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Tearful crying is a ubiquitous and likely uniquely human phenomenon. Scholars have argued that emotional tears serve an attachment function: Tears are thought to act as a social glue by evoking social support intentions. Initial experimental studies supported this proposition across several methodologies, but these were conducted almost exclusively on participants from North America and Europe, resulting in limited generalizability. This project examined the tears-social support intentions effect and possible mediating and moderating variables in a fully pre-registered study across 7007 participants (24,886 ratings) and 41 countries spanning all populated continents. Participants were presented with four pictures out of 100 possible targets with or without digitally-added tears. We confirmed the main prediction that seeing a tearful individual elicits the intention to support, d = 0.49 [0.43, 0.55]. Our data suggest that this effect could be mediated by perceiving the crying target as warmer and more helpless, feeling more connected, as well as feeling more empathic concern for the crier, but not by an increase in personal distress of the observer. The effect was moderated by the situational valence, identifying the target as part of one's group, and trait empathic concern. A neutral situation, high trait empathic concern, and low identification increased the effect. We observed high heterogeneity across countries that was, via split-half validation, best explained by country-level GDP per capita and subjective well-being with stronger effects for higher-scoring countries. These findings suggest that tears can function as social glue, providing one possible explanation why emotional crying persists into adulthood., National Science Centre, Poland; Polish National Agency for Academic Exchange Bekker Programme; Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology; Hungarian National Research, Development and Innovation Office; Hungarian Brain Research Programme; Internal Fund of the Open University of Israel

International audience; This study aims at examining the precise temporal dynamics of the emotional facial decoding as it unfolds in the brain, according to the emotions displayed. To characterize this processing as it occurs in ecological settings, we focused on unconstrained visual explorations of natural emotional faces (i.e., free eye movements). The General Linear Model (GLM; Smith and Kutas, 2015a,b; Kristensen et al., 2017a) enables such a depiction. It allows deconvolving adjacent overlapping responses of the eye fixation-related potentials (EFRPs) elicited by the subsequent fixations and the event-related potentials (ERPs) elicited at the stimuli onset. Nineteen participants were displayed with spontaneous static facial expressions of emotions (Neutral, Disgust, Surprise, and Happiness) from the DynEmo database (Tcherkassof et al., 2013). Behavioral results on participants’ eye movements show that the usual diagnostic features in emotional decoding (eyes for negative facial displays and mouth for positive ones) are consistent with the literature. The impact of emotional category on both the ERPs and the EFRPs elicited by the free exploration of the emotional faces is observed upon the temporal dynamics of the emotional facial expression processing. Regarding the ERP at stimulus onset, there is a significant emotion-dependent modulation of the P2–P3 complex and LPP components’ amplitude at the left frontal site for the ERPs computed by averaging. Yet, the GLM reveals the impact of subsequent fixations on the ERPs time-locked on stimulus onset. Results are also in line with the valence hypothesis. The observed differences between the two estimation methods (Average vs. GLM) suggest the predominance of the right hemisphere at the stimulus onset and the implication of the left hemisphere in the processing of the information encoded by subsequent fixations. Concerning the first EFRP, the Lambda response and the P2 component are modulated by the emotion of surprise compared to the neutral emotion, suggesting an impact of high-level factors, in parieto-occipital sites. Moreover, no difference is observed on the second and subsequent EFRP. Taken together, the results stress the significant gain obtained in analyzing the EFRPs using the GLM method and pave the way toward efficient ecological emotional dynamic stimuli analyses.

Resume Dans la vie courante, le terme emotion designe en premier lieu des phenomenes experientiels qui sortent de l’ordinaire. En raison des mouvements de l’âme qui les caracterisent, Descartes a designe ces phenomenes par le terme emotion, un mot qui a son epoque signifiait emeute ou agitation. Aristote reconnaissait le meme phenomene dans son emploi du mot kinesis. En effet, les ressentis emotionnels sont des perceptions de l’engagement dynamique du corps dans l’interaction. Pourtant, la qualite cinesthesique des emotions a ete delaissee par la plupart des theories psychologiques. Cet article presente les arguments plaidant en faveur d’un modele perceptif de l’emotion qui defend l’idee que les emotions sont des attitudes corporelles exprimant la relation du sujet a l’objet emotionnel. Ces arguments sont bases sur les recentes avancees des sciences cognitives notamment en matiere de cognition incarnee. Ce modele perceptif decrit une sequence fonctionnelle du processus de l’emotion qui s’inscrit dans la perspective des theories multi-componentielles actuelles des emotions.

Previous research has documented that the major forms of emotional action readiness are likely to be universal and that the main forms of states of action readiness are exhibited in facial expressions of emotion. A comparative study between an African (Burkinabe) and an European (French) population was conducted in order to investigate how these two cultures assess facial expressions of four emotions (joy, sadness, anger and fear) in terms of action readiness modes as well as in terms of emotion labels. Results show that specific patterns of action readiness modes characterize the facial expressions. According to discriminant analyses, these patterns yield high percentages of correct classifications, comparable to those yielded with emotion labels ratings. Action readiness patterns even allow, for the African group, better classifications of the facial expressions than do the emotion labeling. Finally, an ethnic bias seems to emerge. Compared to black faces, white faces are slightly better classified by French participants whereas black faces are somewhat better classified than are white ones by Burkinabe participants, except for anger expressions which profile of result differ from the other facial expressions.

International audience; DynEmo is a database available to the scientific community (https://DynEmo.liglab.fr/). It contains dynamic and natural emotional facial expressions (EFEs) displaying subjective affective states rated by both the expresser and observers. Methodological and contextual information is provided for each expression. This multimodal corpus meets psychological, ethical, and technical criteria. It is quite large, containing two sets of 233 and 125 recordings of EFE of ordinary Caucasian people (ages 25 to 65, 182 females and 176 males) filmed in natural but standardized conditions. In the Set 1, EFE recordings are associated with the affective state of the expresser (self-reported after the emotion inducing task, using dimensional, action readiness, and emotional labels items). In the Set 2, EFE recordings are both associated with the affective state of the expresser and with the time line (continuous annotations) of observers' ratings of the emotions displayed throughout the recording. The time line allows any researcher interested in analysing non-verbal human behavior to segment the expressions into emotions.

Our experiment aims at examining the impact of induced shame on altruism in a dictator game context with exit option. Using an Internet design, we collect a large battery of psychological and demographic variables which enables us to investigate dispositional and social characteristics likely to influence subjects’ altruistic behaviour. Using the emotional induction technique, we induce either shameful or neutral emotions to the participants before they play the dictator game. We then measure the evaluation that subjects give of their own emotions, and subsequently observe their altruistic behaviour. We find that imagined shame-induction is able to increase significantly altruistic behaviour. We observe that forty-one percent of participants are willing to choose to exit the game and do not observe any difference in exiting between the two emotion conditions. Our data show that women are significantly more eager to take the exit option than males. Economics students are, to a large extent, more prone to adopt greedy choices patterns than other social sciences students.

Our experiment aims at studying the impact of self-esteem on risk-prone choices in an Allais-type decision context using hypothetical money. We use an Internet protocol in order to reach a large heterogeneous student population sample. An anticipated regret explanation for the certainty effect implies that self-esteem is a crucial psychological variable in what concerns risky decision, but only when the choice is between a safe option and a risky option. Thus, in our experiment, we hypothesize that low self-esteem people will choose more frequently the safe option (rather than the risky-prone option) than high self-esteem people, whereas low self-esteem and high self-esteem individuals will show the same pattern of choices between two different risk-based options. Our data confirm our hypothesis. Regarding risky choices preferences, we also observe that females, non economists and older people significantly exhibit safer choice preferences than other participants. We find also that men and students in economics are more likely to conform to expected utility theory than females and other social science students respectively. We then discuss what these findings mean for economic regret theory, and suggest that a complete theory of decision-making under risk should introduce both situational and motivational explanations of individual behaviour.