How does it feel to be greedy? The role of pride in avaricious acquisition.

BACKGROUND: Psychologists define greed as a desire to acquire more and the dissatisfaction of never having enough, but studies have not examined the psychological processes that underlie and sustain this disposition. We propose that a desire to attain pride might be one emotional mechanism that promotes greedy acquisition. In this account, greedy people experience a boost of pride from acquisition but these feelings are short-lived, potentially leading to the perpetual acquisitiveness characteristic of dispositional greed. METHOD: Four studies (including one reported in the SOM due to space limitations) using correlational, longitudinal, and daily-diary methods (N = 1778) test hypotheses about how individuals high in dispositional greed respond emotionally to new acquisitions, both when they occur and several weeks later. RESULTS: Greedy people experience heightened feelings of authentic pride in response to new acquisitions, but these feelings quickly fade. This pattern is distinct to authentic pride and not attributable to shared variance with positive affect. Greedy people also feel elevated hubristic pride in response to acquisitions, but this seems to be part of a dispositional tendency observed in response to a range of events. CONCLUSIONS: These studies provide a new understanding of a psychological process that is associated with, and could partially explain, greedy acquisition.

Nonverbal displays of dominance and prestige: Evidence for cross-cultural and early-emerging recognition.

Two universal strategies for attaining influence-dominance, or the use of intimidation and force to obtain power, and prestige, or garnering respect by demonstrating knowledge and expertise-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays in North America. Given evidence for the emergence and effectiveness of these strategies across cultures, including non-Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic small-scale, traditional societies in Africa, Asia, and South America, the nonverbal displays that are used to reliably communicate these strategies also might be universal. Here, we demonstrate that the dominance display is recognized by the Mayangna, a small-scale society in rural Nicaragua, and by Canadian children as young as 2 and 3 years old. We also find that the prestige display is reliably differentiated from dominance by both groups, and judged as a high-rank signal by the Mayangna. However, members of the Mayangna confused the prestige display with happiness, and children confused the prestige display with a neutral expression. Overall, findings are consistent with a ubiquitous and early-emerging ability to recognize dominance, and with the suggestion that the prestige display is more culturally variable and ontogenetically slower to emerge. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Beyond the fearful ape hypothesis: Humans are also supplicating and appeasing apes.

We review research suggesting that several of the functions attributed to fear, in the target article's fearful ape hypothesis, also apply to supplication and appeasement emotions. These emotions facilitate support provisioning from others and the formation and maintenance of cooperative relationships. We therefore propose that the fearful ape hypothesis be expanded to include several other distinctively human emotional tendencies.

The viability and validity of the Authentic and Hubristic Pride scales: Reply to Dickens and Murphy (2023).

Dickens and Murphy (see record 2023-63008-001) claim that the Authentic and Hubristic Pride (i.e., AP/HP) scales (see record 2007-02840-009), which we developed and validated over 15 years ago, do not validly assess the theoretical constructs of authentic and hubristic pride (e.g., Tracy & Robins, 2004a, 2007). These authors further call for the development of new measures based on a top-down approach, which would incorporate the theory into scale items. Although we appreciate Dickens and Murphy's emphasis on the need for valid assessment tools in this important research domain, we disagree with their conclusion that the extant scales are "fundamentally invalid." Here, we explain why a top-down approach would not be preferable to the bottom-up one we used and review the relatively large body of evidence supporting the validity of the extant AP/HP scales. Dickens and Murphy also raised several concerns regarding the HP scale specifically; most of these, as we explain, are either incorrect, exaggerated, or valid concerns but not ones that invalidate the HP scale. Nonetheless, we agree with Dickens and Murphy's suggestion that the AP/HP scales could be improved, and we echo their call for future research in this vein. Finally, we recommend that scholars seeking to advance the field in this way adopt the "living document" approach advocated by Gerasimova (2022). (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Emotions do reliably co-occur with predicted facial signals: Comment on Durán and Fernández-Dols (2021).

Durán and Fernández-Dols (see record 2022-03375-001) have done the field a service by conducting a meta-analytic review of the association between emotion experiences and facial expressions. Although they conclude that no meaningful association exists, our reading of their analyses suggest a different interpretation: The data that they report indicate an association of substantial magnitude-as large as 1.5 times the size of the average effect in social psychology and larger than 76% of meta-analytic effects previously reported throughout personality and social psychology (Gignac & Szodorai, 2016; Richard et al., 2003). Moreover, reexamination of some of the exclusion and classification choices made by Durán and Fernández-Dols (e.g., excluding intraindividual designs and studies purported to measure "amusement" from the primary analyses of "happiness") suggests that the observed large effects would be larger still if a more comprehensive set of studies had been included in their review. In sum, we conclude that Durán and Fernández-Dols' meta-analyses provide robust evidence that emotions do reliably co-occur with their predicted facial signals, although this conclusion is opposite to the one stated in their report. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).

Greed communication predicts the approval and reach of US senators' tweets.

Social media are at the forefront of modern political campaigning. They allow politicians to communicate directly with constituents and constituents to endorse politicians' messages and share them with their networks. Analyzing every tweet of all US senators holding office from 2013 to 2021 (861,104 tweets from 140 senators), we identify a psycholinguistic factor, greed communication, that robustly predicts increased approval (favorites) and reach (retweets). These effects persist when tested against diverse established psycholinguistic predictors of political content dissemination on social media and various other psycholinguistic variables. We further find that greed communication in the tweets of Democratic senators is associated with greater approval and retweeting compared to greed communication in the tweets of Republican senators, especially when those tweets also mention political outgroups.

Pride: The Emotional Foundation of Social Rank Attainment.

Pride is a self-conscious emotion, comprised of two distinct facets known as authentic and hubristic pride, and associated with a cross-culturally recognized nonverbal expression. Authentic pride involves feelings of accomplishment and confidence and promotes prosocial behaviors, whereas hubristic pride involves feelings of arrogance and conceit and promotes antisociality. Each facet of pride, we argue, contributes to a distinct means of attaining social rank: Authentic pride seems to promote prestige-a rank based on earned respect-whereas hubristic pride seems to promote dominance-a rank based on aggression and coercion. Both prestige and dominance are effective routes to power and influence in human groups, so both facets of pride are likely to be functional adaptations. Overall, the reviewed research suggests that pride is likely to be a human universal, critical for social relationships and rank attainment across human societies.

How emotions, relationships, and culture constitute each other: advances in social functionalist theory.

Social Functionalist Theory (SFT) emerged 20 years ago to orient emotion science to the social nature of emotion. Here we expand upon SFT and make the case for how emotions, relationships, and culture constitute one another. First, we posit that emotions enable the individual to meet six "relational needs" within social interactions: security, commitment, status, trust, fairness, and belongingness. Building upon this new theorising, we detail four principles concerning emotional experience, cognition, expression, and the cultural archiving of emotion. We conclude by considering the bidirectional influences between culture, relationships, and emotion, outlining areas of future inquiry.

The Chicken and Egg of Pride and Social Rank.

Prior research has found an association between pride experiences and social rank outcomes. However, the causal direction of this relationship remains unclear. The current research used a longitudinal design (N = 1,653) to investigate whether pride experiences are likely to be a cause, consequence, or both, of social rank outcomes, by tracking changes in individuals' pride and social rank over time. Prior research also has uncovered distinct correlational relationships between the two facets of pride, authentic and hubristic, and two forms of social rank, prestige and dominance, respectively. We therefore separately examined longitudinal relationships between each pride facet and each form of social rank. Results reveal distinct bidirectional relationships between authentic pride and prestige and hubristic pride and dominance, suggesting that specific kinds of pride experiences and specific forms of social rank are both an antecedent and a consequence of one another.

Is a downwards head tilt a cross-cultural signal of dominance? Evidence for a universal visual illusion.

The present pre-registered research provides the first evidence that a downwards head tilt is sufficient to communicate dominance from a neutral facial expression among the Mayangna, members of an unindustrialized, small-scale traditional society in Nicaragua who have had minimal exposure to North American culture. Consistent with the Action Unit imposter effect observed in North American populations (Witkower and Tracy in Psychol Sci 30:893-906, 2019), changes to the appearance of the upper face caused by a downwards head tilt were sufficient to elicit perceptions of dominance among this population. Given that the Mayangna are unlikely to associate a downwards head tilt or related apparent facial changes with dominance as a result of cross-cultural learning, the present results suggest that perceptions of dominance formed from a downwards head tilt, and the visual illusion shaping these perceptions, are a widely generalizable, and possibly universal, feature of human psychology.

How and why head position changes the perception of facial expressions of emotion.

A large body of research on emotion communication has demonstrated that facial muscle movements (i.e., facial expressions) influence social perceptions made from faces. However, new research suggests that head position can also affect the way that faces are perceived, by systematically changing the appearance of the face. More specifically, according to the action-unit imposter account, tilting one's head downward causes the eyebrows to appear lower and take on a V shape-the same appearance cues associated with a particular facial muscle movement (corrugator activity, or Action Unit 4 [AU4]). Drawing on this account, four studies (two of which were preregistered) tested whether a downward head tilt intensifies perceptions of facial expressions of emotion that include V-shaped eyebrows from AU4 but weaken perceptions of expressions that do not. Supporting this hypothesis, findings showed that (a) when the head is tilted downward, anger expressions-which include V-shaped eyebrows from AU4-are perceived as more intense, whereas expressions of happiness, disgust, fear, and surprise-which do not include V-shaped eyebrows from AU4-are perceived as less intense; (b) visually apparent changes to the eyebrows caused by the action-unit imposter effect account for the effect of a downward head tilt on perceptions of anger; and (c) this head movement is spontaneously used by individuals seeking to encode facial expressions of anger. Together, findings suggest that head movements play an important role in communicating emotion expressions from the face, especially anger. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

A paradox of pride: Hubristic pride predicts strategic dishonesty in response to status threats.

Numerous studies have shown that pride comprises two distinct facets: authentic pride, which is associated with achievement, high self-esteem, and prosocial personality traits; and hubristic pride, associated with arrogance, low self-esteem, and antisocial personality traits. Functionalist accounts suggest that both pride facets facilitate the attainment of social rank, raising the question of how the more antisocial and dysfunctional hubristic facet could increase one's social status. We propose that hubristically proud individuals use the antisocial behavior of dishonesty in a strategic and ultimately adaptive way, to gain status in response to experienced status threats. We tested this account in eight studies (seven of which were preregistered) by placing participants in a situation in which they encountered an opportunity to lie as a means of obtaining various social rewards (e.g., status, power). Findings show that hubristically proud participants engaged in dishonest behavior when faced with a status threat, but not when faced with the threat of a loss of power or generalized inferiority; these individuals also did not behave dishonestly in a nonsocial situation. We further found that the observed effects of hubristic pride on dishonesty were largely independent of shared variance with narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. These findings suggest that hubristic pride may engender a willingness to lie to get ahead, but only in situations where one's status has been threatened. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).

Beyond Face Value: Evidence for the Universality of Bodily Expressions of Emotion.

Research on emotion communication typically focuses on facial expressions, yet scientists dating back to Darwin have noted the importance of the body in conveying emotions. In fact, studies have found that the body is reliably used to express and recognize anger, fear, and sadness, by individuals in several industrialized populations. Here, we provide the first evidence that bodily expressions of these three emotions are reliably recognized by members of an isolated small-scale traditional society: the Mayangna of Nicaragua. Specifically, we found that recognition rates for sadness and anger bodily expressions were high, and recognition rates for a fear bodily expression were lower but still significantly greater than chance. Given that the Mayangna are unlikely to have learned these bodily expressions through cross-cultural transmission, their ability to recognize these displays provides strong evidence for the universality of each expression. Supplementary Information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s42761-021-00052-y.

What matters emotionally: The importance of pride for cumulative culture.

Osiurak and Reynaud highlight a major omission of models of cumulative technological culture. I propose an additional problematic omission: pride. By taking this emotion into account, we can address the question of why humans seek to learn, teach, and innovate - three processes essential to cumulative technological culture (CTC). By fostering achievement, prestige, and social learning, pride provides a pivotal piece of the puzzle.

A Provisional Taxonomy of Subjectively Experienced Positive Emotions.

Over the past two decades, scholars have conducted studies on the subjective experience of over 30 positive emotional states (see Weidman, Steckler, & Tracy, 2017). Yet, evidence from research on the non-verbal expression and biological correlates of positive emotions suggests that people likely experience far fewer than 30 distinct positive emotions. The present research provided an initial, lexically driven examination of how many, and which, positive emotions cohere as distinct subjective experiences, at both the state and trait levels. Four studies (including two pre-registered replications) using factor and network analyses of 5939 participants' emotional experiences, elicited through the relived emotions task, found consistent evidence for nine distinct positive emotion states and five distinct traits. At both levels, many frequently studied positive emotions were found to overlap considerably or entirely with other ostensibly distinct states in terms of the subjective components used to describe them, suggesting that researchers currently study more positive emotions than individuals experience distinctively. These findings provide the first-ever comprehensive portrait of the taxonomic structure of subjectively experienced positive emotions, with the ultimate aim of inspiring further examination of the positive emotion space at the subjective experiential as well as more biological and behavioral levels of analysis.

Picking up good vibrations: Uncovering the content of distinct positive emotion subjective experience.

Inquiry into positive emotions such as awe, compassion, gratitude, and pride has increased rapidly in recent years. Yet, the distinct subjective content of each positive emotion remains unknown, leaving unclear what people feel, think, and do when they experience these states, and whether regularly studied positive emotions are experientially distinct from other positive emotions. Furthermore, there are currently no validated measurement tools with which to assess the majority of positive emotions. The present research aimed to address these limitations. In Study 1 (N = 150) participants generated over 1,000 subjective elements (i.e., thoughts, feelings, and action tendencies) characterizing 18 regularly studied positive emotions. In Studies 2-3 (N = 3,334) participants were induced to experience each of these emotions through the Relived Emotion Task, and then reported whether the previously uncovered subjective elements characterized their feelings. Using factor analyses, we examined which elements cohered together in response to each emotion and which emotions were associated with distinctive content compared with conceptually similar emotions. Results revealed distinctive subjective content associated with 15 positive emotions, as well as 4 positive emotions often treated as distinct that were not associated with distinct subjective content. Using these results, we developed reliable self-report scales for assessing each emotion and provided initial validation for these scales. These findings lay the groundwork for future empirical efforts aimed at understanding the similarities and differences among positive emotions, and for the construction of a taxonomy of subjectively experienced positive emotions. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).

Two signals of social rank: Prestige and dominance are associated with distinct nonverbal displays.

Converging evidence suggests that high rank is communicated through various nonverbal behaviors (e.g., expansiveness), but prior studies have not examined whether 2 distinct forms of high rank-known as prestige and dominance-are communicated through distinct nonverbal displays. Given the divergent messages that prestigious and dominant leaders need to send in order to attain and retain their place in the social hierarchy, theoretical accounts would suggest that individuals use distinct sets of nonverbal behaviors to communicate these 2 forms of high rank. In the present research, we tested this hypothesis in 7 studies, using carefully controlled experimental designs (Studies 1, 2, 3, 4a, and 4b) and the assessment of spontaneously displayed nonverbal behaviors that occurred during a lab-based group interaction (Study 5) and a real-world political contest (Study 6). Results converged across studies to show that prestige and dominance strategies are associated with distinct sets of nonverbal behaviors, which are largely consistent with theoretical predictions. Specifically, prestige, or the attainment of rank through earned respect, and dominance, or the use of intimidation and force to obtain power, are communicated from different head positions (i.e., tilted upward vs. downward), smiling behaviors (i.e., presence vs. absence of a symmetrical smile), and different forms of bodily expansion (i.e., subtle chest expansion vs. more grandiose space-taking). These findings provide the first evidence for 2 distinct signals of high rank, which spontaneously emerge in social interactions and guide social perceptions and the conferral of power. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

How affect shapes status: distinct emotional experiences and expressions facilitate social hierarchy navigation.

All human societies are organized hierarchically, and individuals who occupy positions of high social rank typically acquire fitness advantages over lower ranking group members. Here, we argue that certain emotions function, at least in part, to help individuals successfully navigate these hierarchies. We review evidence suggesting that nine distinct emotions - pride, shame, anger, fear, sadness, disgust, contempt, envy, and admiration - influence social rank outcomes in important ways; most notably subjective experiences of these emotions motivate adaptive status-relevant behavior, and nonverbal expressions associated with these emotions send adaptive messages to others which facilitate expressers' attainment and maintenance of social rank. In sum, the reviewed emotions are thought to have intrapersonal and interpersonal consequences relevant to the navigation of social hierarchies.