-adaptive structures. We support Darwin’s own pluralistic approach to identifying the agents of evolutionary change.

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Gigerenzer, G. (1998). Surrogates for theories. Theory and Psychology, 8, 195–204.

I first discuss several strategies that serve as surrogates for theories in psychology: one-word explanation, redescription, drawing vague dichotomies, and data fitting. I then identify two conventions that allow these surrogates to flourish and multiply: null hypothesis testing, which makes precise hypotheses irrelevant, and the isolation of research in different disciplines, which prevents the exchange of positive metaphors between fields. Key Words: explanation, null hypothesis testing, redescription, surrogates, theory construction. I like conference dinners. At such a dinner several years ago, I was crammed in with four graduate students and four professors around a table laden with Chinese food. The graduate students were eager to learn first-hand how to complete a dissertation and begin a research career, and the professors were keen to give advice. With authority, one colleague advised them: “Don’t think big. Just do four or five experiments, clip them together, and hand them in. ” The graduate students nodded gratefully. They continued to nod when I added: “Don’t follow this advice unless you are mediocre or unimaginative. Try to think in a deep, bold, and precise way. Take risks and be courageous. ” What a dilemma. How could these students apply these contradictory pieces of advice?

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Geary, D. C. (2000). Evolution and proximate expression of human paternal investment. Psychological Bulletin, 126, 55–77.

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Gangestad, S. W., & Thornhill, R. (1998). Menstrual cycle variation in women’s preferences for the scent of symmetrical men. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 265B, 927–933.

Evidence suggests that female sexual preferences change across the menstrual cycle. Women’s extra-pair copulations tend to occur in their most fertile period, whereas their intra-pair copulations tend to be more evenly spread out across the cycle. This pattern is consistent with women preferentially seeking men who evidence phenotypic markers of genetic benefits just before and during ovulation. This study examined whether women’s olfactory preferences for men’s scent would tend to favour the scent of more symmetrical men, most notably during the women’s fertile period. College women sniffed and rated the attractiveness of the scent of 41 T-shirts worn over a period of two nights by different men. Results indicated that normally cycling (non-pill using) women near the peak fertility of their cycle tended to prefer the scent of shirts worn by symmetrical men. Normally ovulating women at low fertility within their cycle, and women using a contraceptive pill, showed no significant preference for either symmetrical or asymmetrical men’s scent. A separate analysis revealed that, within the set of normally cycling women, individual women’s preference for symmetry correlated with their probability of conception, given the actuarial value associated with the day of the cycle they reported at the time they smelled the shirts. Potential sexual selection processes and proximate mechanisms accounting for these findings are discussed.

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Gangestad, S. W., & Simpson, J. A. (2000). The evolution of human mating: Trade-offs and strategic pluralism. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 23, 573–644.

During human evolutionary history, there were trade-offs between expending time and energy on child-rearing and mating, so both men and women evolved conditional mating strategies guided by cues signaling the circumstances. Many short-term matings might be successful for some men; others might try to find and keep a single mate, investing their effort in rearing her offspring. Recent evidence suggests that men with features signaling genetic benefits to offspring should be preferred by women as short-term mates, but there are trade-offs between a mate’s genetic fitness and his willingness to help in child-rearing. It is these circumstances and the cues that signal them that underlie the variation in short- and long-term mating strategies between and within the sexes.

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Furlow, F. B., Armijo-Prewitt, T., Gangestad, S. W., & Thornhill, R. (1997). Fluctuating asymmetry and psychometric intelligence. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London, 264B, 823–829.

Little is known about the genetic nature of human psychometric intelligence (IQ), but it is widely assumed that IQ’s heritability is at loci for intelligence per se. We present evidence consistent with a hypothesis that interindividual IQ differences are partly due to heritable vulnerabilities to environmental sources of developmental stress, an indirect genetic mechanism for the heritability of IQ. Using fluctuating asymmetry (FA) of the body (the asymmetry resulting from errors in the development of normally symmetrical bilateral traits under stressful conditions), we estimated the relative developmental instability of 112 undergraduates and administered to them Cattell’s culture fair intelligence test (CFIT). A subsequent replication on 128 students was performed. In both samples, FA correlated negatively and significantly with CFIT scores. We propose two non-mutually exclusive physiological explanations for this correlation. First, external body FA may correlate negatively with the developmental integrity of the brain. Second, individual energy budget allocations and/or low metabolic efficiency in high-FA individuals may lower IQ scores. We review the data on IQ in light of our findings and conclude that improving developmental quality may increase average IQ in future generations.

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Folstad, I., & Karter, A. J. (1992). Parasites, bright males, and the immunocompetence handicap. The American Naturalist, 139, 603–622.

It has been argued that [female][female] should be able to choose parasite-resistant mates on the basis of the quality of [male] secondary sexual characters, and that such signals must be costly handicaps in order to evolve. To a large extent, handicap hypotheses have relied on energetic explanations for these costs. This paper presents a phenomenological model, operating at an intraspecific level, which views the cost of secondary sexual development in endocrinological terms. Testosterone has a dual effect: it stimulates development of characters used in sexual selection while reducing immunocompetence. This creates a physiological trade-off that influences and is influenced by the parasite burden. It is proposed that there is a negative feedback loop between signal intensity and parasite burden, and that testosterone-dependent signal intensity is a plastic response. This response is modified in accordance with the competing demands of the potential costs of parasite infection vs. that of increased reproductive success afforded by exaggerated signals. This trade-off is intimately involved in the evolution of secondary sexual characters, and may explain some of the equivocal empirical results that have surfaced in attempts to measure the effect of parasites on sexual selection.

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Ellis, B. J., & Garber, J. (2000). Psychosocial antecedents of pubertal maturation in girls: Parental psychopathology, stepfather presence, and family and martial stress. Child Development, 71,485–501.

Drawing on Belsky, Steinberg, and Draper’s evolutionary theory of the development of reproductive strategies, we tested a model of individual differences in girls’ pubertal timing. This model posits that a history of psychopathology in mothers results in earlier pubertal maturation in daughters, and that this effect is mediated by discordant family relationships and father absence/stepfather presence. The model was supported in a short-term longitudinal study of 87 adolescent girls. In the primary test of the model, it was found that a history of mood disorders in mothers predicted earlier pubertal timing in daughters, and this relation was fully mediated by dyadic stress and biological father absence. In families in which the mother’s romantic partner was not the biological father, dyadic stress accounted for almost half of the variation in daughters’ pubertal timing. Stepfather presence, rather than biological father absence, best accounted for earlier pubertal maturation in girls living apart from their biological fathers. We propose that stepfather presence and stressful family relationships constitute separate paths to early pubertal maturation in girls.

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Ellis, B. J. (1992). The evolution of sexual attraction: Evaluative mechanisms in women. In J. H. Barkow, L. Cosmides, & J. Tooby (Eds.), The adapted mind: Evolutionary psychology and the generation of culture (pp. 267–288). New York: Oxford University Press.

GOOGLE BOOKS – INCOMPLETE (but you’ll get some of it…)

Eberhard, W. G. (1993). Evaluating models of sexual selection: Genitalia as a test case. The American Naturalist, 142,564–571.

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Draper, P., & Harpending, H. (1988). A sociobiological perspective on the development of human reproductive strategies. In K.B. MacDonald (Ed.), Sociobiological perspectives on human development (pp. 340–372). New York: Springer-Verlag.

Humans show a great deal of variability in their reproductive behavior, including types of sexual activity, types of ties between males and females, and ways of arranging for the rearing of offspring. We will consider three principal topics: (1) Father absence versus father presence, contrasting children who are reared in a family system in which there is a closely involved and economically contributing father in contrast to a family system in which women rear their children in cooperation with other women (usually kin) and without consistent help from a man who is father to children. (2) Peer rearing versus parent rearing, concerning who does the primary work of rearing children—whether biological parents themselves and in a proximate sense provide for the care of their own children or whether parental surrogates do the major child tending work under some form of distal parental supervision. (3) Pair-bonding between parents versus individual strategies that do not include reciprocation with a mate, with a view toward understanding several psychiatric “disorders” as manifestations of more general evolved propensities against cooperation.

In the first two cases we discuss the consequences which being reared under one or the other of these conditions can have for the individual’s reproductive strategy. For simplicity we portray the conditions as dichotomous alternatives but we recognize that in actual life individual experience can vary along a continuum from one to the other. There are data on these topics, and evolutionary theory can help us understand these patterns in a way that takes account both of environmental differences among groups and the evolved characteristics of our species.

The evidence about why some adults seem to prefer to bond with one individual of the opposite sex while others mate in quite different contexts is quite sketchy. We will discuss characteristics of sociopaths and hysterics, individuals with clusters of traits identified by psychiatrists and usually interpreted as victims of mental illnesses. We will point out that these trait clusters seem to make good sense when considered in the light of the evolutionary theory of reproductive strategies, even though there is no good evidence of learning or of effects of rearing environment on their development.

Our view of learning is that humans have been selected to be differentially sensitive to certain cues in their immediate early childhood environment (Bowlby 1969, 1973; Lumsden & Wilson, 1981; MacDonald, 1984). It is as if human young acquire early socialization with their antennae tuned to detect certain attributes in their environment, especially the role played by mother’s mate and the mother’s attitude to her mate(s), and the role of parents as opposed to nonparental surrogates in providing proximate care in early childhood. These are examples of contextual variables which influence learning tracks in early childhood and which can be understood in the context of our evolutionary past.

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DeKay, W. T., & Buss, D. M. (1992). Human nature, individual differences, and the importance of context: Perspectives from evolutionary psychology. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 1, 184–189.

Evolutionary psychology is emerging as an important theoretical perspective in many branches ofpsychology: cognition,’ perception, psycholinguistics, social psychology,’ developmental psychology, clinical psychology, and personality psychology. Its promise lies not insupplanting other psychological perspectives or research programs, but rather in adding additional layers of analysis and understanding to human psychological phenomena. Evolutionary psychology starts by posing three important questions that have been relatively neglected over the past century: What are the origins of human psychological mechanisms? What adaptive problems selected for their existence? What functions were they designed to serve?

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Darwin, C. (1872). The expression of the emotions in man and animals. London: John Murray.

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Darwin, C. (1859). On the origin of species by means of natural selection or the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life. London: John Murray.

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Buunk, A. P., Angleitner, A., Oubaid, V., & Buss, D. M. (1996). Sex differences in jealousy in evolutionary and cultural perspective: Tests from the Netherlands, Germany, and the United States. Psychological Science, 7, 359–363.

As predicted by models derived from evolutionary psychology, men within the United States have been shown to exhibit greater psychological and physiological distress to sexual than to emotional infidelity of their partner, and women have been shown to exhibit more distress to emotional than to sexual infidelity Because cross-cultural tests are critical for evolutionary hypotheses, we examined these sex differences in three parallel studies conducted in the Netherlands (N = 207), Germany (N = 200), and the United States (N = 224) Two key findings emerged First, the sex differences in sexual jealousy are robust across these cultures, providing support for the evolutionary psychological model Second, the magnitude of the sex differences varies somewhat across cultures—large for the United States, medium for Germany and the Netherlands Discussion focuses on the evolutionary psychology of jealousy and on the sensitivity of sex differences in the sexual sphere to cultural input

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Buss, D. M., & Shackelford, T. K. (1997). From vigilance to violence: Mate retention tactics in married couples. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 72, 346–361.

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Buss, D. M., & Schmitt, D. P. (1993). Sexual strategies theory: An evolutionary perspective on human mating. Psychological Review, 100, 204–232.

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Buss, D. M., Larsen, R., Westen, D., & Semmelroth, J. (1992). Sex differences in jealousy: Evolution, physiology, and psychology. Psychological Science, 3, 251–255.

In species with internal female fertilization, males risk both lowered paternity probability and investment in rival gametes if their mates have sexual contact with other males. Females of such species do not risk lowered maternity probability through partner infidelity, but they do risk the diversion of their mates’ commitment and resources to rival females. Three studies tested the hypothesis that sex differences in jealousy emerged in humans as solutions to the respective adaptive problems faced by each sex. In Study 1, men and women selected which event would upset them more—a partner’s sexual infidelity or emotional infidelity. Study 2 recorded physiological responses (heart rate, electrodermal response, corrugator supercilii contraction) while subjects imagined separately the two types of partner infidelity. Study 3 tested the effect of being in a committed sexual relationship on the activation of jealousy. All studies showed large sex differences, confirming hypothesized sex linkages in jealousy activation.

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Buss, D. M., Haselton, M. G., Shackelford, T. K., Bleske, A. L., & Wakefield, J. C. (1998). Adaptation, exaptations, and spandrels. American Psychologist, 53, 533–548.

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Buss, D. M., & Dedden, L. A. (1990). Derogation of competitors. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships, 7, 395–422.

Verbal signals are sometimes used to manipulate the impressions that people form about oneself and others. For the goal of self-enhancement, one can manipulate impressions either by elevating oneself or by derogating others. Five hypotheses about derogation of same-sex competitors were generated from an evolutionary model of human-mate competition. These hypotheses focused on sex differences in the importance that humans attach to external resources, rank, achievements, physical prowess, reproductive value and fidelity. Four studies were conducted to test these hypotheses. In a preliminary study (N = 80), subjects nominated intrasexual derogation tactics they had previously observed. Study 1 (N = 120) examined estimates of the likelihood that men and women would perform each tactic. Study 2 (N = 101) identified the perceived effectiveness of each derogation tactic for men and women. Study 3 (N = 100) used act reports based on self-recording and observer-recording to identify the likelihood of specific persons performing each derogation tactic. Although there were variations across studies and several anomalies, results generally supported the hypotheses based on an evolutionary model of human intrasexual mate competition. Discussion focuses on the importance of discourse and impression manipulation in the evolution of human competition.

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Buss, D. M. (1995). Evolutionary psychology: A new paradigm for psychological science. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 1–49.

Psychological science is currently in conceptual disarray, characterized by unconnected mini-theories and isolated empirical findings. We lack a theory of the functional properties of the human mind that could provide the needed integration—a theory about what the mechanisms of mind are “designed” to do. Evolutionary psychology provides the conceptual tools for emerging from this fragmented state. In this target article, I outline the fundamental premises of evolutionary psychology; illustrate the application of evolutionary psychology to domains such as reasoning, social exchange, language, aggression, jealousy, sex, and status; and then consider the implications of evolutionary psychology for the key branches of social, personality, developmental, and cognitive psychology and suggest ways in which these disciplinary boundaries can be transcended. I conclude by looking at the emergence of evolutionary psychology as our field matures into the 21st century.

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Buss, D. M. (1991). Evolutionary personality psychology. Annual Review of Psychology, 45, 459–491.

A new discipline is emerging called “evolutionary psychology.” Its central aim is to identify psychological mechanisms and behavioral strategies as evolved solutions to the adaptive problems our species has faced over millions of years. Because personality psychology is dedicated to studying human nature in all of its individually different manifestations, this field is uniquely positioned to contribute to, and become informed by, evolutionary
psychology. This review differs from previous ones in articulating an evolutionary metatheory to organize the diverse strands of current personality research and to clarify many of its core concerns. These include: clarifying the debate about personality consistency, clarifying the causal status of dispositions, understanding interactionism, identifying important features of context, identifying the structure of goal-directed strategies, explaining the origins of individual differences, and placing the five-factor model of personality in adaptive context. In clarifying these issues, several crucial misunderstandings must be corrected the “sociobiological fallacy,” the “fundamental situational error,” and the “fallacy of genetic determinism.”

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Buss, D. M. (1989). Sex differences in human mate preferences: Evolutionary hypotheses tested in 37 cultures. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 12, 1–49.

Contemporary mate preferences can provide important clues to human reproductive history. Little is known about which characteristics people value in potential mates. Five predictions were made about sex differences in human mate preferences based on evolutionary conceptions of parental investment, sexual selection, human reproductive capacity, and sexual asymmetries regarding certainty of paternity versus maternity. The predictions centered on how each sex valued earning capacity, ambition— industriousness, youth, physical attractiveness, and chastity. Predictions were tested in data from 37 samples drawn from 33 countries located on six continents and five islands (total N = 10,047). For 27 countries, demographic data on actual age at marriage provided a validity check on questionnaire data. Females were found to value cues to resource acquisition in potential mates more highly than males. Characteristics signaling reproductive capacity were valued more by males than by females. These sex differences may reflect different evolutionary selection pressures on human males and females; they provide powerful cross-cultural evidence of current sex differences in reproductive strategies. Discussion focuses on proximate mechanisms underlying mate preferences, consequences for human intrasexual competition, and the limitations of this study.

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Belsky, J., Steinberg, L., & Draper, P. (1991). Childhood experience, interpersonal development, and reproductive strategy: An evolutionary theory of socialization. Child Development, 62, 647–670.

The concept of “reproductive strategy” drawn from the field of behavioral ecology is applied to the study of childhood experience and interpersonal development in order to develop an evolutionary theory of socialization. The theory is presented in terms of 2 divergent development pathways considered to promote reproductive success in the contexts in which they have arisen. One is characterized, in childhood, by a stressful rearing environment and the development of insecure attachments to parents and subsequent behavior problems; in adolescence by early pubertal development and precocious sexuality; and, in adulthood, by unstable pair bonds and limited investment in child rearing, whereas the other is characterized by the opposite. The relation between this theory and prevailing theories of socialization, specifically, attachment, social-learning, and discrete-emotions theory, is considered and research consistent with our evolutionary theory is reviewed. Finally, directions for future research are discussed.

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Baker, R. R., & Bellis, M. A. (1993). Human sperm competition: Ejaculate manipulation by females and a function for the female orgasm. Animal Behavior, 46, 887–909.

Behavioural ecologists view monogamy as a subtle mixture of conflict and cooperation between the sexes. In part, conflict and cooperation is cryptic, taking place within the female’s reproductive tract. In this paper the cryptic interaction for humans was analysed using data from both a nationwide survey and counts of sperm inseminated into, and ejected by, females. On average, 35% of sperm were ejected by the female within 30 min of insemination. The occurrence and timing of female orgasm in relation to copulation and male ejaculation influenced the number of sperm retained at both the current and next copulation. Orgasms that climaxed at any time between 1 min before the male ejaculated up to 45 min after led to a high level of sperm retention

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Andersson, M. (1982). Female choice selects for extreme tail length in a widowbird. Nature, 299,818–820.

Darwin’s1 hypothesis that male secondary sexual ornaments evolve through female preferences is theoretically plausible2?7, but there is little experimental field evidence that such preferences exist8?10. I have studied female choice in relation to male tail length in the long-tailed widowbird, Euplectes progne, and report here that males in which the tail was experimentally elongated showed higher mating success than males having normal or reduced tails. The possibility that intrasexual competition among males maintains the long tail was not supported: males with shortened tails held their territories as long as did other males. These results suggest that the extreme tail length in male long-tailed widowbirds is maintained by female mating preferences.

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Gomez, R. L., Bootzin, R. R., & Nadel, L. (2006). Naps Promote Abstraction in Language-Learning Infants. Psychological Science, 17(8), 670-67

Infants engage in an extraordinary amount of learning during their waking hours even though much of their day is consumed by sleep. What role does sleep play in infant learning? Fifteen-month-olds were familiarized with an artificial language 4 hr prior to a lab visit. Learning the language involved relating initial and final words in auditory strings by remembering the exact word dependencies or by remembering an abstract relation between initial and final words. One group napped during the interval between familiarization and test. Another group did not nap. Infants who napped appeared to remember a more abstract relation, one they could apply to stimuli that were similar but not identical to those from familiarization. Infants who did not nap showed a memory effect. Naps appear to promote a qualitative change in memory, one involving greater flexibility in learning.

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Newton, A. M., Villiers, J. G. (2007). Thinking While Talking: Adults Fail Nonverbal False-Belief Reasoning. Psychological Science, 18(7), 574-579.

This experiment tested the ability of 81 adult subjects to make a decision on a simple nonverbal false-belief reasoning task while concurrently either shadowing prerecorded spoken dialogue or tapping along with a rhythmic shadowing track. Our results showed that the verbal task, but not tapping, significantly disrupted false-belief reasoning, suggesting that language plays a key role in working theory of mind in adults, even when the false-belief reasoning is nonverbal.

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Weger, U. W., Meier, B. P., Robinson, M. D., Inhoff, A. W. (2007). Things are sounding up: Affective influences on auditory tone perception. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 14(3), 517-521.

Recent studies have documented robust and intriguing associations between affect and performance in cognitive tasks. The present two experiments sought to extend this line of work with reference to potential cross-modal effects. Specifically, the present studies examined whether word evaluations would bias subsequent judgments of low- and high-pitch tones. Because affective metaphors and related associations consistently indicate that positive is high and negative is low, we predicted and found that positive evaluations biased tone judgment in the direction of high-pitch tones, whereas the opposite was true of negative evaluations. Effects were found on accuracy rates, response biases, and reaction times. These effects occurred despite the irrelevance of prime evaluations to the tone judgment task. In addition to clarifying the nature of these cross-modal associations, the present results further the idea that affective evaluations exert large effects on perceptual judgments related to verticality.

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Toro, J. M., Nespor, M., Mehler, J., Bonatti, L. L. (2008). Finding Words and Rules in a Speech Stream: Functional Differences Between Vowels and Consonants. Psychological Science, 19(2), 137-144.

We have proposed that consonants give cues primarily about the lexicon, whereas vowels carry cues about syntax. In a study supporting this hypothesis, we showed that when segmenting words from an artificial continuous stream, participants compute statistical relations over consonants, but not over vowels. In the study reported here, we tested the symmetrical hypothesis that when participants listen to words in a speech stream, they tend to exploit relations among vowels to extract generalizations, but tend to disregard the same relations among consonants. In our streams, participants could segment words on the basis of transitional probabilities in one tier and could extract a structural regularity in the other tier. Participants used consonants to extract words, but vowels to extract a structural generalization. They were unable to extract the same generalization using consonants, even when word segmentation was facilitated and the generalization made simpler. Our results suggest that different signal-driven computations prime lexical and grammatical processing.

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Schon, D., Peretz, I., Besson, M., Boyer, M., Kolinsky, R., & Moreno, S. (2008). Songs as an aid for language acquisition. Cognition, 106 (2), 975-983

In previous research, Saffran and colleagues [Saffran, J. R., Aslin, R. N., & Newport, E. L. (1996). Statistical learning by 8-month-old infants. Science, 274, 1926–1928; Saffran, J. R., Newport, E. L., & Aslin, R. N. (1996). Word segmentation: The role of distributional cues. Journal of Memory and Language, 35, 606–621.] have shown that adults and infants can use the statistical properties of syllable sequences to extract words from continuous speech. They also showed that a similar learning mechanism operates with musical stimuli [Saffran, J. R., Johnson, R. E. K., Aslin, N., & Newport, E. L. (1999). Abstract Statistical learning of tone sequences by human infants and adults. Cognition, 70, 27–52.]. In this work we combined linguistic and musical information and we compared language learning based on speech sequences to language learning based on sung sequences. We hypothesized that, compared to speech sequences, a consistent mapping of linguistic and musical information would enhance learning. Results confirmed the hypothesis showing a strong learning facilitation of song compared to speech. Most importantly, the present results show that learning a new language, especially in the first learning phase wherein one needs to segment new words, may largely benefit of the motivational and structuring properties of music in song.

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Lea, R. B., Rapp, D. N., Elfenbein, A., Mitchel, A. D., & Swinburne Romine, R. (2008). Sweet Silent Thought: Alliteration and Resonance in Poetry Comprehension. Psychological Science, 19 (7), 709-716

Poetic devices like alliteration can heighten readers’ aesthetic experiences and enhance poets’ recall of their epic pieces. The effects of such devices on memory for and appreciation of poetry are well known; however, the mechanisms underlying these effects are not yet understood. We used current theories of language comprehension as a framework for understanding how alliteration affects comprehension processes. Across three experiments, alliterative cues reactivated readers’ memories for previous information when it was phonologically similar to the cue. These effects were obtained when participants read aloud and when they read silently, and with poetry and prose. The results support everyday intuitions about the effects of poetry and aesthetics, and explain the nature of such effects. These findings extend the scope of general memory models by indicating their capacity to explain the influence of nonsemantic discourse features.

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Iverson, J. M., Capirci, O., Volterra, V., & Goldin-Meadow, S. (2008). Learning to talk in a gesture-rich world: Early communication in Italian vs. American children. First Language, 28 (2), 164-181

Italian children are immersed in a gesture-rich culture. Given the large gesture repertoire of Italian adults, young Italian children might be expected to develop a larger inventory of gestures than American children. If so, do these gestures impact the course of language learning? We examined gesture and speech production in Italian and US children between the onset of first words and the onset of two-word combinations. We found differences in the size of the gesture repertoires produced by the Italian vs. the American children, differences that were inversely related to the size of the children’s spoken vocabularies. Despite these differences in gesture vocabulary, in both cultures we found that gesture + speech combinations reliably predicted the onset of two-word combinations, underscoring the robustness of gesture as a harbinger of linguistic development.

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Becker, M. W., Pashler, H., Lubin, J. (2007). Object-Intrinsic Oddities Draw Early Saccades. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 33(1), 20-30.

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Kimchi, R., & Peterson, M. A. (2008). Figure-Ground Segmentation Can Occur Without Attention Psychological Science, 19 (7), 660-668

The question of whether or not figure-ground segmentation can occur without attention is unresolved. Early theorists assumed it can, but the evidence is scant and open to alternative interpretations. Recent research indicating that attention can influence figure-ground segmentation raises the question anew. We examined this issue by asking participants to perform a demanding change-detection task on a small matrix presented on a task-irrelevant scene of alternating regions organized into figures and grounds by convexity. Independently of any change in the matrix, the figure-ground organization of the scene changed or remained the same. Changes in scene organization produced congruency effects on target-change judgments, even though, when probed with surprise questions, participants could report neither the figure-ground status of the region on which the matrix appeared nor any change in that status. When attending to the scene, participants reported figure-ground status and changes to it highly accurately. These results clearly demonstrate that figure-ground segmentation can occur without focal attention.

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Arnell, K. A., Killman, K. V., & Fijavz, D. (2007). Blinded by emotion: Target misses follow attention capture by arousing distractors in RSVP. Emotion, 7(3), 465-477.

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McVay, J. C., & Kane, M. J. (2009). Conducting the train of thought: Working memory capacity, goal neglect, and mind wandering in an executive-control task. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 35 (1), 196-204.

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Plant, A. E., & Peruche, M. B. (2005). The Consequences of Race for Police Officers’ Responses to Criminal Suspects. Psychological Science, 16 (3), 180-183

The current work examined police officers’ decisions to shoot Black and White criminal suspects in a computer simulation. Responses to the simulation revealed that upon initial exposure to the program, the officers were more likely to mistakenly shoot unarmed Black compared with unarmed White suspects. However, after extensive training with the program, in which the race of the suspect was unrelated to the presence of a weapon, the officers were able to eliminate this bias. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the elimination of racial biases and the training of police officers.

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Maratos, F., Mogg, K., & Bradley, B. (2008). Identification of angry faces in the attentional blink. Cognition & Emotion, 22 (7), 1340-1352

According to cognitive and neural theories of emotion, attentional processing of innate threat stimuli, such as angry facial expressions, is prioritised over neutral stimuli. To test this hypothesis, the present study used a modified version of the rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) paradigm to investigate the effect of emotional face stimuli on the attentional blink (AB). The target stimuli were schematic faces which depicted threatening (angry), positive or neutral facial expressions. Results showed that performance accuracy was enhanced (i.e., the AB was reduced) on trials in which the second target was an angry face, rather than a neutral face. Results extend previous research by demonstrating that angry faces reduce the AB, and that this effect is found for schematic facial expressions. These findings further support the proposal that, when there is competition for attentional resources, threat stimuli are given higher priority in processing compared with non-threatening stimuli.

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Snyder, A., Bahramali, H., Hawker, T. & Mitchell, D.J. (2006). Savant-like numerosity skills revealed in normal people by magnetic pulses. Perception, 35, 837-845.

Oliver Sacks observed autistic twins who instantly guessed the exact number of matchsticks that had just fallen on the floor, saying in unison “111”. To test the suggestion that normal individuals have the capacity for savant numerosity, we temporarily simulated the savant condition in normal people by inhibiting the left anterior temporal lobe of twelve participants with repetitive transcranial magnetic stimulation (rTMS). This site has been implicated in the savant condition. Ten participants improved their ability to accurately guess the number of discrete items immediately following rTMS and, of these, eight became worse at guessing as the effects of the pulses receded. The probability of as many as eight out of twelve people doing best just after rTMS and not after sham stimulation by chance alone is less than one in one thousand.

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Fulkerson, A., & Waxman, S. (2007). Words (but not Tones) facilitate object categorization: Evidence from 6- and 12-month-olds. Cognition, 105(1), 218-228.

Recent studies reveal that naming has powerful conceptual consequences within the first year of life. Naming distinct objects with the same word highlights commonalities among the objects and promotes object categorization. In the present experiment, we pursued the origin of this link by examining the influence of words and tones on object categorization in infants at 6 and 12 months. At both ages, infants hearing a novel word for a set of distinct objects successfully formed object categories; those hearing a sequence of tones for the same objects did not. These results support the view that infants are sensitive to powerful and increasingly nuanced links between linguistic and conceptual units very early in the process of lexical acquisition.

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Hayhoe, M. M., Shrivastava, A., Mruczek, R., & Pelz, J. B. (2003). Visual memory and motor planning in a natural task. Journal of Vision, 3, 49-63.

This paper investigates the temporal dependencies of natural vision by measuring eye and hand movements while subjects made a sandwich. The phenomenon of change blindness suggests these temporal dependencies might be limited. Our observations are largely consistent with this, suggesting that much natural vision can be accomplished with “just-in-time” representations. However, we also observe several aspects of performance that point to the need for some representation of the spatial structure of the scene that is built up over different fixations. Patterns of eye-hand coordination and fixation sequences suggest the need for planning and coordinating movements over a period of a few seconds. This planning must be in a coordinate frame that is independent of eye position, and thus requires a representation of the spatial structure in a scene that is built up over different fixations.

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Garsoffky, B., Schwan, S., & Hesse, F.W. (2002). Viewpoint dependency in the recognition of dynamic scenes. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 28(6), 1035-1050.

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Gentner, D., Imai, M., & Boroditsky, L. (2002). As time goes by: Evidence for two systems in processing space — time metaphors. Language and Cognitive Processes, 17(5), 537-565.

Temporal language is often couched in spatial metaphors. English has been claimed to have two space ?time metaphoric systems: the ego-moving metaphor, wherein the observer’s context progresses along the time-line towards the future, and the time-moving metaphor, wherein time is conceived of as a river or conveyor belt on which events are moving from the future to the past. In three experiments, we investigated the psychological status of these metaphors by asking subjects to carry out temporal inferences stated in terms of spatial metaphors. In Experiment 1, we found that subjects were slowed in their processing when the assertions shifted from one spatial metaphoric system to the other. In Experiment 2, we determined that this cost of shifting could not be attributed to local lexical factors. In Experiment 3, we again found this metaphor consistency effect in a naturalistic version of the study in which we asked commonsense time questions of passengers at an airport. The results of the three studies provide converging evidence that people use spatial metaphors in temporal reasoning. Implications for the status of metaphoric systems are discussed.

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Wühr, P., & Waszak, F. (2003). Object-based attentional selection can modulate the Stroop Effect. Memory & Cognition, 31(6), 983-994.

The Stroop (1935) effect is the inability to ignore a color word when the task is to report the ink color of that word (i.e., to say green to the word RED in green ink). The present study investigated whether object-based processing contributes to the Stroop effect. According to this view, observers are unable to ignore irrelevant features of an attended object (Kahneman & Henik, 1981). In three experiments, participants had to name the color of one of two superimposed rectangles and to ignore words that appeared in the relevant object, in the irrelevant object, or in the background. The words were congruent, neutral, or incongruent with respect to the correct color response. Words in the irrelevant object and in the background produced significant Stroop effects, consistent with earlier findings. Importantly, however, words in the relevant object produced larger Stroop effects than did the other conditions, suggesting amplified processing of all the features of an attended object. Thus, object-based processing can modulate the Stroop effect.

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Raz, A., Kirsch, I., Pollard, J., & Nitkin-Kaner, Y. (2006). Suggestion reduces the Stroop Effect. Psychological Science, 17(2), 91-95

We examined the effects of suggestion on Stroop interference in highly suggestible individuals. Participants completed the Stroop task with and without a suggestion to perceive Stroop words as meaningless symbols. Half the participants were given this suggestion in hypnosis, and half were given the suggestion without the induction of hypnosis. Suggestion produced a significant reduction in Stroop inhibition, accounting for about 45% of the variance in Stroop responding, regardless of whether hypnosis had been induced. These findings indicate that suggestion can at least partially overcome the automaticity associated with the Stroop effect.

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Liu, K., & Jiang, Y. (2005). Visual working memory for briefly presented scenes. Journal of Vision, 5, 650-658.

Previous studies have painted a conflicting picture on the amount of visual information humans can extract from viewing a natural scene briefly. Although some studies suggest that a single glimpse is sufficient to put about five visual objects in memory, others find that not much is retained in visual memory even after prolonged viewing. Here we tested subjects’ visual working memory (VWM) for a briefly viewed scene image. A sample scene was presented for 250 ms and masked, followed 1000 ms later by a comparison display. We found that subjects remembered fewer than one sample object. Increasing the viewing duration to about 15 s significantly enhanced performance, with approximately five visual objects remembered. We suggest that adequate encoding of a scene into VWM requires a long duration, and that visual details can accumulate in memory provided that the viewing duration is sufficiently long.

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Tracy, J. L. & Robins, R. W. (2004). Show your pride: Evidence for a discrete emotion expression. Psychological Science, 15(3), 194-197.

Three experiments provide converging evidence that pride has a distinct, recognizable expression. Experiment 1 showed that judges can agree in identifying a posed expression as showing pride and can reliably distinguish pride expressions from expressions of related emotions such as happiness. Experiment 2 showed that judges can identify the pride expression when the task uses an open-ended response format that does not cue them with the label “pride.” Experiment 3 showed that the pride expression includes a small smile, with head tilted slightly back, visibly expanded posture, and arms raised above the head or hands on hips. Overall, these findings challenge the assumption that all positive emotions share the same expression, and suggest that pride may be added to the pantheon of basic emotions generally viewed as evolved responses.

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Mondloch, C. J., & Maurer, D. (2004). Do small white balls squeak? Pitch-object correspondences in young children. Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, 4(2), 133-136.

Adults with auditory-visual synesthesia agree that higher pitched sounds induce smaller, brighter visual percepts. We have hypothesized that these correspondences are remnants of cross-modal neural connections that are present at birth and that influence the development of perception and language even in adults and children without synesthesia. In this study, we explored these correspondences in preschoolers (30-36 months; n = 12 per experiment). The children were asked to indicate which of two bouncing balls was making a centrally located sound. The balls varied in size and/or surface darkness; the sound varied in pitch. The children reliably matched the higher pitched sound to a smaller and lighter (white) ball (Experiment 1), to a lighter (white) ball (Experiment 2), and in one of two groups, to a smaller ball (Experiment 3). Children’s matching of pitch and size cannot be attributed to intensity matching or to learning. These data support the hypothesis that some cross-modal correspondences may be remnants of the neural mechanisms underlying neonatal perception.

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Mathews, A., Fox, E., Yiend, J., & Calder, A. (2003). The face of fear: Effects of eye gaze and emotion on visual attention. Visual Cognition 10(7), 823-835.

We investigated whether a fearful expression enhances the effect of another’s gaze in directing the attention of an observer. Participants viewed photographs of faces whose gaze was directed ahead, to the left or to the right. Target letters then appeared unpredictably to the left or right. As expected, targets in the location indicated by gaze were detected more rapidly. In nonanxious volunteers the effects of fearful gaze did not differ from neutral gaze, but fearful expression had a more powerful influence in a selected high anxious group. Attention is thus more likely to be guided by the direction of fearful than neutral gaze, but only in anxiety-prone individuals.

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Raymond, J. E., Fenske, M. J., & Westobe, N. (2005). Emotional devaluation of distracting patterns and faces: A consequence of attentional inhibition during visual search? Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, 31(6), 1404-15.

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Olson, I. R., & Marshuetz, C. (2005). Facial attractiveness is appraised in a glance. Emotion, 5(4), 498-502.

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Morris, J. S., Öhman, A., & Dolan, R. J., (1999). A subcortical pathway to the right amygala mediating “unseen” fear. Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, 96, 1680-1685.

Neuroimaging studies have shown differential amygdala responses to masked (“unseen”) emotional stimuli. How visual signals related to such unseen stimuli access the amygdala is unknown. A possible pathway, involving the superior colliculus and pulvinar, is suggested by observations of patients with striate cortex lesions who show preserved abilities to localize and discriminate visual stimuli that are not consciously perceived (“blindsight”). We used measures of right amygdala neural activity acquired from volunteer subjects viewing masked fear-conditioned faces to determine whether a colliculo-pulvinar pathway was engaged during processing of these unseen target stimuli. Increased connectivity between right amygdala, pulvinar, and superior colliculus was evident when fear-conditioned faces were unseen rather than seen. Right amygdala connectivity with fusiform and orbitofrontal cortices decreased in the same condition. By contrast, the left amygdala, whose activity did not discriminate seen and unseen fear-conditioned targets, showed no masking-dependent changes in connectivity with superior colliculus or pulvinar. These results suggest that a subcortical pathway to the right amygdala, via midbrain and thalamus, provides a route for processing behaviorally relevant unseen visual events in parallel to a cortical route necessary for conscious identification.

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Gosselin, N., Peretz, I., Noulhiane, M., Hasboun, D., Beckett, C., Baulac., M., & Samson, S. (2005). Impaired recognition of scary music following unilateral temporal lobe excision. Brain, 128, 628-640.

Music constitutes an ideal means to create a sense of suspense in films. However, there has been minimal investigation into the underlying cerebral organization for perceiving danger created by music. In comparison, the amygdala’s role in recognition of fear in non-musical contexts has been well established. The present study sought to fill this gap in exploring how patients with amygdala resection recognize emotional expression in music. To this aim, we tested 16 patients with left (LTR; n = or right (RTR; n = medial temporal resection (including amygdala) for the relief of medically intractable seizures and 16 matched controls in an emotion recognition task involving instrumental music. The musical selections were purposely created to induce fear, peacefulness, happiness and sadness. Participants were asked to rate to what extent each musical passage expressed these four emotions on 10-point scales. In order to check for the presence of a perceptual problem, the same musical selections were presented to the participants in an error detection task. None of the patients was found to perform below controls in the perceptual task. In contrast, both LTR and RTR patients were found to be impaired in the recognition of scary music. Recognition of happy and sad music was normal. These findings suggest that the anteromedial temporal lobe (including the amygdala) plays a role in the recognition of danger in a musical context.

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Dittmar, H., Halliwell, H., & Ive, S. (2006). Does Barbie make girls want to be thin? The effect of experimental exposure to images of dolls on the body image of 5- to 8-year-old girls. Developmental Psychology, 42(2), 283-292.

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Weber, R., Ritterfield, U., & Mathiak, K. (2006). Does playing violent video games induce aggression? Empirical evidence of a Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study. Media Psychology, 8, 39-60.

This study aims to advance the media effects debate concerning violent video games. Meta-analytic reviews reveal a small but noticeable association between playing violent video games and aggressive reactions. However, evidence for causal associations is still rare. In a novel, event-related functional magnetic resonance imaging study, 13 male research participants were observed playing a latest-generation violent video game. Each participant’s game play was recorded and content analyzed on a frame-by-frame basis. Onscreen activities were coded as either “passive/dead, no interactions”; “active/safe, no imminent danger/no violent interactions”; “active/potential danger occurs, violent interactions expected”; “active/under attack, some violent interactions”; and “active/fighting and killing, many violent interactions.” Previous studies in neuroscience on aggressive thoughts and behaviors suggested that virtual violence would suppress affective areas of the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) and the amygdala subsequent to activity variations at cognitive areas of the ACC. Comparison of game play activities with and without virtual violence in 11 participants confirmed the hypothesis. The rather large observed effects can be considered as caused by the virtual violence. We discuss the applicability of neuroscience methodology in media effects studies, with a special emphasis on the assumption of virtuality prevalent in video game play.

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Sommerville, J. A., Woodward, A. L., & Needham, A. (2005). Action experience alters 3-month-old infants’ perception of others’ actions. Cognition, 96, 1-11.

An intervention facilitated 3-month-old infants’ apprehension of objects either prior to (reach first), or after (watch first) viewing another person grasp similar objects in a visual habituation procedure. Action experience facilitated action perception: reach-first infants focused on the relation between the actor and her goal, but watch-first infants did not. Infants’ sensitivity to the actor’s goal was correlated with their engagement in object-directed contact with the toys. These findings indicate that infants can rapidly form goal-based action representations and suggest a developmental link between infants’ goal directed actions and their ability to detect goals in the actions of others.

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Rentfrow, P. J., & Gosling, S. D. (2006). Message in a ballad: The role of music preferences in interpersonal perception. Psychological Science, 17(3), 236-242.

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Ward, J. (2004). Emotionally mediated synaesthesia. Cognitive Neuropsychology, 21, 761-772.

This study reports a synaesthete, GW, who experiences synaesthetic colours in response to a limited range of stimuli-namely those that have an emotional connotation. GW is significantly more consistent than a group of controls, and shows a Stroop-like congruency effect when the text colour differs from that reported for her synaesthetic photisms. The names of people who are known personally to GW are more likely to induce a synaesthetic colour than names referring to people with whom she is not personally acquainted and other categories of word (including colour names themselves). This feature resembles a number of reports in the historical literature on synaesthesia. This is explained by the fact that these stimuli are more likely to elicit an emotional response. In support of this, other words that have an emotional connotation (e.g., “love”) have a tendency to elicit a synaesthetic response. The valence of the emotion (positive vs. negative) may have some role to play in determining the colour of the stimulus. It is concluded that emotion-colour synaesthesia is a genuine, if unusual, form of synaesthesia.

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Murray, J. P., Liotti, M., Ingmundson, P. T., Mayberg, H. S., Pu, Y., Zamarripa, F., Liu, Y., Woldorff, M. G., Gao, J., and Fox, P. T. (2006). Children’s brain activations while viewing televised violence revealed by fMRI. Media Psychology, 8, 25-37.

Though social and behavioral effects of TV violence have been studied extensively, the brain systems involved in TV violence viewing in children are, at present, not known. In this study, 8 children viewed televised violent and nonviolent video sequences while brain activity was measured with functional magnetic resonance imaging. Both violent and nonviolent viewing activated regions involved in visual motion, visual object and scenes, and auditory listening. However, viewing TV violence selectively recruited a network of right hemisphere regions including precuneus, posterior cingulate, amygdala, inferior parietal, and prefrontal and premotor cortex. Bilateral activations were apparent in hippocampus, parahippo-campus, and pulvinar. TV violence viewing transiently recruits a network of brain regions involved in the regulation of emotion, arousal and attention, episodic memory encoding and retrieval, and motor programming. This pattern of brain activations may explain the behavioral effects observed in many studies, especially the finding that children who are frequent viewers of TV violence are more likely to behave aggressively. Such extensive viewing may result in a large number of aggressive scripts stored in long-term memory in the posterior cingulate, which facilitates rapid recall of aggressive scenes that serve as a guide for overt social behavior.

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Notman, L. A., Sowden, P. T., & Ozgen, E. (2005). The nature of learned categorical perception effects: A psychophysical approach. Cognition, 95, 1-14.

Categorical perception is often cited as a striking example of cognitive influences on perception. However, some evidence suggests the term is a misnomer, with effects based on cognitive not perceptual processing. Here, using a psychophysical approach, we provide evidence consistent with a learned categorical perception effect that is dependent on analysis within the visual processing stream. An improvement in participants’ discrimination between grating patterns that they had learned to place in different categories was ‘tuned’ around the orientation of the patterns experienced during category learning. Thus, here, categorical perception may result from attentionally modulated perceptual learning about diagnostic category features, based upon orientation-selective stages of analysis. This argues strongly that category learning can alter our perception of the world.

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Turatto, M., Mazza, V., & Umiltà, C. (2005). Crossmodal object-based attention: Auditory objects affect visual processing. Cognition, 96, 55-64.

According to the object-based view, visual attention can be deployed to “objects” or perceptual units, regardless of spatial locations. Recently, however, the notion of object has also been extended to the auditory domain, with some authors suggesting possible interactions between visual and auditory objects. Here we show that task-irrelevant auditory objects may affect the deployment of visual attention, providing evidence that crossmodal links can also occur at an object-based level. Hence, in addition to the well documented control of visual objects over what we hear, our findings demonstrate that, in some cases, auditory objects can affect visual processing.

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Fenske, M. J., Raymond, J. E., Kessler, K., Westoby, N., & Tipper, S. P. (2005). Attentional inhibition has social-emotional consequences for unfamiliar faces. Psychological Science, 16(10), 753-758.

Visual attention studies often rely on response time measures to show the impact of attentional facilitation and inhibition. Here we extend the investigation of the effects of attention on behavior and show that prior attentional states associated with unfamiliar faces can influence subsequent social-emotional judgments about those faces. Participants were shown pairs of face images and were asked to withhold a response if a transparent stop-signal cue appeared over one of the faces. This served to associate the cued face with an inhibitory state. Later, when asked to make social-emotional choices about these face pairs, participants chose uncued faces more often than cued faces as “more trustworthy” and chose cued faces more often than uncued faces as “less trustworthy.” For perceptual choices, there was no effect of how the question was framed (which face is “on a lighter background” vs. “on a darker background”). These results suggest that attentional inhibition can be associated with socially relevant stimuli, such as faces, and can have specific, deleterious effects on social-emotional judgments.

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Arita, A., Hiraki, K., Kanda, T., & Ishiguro, H. (2005). Can we talk to robots? Ten-month-old infants expected humanoid robots to be talked to by humans. Cognition, 95, 49-57.

As technology advances, many human-like robots are being developed. Although these humanoid robots should be classified as objects, they share many properties with human beings. This raises the question of how infants classify them. Based on the looking-time paradigm used by [Legerstee, M., Barna, J., & DiAdamo, C., (2000). Precursors to the development of intention at 6 months: understanding people and their actions. Developmental Psychology, 36, 5, 627-634.], we investigated whether 10-month-old infants expected people to talk to a humanoid robot. In a familiarization period, each infant observed an actor and an interactive robot behaving like a human, a non-interactive robot remaining stationary, and a non-interactive robot behaving like a human. In subsequent test trials, the infants were shown another actor talking to the robot and to the actor. We found that infants who had previously observed the interactive robot showed no difference in looking-time between the two types of test events. Infants in the other conditions, however, looked longer at the test event where the second experimenter talked to the robot rather than where the second experimenter talked to the person. These results suggest that infants interpret the interactive robot as a communicative agent and the non-interactive robot as an object. Our findings imply that infants categorize interactive humanoid robots as a kind of human being.

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Kirsh, S. J. (2003). The effects of violent video games on adolescents: The overlooked influence of development. Aggression and Violent Behavior, 8, 377-389.

Recent acts of extreme violence involving teens and associated links to violent video games have led to an increased interest in video game violence. Research suggests that violent video games influence aggressive behavior, aggressive affect, aggressive cognition, and physiological arousal. Anderson and Bushman [Annu. Rev. Psychol. 53 (2002) 27.] have posited a General Aggression Model (GAM) to explain the mechanism behind the link between violent video games and aggressive behavior. However, the influence of violent video games as a function of developmental changes across adolescence has yet to be addressed. The purpose of this review is to integrate the GAM with developmental changes that occur across adolescence.

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Manakuta, Y., McClelland, J. L., Johnson, M. H., & Siegler, R. (1997). Rethinking infant knowledge: Toward an adaptive process account of successes and failures in object permanence tasks. Psychological Review, 104, 686-713.

Infants seem sensitive to hidden objects in habituation tasks at 3.5 months but fall to retrieve hidden objects until 8 months. The authors first consider principle-based accounts of these successes and failures, in which early successes imply knowledge of principles and failures are attributed to ancillary deficits. One account is that infants younger than 8 months have the object permanence principle but lack means-ends abilities. To test this, 7-month-olds were trained on means-ends behaviors and were tested on retrieval of visible and occluded toys. Means-ends demands were the same, yet infants made more toy-guided retrievals in the visible case. The authors offer an adaptive process account in which knowledge is graded and embedded in specific behavioral processes.
Simulation models that learn gradually to represent occluded objects show how this approach can account for success and failure in object permanence tasks without assuming principles and ancillary deficits.

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Fiorio, M., Tinazzi, M., & Aglioti, S. M. (2006). Selective impairment of hand mental rotation in patients with focal hand dystonia. Brain, 129, 47-54.

Mental rotation of body parts determines activation of cortical and subcortical systems involved in motor planning and execution, such as motor and premotor areas and basal ganglia. These structures are severely impaired in several movement disorders, including dystonia. Writer’s cramp is the most common form of focal hand dystonia. This study investigates whether patients affected by writer’s cramp present with difficulties in tasks involving mental rotation of body parts and whether any impairments are specific to the affected hand or generalized to other body parts. For this purpose we tested 15 patients with right writer’s cramp (aged 21–68 years, 8 women) and 15 healthy control subjects (10 women, age and education matched). Stimuli consisted of realistic photographs of hands and feet presented on a computer monitor in different orientations with respect to the upright canonical orientation. In each trial, subjects gave a laterality judgement by reporting verbally whether the presented body part was left or right. Two main results of the study are, firstly, writer’s cramp patients are slower than controls in mentally rotating hands [F (1,28) = 5.4; P = 0.028] but not feet, and secondly, the pattern of response times to stimuli at various orientations suggests that the mental motor imagery of controls and patients reflects the type of processes and mechanisms called into play during actual execution of the same movements. In particular, increased difficulty in rotating right-sided stimuli at 120° and left-sided stimuli at 240° would suggest that mental rotation of body parts reflects the anatomical constraints of real hand movements. In conclusion, patients with writer’s cramp presented mental rotation deficits specific to the hand. Importantly, deficits were present during mental rotation of both the right (affected) and the left (unaffected) hand, thus suggesting that the observed alterations may be independent and even exist prior to overt manifestations of dystonia.

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Clarke, T. J., Bradshaw, M. F., Field, D. T., Hampson, S. E., & Rose, D. (2005). The perception of emotion from body movement in point-light displays of interpersonal dialogue. Perception, 34, 1171-1180.

We examined whether it is possible to identify the emotional content of behaviour from point-light displays where pairs of actors are engaged in interpersonal communication. These actors displayed a series of emotions, which included sadness, anger, joy, disgust, fear, and romantic love. In experiment 1, subjects viewed brief clips of these point-light displays presented the right way up and upside down. In experiment 2, the importance of the interaction between the two figures in the recognition of emotion was examined. Subjects were shown upright versions of (i) the original pairs (dyads), (ii) a single actor (monad), and (iii) a dyad comprising a single actor and his/her mirror image (reflected dyad). In each experiment, the subjects rated the emotional content of the displays by moving a slider along a horizontal scale. All of the emotions received a rating for every clip. In experiment 1, when the displays were upright, the correct emotions were identified in each case except disgust; but, when the displays were inverted, performance was significantly diminished for some emotions. In experiment 2, the recognition of love and joy was impaired by the absence of the acting partner, and the recognition of sadness, joy, and fear was impaired in the non-veridical (mirror image) displays. These findings both support and extend previous research by showing that biological motion is sufficient for the perception of emotion, although inversion affects performance. Moreover, emotion perception from biological motion can be affected by the veridical or non-veridical social context within the displays.

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Shepard, R. N., & Metzler, J. (1971). Mental rotation of three-dimensional objects. Science 171, 701-703.

The time required to recognize that two perspective drawings portray objects of the same three-dimensional shape is found to be (i) a linearly increasing function of the angular difference in the portrayed orientations of the two objects and (ii) no shorter for differences corresponding simply to a rigid rotation of one of the two-dimensional drawings in its own picture plane than for differences corresponding to a rotation of the three-dimensional object in depth.

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Epstein, L. H., Handley, E. A., Dearing, K. K, Cho, D. D., Roemmich, J. N., Paluch, R. A., Raja, S., Pak, Y., & Spring, B. (2006). Purchases of food in youth: Influence of price and income. Psychological Science, 17(1), 82-89.

One way to increase choice of healthy over unhealthy behaviors is to increase the cost of less healthy alternatives or reduce the cost of healthier alternatives. The influence of price on purchases of healthy and unhealthy foods was evaluated in two laboratory experiments. In Experiment 1, thirty-two 10- to 12-year-old youth were given $5.00 and allowed to purchase multiple portions of a healthy food (fruit or vegetable) and a less healthy food (higher-fat snack). The price of one type of food varied from $0.50 to $2.50, while the price of the other type was held at $1.00. Increasing the price of a type of food reduced purchases of that type of food, but did not lead to substitution with the alternative type of food. In Experiment 2, twenty 10- to 14-year-old youth were given $1.00, $3.00, and $5.00 to purchase healthy and unhealthy foods. The price of each food was raised and lowered by 25% and 50%. Raising the price of healthy or unhealthy foods resulted in decreased purchases of those foods, and income available interacted with price to predict the pattern of substitution of alternative foods. These results show the potential for controlled laboratory studies of price and food purchases, and show that the substitution of healthier for unhealthy food is related to available money.

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Hill, H. C. H., Troje, N. F., & Johnston, A. (2005). Range- and domain-specific exaggeration of facial speech. Journal of Vision, 5, 793-807

Is it possible to exaggerate the different ways in which people talk, just as we can caricature their faces? In this paper, we exaggerate animated facial movement to investigate how the emotional manner of speech is conveyed. Range-specific exaggerations selectively emphasized emotional manner whereas domain-specific exaggerations of differences in duration did not. Range-specific exaggeration relative to a time-locked average was more effective than absolute exaggeration of differences from the static, neutral face, despite smaller absolute differences in movement. Thus, exaggeration is most effective when the average used captures shared properties, allowing task-relevant differences to be selectively amplified. Playing the stimuli backwards showed that the effects of exaggeration were temporally reversible, although emotion-consistent ratings for stimuli played forwards were higher overall. Comparison with silent video showed that these stimuli also conveyed the intended emotional manner, that the relative rating of animations depends on the emotion, and that exaggerated animations were always rated at least as highly as video. Explanations in terms of key frame encoding and muscle-based models of facial movement are considered, as are possible methods for capturing timing-based cues.

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Bering, J. M. & Bjorklund, D. F. (2004). The natural emergence of reasoning about the afterlife as a developmental regularity. Developmental Psychology 40(2), 217-233.

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Kaschak, M. P., Madden, C. J., Therriault, D. J., Yaxley, R. J, Aveyard, M., Blanchard, A. A., & Zwaan, R. A. (2005). Perception of motion affects language processing. Cognition, 94, 79-89.

Recently developed accounts of language comprehension propose that sentences are understood by constructing a perceptual simulation of the events being described. These simulations involve the re-activation of patterns of brain activation that were formed during the comprehender’s interaction with the world. In two experiments we explored the specificity of the processing mechanisms required to construct simulations during language comprehension. Participants listened to (and made judgments on) sentences that described motion in a particular direction (e.g. “The car approached you”). They simultaneously viewed dynamic black-and-white stimuli that produced the perception of movement in the same direction as the action specified in the sentence (i.e. towards you) or in the opposite direction as the action specified in the sentence (i.e. away from you). Responses were faster to sentences presented concurrently with a visual stimulus depicting motion in the opposite direction as the action described in the sentence. This suggests that the processing mechanisms recruited to construct simulations during language comprehension are also used during visual perception, and that these mechanisms can be quite specific.

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Ehinger, K., & Brockmole, J. (2008). The role of color in visual search in real-world scenes: Evidence from contextual cuing. Perception & Psychophysics, 70 (7), 1366-1378.

Because the importance of color in visual tasks such as object identification and scene memory has been debated, we sought to determine whether color is used to guide visual search in contextual cuing with real-world scenes. In Experiment 1, participants searched for targets in repeated scenes that were shown in one of three conditions: natural colors, unnatural colors that remained consistent across repetitions, and unnatural colors that changed on every repetition. We found that the pattern of learning was the same in all three conditions. In Experiment 2, we did a transfer test in which the repeating scenes were shown in consistent colors that suddenly changed on the last block of the experiment. The color change had no effect on search times, relative to a condition in which the colors did not change. In Experiments 3 and 4, we replicated Experiments 1 and 2, using scenes from a color-diagnostic category of scenes, and obtained similar results. We conclude that color is not used to guide visual search in real-world contextual cuing, a finding that constrains the role of color in scene identification and recognition processes.

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Proulx, T, & Heine, S. J. (2008). The case of the transmogrifying experimenter: affirmation of a moral schema following implicit change detection. Psychological science, 19 (12), 1294-1300

The meaning-maintenance model posits that threats to schemas lead people to affirm unrelated schemas. In two studies testing this hypothesis, participants who were presented with a perceptual anomaly (viz., the experimenter was switched without participants consciously noticing) demonstrated greater affirmation of moral beliefs compared with participants in a control condition. Another study investigated whether the schema affirmation was prompted by unconscious arousal. Participants witnessed the changing experimenter and then consumed a placebo. Those who were informed that the placebo caused side effects of arousal did not show the moral-belief affirmation observed in the previous studies, as they misattributed their arousal to the placebo. In contrast, those who were not informed of such side effects demonstrated moral-belief affirmation. The results demonstrate the functional interchangeability of different meaning frameworks, and highlight the role of unconscious arousal in prompting people to seek alternative schemas in the face of a meaning threat.

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Strack, F., Argyle, M., & Schwarz, N. (1991). Subjective Well-being: An interdisciplinary perspective. Oxford, England: Pergamon Press.

The happiness of the human species has always been at the focus of attention of the humanities. Its manifestations were prime topics for literary and poetic descriptions. Its possibility has been an issue in philosophy ever since
Plato and Seneca. The great religions gained their attraction partly from their recipes for reaching this goal. Political ideologies centred around the ideal society that would guarantee ultimate happiness. Economists developed quantitative measures to describe a whole nation’s well-being (see Chapter 5) while social scientists, noting the shortcomings of economic indices, concerned themselves with various social indicators to describe the quality of life.

And psychology?….

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Thorne, A. and McLean, K. C. (2002). Gendered reminiscence practices and self-definition in late adolescence. Sex Roles 46, 267–277.

The purpose of this study was to examine gender differences in the emotional construction of life-threatening events (LTEs) that were chosen as self-defining by late adolescents. European American college students (41 women, 25 men) whose average age was 19 were selected from a larger sample (n = 139) because they reported at least 1 LTE among 3 self-defining memories. Memory narratives were elicited with a questionnaire (Singer & Moffitt, 1991-1992) and coded for emotional position. As expected, tough, action-packed positions were more prevalent in men’s narratives, and compassionate positions were more prevalent in women’s narratives. Unexpectedly, narratives that emphasized one’s own vulnerability (fear or sadness) were equally prevalent for men and women, and women’s emotional discourse was more conditional upon type of event, i.e., deaths vs. assaults. Findings provide the most explicit evidence to date that some gendered reminiscence practices found in prior studies of children are reflected in late adolescents’ self-defining reminiscences. Implications are also discussed for a more situated understanding of gendered reminiscence pratices and for theories of identity development.

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Taylor, S. E., Kemeny, M. E., Reed, G. M., Bower, J. E., & Gruenewald, T. L. (2000). Psychological resources, positive illusions, and health. American Psychologist, 55, 99-109.

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Seligman, M. E. P., & Csikszentmihalyi, M. (2000). Positive psychology: An introduction. American Psychologist, 55, 5-14.

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Sheldon, K. M., & Kasser, T. (1998). Pursuing personal goals: Skills enable progress but not all progress is beneficial. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 1319–1331.

Although goal theorists have speculated about the causes and consequences of making progress at personal goals, little longitudinal research has examined these issues. In the current prospective study, participants with stronger social and self-regulatory skills made more progress in their goals over the course of a semester. In turn, goal progress predicted increases in psychological well-being, both in short-term (5-day) increments and across the whole semester; At both short- and long-term levels of analysis, however, the amount that well-being increased depended on the “organismic congruence” of participants’ goals. That is, participants benefited most from goal attainment when the goals that they pursued were consistent with inherent psychological needs. We conclude that a fuller understanding of the relations between goals, performance, and psychological well-being requires recourse to both cybernetic and organismic theories of motivation.

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Sheldon, K. M., & Kasser, T. (1995). Coherence and congruence: Two aspects of personality integration. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68, 531–543.

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Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1998). Not all personal goals are personal: Comparing autonomous and controlled reasons for goals as predictors of effort and attainment. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 24, 546–557.

Even when goals are self-generated, they may not feel truly “personal,” that is, autonomous and self-integrated. In three studies (one concurrent and two prospective), we found that the autonomy of personal goals predicted goal attainment. In contrast, the strength of “controlled” motivation did not predict attainment. Studies 2 and 3 validated a mediational model in which autonomy led to attainment because it promoted sustained effort investment. In Study 3, the Goal Attainment Scaling methodology was used to provide a more objective measure of goal attainment, and additional analyses were performed to rule out expectancy, value, and expectancy x value explanations of the autonomy-to-attainment effects. Results are discussed in terms of contemporary models of volition and self-regulation.

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Sheldon, K. M., & Elliot, A. J. (1999). Goal striving, need-satisfaction, and longitudinal well-being: The self-concordance model. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 76, 482–497.

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Sheldon, K. M., Ryan, R. M., & Reis, H. T. (1996). What makes for a good day?: Competence and autonomy in the day and in the person. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 22, 1270–1279.

This diary study examined the proposal that satisfaction of two psychological needs, competence and autonomy, leads to daily well-being. Between-subjects analyses indicated that participants higher in trait competence and trait autonomy tended to have “better” days on average. Independently, within-subject analyses showed that good days were those in which participants felt more competent and autonomous in their daily activities, relative to their own baselines. Other predictors of daily well-being included gender, whether the day fell on a weekend, and the amount of negative affect and physical symptomatology felt the day before. Although past diary studies have tended to focus on threats to daily well-being, the authors suggest that psychological need concepts offer promise for understanding its positive sources.

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Sheldon, K. M., & Houser-Marko, L. (2001). Self-concordance, goal-attainment, and the pursuit of happiness: Can there be an upward spiral? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80, 152– 165.

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Schwartz, B. & Hill, K. E. (2006). Practical wisdom: Aristotle meets positive psychology. Journal of Happiness Studies (7), 377–395

The strengths and virtues identified by positive psychology are treated as logically independent, and it is recommended that people identify their “signature” strengths and cultivate them, because more of a strength is better [Peterson and Seligman: 2004, Character Strengths and Virtues: A Handbook and Classification (Oxford University Press, New York); Seligman: 2002, Authentic Happiness (Free Press, New York)]. The present paper contrasts that view with the Aristotelian view that virtues are interdependent, that happiness (eudaimonia) requires all the virtues, and that more of a virtue is not always better than less. We argue that practical wisdom is the master virtue essential to solving problems of specificity, relevance, and conflict that inevitably arise whenever character strengths must be translated into action in concrete situations. We also argue that practical wisdom is becoming increasingly difficult to nurture and display in modern society, so that attention must be paid to reshaping social institutions to encourage the use of practical wisdom rather than inhibiting it.

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Ryan, R.R., & Deci, E.L. (2000). Self-Determination Theory and the Facilitation of Intrinsic Motivation, Social Development, and Well-Being. American Psychologist, 55, 68-78.

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Reis, H. T., Sheldon, K. M., Ryan, R. M., Gable, S. L., & Roscoe, J. (2000). Daily well-being: The role of autonomy, competence, and relatedness. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 26, 419–443.

Emotional well-being is most typically studied in trait or trait-like terms, yet a growing literature indicates that daily (within-person) fluctuations in emotional well-being may be equally important. The present research explored the hypothesis that daily variations may be understood in terms of the degree to which three basic needs—autonomy, competence, and relatedness—are satisfied in daily activity. Hierarchical linear models were used to examine this hypothesis across 2 weeks of daily activity and well-being reports controlling for trait-level individual differences. Results strongly supported the hypothesis. The authors also examined the social activities that contribute to satisfaction of relatedness needs. The best predictors were meaningful talk and feeling understood and appreciated by interaction partners. Finally, the authors found systematic day-of-the-week variations in emotional well-being and need satisfaction. These results are discussed in terms of the importance of daily activities and the need to consider both trait and day-level determinants of well-being.

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Otake, K., Shimai, S., Tanaka-Matsumi, J., & Fredrickson, B. (2006). Happy People become happier through kindness: A counting kindnesses Intervention. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7, 361–375

We examined the relationship between the character strength of kindness and subjective happiness (Study 1), and the effects of a counting kindnesses intervention on subjective happiness (Study 2). In Study 1, participants were 175 Japanese undergraduate students and in Study 2, participants were 119 Japanese women (71 in the intervention group and 48 in the control group). Results showed that: (a) Happy people scored higher on their motivation to perform, and their recognition and enactment of kind behaviors. (b) Happy people have more happy memories in daily life in terms of both quantity and quality. (c) Subjective happiness was increased simply by counting one’s own acts of kindness for one week. (d) Happy people became more kind and grateful through the counting kindnesses intervention. Discussion centers on the importance of kindness in producing subjective happiness.

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Niedenthal, P. M., Setterland, M. B., & Wherry, M. B. (1992). Possible self-complexity and affective reactions to goal-relevent evaluations. Jornal of Personality and Social Psychology, 63, 5-16.

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Markus, H., & Nurius, P. (1986). Possible selves. American Psychologist, 41, 954-969.

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Alex Linley, A. P., Nielsen, K. M., Wood, A. M., Gillett, R., & Biswas-Diener, R. (2010). Using Signature Strengths in Pursuit of Goals: Effects on Goal Progress, Need Satisfaction, and Well-being, and Implications for Coaching Psychologists.

In recent years there has been a growing interest in research related to the use ofstrengths. Although results from past research have consistently suggested that the useof strengths is associated with higher performance and greater well-being there is, asyet, no clear theory describing how using strengths might contribute to greater well-being or goal progress. In this paper we test a repeated measures cross-sectionalmodel in which using signature strengths is associated with goal progress, which is inturn associated with the fulfilment of psychological needs, and in turn well-being. Ourresults suggest that strengths use is associated with better goal progress, which isassociated with psychological need fulfilment and enhanced well-being. Implicationsfor practice and future research are discussed

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Graham, J., Haidt, J., & Nosek, B. (2009). Liberals and conservatives use different sets of moral foundations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 96, 1029-1046

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Haidt, J., & Graham, J. (2009). Planet of the Durkheimians, Where Community, Authority, and Sacredness are Foundations of Morality. In J. Jost, A. C. Kay, & H. Thorisdottir (Eds.), Social and Psychological Bases of Ideology and System Justification.

Most academic efforts to understand morality and ideology come from theorists who constrain the moral domain to issues of harm and fairness. For such theorists, conservative beliefs are puzzles requiring non-moral explanations. In contrast, we present the “five foundations theory of intuitive ethics,” which broadens the moral domain to match the anthropological literature on morality. We extend the theory by integrating it with a review of the sociological constructs of community, authority, and sacredness, as formulated by Emile Durkheim and others. We present data supporting the theory, which also shows that liberals may have a special difficulty in understanding the morality of conservatives. We suggest that what liberals see as a non-moral motivation for system justification may be better described as a moral motivation to protect society, groups, and the structures and constraints that are often (though not always) beneficial for individuals.

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Schnall, S., Haidt, J., Clore, G., & Jordan, A. (2008). Disgust as embodied moral judgement. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 34, 1096-1109.

How, and for whom, does disgust influence moral judgment? In four experiments participants made moral judgments while experiencing extraneous feelings of disgust. Disgust was induced in Experiment 1 by exposure to a bad smell, in Experiment 2 by working in a disgusting room, in Experiment 3 by recalling a physically disgusting experience, and in Experiment 4 through a video induction. In each case, the results showed that disgust can increase the severity of moral judgments relative to controls. Experiment 4 found that disgust had a different effect on moral judgment than did sadness. In addition, Experiments 2-4 showed that the role of disgust in severity of moral judgments depends on participants’ sensitivity to their own bodily sensations. Taken together, these data indicate the importance—and specificity—of gut feelings in moral judgments.

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Haidt, J. (2008). Morality. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3, 65-72.

Moral psychology is a rapidly growing field with two principle lineages. The main line began with Jean Piaget and includes developmental psychologists who have studied the acquisition of moral concepts and reasoning. The alternative line began in the 1990s with a new synthesis of evolutionary, neurological, and social-psychological research in which the central phenomena are moral emotions and intuitions. In this essay, I show how both of these lines have been shaped by an older debate between two 19th century narratives about modernity: one celebrating the liberation of individuals, the other mourning the loss of community and moral authority. I suggest that both lines of moral psychology have limited themselves to the moral domain prescribed by the liberation narrative, and so one future step for moral psychology should be to study alternative moral perspectives, particularly religious and politically conservative ones in which morality is, in part, about protecting groups, institutions, and souls.

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Haidt, J. (2007). The new synthesis in moral psychology. Science, 316, 998-1002

I was invited to summarize the state of the art in moral psychology for Science. I had to say it all in less than 2 pages. This exercize helped me to identify the 4 principles of moral psychology that now guide my approach to so much of moral and political psychology: 1) Intuitive primacy (but not dictatorship), 2) Moral thinking is for social doing, 3) Morality binds and builds, 4) There is more to morality than harm and fairness.

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Haidt, J., & Kesebir, S. (2010). Morality. In S. Fiske, & D. Gilbert (Eds.) Handbook of Social Psychology, 5th Edition

This is my absolute most-complete statement on what morality is, where it comes from, how it works, and why people disagree about it. It is in essence a precis of my next book, The Righteous Mind. It’s long, and it’s written for an audience of social psychologists, but it should be accessible to non-specialists.

In one of the earliest textbooks of social psychology, William McDougall wrote that “ The fundamental prob-
lem of social psychology is the moralization of the individual by the society into which he is born as a creature
in which the non – moral and purely egoistic tendencies are so much stronger than any altruistic tendencies ”
(McDougall, 1908/1998, p. 18). McDougall dreamed of a social psychology that would span the study of individu-
als and societies, and he believed morality would be the main bridge. He hoped that social psychology would one
day document the full set of “ instincts ” and other endowments present in individual minds, and then demonstrate how these were activated and combined to create large and cooperative groups of individuals. If McDougall could come back today and see how his beloved field has fared, what would he think of its progress?…

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Lyubomirsky, S. (2001). Why are some people happier than others? The role of cognitive and motivational processes in well-being. American Psychologist, 56, 239-249.

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Lykken, D., & Tellegen, A. (1996). Happiness is a stochastic phenomenon. Psychological Science, 7, 186-189.

Happiness, or subjective well-being, was measured on a birth-record-based sample of several thousand middle-aged twins using the Well-Being (WB) scale of the Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire Neither socioeconomic status, educational attainment, family income, marital status, nor an indicant of religious commitment could account for more than about 3% of the variance in WB From 44% to 52% of the variance in WB, however, is associated with genetic variation Based on the retest of smaller samples of twins after intervals of 4 5 and 10 years, we estimate that the heriability of the stable component of subjective well-being approaches 80%

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Peterson, C. (2000). The future of optimism. American Psychologist, 55 (1), 44-55.

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Lazarus, R.S., (1991). Emotion and adaptation. New York: Oxford University Press. In Pervin, L. A. (Ed.). Handbook of personality: Theory and Research, pp609-637, New York: Guilford.

No Abstract. Discussion of emotion and it’s place in psychology as a field. Worth reading if you’re doing a paper on emotion, but note the date and get more recent stuff too.

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Keltner, D., & Haidt, J. (2003). Approaching awe, a moral, spiritual, and aesthetic emotion. Cognition and Emotion, 17, 297-314.

In this paper we present a prototype approach to awe. We suggest that two appraisals are central and are present in all clear cases of awe: perceived vastness, and a need for accommodation, defined as an inability to assimilate an experience into current mental structures. Five additional appraisals account for variation in the hedonic tone of awe experiences: threat, beauty, exceptional ability, virtue, and the supernatural. We derive this perspective from a review of what has been written about awe in religion, philosophy, sociology, and psychology, and then we apply this perspective to an analysis of awe and related states such as admiration, elevation, and the epiphanic experience.

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Kashdan, T.B. (2004). The assessment of subjective well-being (issues raised by the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire). Personality and Individual Differences, 36, 1225-1232.

This commentary raises conceptual issues related to recent efforts to develop measures of subjective well-being (SWB). Specifically, Hills’ and Argyle’s (2002) article on the development of the 29-item Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), and its predecessor, the 20-item Oxford Happiness Inventory (Argyle, Martin & Crossland, 1989). Instead of assessing the structure of subjective well-being (SWB), items of the OHQ tap into self-esteem, sense of purpose, social interest and kindness, sense of humor, and aesthetic appreciation. The item content of the OHQ fails to differentiate the assessment of SWB from the predictors, correlates, and consequences of SWB. In contrast to published SWB findings with other measures, data are presented suggesting that the OHQ has artificially inflated correlations with those constructs tapped by the OHQ: self-esteem, sense of purpose, and social interest/extraversion. The operationalization of SWB by the OHQ is not based on relevant definition and theory and appears to invite nonrandom error into the study of SWB. The article concludes with an appeal for the use of more stringent conceptual and analytic approaches.

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Hills, P., & Argyle, M. (2002). The Oxford Happiness Questionnaire: a compact scale for the measurement of psychological well-being. Personality and Individual Differences, 33, 1073-1082.

An improved instrument, the Oxford Happiness Questionnaire (OHQ), has been derived from the Oxford Happiness Inventory, (OHI). The OHI comprises 29 items, each involving the selection of one of four options that are different for each item. The OHQ includes similar items to those of the OHI, each presented as a single statement which can be endorsed on a uniform six-point Likert scale. The revised instrument is compact, easy to administer and allows endorsements over an extended range. When tested against the OHI, the validity of the OHQ was satisfactory and the associations between the scales and a battery of personality variables known to be associated with well-being, were stronger for the OHQ than for the OHI. Although parallel factor analyses of OHI and the OHQ produced virtually identical statistical results, the solution for the OHQ could not be interpreted. The previously reported factorisability of the OHI may owe more to the way the items are formatted and presented, than to the nature of the items themselves. Sequential orthogonal factor analyses of the OHQ identified a single higher order factor, which suggests that the construct of well-being it measures is uni-dimensional. Discriminant analysis has been employed to produce a short-form version of the OHQ with eight items.

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Jadad A. R., Moore, R. A., Carroll, D., Jenkinson, C., Reynolds, D. J., Gavaghan, D. J., et al. (1996). Assessing the quality of reports of randomized clinical trials: Is blinding necessary? Controlled Clinical Trials, 17(1),1–12.

It has been suggested that the quality of clinical trials should be assessed by blinded raters to limit the risk of introducing bias into meta-analyses and systematic reviews, and into the peer-review process. There is very little evidence in the literature to substantiate this. This study describes the development of an instrument to assess the quality of reports of randomized clinical trials (RCTs) in pain research and its use to determine the effect of rater blinding on the assessments of quality. A multidisciplinary panel of six judges produced an initial version of the instrument. Fourteen raters from three different backgrounds assessed the quality of 36 research reports in pain research, selected from three different samples. Seven were allocated randomly to perform the assessments under blind conditions. The final version of the instrument included three items. These items were scored consistently by all the raters regardless of background and could discriminate between reports from the different samples. Blind assessments produced significantly lower and more consistent scores than open assessments. The implications of this finding for systematic reviews, meta-analytic research and the peer-review process are discussed.

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Lawler, D. A., & Hopker, S. W. (2001). The effectiveness of exercise as an intervention in the management of depression: systematic review and meta-regression analysis of randomised controlled trials. BMJ, 322, 763

Objective: To determine the effectiveness of exercise as an intervention in the management of depression.
Design: Systematic review and meta-regression analysis of randomised controlled trials obtained from five electronic databases (Medline, Embase, Sports Discus, PsycLIT, Cochrane Library) and through contact with experts in the field, bibliographic searches, and hand searches of recent copies of relevant journals.
Main outcome measures: Standardised mean difference in effect size and weighted mean difference in Beck depression inventory score between exercise and no treatment and between exercise and cognitive therapy.
Results: All of the 14 studies analysed had important methodological weaknesses; randomisation was adequately concealed in only three studies, intention to treat analysis was undertaken in only two, and assessment of outcome was blinded in only one. The participants in most studies were community volunteers, and diagnosis was determined by their score on the Beck depression inventory. When compared with no treatment, exercise reduced symptoms of depression (standardised mean difference in effect size -1.1 (95% confidence interval -1.5 to -0.6); weighted mean difference in Beck depression inventory -7.3 (-10.0 to -4.6)). The effect size was significantly greater in those trials with shorter follow up and in two trials reported only as conference abstracts. The effect of exercise was similar to that of cognitive therapy (standardised mean difference -0.3 (95% confidence interval -0.7 to 0.1)).
Conclusions: The effectiveness of exercise in reducing symptoms of depression cannot be determined because of a lack of good quality research on clinical populations with adequate follow up.

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Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218-226.

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Deci, E. L., & Ryan, R. M. (2000). The “what” and “why” of goal pursuits: Human needs and the self-determination of behavior. Psychological Inquiry, 4, 227–268.

Self-determination theory (SDT) maintains that an understanding of human motivation requires a consideration of innate psychological needs for competence, autonomy, and relatedness. We discuss the SDT concept of needs as it relates to previous need theories, emphasizing that needs specify the necessary conditions for psychological growth, integrity, and well-being. This concept of needs leads to the hypotheses that different regulatory processes underlying goal pursuits are differentially associated with effective functioning and well-being and also that different goal contents have different relations to the quality of behavior and mental health, specifically because different regulatory processes and different goal contents are associated with differing degrees of need satisfaction. Social contexts and individual differences that support satisfaction of the basic needs facilitate natural growth processes including intrinsically motivated behavior and integration of extrinsic motivations, whereas those that forestall autonomy, competence, or relatedness are associated with poorer motivation, performance, and well-being. We also discuss the relation of the psychological needs to cultural values, evolutionary processes, and other contemporary motivation theories.

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Baumeister, R. F., & Vohs, K. D. (2007). Self-Regulation, Ego Depletion, and Motivation. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 1, 1-14.

Motivation is underappreciated in self-regulation theories (as is true in social personality psychology at large). This paper reviews the role of motivation in the context of the strength, or limited-resource, model of self-control in several domains. Sacrificing one desire in order to pursue another is more difficult when the incipient response is strongly motivated, a notion that highlights the struggle between urges and restraints. A reduction in ego resources can be temporarily overcome by strong motivation – nevertheless, ego depletion is not solely a loss of motivation: Recent experiments indicate that regulatory resources are rooted in physical energy stores. Motivational conflicts, especially the clash between selfish motives and behaviors that promote social acceptance, set the stage for the necessity of self-regulation and the circumstances in which ego depletion is most likely.

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Trivers, R. L. (1971). The evolution of reciprocal altruism. The Quarterly Review of Biology, 46(1), p35-57

A model is presented to account for the natural selection of what is termed reciprocally altruistic behavior. The model shows how selection can operate against the cheater (non-reciprocator) in the system. Three instances of altruistic behavior are discussed, the evolution of which the model can explain: (1) behavior involved in cleaning symbioses; (2) warning cries in birds; and (3) human reciprocal altruism. Regarding human reciprocal altruism, it is shown that the details of the psychological system that regulates this altruism can be explained by the model. Specifically, friendship, dislike, moralistic aggression, gratitude, sympathy, trust, suspicion, trustworthiness, aspects of guilt, and some forms of dishonesty and hypocrisy can be explained as important adaptations to regulate the altruistic system. Each individual human is seen as possessing altruistic and cheating tendencies, the expression of which is sensitive to developmental variables that were selected to set the tendencies at a balance appropriate to the local social and ecological environment.

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Smyth, J., True, N., & Souto, J. (2001). Effects of writing about traumatic experiences: The necessity for narrative structuring. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 20(2), 161-172

Although writing about traumatic events has been shown to produce a variety of health benefits, little is known about how writing produces benefits. The degree to which individuals form narrative structure when writing may predict health improvements. This study manipulated narrative formation during writing to test if narrative structure is necessary for writing to be beneficial. A total of 116 healthy students were randomly assigned to write about control topics or about their thoughts and feelings regarding the most traumatic event of their life in one of two ways: list in an fragmented format or construct a narrative. Individuals asked to form a narrative reported less restriction of activity because of illness and showed higher avoidant thinking than the other groups. The fragmented writing group did not differ from controls on any measure. These data (a) demonstrate that instructions to form a narrative produce a different response to writing than instructions to form fragmented and control writing and (b) suggest narrative formation may be required to achieve health benefits.

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Smyth, J. (1998). Written emotional expression: Effect sizes, outcome types, and moderating variables. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 66(1), 174-184

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Sheldon, K. M. & Lyubomirsky, S (2006). How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualising best possible selves. Journal of Positive Psychology, 1(2), 73-82.

A 4-week experimental study (N = 67) examined the motivational predictors and positive emotion outcomes of regularly practicing two mental exercises: counting one’s blessings (“gratitude”) and visualizing best possible selves (“BPS”). In a control exercise, participants attended to the details of their day. Undergraduates performed one of the three exercises during Session I and were asked to continue performing it at home until Session II (in 2 weeks) and again until Session III (in a further 2 weeks). Following previous theory and research, the practices of gratitude and BPS were expected to boost immediate positive affect, relative to the control condition. In addition, we hypothesized that continuing effortful performance of these exercises would be necessary to maintain the boosts (Lyubomirsky, S., Sheldon, K. M., & Schkade, D. (2005a). Pursuing happiness: The architecture of sustainable change. Review of General Psychology, 9, 111-131). Finally, initial self-concordant motivation to perform the exercise was expected to predict actual performance and to moderate the effects of performance on increased mood. Results generally supported these hypotheses, and suggested that the BPS exercise may be most beneficial for raising and maintaining positive mood. Implications of the results for understanding the critical factors involved in increasing and sustaining positive affect are discussed.

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Pennebaker, J. W. (1997). Writing about emotional experiences as a therapeutic process. Psychological Science, 8(3), 162-166.

For the past decade, an increasing number of studies have demonstrated that when individuals write about emotional experiences, significant physical and mental health improvements follow The basic paradigm and findings are summarized along with some boundary conditions Although a reduction in inhibition may contribute to the disclosure phenomenon changes in basic cognitive and linguistic processes during writing predict better health Implications for theory and treatment are discussed.

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McCullough, M. E., Emmons, R. A., Tsang, J. A. (2002). The grateful disposition: A conceptual and empirical topography. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82(1), 112-127

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Fredrickson, B. L., Tugade, M. M., Waugh, C. E., & Larkin, G. R. (2003). What good are positive emotions in crises? A prospective study of resilience and emotions following the terrorist attacks on The United States on September 11, 2001. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 84(2), 365-376

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Fredrickson, B. L. (1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology. 2(3), 300-319.

This article opens by noting that positive emotions do not fit existing models of emotions. Consequently, a new model is advanced to describe the form and function of a subset of positive emotions, including joy, interest, contentment, and love. This new model posits that these positive emotions serve to broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoire, which in turn has the effect of building that individual’s physical, intellectual, and social resources. Empirical evidence to support this broaden-and-build model of positive emotions is reviewed, and implications for emotion regulation and health promotion are discussed.

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Emmons, R. A., & McCullough, M. E. (2003). Counting blessings versus burdens: An experimental investigation of gratitude and subjective well-being in daily life. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. 84(2), 377-389

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Burton, C. M., & King, L A. (2004). The health benefits of writing about intensely positive experiences. Journal of Research in Personality, 38, 150-163

In a variation on Pennebaker’s writing paradigm, a sample of 90 undergraduates were randomly assigned to write about either an intensely positive experience (IPE) (n=48) or a control topic (n=42) for 20 min each day for three consecutive days. Mood measures were taken before and after writing. Three months later, measures of health center visits for illness were obtained. Writing about IPEs was associated with enhanced positive mood. Writing about IPEs was also associated with significantly fewer health center visits for illness, compared to controls. Results are interpreted as challenging previously considered mechanisms of the positive benefits of writing.

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Mischel, W., Shoda, Y., & Rodriguez, M. L. (1989). Delay of gratification in children. Science, 244, 933-938.

To function effectively, individuals must voluntarily postpone immediate gratification and persist in goal-directed behavior for the sake of later outcomes. The present research program analyzed the nature of this type of future-oriented self-control and the psychological processes that underlie it. Enduring individual differences in self-control were found as early as the preschool years. Those 4-year-old children who delayed gratification longer in certain laboratory situations developed into more cognitively and socially competent adolescents, achieving higher scholastic performance and coping better with frustration and stress. Experiments in the same research program also identified specific cognitive and attentional processes that allow effective self-regulation early in the course of development. The experimental results, in turn, specified the particular types of preschool delay situations diagnostic for predicting aspects of cognitive and social competence later in life.

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Jog, M. S., Kubota, Y., Connolly, C. I., Hillegaart, V. and Graybiel, A. M. (1999) Building neural representations of habits. Science, 286, 1745-1749.

Memories for habits and skills (“implicit or procedural memory”) and memories for facts (“explicit or episodic memory”) are built up in different brain systems and are vulnerable to different neurodegenerative disorders in humans. So that the striatum-based mechanisms underlying habit formation could be studied, chronic recordings from ensembles of striatal neurons were made with multiple tetrodes as rats learned a T-maze procedural task. Large and widely distributed changes in the neuronal activity patterns occurred in the sensorimotor striatum during behavioral acquisition, culminating in task-related activity emphasizing the beginning and end of the automatized procedure. The new ensemble patterns remained stable during weeks of subsequent performance of the same task. These results suggest that the encoding of action in the sensorimotor striatum undergoes dynamic reorganization as habit learning proceeds.

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Dweck, C. S., Chiu, C., Hong. Y. (1995). Implicit theories and their role in judgment and reactions: A world from two perspectives. Psychological Inquiry, 6, 267-285.

In this target article, we present evidence for a new model of individual differences in judgments and reactions. The model holds that people’s implicit theories about human attributes structure the way they understand and react to human actions and outcomes. We review research showing that when people believe that attributes (such as intelligence or moral character) are fixed, trait-like entities (an entity theory), they tend to understand outcomes and actions in terms of these fixed traits (‘I failed the test because I am dumb’ or ‘He stole the bread because he is dishonest’). In contrast, when people believe that attributes are more dynamic, malleable, and developable (an incremental theory), they tend to focus less on broad traits and, instead, tend to understand outcomes and actions in terms of more specific behavioral or psychological mediators (‘I failed the test because of my effort or strategy’ or ‘He stole the bread because he was desperate’). The two frameworks also appear to foster different reactions: helpless versus mastery-oriented responses to personal setbacks and an emphasis on retribution versus education or rehabilitation for transgressions. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for personality, motivation, and social perception.

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Duckworth, A. L., Steen, T. A., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Positive psychology in clinical practice. Annual Review of Clinical Psychology, 1(1), 629-651.

Positive psychology is the scientific study of positive experiences and positive individual traits, and the institutions that facilitate their development. A field concerned with well-being and optimal functioning, positive psychology aims to broaden the focus of clinical psychology beyond suffering and its direct alleviation. Our proposed conceptual framework parses happiness into three domains: pleasure, engagement, and meaning. For each of these constructs, there are now valid and practical assessment tools appropriate for the clinical setting. Additionally, mounting evidence demonstrates the efficacy and effectiveness of positive interventions aimed at cultivating pleasure, engagement, and meaning. We contend that positive interventions are justifiable in their own right. Positive interventions may also usefully supplement direct attempts to prevent and treat psychopathology and, indeed, may covertly be a central component of good psychotherapy as it is done now.

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Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Self-discipline gives girls the edge: Gender in self-discipline, grades, and achievement test scores. Journal of Educational Psychology, 98(1), 198-208.

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Duckworth, A. L., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2005). Self-discipline outdoes IQ in predicting academic performance of adolescents. Psychological Science, 16(12), 939-944.

In a longitudinal study of 140 eighth-grade students, self-discipline measured by self-report, parent report, teacher report, and monetary choice questionnaires in the fall predicted final grades, school attendance, standardized achievement-test scores, and selection into a competitive high school program the following spring. In a replication with 164 eighth graders, a behavioral delay-of-gratification task, a questionnaire on study habits, and a group-administered IQ test were added. Self-discipline measured in the fall accounted for more than twice as much variance as IQ in final grades, high school selection, school attendance, hours spent doing homework, hours spent watching television (inversely), and the time of day students began their homework. The effect of self-discipline on final grades held even when controlling for first-marking-period grades, achievement-test scores, and measured IQ. These findings suggest a major reason for students falling short of their intellectual potential: their failure to exercise self-discipline.

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Baumeister, R. F., Gailliot, M., DeWall, C. N., & Oaten, M. (2006). Self-regulation and personality: How interventions increase regulatory success, and how depletion moderates the effects of traits on behaviour. Journal of Personality, 74(6), 1773-1801.

Self-regulation is a highly adaptive, distinctively human trait that enables people to override and alter their responses, including changing themselves so as to live up to social and other standards. Recent evidence indicates that self-regulation often consumes a limited resource, akin to energy or strength, thereby creating a temporary state of ego depletion. This article summarizes recent evidence indicating that regular exercises in self-regulation can produce broad improvements in self-regulation (like strengthening a muscle), making people less vulnerable to ego depletion. Furthermore, it shows that ego depletion moderates the effects of many traits on behavior, particularly such that wide differences in socially disapproved motivations produce greater differences in behavior
when ego depletion weakens the customary inner restraints.

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Ruini, C., & Fava, G. A. (2004) Clinical applications of well-being therapy. In P. A. Linley & S. Joseph (Eds.), Positive psychology in practice (pp. 371-387). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

THE CONCEPT OF psychological well-being has received increasing attention in clinical psychology. Recent investigations have documented the complex relationship among well-being, distress, and personality traits, both in clinical (Fava, Rafanelli, etal., 2001) and nonclinical populations (Ruini etal., 2003). The findings show that psychological well-being could not be equated with the absence of symptomatology, nor with personality traits. It is thus particularly important to analyze the concept of well-being in clinical settings, with emphasis on changes in well-being occurring during psychotherapy.

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Linley, P. A., & Joseph, S. (Eds.). (2004). Positive psychology in practice. Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley.

Full book.

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Joseph, S., & Linley, A. (2004) Positive therapy: A positive psychological theory of therapeutic practice. In P. A. Linley & S. Joseph (Eds.), Positive psychology in practice (pp. 354-368). New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc.

IN THIS CHAPTER, we explore the relevance of positive psychology to therapy. We are interested in what positive psychology has to offer in how we think aboutthe ways we work with people, whether in clinical and health care settings orother applied psychological settings. First, we describe what we see as a funda-mental assumption of positive psychology. Second, we discuss the implication ofthis assumption for therapy practice. It is not our intention to advocate new ways of working therapeutically, but rather to ask what it is to work therapeutically within a positive psychology framework. Can some therapies be considered posi-tive therapies? Our answer to this is yes. In particular, those therapies based onthe theoretical premise of an organismic valuing process and an actualizing ten-dency appear to be most consistent with what the positive psychology research is now telling us.

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Sallis, J. F., McKenzie, T. L., Kolody, B., Lewis, M., Marshall, S. & Rosengard P. (1999). Effects of health-related physical education on academic achievement: Project SPARK. Research Quarterly for Exercise and Sport, 70, 127-134

The effects of 2 year health-related school physical education program on standardized academic achievement scores was assessed in 759 childn-n who completed Metropolitan Achievement TestS’ befare and after the program. Schools wen’randomly assigned to condition: ( a) Specialists taught the Sports, Play, and Active Recreation for Kids cumculum; (b) classroom teachers wen’ trained to implement the cumculum,. and ( c) controls continued their usual programs. The Trained Teacher condition was superior to Control on Language, Reading, and Basic Battery. The Specialist condition was superior to Control on Reading, but inferior on Language. Despite devoting twice as many minutes per week to physical education as Controls, the health-related physical education program did not interfere with academic achievement. Health-related physical education may have favorable effects on
students’ academic achievement.

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Kritz-Silverstein, D., Barrett-Connor, E., & Corbeau, C. (2001). Cross-sectional and prospective study of exercise and depressed mood in the elderly – The Rancho Bernardo study. American Journal of Epidemiology, 153(6), 596-603.

This study examined cross-sectional and prospective associations of exercise with depressed mood in a community-based sample of older men and women (aged 50-89 years in 1984-1987) in southern California. Regular strenuous exercise and exercise ?3 times per week were reported; depressed mood was assessed by using the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI). After exclusion of persons with categorical depression and those rating themselves largely or extremely physically limited during the previous month, data on 932 men and 1,097 women were available for cross-sectional analysis. Exercise and depressed mood were reassessed for 404 men and 540 women in 1992-1995; these data were the focus of prospective analyses. In 1984-1987, exercise rates were high (>80%), and average BDI scores were low. Cross-sectional analyses indicated that before and after adjustment for covariates, exercise was significantly associated with less depressed mood. However, prospective analyses of the 944 persons who attended both clinic visits indicated no association between baseline exercise and either follow-up BDI score (p > 0.10) or change in BDI score between baseline and follow-up (p > 0.10). Results confirm that exercisers have less depressed mood. However, exercise does not protect against future depressed mood for those not clinically depressed at baseline.

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Dienstbier, R.A. (1989). Arousal and physiological toughness: Implications for mental and physical health. Psychological Review, 96, 84-100.

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Blumenthal, J. A., Babyak, M.A., Moore, K. A., Craighead, W. E., Herman, S., Khatri, P., Waugh, R., Napolitano, M. A., Forman, L. M., Appelbaum, M., Doraiswamy, P. M., & Krishnan, K. R. (1999). Effects of exercise training on older patients with major depression. Archives of Internal Medicine, 159, 2349-2356.

Background Previous observational and interventional studies have suggested that regular physical exercise may be associated with reduced symptoms of depression. However, the extent to which exercise training may reduce depressive symptoms in older patients with major depressive disorder (MDD) has not been systematically evaluated.

Objective To assess the effectiveness of an aerobic exercise program compared with standard medication (ie, antidepressants) for treatment of MDD in older patients, we conducted a 16-week randomized controlled trial.

Methods One hundred fifty-six men and women with MDD (age, 50 years) were assigned randomly to a program of aerobic exercise, antidepressants (sertraline hydrochloride), or combined exercise and medication. Subjects underwent comprehensive evaluations of depression, including the presence and severity of MDD using Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, Fourth Edition criteria and Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HAM-D) and Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) scores before and after treatment. Secondary outcome measures included aerobic capacity, life satisfaction, self-esteem, anxiety, and dysfunctional cognitions.

Results After 16 weeks of treatment, the groups did not differ statistically on HAM-D or BDI scores (P = .67); adjustment for baseline levels of depression yielded an essentially identical result. Growth curve models revealed that all groups exhibited statistically and clinically significant reductions on HAM-D and BDI scores. However, patients receiving medication alone exhibited the fastest initial response; among patients receiving combination therapy, those with less severe depressive symptoms initially showed a more rapid response than those with initially more severe depressive symptoms.

Conclusions An exercise training program may be considered an alternative to antidepressants for treatment of depression in older persons. Although antidepressants may facilitate a more rapid initial therapeutic response than exercise, after 16 weeks of treatment exercise was equally effective in reducing depression among patients with MDD.

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Babyak, M. A., Blumenthal, J. A., Herman, S., Khatri, P., Doraiswamy, P. M., Moore, K. A., Craighead, W. E., Baldewicz, T. T., & Krishnan, K. R. (2000). Exercise treatment for major depression: Maintenance of therapeutic benefit at 10 months. Psychosomatic Medicine, 62, 633-638.

OBJECTIVE: The purpose of this study was to assess the status of 156 adult volunteers with major depressive disorder (MDD) 6 months after completion of a study in which they were randomly assigned to a 4-month course of aerobic exercise, sertraline therapy, or a combination of exercise and sertraline.

METHODS: The presence and severity of depression were assessed by clinical interview using the Diagnostic Interview Schedule and the Hamilton Rating Scale for Depression (HRSD) and by self-report using the Beck Depression Inventory. Assessments were performed at baseline, after 4 months of treatment, and 6 months after treatment was concluded (ie, after 10 months).

RESULTS: After 4 months patients in all three groups exhibited significant improvement; the proportion of remitted participants (ie, those who no longer met diagnostic criteria for MDD and had an HRSD score <8) was comparable across the three treatment conditions. After 10 months, however, remitted subjects in the exercise group had significantly lower relapse rates (p = .01) than subjects in the medication group. Exercising on one’s own during the follow-up period was associated with a reduced probability of depression diagnosis at the end of that period (odds ratio = 0.49, p = .0009).

CONCLUSIONS: Among individuals with MDD, exercise therapy is feasible and is associated with significant therapeutic benefit, especially if exercise is continued over time.

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Wallah, H., Buhheld, N., Buttenmueller V., Kleinknecht, N., Smidt, S. (2006). Measuring mindfulness: the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory. Personality and Individual Differences, 40, 1543-1555.

Mindfulness, a concept originally derived from Buddhist psychology, is essential for some well-known clinical interventions. Therefore an instrument for measuring mindfulness is useful. We report here on two studies constructing and validating the Freiburg Mindfulness Inventory (FMI) including a short form. A preliminary questionnaire was constructed through expert interviews and extensive literature analysis and tested in 115 subjects attending mindfulness meditation retreats. This psychometrically sound 30-item scale with an internal consistency of Cronbach alpha = .93 was able to significantly demonstrate the increase in mindfulness after the retreat and to discriminate between experienced and novice meditators. In a second study we broadened the scope of the concept to 86 subjects without meditation experience, 117 subjects with clinical problems, and 54 participants from retreats. Reducing the scale to a short form with 14 items resulted in a semantically robust and psychometrically stable (alpha = .86) form. Correlation with other relevant constructs (self-awareness, dissociation, global severity index, meditation experience in years) was significant in the medium to low range of correlations and lends construct validity to the scale. Principal Component Analysis suggests one common factor. This short scale is sensitive to change and can be used also with subjects without previous meditation experience.

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Shapiro, S., Astin, J., Bishop, S., & Cordova, M. (2005). Mindfulness-based stress reduction for health care professionals: results from a randomized trial. International Journal of Stress Management, 12(2), 164-176.

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Baer, R., Smith, G., Hopkins, J., Krietemeyer, J., Toney, L. (2006) Using self-report assessment methods to exploring facets of mindfulness. Assessment, 13(1), 27-45.

The authors examine the facet structure of mindfulness using five recently developed mindfulness questionnaires. Two large samples of undergraduate students completed mindfulness questionnaires and measures of other constructs. Psychometric properties of the mindfulness questionnaires were examined, including internal consistency and convergent and discriminant relationships with other variables. Factor analyses of the combined pool of items from the mindfulness questionnaires suggested that collectively they contain five clear, interpretable facets of mindfulness. Hierarchical confirmatory factor analyses suggested that at least four of the identified factors are components of an overall mindfulness construct and that the factor structure of mindfulness may vary with meditation experience. Mindfulness facets were shown to be differentially correlated in expected ways with several other constructs and to have incremental validity in the prediction of psychological symptoms. Findings suggest that conceptualizing mindfulness as a multifaceted construct is helpful in understanding its components and its relationships with other variables.

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Sin, N. L., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). Enhancing well-being and alleviating depressive symptoms with positive psychology interventions: A practice-friendly meta-analysis. Journal of Clinical Psychology: In Session, 65, 467-487.

Do positive psychology interventions – that is, treatment methods or intentional activities aimed at cultivating positive feelings, positive behaviors, or positive cognitions – enhance well-being and ameliorate depressive symptoms? A meta-analysis of 51 such interventions with 4,266 individuals was conducted to address this question and to provide practical guidance to clinicians. The results revealed that positive psychology interventions do indeed significantly enhance well-being (mean r=.29) and decrease depressive symptoms (mean r=.31). In addition, several factors were found to impact the effectiveness of positive psychology interventions, including the depression status, self-selection, and age of participants, as well as the format and duration of the interventions. Accordingly, clinicians should be encouraged to incorporate positive psychology techniques into their clinical work, particularly for treating clients who are depressed, relatively older, or highly motivated to improve. Our findings also suggest that clinicians would do well to deliver positive psychology interventions as individual (versus group) therapy and for relatively longer periods of time.

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Sheldon, K. M., & Lyubomirsky, S. (in press). Change your actions, not your circumstances: An experimental test of the Sustainable Happiness Model. In A. K. Dutt & B. Radcliff (Eds.), Happiness, economics, and politics: Toward a multi-disciplinary approach. New York: Edward Elgar.

Is it possible to become a happier person? This is an enormously important issue for subjective well-being (SWB) researchers, as well as for the burgeoning field of positive psychology (Seligman & Csikszentmihalyi, 2000, Sheldon, 2004). Indeed, if happiness cannot be lastingly increased, then one of the basic premises of positive psychology is suspect – namely, that positive psychology is about more than curing disorders or “bringing people back to 0,” but is instead about helping to move people “beyond 0,” to new heights of fulfillment and satisfaction (Seligman, 2002).

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Rejeski, W. J., Shelton, B., Miller, M. E., Dunn, A. L., King, A. C., Sallis, J. F., et al. (2001). Mediators of increased physical activity and change in subjective well-being: Results from the Activity Counseling Trial (ACT). Journal of Health Psychology, 6(2), 159-168.

The purpose of this study was to examine whether change in satisfaction with physical function (SF), satisfaction with physical appearance (SA), and self-efficacy (SE) mediate the effects that increased physical activity has on change in subjective well-being (SWB). Participants in this investigation consisted of 854 men (n = 471) and women (n = 383) who took part in the Activity Counseling Trial (ACT). ACT was a 24-month multicenter, randomized controlled trial to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions to promote physical activity in the primary care setting. Participants were assigned to one of three treatments: standard care control, staff-assisted intervention, or staff-counseling intervention. Results revealed that, irrespective of treatment arm, change in physical activity was related to change in SBW and to change in all mediators of interest. A statistical test of mediation revealed that the influence of change in physical activity on SWB was due to change in all three mediators with change in SF making the greatest contribution to the model.

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Liberman, V., Boehm, J. K., Lyubomirsky, S., & Ross, L. D. (2009). Happiness and memory: Affective significance of endowment and contrast. Emotion, 9, 666-680.

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King, L. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 798-807.

In a variation on Pennebaker’s writing paradigm, a sample of 81 undergraduates wrote about one of four topics for 20 minutes each day for 4 consecutive days. Participants were randomly assigned to write about their most traumatic life event, their best possible future self, both of these topics, or a nonemotional control topic. Mood was measured before and after writing and health center data for illness were obtained with participant consent. Three weeks later, measures of subjective well-being were obtained. Writing about life goals was significantly less upsetting than writing about trauma and was associated with a significant increase in subjective well-being. Five months after writing, a significant interaction emerged such that writing about trauma, one’s best possible self, or both were associated with decreased illness compared with controls. Results indicate that writing about self-regulatory topics can be associated with the same health benefits as writing about trauma.

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Hefferon, K., Grealy, M. & Mutrie, N. (2008). The perceived influence of an exercise class intervention on the process and outcomes of posttraumatic growth. Journal of Mental Health and Physical Activity, 1 (1), 32-39.

Post-traumatic growth (PTG) is the phenomenon of positive change through the experience of trauma and has been linked recently to the participation in group based therapies. The aim of this study was the explorative documentation of the experience of PTG among breast cancer patients and the role, if any, that a group based physical activity intervention had in the attainment of growth. Ten female breast cancer survivors, from an already existing study, participated in an individual, open-ended interview. Employing interpretive phenomenological analysis (IPA), interviews were transcribed verbatim and analysed for themes that reflected the women’s experience of growing from adversity. The women attributed much of their process and outcomes of PTG to the experience of participating in an exercise intervention programme during rehabilitation. The programme’s success in facilitating PTG could be viewed as superior in some ways to other group based therapies in offering the women a safe environment, positive support system, opportunity to transfer new skills and heightened health awareness/behaviours. Future research should acknowledge and conduct further investigations into the role of physical activity interventions as facilitators of the PTG process.

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Fordyce, M. W. (1983). A Program to Increase Happiness: Further Studies. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 30(4), 483-498

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Fordyce, M.W. (1977). Development of a program to increase personal happiness. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 24, 511-521.

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Gable, S. L., Impett, E. A., Reis, H. T., & Asher, E. R. (2004). What do you do when things go right? The Intrapersonal and Interpersonal Benefits of Sharing Positive Events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 87, 228-245.

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Camacho, T. C., Roberts, R. E., Lazarus, N. B., Kaplan, G. A., & Cohen, R. D. (1991). Physical activity and depression- Evidence from the Almeda county study. American Journal of Epidemiology, 134(2), 220-231.

The relation between level of physical activity and risk of subsequent depression was examined using three waves of data from the Alameda County Study. Among subjects who were not depressed at baseline, those who reported a low activity level were at significantly greater risk for depression at the 1974 follow-up than were those who reported high levels of activity at baseline. Adjustments for physical health, socioeco-nomic status, life events, social supports, and other health habits did not affect the association appreciably. Associations between 1965–1974 changes in activity level and depression in the 1983 follow-up suggest that the risk of depression can be altered by changes in exercise habits, although these associations were not statistically significant after adjustment for covariates. These results provide somewhat stronger evidence for an activity-depression link than do previous studies, and they argue for the inclusion of exercise programs as part of community mental health programs, as well as for further studies that focus on the relation between life-style and mental health.

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Bryant, F.B., Smart, C.M., & King, S.P. (2005). Using the past to enhance the present: Boosting happiness through positive reminiscence. Journal of Happiness Studies, 6, 227-260.

Two studies explored relations between positive reminiscing and emotional experience – a survey of naturally occurring reminiscence (Study 1) and a field experiment testing the affective consequences of two styles of reminiscing (Study 2). In Study 1, frequency of positive reminiscing predicted perceived ability to enjoy life, and students who reminisced using cognitive imagery reported a greater ability to savor positive events than those who reminisced using memorabilia. In Study 2, students were randomly assigned either to reminisce about pleasant memories using cognitive imagery, reminisce about pleasant memories using memorabilia, or think about current concerns (control condition) for 10?min twice daily for a week. Both reminiscence groups reported greater increases in the percent of time they felt happy over the past week than the control group; and happiness increased more in the cognitive imagery group than in the memorabilia group.

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Boehm, J. K., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2009). The promise of sustainable happiness. In S. J. Lopez (Ed.), Handbook of positive psychology (2nd ed.; pp. 667-677). Oxford: Oxford University Press.

From ancient history to recent times, philosophers, writers, self-help gurus, and now scientists have taken up the challenge of how to foster greater happiness. This chapter discusses why some people are happier than others, focusing on the distinctive ways that happy and unhappy individuals construe themselves and others, respond to social comparisons, make decisions, and self-reflect. We suggest that, despite several barriers to increased well-being, less happy people can strive successfully to be happier by learning a variety of effortful strategies and practicing them with determination and commitment. The sustainable happiness model (Lyubomirsky, Sheldon, & Schkade, 2005) provides a theoretical framework for experimental intervention research on how to increase and maintain happiness. According to this model, three factors contribute to an individual’s chronic happiness level – 1) the set point, 2) life circumstances, and 3) intentional activities, or effortful acts that are naturally variable and episodic. Such activities, which include committing acts of kindness, expressing gratitude or optimism, and savoring joyful life events, represent the most promising route to sustaining enhanced happiness. We describe a half dozen randomized controlled interventions testing the efficacy of each of these activities in raising and maintaining well-being, as well as the mediators and moderators underlying their effects. Future researchers must endeavor not only to learn which particular practices make people happier, but how and why they do so.

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Peterson C., & Park, N. (2006). Character strengths in organizations. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 27, 1-6.

Character refers to qualities within individuals that lead them to desire and to pursue the good. We propose that strengths of character are a neglected but critically important resource for organizations. Character matters because it leads people to do the right thing, and the right thing can be productive and profitable.

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Steen, T. A., Kachorek, L. V., & Peterson, C. (2003). Character strengths among youth. Journal of Youth and Adolescence, 32, 5-16.

Four hundred and fiftynine students from 20 different high school classrooms in Michigan participated in focus group discussions about the character strengths included in the Values in Action Classification. Students were interested in the subject of good character and able to discuss with candor and sophistication instances of each strength. They were especially drawn to the positive traits of leadership, practical intelligence, wisdom, social intelligence, love of learning, spirituality, and the capacity to love and be loved. Students believed that strengths were largely acquired rather than innate and that these strengths developed through ongoing life experience as opposed to formal instruction. They cited an almost complete lack of contemporary role models exemplifying different strengths of character. Implications of these findings for the quantitative assessment of positive traits were discussed, as were implications for designing character education programs for adolescents. We suggest that peers can be an especially important force in encouraging the development and display of good character among youth.

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Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2003). Character strengths before and after September 11. Psychological Science, 14, 381-384.

Did Americans change following the September 11 terrorist attacks? We provide a tentative answer with respect to the positive traits included in the Values in Action Classification of Strengths and measured with a self-report questionnaire available on-line and completed by 4,817 respondents. When scores for individuals completing the survey in the 2 months immediately after September 11 were compared with scores for those individuals who completed the survey before September 11, seven character strengths showed increases: gratitude, hope, kindness, leadership, love, spirituality, and teamwork. Ten months after September 11, these character strengths were still elevated, although to a somewhat lesser degree than immediately following the attacks.

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Park, N., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Strengths of character and well-being. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23, 603-619.

We investigated the relationship between various character strengths and life satisfaction among 5,299 adults from three Internet samples using the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths. Consistently and robustly associated with life satisfaction were hope, zest, gratitude, love, and curiosity. Only weakly associated with life satisfaction, in contrast, were modesty and the intellectual strengths of appreciation of beauty, creativity, judgment, and love of learning. In general, the relationship between character strengths and life satisfaction was monotonic, indicating that excess on any one character strength does not diminish life satisfaction.

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Peterson, C., Park., N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Greater strengths of character and recovery from illness. Journal of Positive Psychology, 1, 17-26.

How are character strengths related to recovery? A retrospective web-based study of 2087 adults found small but reliable associations between a history of physical illness and the character strengths of appreciation of beauty, bravery, curiosity, fairness, forgiveness, gratitude, humor, kindness, love of learning, and spirituality. A history of psychological disorder and the character strengths of appreciation of beauty, creativity, curiosity, gratitude, and love of learning were also associated. A history of problems was linked to decreased life satisfaction, but only among those who had not recovered. In the case of physical illness, less of a toll on life satisfaction was found among those with the character strengths of bravery, kindness, and humor, and in the case of psychological disorder, less of a toll on life satisfaction was found among those with the character strengths of appreciation of beauty and love of learning. We suggest that recovery from illness and disorder may benefit character.

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Park, N., Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2006). Strengths in fifty-four nations and the fifty US states. Journal of Positive Psychology, 1, 118-129.

In a web-based study of 117,676 adults from 54 nations and all 50 US states, we investigated the relative prevalence of 24 different strengths of character. The most commonly-endorsed strengths in the USA were kindness, fairness, honesty, gratitude, and judgment, and the lesser strengths included prudence, modesty, and self-regulation. The profile of character strengths in the USA converged with profiles based on respondents from each of the other nations. Except for religiousness, comparisons within the US sample showed no differences as a function of state or geographical region. Our results may reveal something about universal human nature and/or the character requirements minimally needed for a viable society.

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Biswas-Diener, R. (2006). From the equator to the north pole: A study of character strengths. Journal of Happiness Studies, 7, 293-310.

Recently, psychologists have begun to shift their research attention to positive topics historically overlooked by the profession. The study of character strengths is a major research interest of positive psychologists. A classification of 24 character strengths, called the Values in Action (VIA) Classification, has recently been developed, and the current study evaluates these character strengths across cultures. Among 123 members of the Kenyan Maasai, 71 Inughuit in Northern Greenland, and 519 University of Illinois students, we found high rates of agreement about the existence, desirability, and development of these strengths of character. Despite these strong similarities, there were differences between and within cultures in terms of gender, the perceived importance of specific strengths (such as modesty), and the existence of cultural institutions that promote each strength.

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Steger, M. F., Hicks, B. M., Kashdan, T. B., Krueger, R. F., & Bouchard, T. J., Jr. (2007). Genetic and environmental influences on the positive traits of the Values in Action classification, and biometric covariance with normal personality. Journal of Research in Personality, 41, 524-539.

Virtually all human individual differences have been shown to be moderately heritable. Much of this research, however, focuses on measures of dysfunctional behavior and relatively fewer studieshave focused on positive traits. The values in action (VIA) project is a comprehensive and ambitiousclassification of 24 positive traits, also known as character strengths (Peterson, C., & Seligman, M. E.P. (2004). Character strengths and virtues: A handbook and classification. Washington, DC: AmericanPsychological Association), the majority of which have received no behavior genetic attention. Usinga sample of 336 middle-aged twins drawn from the Minnesota Twin Registry who completed theVIA inventory of strengths, we detected significant genetic and non-shared environmental effects for21 of 24 character strengths with little evidence of shared environmental contributions. Associationswith a previously administered measure of normal personality found moderate phenotypic overlapand that genetic influences on personality traits could account for most, but not all, of the heritablevariance in character strengths.

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Peterson, C., Park, N., Pole, N., D’Andrea, W., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2008). Strengths of character and posttraumatic growth. Journal of Traumatic Stress, 21, 214-217

How are strengths of character related to growth following trauma? A retrospective Web-based study of 1,739 adults found small, but positive associations among the number of potentially traumatic events experienced and a number of cognitive and interpersonal character strengths. It was concluded that growth following trauma may entail the strengthening of character.

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Linley, P. A., Maltby, J., Wood, A. M., Joseph, S., Harrington, S., Peterson, C., Park, N., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2007). Character strengths in the United Kingdom: The VIA Inventory of Strengths. Personality and Individual Differences, 43 (2), 341-351

The development of a classification of strengths, the Values in Action Inventory of Strengths, has done much to advance research into strengths of character. Using an Internet sample of 17,056 UK respondents, we present data on the character strengths of a large UK sample. Women typically scored higher on strengths than did men. However, four of the top five “signature strengths” of the UK men and women overall were the same (open-mindedness, fairness, curiosity, and love of learning). Strengths typically showed small but significant positive associations with age, with the strongest associations with age between curiosity and love of learning (strengths of wisdom and knowledge), fairness (a strength of justice), and forgiveness and self-regulation (strengths of temperance). The discussion addresses potential limitations and suggests pertinent directions for future research.

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Seligman, M. E. P., Steen, T. A., Park, N., & Peterson, C. (2005). Positive psychology progress: Empirical validation of interventions. American Psychologist, 60(5), 410-421.

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Oishi, S., Diener, E., & Lucas, R. (2007). The Optimum Level of Well-Being: Can People Be Too Happy? Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2 (4), 346–360.

Psychologists, self-help gurus, and parents all work to make their clients, friends, and children happier. Recent research indicates that happiness is functional and generally leads to success. However, most people are already above neutral in happiness, which raises the question of whether higher levels of happiness facilitate more effective functioning than do lower levels. Our analyses of large survey data and longitudinal data show that people who experience the highest levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of close relationships and volunteer work, but that those who experience slightly lower levels of happiness are the most successful in terms of income, education, and political participation. Once people are moderately happy, the most effective level of happiness appears to depend on the specific outcomes used to define success, as well as the resources that are available.

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Biswas-Diener, R., & Diener, E. (2006). The subjective well-being of the homeless, and lessons for happiness. Social Indicators Research, 76, 185- 205.

The current study assessed the subjective well-being of a broad spectrum of homeless people. One-hundred-and-eighty-six homeless people from the streets of Calcutta (India), California, and a tent camp in Portland (Oregon) were interviewed, and responded to measures of subjective well-being. They answered questions about life satisfaction, satisfaction with various life domains, and their experience of positive and negative emotions. The mean rating of life satisfaction was slightly negative for both American samples but positive for the pavement dwellers in Calcutta. Satisfaction with self-related domains was positive, whereas satisfaction with material related domains was generally negative. Satisfaction with social domains appears to be the area of largest variation among the groups. We discuss the importance of social factors and basic material needs as they relate to overall subjective well-being of the homeless.

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Diener, E., Lucas, R., & Scollon, C. N. (2006). Beyond the hedonic treadmill: Revising the adaptation theory of well-being. American Psychologist, 61, 305-314.

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Scollon, C. N. & Diener, E. (2006). Love, work, and changes in extraversion and neuroticism over time. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 91, 1152-1165.

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Lyubomirsky, S., King, L., & Diener, E. (2005). The benefits of frequent positive affect: Does happiness lead to success? Psychological Bulletin, 131, 803-855.

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Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2004). Beyond money: Toward an economy of well-being. Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 5, 1-31.

Policy decisions at the organizational, corporate, and governmental levels should be more heavily influenced by issues related to well-being––people’s evaluations and feelings about their lives. Domestic policy currently focuses heavily on economic outcomes, although economic indicators omit, and even mislead about, much of what society values. We show that economic indicators have many shortcomings, and that measures of well-being point to important conclusions that are not apparent from economic indicators alone.

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Lucas, R. E., Clark, A. E., Georgellis, Y., & Diener, E. (2004). Unemployment alters the set-point for life satisfaction. Psychological Science, 15, 8-13.

According to set-point theories of subjective well-being, people react to events but then return to baseline levels of happiness and satisfaction over time. We test this idea by examining reaction and adaptation to unemployment in a 15-year longitudinal study. In accordance with set-point theory, individuals reacted strongly to unemployment and then shifted back toward their baseline levels of life satisfaction. However, on average, individuals did not completely return to their former levels of satisfaction, even after they became re-employed. Furthermore, contrary to expectations from adaptation theories, people who had experienced unemployment in the past did not react any less negatively to a new bout of unemployment. These results suggest that although life satisfaction is moderately stable over time, life events can have a strong influence on long-term levels of subjective well-being.

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Diener, E., & Clifton, D. (2002). Life satisfaction and religiosity in broad probability samples. Psychological Inquiry, 13, 206-209.

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Diener, E. (2000). Subjective well-being: The science of happiness, and a proposal for a national index. American Psychologist, 55, 34-43.

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Diener, E., Gohm, C., Suh, E., & Oishi, S. (2000). Similarity of the relations between marital status and subjective well-being across cultures. Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology, 31, 419-436.

In a sample of 59,169 persons in 42 nations, relations between marital status and subjective well-being were found to be very similar across the world. Although cultural variables were found to alter the size of certain relations between marital status and subjective well-being, the effect sizes were very small. Specifically, in terms of life satisfaction, the benefit of marriage over cohabitation was greater in collectivist than in individualist nations. In terms of positive emotions, the benefit of being married over being divorced or separated was smaller in collectivist than in individualist nations. In addition, in terms of negative emotions, the benefit of being married over being divorced or separated was smaller in nations with a high tolerance for divorce. Finally, the relations between marital status, culture, and subjective well-being did not differ by gender. Because of the small size of the effects of the cultural variables, the authors concluded that the relations between marital status and subjective well-being are very similar across the world.

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Seidlitz, L., & Diener, E. (1998). Sex differences in the recall of affective experiences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74, 262-271.

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Seidlitz, L., Wyer, R. S., & Diener, E. (1997). Cognitive correlates of subjective well-being: The processing of valenced life events by happy and unhappy persons. Journal of Research in Personality, 31, 240-256.

In a two-phase study, we examined the relations of subjective well-being with the cognitive processing of affectively valenced life events. In Phase 1, both more intense and more enduring reactions to positive life events than negative ones were associated with higher well-being, and for intensity of reactions, this relation was stronger for those events that were subsequently recalled. When equal numbers of positive and negative life events were eligible for recall, well-being was unrelated to the relative likelihood of recalling the two types of events. Phase 2 suggested that life events are organized in memory according to the domain in which they occur but not according to their valence. However, neither the organization nor the retrieval of life events correlated with well-being. In combination, these findings suggest that cognitive processes associated with the encoding of life events, but neither the organization nor the retrieval of these events, are associated with subjective well-being.

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Lucas, R. E., Diener, E., & Suh, E. (1996). Discriminant validity of well-being measures. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 71, 616-628.

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Suh, E., Diener, E., & Fujita, F. (1996). Events and subjective well-being: Only recent events matter. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 70, 1091-1102.

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Diener, E., Diener, M., & Diener, C. (1995). Factors predicting the subjective well-being of nations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 851-864.

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Diener, E., Wolsic, B., & Fujita, F. (1995). Physical attractiveness and subjective well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 120-129.

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Seidlitz, L., & Diener, E. (1993) Memory for positive versus negative life events: Theories for the differences between happy and unhappy persons. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 654-664.

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Diener, E., Sandvik, E., & Pavot, W. (1991). Happiness is the frequency, not the intensity, of positive versus negative affect. In F. Strack, M. Argyle, & N. Schwarz (Eds.), Subjective well-being: An interdisciplinary perspective (pp. 119-139). New York: Pergamon.

In this chapter we suggest that “happiness,” or high subjective wellbeing, is more strongly associated with the frequency and duration of people’s positive feelings, not with the intensity of those feelings. People who rarely or never feel euphoria, for instance, can nonetheless report very high levels of well-being. We hypothesize that there are several reasons that subjective well-being is more strongly associated with the amount of time people feel positive versus negative feelings rather than with the intensity of their positive feelings. Intense positive feelings often have costs, including a tendency to more intense negative feelings in negative situations. Another hypothesis is that it is more difficult to accurately measure the intensity of feelings than their time-course, and this makes the amount of time people feel positive more amenable to study with self-report methods. The intensity of people’s positive emotions should not be ignored, but should be studied in combination with the time-course (frequency and duration) of positive and negative feelings.

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Fujita, F., Diener, E., & Sandvik, E. (1991). Gender differences in negative affect and well-being: The case for emotional intensity. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 61, 427-434.

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Pavot, W., Diener, E., & Fujita, F. (1990). Extraversion and happiness. Personality and Individual Differences, 11, 1299-1306.

The relationship between extraversion and happiness or subjective well-being (SWB) is one of the most consistently replicated and robust findings in the SWB literature. The present study was conducted in order to examine three key aspects of the relationship: (1) Whether it is primarily substantive in nature, or a product of self-report response artifacts, such as social desirability; (2) What the underlying systems or mechanisms involved in the relationship are; and (3) Whether Eysenck’s two dimensions of extraversion and neuroticism combine additively or interactively in their influence upon an individual’s level of SWB. The results are supportive of the substantive nature of the relationship, and suggest that both situational and personality factors combine to produce the positive correlation between extraversion and SWB. In terms of the interaction of extraversion and neuroticism, the results are mixed in supporting both an additive and interactive relationship.

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Thomas, D. L., & Diener, E. (1990). Memory accuracy in the recall of emotions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 59, 291-297.

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Smith, R. H., Diener, E., & Wedell, D. H. (1989). Intrapersonal and social comparison determinants of happiness: A range-frequency analysis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 56, 317-325.

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Larsen, R. J., Diener, E., & Emmons, R. A. (1986). Affect intensity and reactions to daily life events. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 51, 803-814.

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Diener, E., & Emmons, R. A. (1985). The independence of positive and negative affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 1105-1117.

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Diener, E., Horwitz, J., & Emmons, R. A. (1985). Happiness of the very wealthy. Social Indicator Research, 16, 263-274.

The subjective well-being of very wealthy persons was compared with that of a control group who lived in the same geographical area. One hundred persons from Forbes list of wealthiest Americans were queried, as well as 100 control persons selected from telephone directories. The 49 wealthy respondents reported average levels of subjective well-being which were higher than the 62 control group respondents and any subgroup of respondents in a national sample. However, there were unhappy wealthy people and the average level of this group was only modestly higher than for other groups. None of the respondents believed that money is a major source of happiness. When the major sources of happiness mentioned by the two groups were coded for Maslow’s needs, it was found that the wealthy group more often mentioned self-esteem and self-actualization and less frequently mentioned physiological and security needs.

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Emmons, R. A., & Diener, E. (1985). Personality correlates of subjective well-being. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 11, 89-97.

This study investigated the personality correlates of three dimensions of subjective well-being (S WB): Positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction. Participants in two samples completed daily mood reports and a number of relevant personality inventories. Interpersonal competencies were found to correlate most strongly with positive affect, internal emotional states with negative affect, whereas the correlates of life satisfaction included both interpersonal competencies and internal emotional states. In general, results supported Costa and McCrae’s (1980) model postulating two different sets of personality traits that influence positive and negative affect separately.

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Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (1993). Review of the Satisfaction with Life Scale. Psychological Assessment, 5, 164-172.

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Pavot, W., Diener, E., & Suh, E. (1998). The Temporal Satisfaction with Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 70, 340-354.

This article introduces The Temporal Satisfaction With Life Scale (TSWLS), and reports data establishing its reliability and validity as a measure of life satisfaction. The addition of a temporal dimension allows the TSWLS to assess an individual’s past, present, and future life satisfaction. Data relevant to reliability and validity of the TSWLS were gathered from three samples, including one college sample and two adult samples. Moderate to strong correlations with other self- and peer-reported measures of well-being and life satisfaction were observed. Factor analyses revealed a three-factor structure, with the factors corresponding to past, present, and future time frames. Measures of internal and temporal reliability show the TSWLS to be a highly consistent measure of global life satisfaction.

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Pavot, W., & Diener, E. (2008). The Satisfaction With Life Scale and the emerging construct of life satisfaction. The Journal of Positive Psychology, 3, 137-152.

Since its introduction in 1985, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS; Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) has been heavily used as a measure of the life satisfaction component of subjective well-being. Scores on the SWLS have been shown to correlate with measures of mental health and to be predictive of future behaviors such as suicide attempts. In the area of health psychology, the SWLS has been used to examine the subjective quality of life of people experiencing serious health concerns. At a theoretical level, extensive research conducted since the last review (Pavot & Diener, 1993) has more clearly articulated the nature of life satisfaction judgments, and the multiple forces that can exert an influence on such judgments. In this review, we examine the evolving views of life satisfaction, offer updated psychometric data for the SWLS, and discuss future issues in the assessment of life satisfaction.

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Slocum-Gori, S., Zumbo, B., Michalos, A., & Diener, E. (2009).A note on the dimensionality of quality of life scales: an illustration with the satisfaction with life scale (swls). Social Indicators Research, 92, 489-496.

A case is made that measures used in quality of life and happiness research will be essentially unidimensional: inherently tapping minor dimensions. This is illustrated using Diener’s Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS). It is shown that the SWLS does not meet the standard of strict unidimensionality, but that the interpretation of the total scale score is not compromised because the additional dimensions are relatively minor. In the context of the example, a multi-step strategy is described that allows researchers to test for essential unidimensionality. Throughout the article, essential unidimensionality is contrasted with the received view of strict unidimensionality and confirmatory factor analysis methods.

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Diener, E., Emmons, R. A., Larsen, R. J., & Griffin, S. (1985). The Satisfaction With Life Scale. Journal of Personality Assessment, 49, 71-75.

This article reports the development and validation of a scale to measure global life satisfaction, the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS). Among the various components of subjective well-being, the SWLS is narrowly focused to assess global life satisfaction and does not tap related constructs such as positive affect or loneliness. The SWLS is shown to have favorable psychometric properties, including high internal consistency and high temporal reliability. Scores on the SWLS correlate moderately to highly with other measures of subjective well-being, and correlate predictably with specific personality characteristics. It is noted that the SWLS is Suited for use with different age groups, and other potential uses of the scale are discussed.

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Diener, E. (1994). Assessing subjective well-being: Progress and opportunities. Social Indicators Research, 31, 103-157.

Subjective well-being (SWB) comprises people’s longer-term levels of pleasant affect, lack of unpleasant affect, and life satisfaction. It displays moderately high levels of cross-situational consistency and temporal stability. Self-report measures of SWB show adequate validity, reliability, factor invariance, and sensitivity to change. Despite the success of the measures to date, more sophisticated approaches to defining and measuring SWB are now possible. Affect includes facial, physiological, motivational, behavioral, and cognitive components. Self-reports assess primarily the cognitive component of affect, and thus are unlikely to yield a complete picture of respondents’ emotional lives. For example, denial may influence self-reports of SWB more than other components. Additionally, emotions are responses which vary on a number of dimensions such as intensity, suggesting that mean levels of affect as captured by existing measures do not give a complete account of SWB. Advances in cognitive psychology indicate that differences in memory retrieval, mood as information, and scaling processes can influence self-reports of SWB. Finally, theories of communication alert us to the types of information that are likely to be given in self-reports of SWB. These advances from psychology suggest that a multimethod approach to assessing SWB will create a more comprehensive depiction of the phenomenon. Not only will a multifaceted test battery yield more credible data, but inconsistencies between various measurement methods and between the various components of well-being will both help us better understand SWB indictors and group differences in well-being. Knowledge of cognition, personality, and emotion will also aid in the development of sophisticated theoretical definitions of subjective well-being. For example, life satisfaction is theorized to be a judgment that respondents construct based on currently salient information. Finally, it is concluded that measuring negative reactions such as depression or anxiety give an incomplete picture of people’s well-being, and that it is imperative to measure life satisfaction and positive emotions as well.

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McCrae, R., & Costa, P. (1997). Personality trait structures as a human universal. American Psychologist,
52, 509-516

Patterns of covariation among personality traits in English-speaking populations can be summarized by the five-factor model (FFM). To assess the cross-cultural generalizability of the FFM, data from studies using 6 translations of the Revised NEO Personality Inventory (P.T. Costa & R. R. McCrae, 1992) were compared with the American factor structure. German, Portuguese, Hebrew, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese samples (N = 7,134) showed similar structures after varimax rotation of 5 factors. When targeted rotations were used, the American factor structure was closely reproduced, even at the level of secondary loadings. Because the samples studied represented highly diverse cultures with languages from 5 distinct language families, these data strongly suggest that personality trait structure is universal.

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Hendrisks, A. A. Q. J., Perugini, M., Angleitner, A., et al. (2003). The five factor personality inventory: Cross-cultural generalizability across 13 countries. European Journal of Personality, 17, 347-373.

In the present study, we investigated the structural invariance of the Five-Factor Personality Inventory (FFPI) across a variety of cultures. Self-report data sets from ten European and three non-European countries were available, representing the Germanic (Belgium, England, Germany, the Netherlands, USA), Romance (Italy, Spain), and Slavic branches (Croatia, Czech Republic, Slovakia) of the Indo-European languages, as well as the Semito-Hamitic (Israel) and Altaic (Hungary, Japan) language families. Each data set was subjected to principal component analysis, followed by varimax rotation and orthogonal Procrustes rotation to optimal agreement with (i) the Dutch normative structure and (ii) an American large-sample structure. Three criteria (scree test, internal consistency reliabilities of the varimax-rotated components, and parallel analysis) were used to establish the number of factors to be retained for rotation. Clear five-factor structures were found in all samples except in the smallest one (USA, N = 97). Internal consistency reliabilities of the five components were generally good and high congruence was found between each sample structure and both reference structures. More than 80% of the items were equally stable within each country. Based on the results, an international FFPI reference structure is proposed. This reference structure can facilitate standardized communications about Big Five scores across research programmes.

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Goldberg., L. R. (1992). The development of the markers for the Big-Five factor structure. Psychological
Assessment, 4, 26-42.

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Costa Jr., P. T. & McCrae., R. R. (1995). Primary traits of Eysenck’s P-E-N system: Three- and Five-Factor
Solutions. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69, 308-317.

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Goldberg, L. (1993). The structure of phenotypic personality traits. American Psychologist, 48, 26-34.

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Matthews, G. & Gilliland, K. (1999). The personality theories of H. J. Eysenck and J, A, Gray: A comparative review. Personality and Individual Differences, 26 (4), 583-626.

Hans J. Eysenck and Jeffrey A. Gray have proposed influential theories of the biological bases of personality traits. Eysenck’s theory concerns the extraversion, neuroticism and psychoticism traits, whereas Gray proposes the use of new, rotated axes of impulsivity and anxiety. Eysenck uses multiple arousal systems as the central explanatory constructs, whereas Gray describes more specific systems related to behavioural inhibition and activation. This article reviews the evidence relating to these theories provided by studies of c.n.s. and a.n.s. psychophysiology, subjective affect, conditioning and attention and performance. It discusses key predictive successes and failures and methodological problems which may impede theory-testing. It is concluded that there is a solid core of predictive support for the Eysenck theory in some paradigms, such as the moderator effect of stimulation level on individual differences in phasic electrodermal response and eyelid conditioning. In other settings, the theory fails to explain empirical data adequately, especially in studies of subjective response and attention and performance. Gray’s theory has advanced research through stimulating interest in moderation of personality effects by motivational variables. It also provides a better explanation than Eysenck’s theory for certain data, such as instrumental conditioning to reward stimuli and the positive affectivity of extraverts. Overall, however, Gray’s theory explains a narrower range of findings than Eysenck’s. There is little evidence that Gray’s revised personality axes are generally more predictive of psychophysiological and performance criteria than Eysenck’s original dimensions. Finally, it is suggested that the assumptions of the biological approach to personality are in need of reassessment. It is possible that the biological theories may be improved through developments in methodology or through discriminating multiple systems underpinning traits. For example, extraversion may have distinct “reticulo–cortical” and “dopaminergic” aspects. Alternatively, the biological approach may not in fact be adequate for explaining behavioural correlates of traits. In this case, trait research should place more emphasis on cognitive or social bases for personality.

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Zinbarg, R. E. & Mohlman, J. (1998). Individual differences in the acquisition of affectively
valenced associations. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 74 (4), 1024-1040

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Canli, T., Zhao, Z., Desmond, J. E., Kang, E. J., Gross, J. & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2001). An fMRI study of personality influences on brain reactivity to emotional stimuli, Behavioural Neuroscience, 115, 1, 33-42.

Functional imaging studies have examined which brain regions respond to emotional stimuli, but they have not determined how stable personality traits moderate such brain activation. Two personality traits. extraversion and neuroticism, are strongly associated with emotional experience and may thus moderate brain reactivity to emotional stimuli. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to directly test whether individual differences in brain reactivity to emotional stimuli are correlated with extraversion and neuroticism in healthy women. Extraversion was correlated with brain reactivity to positive stimuli in localized brain regions, and neuroticism was correlated with brain reactivity to negative stimuli in localized brain regions. This study provides direct evidence that personality is associated with brain reactivity to emotional stimuli and identifies both common and distinct brain regions where such modulation takes place.

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Gosling, S.D. (2001). From mice to men: What can we learn from personality from animal research? Psychological Bulletin, 127, 1, 45-86.

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Birley, A. J., Gillespie, N. A., Heath, A. C., Sullivan, P. F., Boomsma, D. I. & Martin, N. G. (2006). Heritability and nineteen-year stability of long and short EPQ-R Neuroticism scales. Personality and Individual Differences, 40, 4, 737-747.

The heritability and stability over a 19 year period of long (23-item) and short (12-item) versions of Eysenck’s Neuroticism scale were compared in a large Australian twin-family sample. Stability over 19 years of the 23-item Neuroticism scale was 0.62 and for the 12-item scale 0.59. Correlations between scores obtained by mailed questionnaire and telephone interview a few weeks apart were 0.87 for the long scale and 0.85 for the short scale; scores obtained by mail were slightly higher, particularly for females. The 12-item scale had slightly reduced power to discriminate both high and low scoring individuals on the full 23-item scale. Mean Neuroticism score for the 12-item scale was atypically low when compared to the distribution of the complete set of scores for all possible combinations (>1 million) of 12-items drawn from the full 23-item EPQ-R. Mean heritabilities for the lowest and highest 300,000 of these combinations were 43.2% and 42.7%, respectively, somewhat higher than the 41.0% for the actual EPQ-R-S 12-item scale. Heritability for the 23-item scale was 46.5%. We conclude that there is little loss of either stability or heritability in using the short EPQ-R scale, but the choice of which 12-items could have been better.

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Keller, M.C., Coventry, W.L., Heath, A.C. & Martin, N.G. (2005). Widespread evidence for non-additive genetic variation in Cloninger’s and Eysenck’s personality dimensions using a twin plus sibling design. Behavior Genetics, 35, 6, 707-721.

Studies using the classical twin design often conclude that most genetic variation underlying personality is additive in nature. However, studies analyzing only twins are very limited in their ability to detect non-additive genetic variation and are unable to detect sources of variation unique to twins, which can mask non-additive genetic variation. The current study assessed 9672 MZ and DZ twin individuals and 3241 of their siblings to investigate the environmental and genetic architecture underlying eight dimensions of personality: four from Eysenck’s Personality Questionnaire and four from Cloninger’s Temperament and Character Inventory. Broad-sense heritability estimates from best-fitting models were two to three times greater than the narrow-sense heritability estimates for Harm Avoidance, Novelty Seeking, Reward Dependence, Persistence, Extraversion, and Neuroticism. This genetic non-additivity could be due to dominance, additive-by-additive epistasis, or to additive genetic effects combined with higher-order epistasis. Environmental effects unique to twins were detected for both Lie and Psychoticism but accounted for little overall variation. Our results illustrate the increased sensitivity afforded by extending the classical twin design to include siblings, and may provide clues to the evolutionary origins of genetic variation underlying personality.

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Sperber, D., Cara, F., Girotta, V. (1995). Relevance theory explains the selection task. Cognition, 57, 31-95.

We propose a general and predictive explanation of the Wason Selection Task (where subjects are asked to select evidence for testing a conditional “rule”). Our explanation is based on a reanalysis of the task, and on Relevance Theory. We argue that subjects’ selections in all true versions of the Selection Task result from the following procedure. Subjects infer from the rule directly testable consequences. They infer them in their order of accessibility, and stop when the resulting interpretation of the rule meets their expectations of relevance. Subjects then select the cards that may test the consequences they have inferred from the rule. Order of accessibility of consequences and expectations of relevance vary with rule and context, and so, therefore, does subjects’ performance. By devising appropriate rule-context pairs, we predict that correct performance can be elicited in any conceptual domain. We corroborate this prediction with four experiments. We argue that past results properly reanalyzed confirm our account. We discuss the relevance of the Selection Task to the study of reasoning.

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Oaksford, M. & Chater, N. (1996). Rational explanation of the selection task. Psychological Review, 103, 381-391.

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Cosmides, L. (1989). The logic of social exchange: Has natural selection shaped how humans reason? Studies with the Wason selection task. Cognition, 31, 187-276.

In order to successfully engage in social exchange—cooperation between two or more individuals for mutual benefit—humans must be able to solve a number of complex computational problems, and do so with special efficiency. Following Marr (1982), Cosmides (1985) and Cosmides and Tooby (1989) used evolutionary principles to develop a computational theory of these adaptive problems. Specific hypotheses concerning the structure of the algorithms that govern how humans reason about social exchange were derived from this computational theory. This article presents a series of experiments designed to test these hypotheses, using the Wason selection task, a test of logical reasoning. Part I reports experiments testing social exchange theory against the availability theories of reasoning; Part II reports experiments testing it against Cheng and Holyoak’s (1985) permission schema theory. The experimental design included eight critical tests designed to choose between social exchange theory and these other two families of theories; the results of all eight tests support social exchange theory. The hypothesis that the human mind includes cognitive processes specialized for reasoning about social exchange predicts the content effects.

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Almor, A., & Sloman, S. (1996). Is deontic reasoning special? Psychological review, 103, 374-80.

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Hertwig, R., & Gigerenzer, G. (1999). The conjunction fallacy revisited: How intelligent inferences look like reasoning errors. Journal of behavioral decision making, 12, 275-305.

Findings in recent research on the conjunction fallacy have been taken as evidence that our minds are not designed to work by the rules of probability. This conclusion springs from the idea that norms should be content-blind – in the present case, the assumption that sound reasoning requires following the conjunction rule of probability theory. But content-blind norms overlook some of the intelligent ways in which humans deal with uncertainty, for instance, when drawing semantic and pragmatic inferences. In a series of studies, we first show that people infer nonmathematical meanings of the polysemous term probability in the classic Linda conjunction problem. We then demonstrate that one can design contexts in which people infer mathematical meanings of the term and are therefore more likely to conform to the conjunction rule. Finally, we report evidence that the term frequency narrows the spectrum of possible interpretations of probability down to its mathematical meanings, and that this fact – rather than the presence or absence of extensional cues – accounts for the low proportion of violations of the conjunction rule when people are asked for frequency judgments. We conclude that a failure to recognize the human capacity for semantic and pragmatic inference can lead rational responses to be misclassified as fallacies.

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Cosmides, L., & Tooby, J. (1996). Are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? Rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty. Cognition, 58, 1-73.

Professional probabilists have long argued over what probability means, with, for example, Bayesians arguing that probabilities refer to subjective degrees of confidence and frequentists arguing that probabilities refer to the frequencies of events in the world. Recently, Gigerenzer and his colleagues have argued that these same distinctions are made by untutored subjects, and that, for many domains, the human mind represents probabilistic information as frequencies. We analyze several reasons why, from an ecological and evolutionary perspective, certain classes of problem-solving mechanisms in the human mind should be expected to represent probabilistic information as frequencies. Then, using a problem famous in the “heuristics and biases” literature for eliciting base rate neglect, we show that correct Bayesian reasoning can be elicited in 76% of subjects – indeed, 92% in the most ecologically valid condition – simply by expressing the problem in frequentist terms. This result adds to the growing body of literature showing that frequentist representations cause various cognitive biases to disappear, including overconfidence, the conjunction fallacy, and base-rate neglect. Taken together, these new findings indicate that the conclusion most common in the literature on judgment under uncertainty – that our inductive reasoning mechanisms do not embody a calculus of probability – will have to be re-examined. From an ecological and evolutionary perspective, humans may turn out to be good intuitive statisticians after all.

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Gigerenzer, G., & Hoffrage, U. (1995). How to improve Bayesian Reasoning Without Instruction: Frequency formats. Psychological Review, 102, 684-704.

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Shanks, D. R., Tunney, R. J., & McCarthy, J. D. (2002). A re-examiniation of probability matching and rational choice. Journal of Behavioral Decision Making, 15, 233-250.

In a typical probability learning task participants are presented with a repeated choice between two response alternatives, one of which has a higher payoff probability than the other. Rational choice theory requires that participants should eventually allocate all their responses to the high-payoff alternative, but previous research has found that people fail to maximize their payoffs. Instead, it is commonly observed that people match their response probabilities to the payoff probabilities. We report three experiments on this choice anomaly using a simple probability learning task in which participants were provided with (i) large financial incentives, (ii) meaningful and regular feedback, and (iii) extensive training. In each experiment large proportions of participants adopted the optimal response strategy and all three of the factors mentioned above contributed to this. The results are supportive of rational choice theory.

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Friedman, D. (1998). Monty Hall’s three doors: Construction and deconstruction of a choice anomaly. American Economic Review, 88, 933-946.

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Axelrod, R. & Hamilton, W.D. (1981). The Evolution of Cooperation. Science, 211, 1390-1396

Cooperation in organisms, whether bacteria or primates, has been a difficulty for evolutionary theory since Darwin. On the assumption that interactions between pairs of individuals occur on a probabilistic basis, a model is developed based on the concept of an evolutionarily stable strategy in the context of the Prisoner’s Dilemma game. Deductions from the model, and the results of a computer tournament show how cooperation based on reciprocity can get started in an asocial world, can thrive while interacting with a wide range of other strategies, and can resist invasion once fully established. Potential applications include specific aspects of territoriality, mating, and disease.

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Tversky, A., & Khaneman, D. (1971). Belief in the law of small numbers. Psychological Bulletin, 76, 105-110.

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Gillovich, T., Vallone, R. , & Tversky, A. (1985). The hot hand in basketball: On the misperceptions of random sequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 17, 295-314.

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Fischhoff, R. (1975). Hindsight ? foresight: The effect of outcome knowledge on judgement under uncertainty. Journal of Experimental Psychology, Human Perception & Performance, 1, 288-299.

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Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. (1981). The framing of decisions and the psychology of choice. Science, 211, 453-458.

The psychological principles that govern the perception of decision problems and the evaluation of probabilities and outcomes produce predictable shifts of preference when the same problem is framed in different ways. Reversals of preference are demonstrated in choices regarding monetary outcomes, both hypothetical and real, and in questions pertaining to the loss of human lives. The effects of frames on preferences are compared to the effects of perspectives on perceptual appearance. The dependence of preferences on the formulation of decision problems is a significant concern for the theory of rational choice.

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Kahneman, D., & Tversky, A. (1979). Prospect theory: An analysis of decision-making under risk. Econometrica, 47, 263-291.

This paper presents a critique of expected utility theory as a descriptive model of decision making under risk, and develops an alternative model, called prospect theory. Choices among risky prospects exhibit several pervasive effects that are inconsistent with the basic tenets of utility theory. In particular, people underweight outcomes that are merely probable in comparison with outcomes that are obtained with certainty. This tendency, called the certainty effect, contributes to risk aversion in choices involving sure gains and to risk seeking in choices involving sure losses. In addition, people generally discard components that are shared by all prospects under consideration. This tendency, called the isolation effect, leads to inconsistent preferences when the same choice is presented in different forms. An alternative theory of choice is developed, in which value is assigned to gains and losses rather than to final assets and in which probabilities are replaced by decision weights. The value function is normally concave for gains, commonly convex for losses, and is generally steeper for losses than for gains. Decision weights are generally lower than the corresponding probabilities, except in the range of low probabilities. Overweighting of low probabilities may contribute to the attractiveness of both insurance and gambling.

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Kahneman, D., Knetsch, J. L., & Thaler, R. (1990). Experimental tests of the endowment effect and the coase theorem. Journal of Political Economy, 98, 1325-1348.

Contrary to theoretical expectations, measures of willingness-to-accept greatly exceed measures of willingness-to-pay. This paper reports several experiments that demonstrate that this “endowment effect” persists even in market settings with opportunities to learn. Consumption objects (e.g., coffee mugs) are randomly given to half the subjects in an experiment. Markets for the mugs are then conducted. The Coase theorem predicts that about half the mugs will trade, but observed volume is always significantly less. When markets for “induced-value” tokens are conducted, the predicted volume is observed, suggesting that transactions costs cannot explain the undertrading for consumption goods. Copyright 1990 by University of Chicago Press.

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Talarico, J. M., LaBar, K., & Rubing, D. C. (2004). Emotional intensity predicts autobiographical memory experience. Memory & Cognition, 32, 1118-1132.

College students generated autobiographical memories from distinct emotional categories that varied in valence (positive vs. negative) and intensity (high vs. low). They then rated various perceptual, cognitive, and emotional properties for each memory. The distribution of these emotional memories favored a vector model over a circumplex model. For memories of all specific emotions, intensity accounted for significantly more variance in autobiographical memory characteristics than did valence or age of the memory. In two additional experiments, we examined multiple memories of emotions of high intensity and positive or negative valence and of positive valence and high or low intensity. Intensity was a more consistent predictor of autobiographical memory properties than was valence or the age of the memory in these experiments as well. The general effects of emotion on autobiographical memory properties are due primarily to intensity differences in emotional experience, not to benefits or detriments associated with a specific valence.

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Horselenberg, R., Merckelbach, H., van Breukelen, G., & Wessel, I. (2004). Individual differences in the accuracy of autobiographical memory. Clinical Psychology Psychotherapy, 11, 168-176.

In recent literature on false memories, autobiographical memory distortions are often linked to manipulations such as hypnosis or imagination. However, Barclay and Wellman (1986) demonstrated that such distortions might also occur more or less spontaneously. The current study sought to replicate this phenomenon. In addition, it examined whether certain personality traits, (i.e. fantasy proneness, dissociation, absorption, suggestibility and depression) might contribute to such spontaneous pseudo-memories. Volunteers (N = 38) kept a diary of self-selected, outstanding events for a 2-week period. Six months later, they were unexpectedly given a recognition test consisting of original memories and several types of foils. Participants performed relatively well on the recognition task, although they had some difficulties differentiating original items from foil items. Curiously enough, fantasy proneness was related to superior recognition performance.

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Conway, M. A. & Pleydell-Pearce, C. W. (2000). The construction of autobiographical memories in the self-memory system. Psychological Review, 107, 261-288.

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Burt, C. D. B., Kemp, S., & Conway, M. A. (2003). Themes, events, and episodes in autobiographical memory. Memory & Cognition, 31, 317-325.

The process by which experience is divided into events was examined. Experiment 1 involved diarists recording their experiences over a 3-month period. Diary entries were later transcribed onto cards and the diarists arranged their cards so as to define events they had experienced, and in a separate phase arranged their cards so as to describe the themes that reflected their life. Examination of event- and theme-building strategies indicated that boundaries were frequently used, and events and themes were often formed from clusters of experience combined using content association rather than temporal sequence. Experiment 2 involved photographs taken by the participants, employed the same procedures as in Experiment 1, and revealed event- and theme-building strategies similar to those identified in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3 the size of the stimulus set from which events and themes were constructed was manipulated; this did not influence construction strategies. Overall, the experiments show that both autobiographical events and themes frequently consist of episodes taken from more than 1 day.

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Parker, E. S., Cahill, L., & McGaugh, J. L. (2006). A case of unusual autobiographical remembering. Neurocase, 12, 35-49.

This report describes AJ, a woman whose remembering dominates her life. Her memory is “nonstop, uncontrollable, and automatic.” AJ spends an excessive amount of time recalling her personal past with considerable accuracy and reliability. If given a date, she can tell you what she was doing and what day of the week it fell on. She differs from other cases of superior memory who use practiced mnemonics to remember vast amounts of personally irrelevant information. We propose the name hyperthymestic syndrome, from the Greek word thymesis meaning remembering, and that AJ is the first reported case.

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Erdelyi, M. H. (2006). The unified theory of repression. Behavioral and Brain Sciences, 29, 499-
551.

Repression has become an empirical fact that is at once obvious and problematic. Fragmented clinical and laboratory traditions and disputed terminology have resulted in a Babel of misunderstandings in which false distinctions are imposed (e.g., between repression and suppression) and necessary distinctions not drawn (e.g., between the mechanism and the use to which it is put, defense being just one). “Repression” was introduced by Herbart to designate the (nondefensive) inhibition of ideas by other ideas in their struggle for consciousness. Freud adapted repression to the defensive inhibition of “unbearable” mental contents. Substantial experimental literatures on attentional biases, thought avoidance, interference, and intentional forgetting exist, the oldest prototype being the work of Ebbinghaus, who showed that intentional avoidance of memories results in their progressive forgetting over time. It has now become clear, as clinicians had claimed, that the inaccessible materials are often available and emerge indirectly (e.g., procedurally, implicitly). It is also now established that the Ebbinghaus retention function can be partly reversed, with resulting increases of conscious memory over time (hypermnesia). Freud’s clinical experience revealed early on that exclusion from consciousness was effected not just by simple repression (inhibition) but also by a variety of distorting techniques, some deployed to degrade latent contents (denial), all eventually subsumed under the rubric of defense mechanisms (“repression in the widest sense”). Freudian and Bartlettian distortions are essentially the same, even in name, except for motive (cognitive vs. emotional), and experimentally induced false memories and other “memory illusions” are laboratory analogs of self-induced distortions.

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Anderson, M. C., Ochsner, K.N., Kuhl, B., Cooper, J., Robertson, E., Gabrieli, S.W., Glover, G.H., Gabrieli, J.D.E. (2004). Neural systems underlying the suppression of unwanted memories. Science, 303, 232-235.

Over a century ago, Freud proposed that unwanted memories can be excluded from awareness, a process called repression. It is unknown, however, how repression occurs in the brain. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging to identify the neural systems involved in keeping unwanted memories out of awareness. Controlling unwanted memories was associated with increased dorsolateral prefrontal activation, reduced hippocampal activation, and impaired retention of those memories. Both prefrontal cortical and right hippocampal activations predicted the magnitude of forgetting. These results confirm the existence of an active forgetting process and establish a neurobiological model for guiding inquiry into motivated forgetting.

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Also available at ScienceMag (registration required)

Anderson, M. C. (2005). The role of inhibitory control in forgetting unwanted memories: A consideration of three methods. In C. MacLeod & B. Uttl (Eds.) Dynamic Cognitive Processes, pp. 159-190. Tokyo: Springer-Verlag.

When confronted with reminders to things that we would prefer not to think about, we often attempt to put the unwanted memories out of awareness. Here, I argue that the ability to control memory is a special case of a broad class of situations thought to require executive control: response override. In such situations, one must stop a strong habitual response to a stimulus due to situational demands, a function thought to be accomplished by inhibitory processes that suppress the response, enabling more flexible, context-sensitive control over behavior. Recent behavioral studies show that inhibitory mechanisms that control overt behavior are also targeted at declarative memories to control retrieval. Recent neuroimaging findings (Anderson et al., 2004) further establish that controlling awareness of unwanted memories is associated with increased dorsolateral prefrontal cortex activation, reduced hippocampal activation, and impaired retention of the unwanted trace and that the magnitude of activation in prefrontal cortex predicts memory suppression. These findings indicate that cognitive and neural systems that support our ability to override prepotent responses can be recruited to override declarative memory retrieval, and that this cognitive act leads to memory failure. The relation between these findings and those obtained with the directed forgetting procedure is also discussed.

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Anderson, A. K., Wais, P. E., & Gabrieli, J. D. E. (2006). Emotion enhances remembrance of neutral events past. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 103, 1599-1604.

Emotional events are bestowed with special prominence in memory. This may reflect greater attention oriented to these events during encoding, and/or enhancement of memory consolidation after emotional events have passed. Here we show invoked emotional arousal results in a retrograde enhancement of long-term memory, determining what will later be remembered or forgotten. Subjects saw pictures of neutral faces and houses followed by emotionally arousing scenes at varying intervals. Self-reported emotional arousal responses predicted a retrograde enhancement of memory for preceding neutral events in a 1-week delayed recognition memory test. At longer picture-scene intervals, no enhancement was found, implicating a critical window in which emotional arousal must occur for retrograde memory enhancement. Postencoding manipulation of emotional arousal specifically enhanced conscious recollection rather than familiarity-based discrimination. An additional study revealed no retrograde enhancement for pictures preceding highly memorable, but nonarousing, distinctive scenes. These findings indicate an important role for emotional arousal in the postencoding enhancement of episodic memory consolidation.

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Loftus, E.F. (2005). Planting misinformation in the human mind:A 30-year investigation of the malleability of memory. Learning and Memory, 12, 361-366.

The misinformation effect refers to the impairment in memory for the past that arises after exposure to misleading information. The phenomenon has been investigated for at least 30 years, as investigators have addressed a number of issues. These include the conditions under which people are especially susceptible to the negative impact of misinformation, and conversely when are they resistant. Warnings about the potential for misinformation sometimes work to inhibit its damaging effects, but only under limited circumstances. The misinformation effect has been observed in a variety of human and nonhuman species. And some groups of individuals are more susceptible than others. At a more theoretical level, investigators have explored the fate of the original memory traces after exposure to misinformation appears to have made them inaccessible. This review of the field ends with a brief discussion of the newer work involving misinformation that has explored the processes by which people come to believe falsely that they experienced rich complex events that never, in fact, occurred.

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Cowan, N., Elliott, E., Saultsa, J. S., Moreya, C. C., Mattox, S., Hismjatullinaa, A., & Conway, A. R. A., (2005). On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes. Cognitive Psychology, 51, 42-100.

Working memory (WM) is the set of mental processes holding limited information in a temporarily accessible state in service of cognition. We provide a theoretical framework to understand the relation between WM and aptitude measures. The WM measures that have yielded high correlations with aptitudes include separate storage-and-processing task components, on the assumption that WM involves both storage and processing. We argue that the critical aspect of successful WM measures is that rehearsal and grouping processes are prevented, allowing a clearer estimate of how many separate chunks of information the focus of attention circumscribes at once. Storage-and-processing tasks correlate with aptitudes, according to this view, largely because the processing task prevents rehearsal and grouping of items to be recalled. In a developmental study, we document that several scope-of-attention measures that do not include a separate processing component, but nevertheless prevent efficient rehearsal or grouping, also correlate well with aptitudes and with storage-and-processing measures. So does digit span in children too young to rehearse.

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Baddeley, A. D. (2001). Is working memory still working? American Psychologist, 56, 851-864.

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Baddeley, A. D. (2003). Working memory: Looking back and looking forward. Nature Reviews: Neuroscience, 4, 829-839

The concept of working memory proposes that a dedicated system maintains and stores
information in the short term, and that this system underlies human thought processes. Current
views of working memory involve a central executive and two storage systems: the phonological
loop and the visuospatial sketchpad. Although this basic model was first proposed 30 years ago,
it has continued to develop and to stimulate research and debate. The model and the most
recent results are reviewed in this article.

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Wandell, B.A. (1999). Computational neuroimaging of human visual cortex. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 22, 145-173.

Functional magnetic resonance imaging is a new neuroimaging method for probing the intact, alert, human brain. With this tool, brain activity that has been hidden can now be measured. Recent advances in measuring and understanding human neural responses underlying motion, color, and pattern perception are reviewed. In individual human brains, we can now identify the positions of several retinotopically organized visual areas; measure retinotopic organization within these areas; identify the location of a motion-sensitive region in individual brains; measure responses associated with contrast, color, and motion; and measure effects of attentional modulation on visually evoked responses. By framing experiments and analyses as questions about visual computation, these neuroimaging measurements can be coupled closely with those from other basic
vision-science methods.

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Parker, A.J. & Newsome, W.T. (1998). Sense and the single neuron: Probing the physiology of perception. Annual Review of Neuroscience, 21, 227-277.

The newly defined field of cognitive neuroscience attempts to draw together the study of all brain mechanisms that underlie our mental life. Historically, the major sensory pathways have provided the most trustworthy insights into how the brain supports cognitive functions such as perception, attention, and short-term memory. The links between neural activity and perception, in particular, have been studied revealingly in recent decades. Here we review the striking progress in this area, giving particular emphasis to the kinds of neural events that underlie the perceptual judgments of conscious observers.

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Desimone, R., Albright, T.D., Gross, C.G. & Bruce, C. (1984). Stimulus selective properties
of inferior temporal neurons in the macaque. Journal of Neuroscience, 4, 2051-2062.

Previous studies have reported that some neurons in the inferior temporal (IT) cortex respond selectively to highly specific complex objects. In the present study, we conducted the first systematic survey of the responses of IT neurons to both simple stimuli, such as edges and bars, and highly complex stimuli, such as models of flowers, snakes, hands, and faces. If a neuron responded to any of these stimuli, we attempted to isolate the critical stimulus features underlying the response. We found that many of the responsive neurons responded well to virtually every stimulus tested. The remaining, stimulus-selective cells were often selective along the dimensions of shape, color, or texture of a stimulus, and this selectivity was maintained throughout a large receptive field. Although most IT neurons do not appear to be “detectors” for complex objects, we did find a separate population of cells that responded selectively to faces. The responses of these cells were dependent on the configuration of specific face features, and their selectivity was maintained over changes in stimulus size and position. A particularly high incidence of such cells was found deep in the superior temporal sulcus. These results indicate that there may be specialized mechanisms for the analysis of faces in IT cortex.

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Craik, F. I. M. (2002) Levels of processing: Past, present… and future? Memory, 10, 305-318.

In this article I first briefly survey some enduring legacies of the Craik and Lockhart (1972) article on levels of processing (LOP) and address some common criticisms. In the next section I discuss whether memory can be regarded as ”pure processing”, the role of short-term memory in an LOP framework, measurement of ”depth” in LOP, encoding-retrieval interactions, the concept of consolidation, and the reality of ”levels” of processing. In the final section I offer some speculations on future directions, discussing the notion of levels of representation and a possible continuing role for LOP in memory research.

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Chun, M. M. and Potter, M. C. (1995). A two-stage model for multiple target detection in rapid serial visual presentation. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception & Performance, 21, 109-127.

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Broadbent, D. E. (1957). A mechanical model for human attention and immediate memory. Psychological Review, 64, 205-215.

A mechanical model is described, to act as an easy introduction to a formal theory of attention and immediate memory in information theory terms. A number of deductions from the theory which agree with experimental results on human beings are given as descriptions of the behavior of the model.

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Bechara, A., Damasio, H. and Damasio, A. (2000). Emotion, decision making and the orbitofrontal cortex. Cerebral Cortex, 10, 295-307.

The somatic marker hypothesis provides a systems-level neuroanatomical and cognitive framework for decision making and the influence on it by emotion. The key idea of this hypothesis is that decision making is a process that is influenced by marker signals that arise in bioregulatory processes, including those that express themselves in emotions and feelings. This influence can occur at multiple levels of operation, some of which occur consciously and some of which occur non-consciously. Here we review studies that confirm various predictions from the hypothesis. The orbitofrontal cortex represents one critical structure in a neural system subserving decision making. Decision making is not mediated by the orbitofrontal cortex alone, but arises from large-scale systems that include other cortical and subcortical components. Such structures include the amygdala, the somatosensory/insular cortices and the peripheral nervous system. Here we focus only on the role of the orbitofrontal cortex in decision making and emotional processing, and the relationship between emotion, decision making and other cognitive functions of the frontal lobe, namely working memory.

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Chan, A.S., Butters, N., Paulsen, J. S., Salmon, D. P., Swenson, M. R., Maloney, L. T. (1993). An Assessment of the Semantic Network In Patients with Alzheimers Disease. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 5(2), 254-261

The present study employed multidimensional scaling and ADDTREE clustering analyses to derive the cognitive maps and clustering representations of normal elderly controls (NC), patients with Alzheimer’s disease (AD), and patients with Hun-tington’s disease (HD); the analyses were performed on subjects’ responses in a category fluency task that involved generating animal names for 60 sec. A measure of the proximity of animal names was used as an index of associational strength; MDS and ADDTREE estimates were based on this measure. A comparison of the NC, AD, and HD subjects’ cognitive maps suggests that the semantic network of AD patients is abnormal in two ways. First, the organization of the semantic network is disrupted. Second, new abnormal associations and clusterings are formed. These results support the notion that AD is characterized by a breakdown in the structure of semantic knowledge and not primarily by a deficiency in the accessibility of semantic information.

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Aggleton, J.P. (1993). The contribution of the amygdala to normal and abnormal emotional states, Trends in Neurosciences, 16, 328-333.

Lesion studies in monkeys have provided some of the most compelling evidence for the involvement of the amygdala in emotional and social behaviour. In spite of this it has proved surprisingly difficult to uncover the precise nature of the role of the amygdala. A number of recent studies now indicate that the amygdala is involved in a specific class of stimulus-reward associations and this discovery, combined with important anatomical findings, has made it possible to gain a much more detailed appreciation of the contribution of the amygdala to emotion in non-human primates. In parallel with this, it appears increasingly likely that amygdala dysfunction contributes to the emotional changes that accompany certain neurological disorders, including dementia and schizophrenia.

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Bartels, A. & Zeki, S. (2000). The neural basis of romantic love. NeuroReport, 11 (17), 3829–3834.

Abstract
The neural correlates of many emotional states have been studied, most recently through the technique of fMRI. However, nothing is known about the neural substrates involved in evoking one of the most overwhelming of all affective states, that of romantic love, about which we report here. The activity in the brains of 17 subjects who were deeply in love was scanned using fMRI, while they viewed pictures of their partners, and compared with the activity produced by viewing pictures of three friends of similar age, sex and duration of friendship as their partners. The activity was restricted to foci in the medial insula and the anterior cingulate cortex and, subcortically, in the caudate nucleus and the putamen, all bilaterally. Deactivations were observed in the posterior cingulate gyrus and in the amygdala and were right-lateralized in the prefrontal, parietal and middle temporal cortices. The combination of these sites differs from those in previous studies of emotion, suggesting that a unique network of areas is responsible for evoking this affective state. This leads us to postulate that the principle of functional specialization in the cortex applies to affective states as well.

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