ABSTRACT
Introduction: Human cooperativeness is an important personality trait. However, the mechanism through which people cooperate remains unclear. Previous research suggests that one of the proposed functions of smiling is to advertise altruistic dispositions, leading to successful cooperation. In particular, studies have reported that Duchenne smiles are honest signals of cooperative intent because they are not easy to produce voluntarily. This study aimed to examine the predictive relationships among altruistic cooperativeness traits, Duchenne smiles, and cooperative behavior. Methods: A total of 90 people were randomly assigned to dyads and filmed while they participated in a ten-minute, unstructured conversation followed by a prisoner's dilemma game to measure their cooperative behaviors. Their smiles during conversations were classified as Duchenne or non-Duchenne. Participants' altruistic dispositions were measured before the conversation began using an anonymous prisoner's dilemma game. Results: The results of our linear regression analyses support previous findings that individual's Duchenne smiles and their own cooperative behavior are positively correlated. However, when we controlled for altruistic cooperativeness, Duchenne smiles no longer correlated with cooperative behavior. The results of the mediation analyses showed that Duchenne smiles and smile synchrony did not mediate the predictive relationship between altruistic cooperativeness and cooperative behavior. Discussion: Our results suggest that human cooperative behavior may be predetermined by altruistic cooperativeness. This calls for the reconsideration of the Duchenne smile as an underlying behavioral mechanism that is effective for signaling altruistic cooperative intent.
ABSTRACT
Previous studies have indicated that divergent idea integration is an effective way to foster extraordinary creativity in groups. This study posits that background music (BGM) may aid in eliciting this phenomenon. Here to describe the effectiveness of BGM on group creativity, we hypothesized and suggested different mechanisms that genre and valence attributes of BGM would lead to extraordinary creativity. The temporal co-ordination of head movement synchrony (HMS) was investigated as a non-verbal cue and we found significant HMS response levels to idea generation. While the HMS as response did not depend on the quality of the prior ideas; it led to higher divergence and originality in the successively generated ideas. Results of this study showed the dominant contribution of upbeat positive valence (UP) music, relative to other genres, in HMS leading to divergent ideas. Following this, the potential role of upbeat music in enhancing participant sociability and positive valence in enhancing cooperation level was discussed. Upbeat positive music may decrease judgmental behavior during creative group tasks and inspire participants to share divergent perspectives. The use of such music can encourage participants to share new perspectives and integrate ideas. It may also provide a potential explanation for the enhancing effect of upbeat positive music on creative outcomes in groups.