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Tactile behavior is a basic communication form as well as an expression of interpersonal involvement. This article presents three studies offering evidence for the positive role of casual interpersonal touch on consumer behavior. More specifically, it provides initial support for the view that tactile stimulation in various consumer behavior situations enhances the positive feeling for and evaluation of both the external stimuli and the touching source. Further, customers touched by a requester tend to comply more than customers in no-touch conditions. Implications for consumer behavior theory and research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans constantly adjust their social relationships and choose new partners of good reputations, thereby promoting the evolution of cooperation. Individuals have to pay a cost to build a reputation, obtain others' information and then make partnership adjustments, yet the conditions under which such costly behaviors are able to evolve remain to be explored. In this model, I assume that individuals have to pay a cost to adjust their partnerships. Furthermore, whether an individual can adjust his partnership based on reputation is determined by his strategic preference, which is updated via coevolution. Using the metaphor of a public goods game where the collective benefit is shared among all members of a group, the coupling dynamics of cooperation and partnership adjustment were numerically simulated. Partner-switching behavior cannot evolve in a public goods game with a low amplification factor. However, such an effect can be exempted by raising the productivity of public goods or the frequency of partnership adjustment. Moreover, costly partner-switching behavior is remarkably promoted by the condition that the mechanism of reputation evaluation considers its prosociality. A mechanism of reputation evaluation that praises both cooperative and partner-switching behaviors allows them to coevolve. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Oxytocin (OT) is a neuropeptide that is attracting growing attention from researchers interested in human emotional and social behavior. There is indeed increasing evidence that OT has a calming effect and that it facilitates pair-bonding and social interactions. Some of OT's effects are thought to be direct, but it has been suggested that OT also may have indirect effects, mediated by changes in behavior. One potentially relevant behavioral change is an increased propensity for “emotional sharing” as this behavior, like OT, is known to have both calming and bonding effects. In this study, 60 healthy young adult men were randomly assigned to receive either intranasal placebo (PL;n = 30) or oxytocin (OT;n = 30). Participants were then instructed to retrieve a painful memory. Subsequently, OT and placebo participants’ willingness to disclose to another person event-related facts (factual sharing) vs. event-related emotions (emotional sharing) was evaluated. Whereas the two groups were equally willing to disclose event-relatedfacts, oxytocin was found to specifically increase the willingness to share event-relatedemotions. This study provides the first evidence that OT increases people's willingness to share their emotions. Importantly, OT did not make people more talkative (word counts were comparable across the two groups) but instead increased the willingness to share the specific component that is responsible for the calming and bonding effects of social sharing: emotions. Findings suggest that OT may shape the form of social sharing so as to maximize its benefits. This might help explain the calming and bonding effects of OT. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

In three studies we examined the effects of private and public self-awareness on the saliency of behavioral standards. We used several well-known manipulations to test the effects of private or public self-awareness on the activation of behavioral standards. We expected and found that public self-awareness was related to relatively social standards, such as "getting along well" with others, conveying a positive image, and wanting to be accepted. Private self-awareness was related to the relatively individualistic standard to be authentic and even to being different from others. The consequences of these results are discussed in light of previous research. It is argued that it is important to acknowledge that awareness of different self-aspects may increase saliency of distinct behavioral standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Losada observed management teams develop their annual strategic plans in a lab designed for studying team behaviour. Based on these findings he developed a dynamical model of team interaction and introduced the concept of meta learning (ML) which represents the ability of a team to avoid undesirable attractors. This paper analyses the dynamic model in more detail and discusses the relationship between ML and the new concept of systems intelligence (SI) introduced by Saarinen and Hämäläinen. We propose that the ML ability of a team clearly represents a systems intelligent competence. Losada's mathematical model predicts interesting dynamic phenomena in team interaction. However, our analysis shows how the model also produces strange and previously unreported behaviour under certain conditions. Thus, the predictive validity of the model also becomes problematic. It remains unclear whether the model behaviour can be said to be in satisfactory accordance with the observations of team interaction. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article draws on ethnographic data to examine how moral person-hood, emotions, and social relationships are constructed quite differently within two organizations with the similar goal of holistically caring for the dying. The analysis shows how the moral rhetoric and related practices at a mainstream hospice encourage volunteers to esteem a static conception of the self-as-character, whereas the Buddhist approach requires volunteers to engage in a process of transcending a self that is continually being worked on. The analysis points to paradoxes in the hospice conceptions of a "good death " and offers critical reflection on the assumption that Western and Buddhist approaches to hospice care are largely equivalent. Organizational, structural, and phenomenological strands of symbolic interactionist thought are drawn on to interpret these findings. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interactionist approach provides a relevant point of view on human-natural environment relations. This essay draws on an interactionist approach from a Meadian, pragmatic, social constructionist perspective. In the context of grounded distinctions for interpreting "natural environment," this discussion considers instances of human intervention and levels of responses, for example, individual, social, cultural, historical, and Utopian, as variant, even conflicting, reconstructions of the foundational relationship of human-natural environment interaction. Incorporating a pragmatic model derived from Rachel Carson, the work at hand focuses on knowledge and ethical claims, as discourse and action shift from preventing to mitigating and adjusting environmental outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on egoism wherein the basis of morality is the pursuit of one's own welfare. It mentions that a substantive egoist specifies a certain state of the person as his ultimate good, while a formal egoist identifies an individual's ultimate good as acting according to the reasons applicable to him. Thus, formal egoistic person does things for others for his own benefit, and not because he expects to merit is some way.

Uncertainty reduction theory has been used to explain communication behavior in initial interaction as well as in more developed relationships. An extension of uncertainty reduction theory is predicted outcome value, in which individuals expect affiliation or attraction as a possible outcome during initial encounters. A complete theory of uncertainty reduction and its relation to affiliative outcomes requires an understanding of the relations among three components of any communicative encounter: preinteraction expectancies about another's anticipated communication behavior, the structure of the interaction (e.g., behavioral actions and reactions that evolve over the course of a conversation), and the outcome of uncertainty reduction (e.g., affiliation, more certainty, ambiguity). This essay examines the relations among these communicative components in expectancy-outcome studies in which behavior is ignored, in expectancy-structure studies that link expectancies to behavioral responses, in structure-outcome studies in which behaviors are aligned with postinteraction ratings of affiliation, and in studies that examine the conjoint effect of expectancy and structure on outcome. Uncertainty reduction is viewed as a lifelong cognitive process in which new information is processed, so that there is a vague sense of uncertainty despite accumulated knowledge in given areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]