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We present the first documented isolation of

Published: 21 February 2017 Pride occurs in every known culture, appears early in development, is reliably triggered by achievements and formidability, and causes a characteristic display that is recognized everywhere. Here, we evaluate the theory that pride evolved to guide decisions relevant to pursuing actions that enhance valuation and respect for a person in the minds of others. By hypothesis, pride is a neurocomputational program tailored by selection to orchestrate cognition and behavior in the service of: (i) motivating the cost-effective pursuit of courses of action that would increase others' valuations and respect of the individual, (ii) motivating the advertisement of acts or characteristics whose recognition by others would lead them to enhance their evaluations of the individual, and (iii) mobilizing the individual to take advantage of the resulting enhanced social landscape. To modulate how much to invest in actions that might lead to enhanced evaluations by others, the pride system must forecast the magnitude of the evaluations the action would evoke in the audience and calibrate its activation proportionally. We tested this prediction in 16 countries across 4 continents (n = 2,085), for 25 acts and traits. As predicted, the pride intensity for a given act or trait closely tracks the valuations of audiences, local (mean r = + 0.82) and foreign (mean r = + 0.75). This relationship is specific to pride and does not generalize to other positive emotions that coactivate with pride but lack its audience-recalibrating function.

Laughter is a nonverbal vocal expression that often communicates positive affect and cooperative intent in humans. Temporally coincident laughter occurring within groups is a potentially rich cue of affiliation to overhearers. We examined listeners’ judgments of affiliation based on brief, decontextualized instances of colaughter between either established friends or recently acquainted strangers. In a sample of 966 participants from 24 societies, people reliably distinguished friends from strangers with an accuracy of 53–67%. Acoustic analyses of the individual laughter segments revealed that, across cultures, listeners’ judgments were consistently predicted by voicing dynamics, suggesting perceptual sensitivity to emotionally triggered spontaneous production. Colaughter affords rapid and accurate appraisals of affiliation that transcend cultural and linguistic boundaries, and may constitute a universal means of signaling cooperative relationships.

Research on human inbreeding avoidance has uncovered at least two central cues to the detection of siblings: witnessing an infant being taken care of by one's mother (i.e. maternal perinatal association) and growing up in close proximity to a child (the so-called Westermarck effect). Both cues have been supported by fieldwork in populations under specific cultural conditions, and by survey research mainly in student populations. Both types of research have relied often on self-reporting. Unfortunately, this method is frequently colored by ceiling effects and notions of social desirability. In order to circumvent this problem, we explored a complementary method for investigating incest aversion that involved measuring psychophysiological responses during an imagery task. As such, we analyzed data on 63 heterosexual female students who viewed pictures of sexual and non-sexual activities while imagining performing these activities with either their partner or their brother. In female subjects with only (one or more) older brothers—a proxy for lacking maternal perinatal association with an opposite-sex sibling—the duration of coresidence with brother(s) predicted activity in the mm. levator labii superioris and alaeque nasi , facial muscles that are highly active when a subject expresses facial disgust. The strength of these responses was also predicted by the frequency of having bathed and shared a bedroom with a brother in early childhood; two activities that may serve as additional cues for relatedness as it can be expected that they are typically performed with genetically related children. As a result, the psychophysiological approach not only complements the use of self-reports in recent research on incest aversion, but also has the potential to fine-tune well-established cues for sibling detection, or to uncover additional ones.

Genetic relatedness is a fundamental determinant of social behavior across species. Over the last few decades, researchers have been investigating the proximate psychological mechanisms that enable humans to assess their genetic relatedness to others. Much of this work has focused on identifying cues that predicted relatedness in ancestral environments and examining how they regulate kin-directed behaviors. Despite progress, many basic questions remain unanswered. Here we address three of these questions. First, we examine the replicability of the effect of two association-based cues to relatedness-maternal perinatal association (MPA) and coresidence duration-on sibling-directed altruism. MPA, the observation of a newborn being cared for by one's mother, strongly signals relatedness, but is only available to the older sibling in a sib-pair. Younger siblings, to whom the MPA cue is not available, appear to fall back on the duration of their coresidence with an older sibling. Second, we determine whether the effects of MPA and coresidence duration on sibling-directed altruism obtain across cultures. Last, we explore whether paternal perinatal association (PPA) informs sibship. Data from six studies conducted in California, Hawaii, Dominica, Belgium, and Argentina support past findings regarding the role of MPA and coresidence duration as cues to siblingship. By contrast, PPA had no effect on altruism. We report on levels of altruism toward full, half, and step siblings, and discuss the role alternate cues might play in discriminating among these types of siblings. (PsycINFO Database Record

Author(s): Bryant, GA; Fessler, DMT; Fusaroli, R; Clint, E; Aaroe, L; Apicella, CL; Petersen, MB; Bickham, ST; Bolyanatz, A; Chavez, B; Smet, DD; Diaz, C; Faněoviěova, J; Fux, M; Giraldo-Perez, PP; Hu, A; Kamble, SV; Kameda, T; Li, NP; Luberti, FR; Prokop, P; Quintelier, K; Scelza, BA; Shin, HJ; Soler, M; Stieger, S; Toyokawa, W; Van den Hende, EA; Viciana-Asensio, H; Yildizhan, SE; Yong, JC; Yuditha, T; Zhou, Y

The authors note that Table 1 appeared incorrectly. The corrected table appears below. (Table Presented).

There is a widespread conviction that people distinguish two kinds of acts: on the one hand, acts that are generalisably wrong because they go against universal principles of harm, justice, or rights; on the other hand, acts that are variably right or wrong depending on the social context. In this paper we criticise existing methods that measure generalisability. We report new findings indicating that a modification of generalisability measures is in order. We discuss our findings in light of recent criticisms of moral/conventional research.

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for the relationship between pathogens and politics. The first, which is an intragroup, traditional norms account, holds that these relationships are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogen neutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup, outgroup-avoidance account, holds that relationships between pathogen avoidance and ideology are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups (who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members). Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the traditional norms account than with the outgroup-avoidance account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to social dominance orientation within the 30 nations.

Research indicating the effects of real blood or of its iconic representation on human behaviour has thus far concentrated on phobia and aggressiveness. Little is known about other responses or, more fundamentally, about the biological basis of all such responses.In this study it is examined whether or not humans are able to detect real blood.Human subjects (n = 89) were asked to distinguish different kinds of blood from red control fluids under varying visual and choice conditions. Relevant differences between subjects were tested for through written questionnaires, including standardized scales for disgust sensitivity (DS-R) and blood phobia (MBPI) and performance on two clinical olfactory tests.Analysis of variance shows that humans are excellent detectors of animal blood (in casu pig blood), whereas the ability of detecting human blood is much less developed. Surprisingly, differences in olfactory capacities and personal experience with blood have no effect on blood detection, while blood fear lowers and disgust sensitivity ameliorates this performance.This study allows further mapping of the exact role of disgust sensitivity in human behaviour, as well as a deliberate choice of materials in blood-related experiments. It is imperative for further research on the behavioural and psychological impact 'blood' resorts on humans.