Ethnographies, histories, and popular culture from many regions around the world suggest that marked moments of love, affection, solidarity, or identification everywhere evoke the same emotion. Based ...on these observations, we developed the kama muta model, in which we conceptualize what people in English often label being moved as a culturally implemented social-relational emotion responding to and regulating communal sharing relations. We hypothesize that experiencing or observing sudden intensification of communal sharing relationships universally tends to elicit this positive emotion, which we call kama muta. When sufficiently intense, kama muta is often accompanied by tears, goosebumps or chills, and feelings of warmth in the center of the chest. We tested this model in seven samples from the United States, Norway, China, Israel, and Portugal. Participants watched short heartwarming videos, and after each video reported the degree, if any, to which they were “moved,” or a translation of this term, its valence, appraisals, sensations, and communal outcome. We confirmed that in each sample, indicators of increased communal sharing predicted kama muta; tears, goosebumps or chills, and warmth in the chest were associated sensations; and the emotion was experienced as predominantly positive, leading to feeling communal with the characters who evoked it.
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NUK, OILJ, SAZU, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK, VSZLJ
Do we run away because we are frightened, or are we frightened because we run away? The authors address this issue with respect to the relation between metacognitive monitoring and metacognitive ...control. When self-regulation is goal driven, monitoring affects control processes so that increased processing effort should enhance feelings of competence and feelings of knowing. In contrast, when self-regulation is data driven, such feelings may be based themselves on the feedback from control processes, in which case they should decrease with increasing effort. Evidence for both monitoring-based control and control-based monitoring occurring even in the same situation is presented. The results are discussed with regard to the issue of the cause-and-effect relation between subjective experience and behavior.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
Throughout evolutionary history, pathogens have imposed strong selection pressures on humans. To minimize humans’ exposure to pathogens, a behavioral immune system that promotes the detection and ...avoidance of disease-connoting cues has evolved. Although most pathogens cannot be discerned by our sensory organs, they produce discernable changes in their environment. As a result, a common denominator of many disease-connoting cues is morphological deviance—figurative disparity from what is normal, visual dissimilarity to the prototype stored in memory. Drawing on an evolutionary rationale, we examine the hypothesis that activation of the behavioral immune system renders people more sensitive to morphological deviance and more prone to perceive dissimilarities between stimuli. In Study 1 (N = 343), participants who scored higher on disgust sensitivity demonstrated greater differentiation between normal and disfigured faces, reflecting greater sensitivity to morphological deviance in the bodily domain. In Study 2 (N = 109), participants who were primed with pathogen threat demonstrated greater differentiation between perfect and imperfect geometrical shapes, reflecting greater sensitivity to morphological deviance even in stimuli that have nothing to do with health or disease. In Study 3 (N = 621), participants who scored higher on disgust sensitivity perceived pairs of neutral pictures as less similar (i.e., more dissimilar) to each other. Literature on the relations to social deviance and implications for social perception and for social behavior is discussed.
Based on the conceptualization of approach as a decrease in distance and avoidance as an increase in distance, we predicted that stimuli with positive valence facilitate behavior for either ...approaching the stimulus (object as reference point) or for bringing the stimulus closer (self as reference point) and that stimuli with negative valence facilitate behavior for withdrawing from the stimulus or for pushing the stimulus away. In Study 1, we found that motions to and from a computer screen where positive and negative words were presented lead to compatibility effects indicative of an object-related frame of reference. In Study 2, we replicated this finding using social stimuli with different evaluative associations (young vs. old persons). Finally, we present evidence that self vs. object reference points can be induced through instruction and thus lead to opposite compatibility effects even when participants make the same objective motion (Study 3).
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UL, UM, UPUK
In self-paced learning, when the regulation of effort is goal driven (e.g., allocated to different items according to their relative importance), judgments of learning (JOLs) increase with study ...time. When it is data driven (i.e., determined by the ease of committing the item to memory), JOLs decrease with study time (
Koriat, Ma'ayan, & Nussinson, 2006
). Because the amount of effort invested in different items is conjointly determined by data-driven and goal-driven regulation, an attribution process must be postulated in which variations in effort are attributed by the learner to data-driven or goal-driven regulation before the implications for metacognitive judgments are determined. To support the reality of this process, the authors asked learners to adopt a facial expression that creates a feeling of effort and induced them to attribute that effort either to data-driven or to goal-driven regulation. This manipulation was found to determine the direction in which experienced effort affected metacognitive judgment.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
When someone violates a social norm, others may think that some sanction would be appropriate. We examine how the experience of emotions like anger and disgust relate to the judged appropriateness of ...sanctions, in a pre-registered analysis of data from a large-scale study in 56 societies. Across the world, we find that individuals who experience anger and disgust over a norm violation are more likely to endorse confrontation, ostracism and, to a smaller extent, gossip. Moreover, we find that the experience of anger is consistently the strongest predictor of judgments of confrontation, compared to other emotions. Although the link between state-based emotions and judgments may seem universal, its strength varies across countries. Aligned with theoretical predictions, this link is stronger in societies, and among individuals, that place higher value on individual autonomy. Thus, autonomy values may increase the role that emotions play in guiding judgments of social sanctions.
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IZUM, KILJ, NUK, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UL, UM, UPUK
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.
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
Perceptions of interpersonal similarity are accompanied by attraction and bonding, often leading to physical contact. Given that physical proximity to social beings increases the odds of catching ...infectious diseases, we propose a reverse relationship, whereby sensitivity to the presence of pathogens results in perceiving unfamiliar others as less similar to oneself. Four studies involving 980 participants and operationalizing others in three different ways confirm that individual differences in propensity to feel disgust (i.e., react emotionally to potential sources of pathogens in the environment) are associated with perceptions of interpersonal similarity to strangers. Study 1 showed that individuals who score higher in disgust sensitivity perceive themselves as less psychologically similar to visually displayed social targets. Study 2, using vague descriptions of hypothetical figures, found that high-disgust-sensitivity participants tend to assume that others' personal preferences contrast with their own. Study 3 demonstrated that the disgust–dissimilarity association holds for prototypical members of social groups. Finally, Study 4 confirmed that this link reflects pathogen-related (above and beyond sexual or moral) disgust. In all studies, controlling for participants' gender, religiosity, and illness recency did not change the results. We discuss our findings and propose novel directions for future research.
•Disgust-sensitive people find little similarity between themselves and strangers•Pathogen disgust predicts similarity perceptions beyond sexual and moral disgust•The threat of pathogens is linked with increased perceived social distance
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GEOZS, IJS, IMTLJ, KILJ, KISLJ, NLZOH, NUK, OILJ, PNG, SAZU, SBCE, SBJE, UILJ, UL, UM, UPUK, ZAGLJ, ZRSKP
In self-paced learning, when the regulation of study effort is goal driven (e.g., allocated to different items according to their relative importance), judgments of learning (JOLs) increase with ...study time. When regulation is data driven (e.g., determined by the ease of committing the item to memory), JOLs decrease with study time (Koriat, Ma'ayan, & Nussinson, 2006). We induced learners to interpret differences in their study time (Experiment 1) or in another learner's study time (Experiment 2) as reflecting either differences in data-driven regulation or differences in goal-driven regulation. This manipulation was found to moderate the relationship of both study time and rated effort to JOLs. The results were seen to support the idea that JOLs are based on study effort but the effects of experienced effort are mediated by an attribution that intervenes between the metacognitive regulation of effort and the monitoring of one's learning. The results invite an attributional theoretical framework that encompasses both data-driven and goal-driven regulation and incorporates the option of attributing experienced effort to either or both of the 2 types of regulation.
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CEKLJ, FFLJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PEFLJ, UPUK
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