Antony S R Manstead

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Verified

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• D Phil (Social Psychology)
• Professor Emeritus at Cardiff University

We investigated the value of the Duchenne (D) smile as a spontaneous sign of felt enjoyment. Participants either smiled spontaneously in response to amusing material (spontaneous condition) or were instructed to pose a smile (deliberate condition). Similar amounts of D and non-Duchenne (ND) smiles were observed in these 2 conditions (Experiment 1)....

Building on intergroup emotion research, we test the idea that intergroup emotion influences self-categorization. We report two studies using minimal (Study 1) and natural (Study 2) groups in which we measured participants' emotional reactions to a group-relevant event before manipulating the emotional reactions of other ingroup members and outgrou...

Social decisions are heavily influenced by emotion. For decades, the dominant research paradigm has been characterized by a focus on the decision maker's own positive or negative mood. We argue that a full understanding of the role of emotion in social decision making requires a complementary focus on interpersonal effects (i.e., the effects of one...

Detecting cooperative partners in situations that have financial stakes is crucial to successful social exchange. The authors tested whether humans are sensitive to subtle facial dynamics of counterparts when deciding whether to trust and cooperate. Participants played a 2-person trust game before which the facial dynamics of the other player were...

Develops the argument that appraisals are the results of social experiences and that the social world is therefore an integral part of the appraisal process. An obvious point is that other persons can be objects of appraisal. However, the authors' idea of social appraisal goes beyond the case in which a person is the source of emotion: even then th...

In recent decades, populism has gained momentum in many Western countries and has increased the salience of the category “the people” in contemporary politics. This success of populist politics may evoke a backlash effect among more dominant groups in general, and the higher educated in particular, potentially triggering support for elitism. Based...

Due to the role that schools play in determining the status of the future occupations of their children (i.e., the selection function of education), high socioeconomic status (SES) parents may not always be supportive of interventions that would reduce the SES achievement gap. In four experiments, we measured the support of parents ( N total = 1966...

A major theme in social psychological models of collective action is that shared social identity is a critical foundation for resistance and collective action. In this review, we suggest that this foundational role of social identity can be double edged for many minority groups because material disadvantage is often coupled with the historical eros...

Societal challenges such as the COVID-19 pandemic have the quality of a social dilemma, in that they compel people to choose between acting in their own interests or the interests of a larger collective. Empirical evidence shows that the choices people make in a social dilemma are influenced by how this decision is framed. In four studies, we exami...

Peer problems are frequently associated with difficulties in recognizing and appraising the emotions of others. It has been argued that facial responsiveness to others’ emotions—or motor empathy—is a precursor of emotion processing and affective empathy. Although mimicry impairments have been observed in studies of young people with conduct problem...

This paper is a commentary on the paper by Keltner and colleagues (this issue). Although Keltner at al.'s expanded version of a social functionalist theory of emotion is a welcome addition to theoretical thinking about the relation between emotion and social life, I argue that their paper accords too much importance to the ways in which emotion is...

A major theme in social psychological models of collective action is that a sense of shared social identity is a critical foundation for collective action. In this review, we suggest that for many minority groups, this foundational role of social identity can be double edged. This is because material disadvantage is also often coupled with the hist...

In interpersonal relations, it is known that expressing self-conscious emotions such as guilt and shame following a transgression is beneficial to reconciliation. In the current research, we examine whether this also applies to intergroup relations. Groups of three persons played an intergroup version of the “centipede game,” in which one party can...

The neuropeptide oxytocin (OT) has been shown to influence social cognition, including better recognition of emotion in faces. One potential way in which OT improves emotion recognition is by increasing the correspondence between a perceiver's own facial activity and observed facial expressions. Here we investigate whether increased facial synchron...

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced teachers and parents to quickly adapt to a new educational context: distance learning. Teachers developed online academic material while parents taught the exercises and lessons provided by teachers to their children at home. Considering that the use of digital tools in education has dramatically increased during th...

We report three studies reported in which we examined how changing the content of an intergroup apology affects how the apology is received. In Study 1, we investigated how emphasizing structural, relational, or identity-related factors influenced reactions to an apology from a large group, a small group, and from an individual. There was limited e...

We investigated the effects of different types of smiles on the perception of uncooperative or untrustworthy behaviour. In five studies, participants assigned to one group played an economic game with a representative of another group. In an initial round, the representative acted uncooperatively by favouring their group and then displayed a domina...

Research over the past decades has demonstrated the explanatory power of emotions, feelings, motivations, moods, and other affective processes when trying to understand and predict how we think and behave. In this consensus article, we ask: has the increasingly recognized impact of affective phenomena ushered in a new era, the era of affectivism?

Despite the assumption that intergroup apologies should lead to forgiveness in the same way that interpersonal ones do, research suggests that this is not the case. We report two studies exploring the application of the Staircase Model of Intergroup Apologies (Wohl, Hornsey, & Philpot, 2011), in which an intergroup apology is embedded in a broader...

How individuals divide resources between themselves and another person is influenced both by their social value orientation (SVO) and the emotions they expect to feel when dividing resources (anticipated emotions). Research has also shown that individuals favor members of their own group (ingroup) over individuals from other groups (outgroup) when...

The COVID-19 pandemic poses an exceptional challenge for humanity. Because public behaviour is key to curbing the pandemic at an early stage, it is important for social psychological researchers to use their knowledge to promote behaviours that help manage the crisis. Here, we identify human values as particularly important in driving both behaviou...

The relationships between subjective status and perceived legitimacy are important for understanding the extent to which people with low status are complicit in their oppression. We use novel data from 66 samples and 30 countries (N = 12,788) and find that people with higher status see the social system as more legitimate than those with lower stat...

Others’ facial expressions can influence whether we trust them. For example, smiles tend to elicit positive impressions and increased cooperation. But how are smiles perceived when displayed by someone who has violated our trust? Here, we investigated the effects of reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles displayed after intergroup trust violatio...

Smiles are ubiquitous. We often think of them as facial expressions communicating joy and positive feelings but a closer examination reveals that people smile in a wide variety of situations – including stressful and negative ones. Moreover, a growing body of literature reveals that the meaning and the social consequences of smiles are largely infl...

There is abundant evidence both from the scientific literature as well as from everyday experiences that people are generally quite capable of inferring emotions from the face. But what does it mean that people are able to recognize others’ emotions? We first reflect on the question of how we can determine what is ‘accurate’. We distinguish between...

Foundations of Affective Social Learning - edited by Daniel Dukes August 2019

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translate...

Despite the increasing attention paid by psychologists to social class, we argue here that insufficient attention has been paid to the ways, in which socio-ecological factors shape both which dimensions of social class are used by individuals to compare themselves with others, and the outcomes of these comparisons. We illustrate our argument by rev...

Individuals have a myriad of potential identities that they can use to define who they are, yet little research has investigated which types of identities people tend to prioritize within their self‐concepts, and how this may vary across individuals. We analyse data from two large UK social surveys (Ns = 16,966 and 44,903) that assessed the importa...

Western societies stress the potential for anyone, irrespective of social background, to improve their position within society. However, disadvantaged students face barriers in gaining a good education. Two studies in secondary schools show how perceptions of identity compatibility and anticipated fit influence students’ university choices. It was...

Intergroup trust is vital for cooperation and societal well-being, but is harder to establish than interpersonal trust. We investigate whether expressions of negative emotions, in particular regret, following economic decisions can shape intergroup trust. In each of three studies participants were members of a group playing a two-round trust game w...

We find evidence that explicit (but not implicit) measures of general attitude towards protest uniquely predict normative and nonnormative political action tendencies, and behavior, over and above extant models of political action. Protest attitude uniquely predicts both the political action tendencies of members of disadvantaged groups and willing...

Most published research focuses on describing differences, while neglecting similarities that are arguably at least as interesting and important. In Study 1, we modified and extended prior procedures for describing similarities and demonstrate the importance of this exercise by examining similarities between groups on 22 social variables (e.g., mor...

In this paper, we investigate lay conceptions of creativity towards science as compared to art. In three studies across Brazil and the UK, we investigated whether science is less strongly associated with creativity compared to art. In Study 1, we found that art is more spontaneously associated with creativity among British but not Brazilian partici...

We tested whether mere source attribution is sufficient to cause polarization between groups, even on consensual non-divisive positions. Across four studies (N = 2,182), using samples from Germany, the UK, and the USA, agreement with aphorisms was high in the absence of source attribution. In contrast, atheists agreed less with brief aphorisms when...

Intergroup exchanges are an integral part of social life but are compromised when one group pursues its interests at another group’s expense. The present research investigates whether expressing emotion can mitigate the negative consequences of such actions. We examine how emotions communicated by either an ingroup or outgroup member following an i...

Previous research found that the within-country variability of human values (e.g., equality and helpfulness) clearly outweighs between-country variability. Across three countries (Brazil, India, and the United Kingdom), the present research tested in student samples whether between-nation differences reside more in the behaviors used to concretely...

Social context plays an important role in everyday emotional interactions, and others' faces often provide contextual cues in social situations. Investigating this complex social process is a challenge that can be addressed with the use of computer-generated facial expressions. In the current research, we use synthesized facial expressions to inves...

Drawing on recent research on the psychology of social class, I argue that the material conditions in which people grow up and live have a lasting impact on their personal and social identities and that this influences both the way they think and feel about their social environment and key aspects of their social behaviour. Relative to middle-class...

Social psychology has studied ethnic, gender, age, national, and other social groups but has neglected education-based groups. This is surprising given the importance of education in predicting people's life outcomes and social attitudes. We study whether and why people evaluate education-based in-groups and out-groups differently. In contrast with...

Oxytocin (OXT) has previously been implicated in a range of prosocial behaviors such as trust and emotion recognition. Nevertheless, recent studies have questioned the evidence for this link. In addition, there has been relatively little conclusive research on the effect of OXT on empathic ability and such studies as there are have not examined the...

Cooperation is a fundamental drive of moral behavior from infancy, yet competitive intergroup contexts can exert a significant influence on resource allocation behavior in childhood. The present study explored how ingroup and outgroup norms of competition and cooperation influenced the allocation of resources between groups among children and adole...

Purpose: Central diabetes insipidus is characterised by arginine vasopressin deficiency. Oxytocin is structurally related to vasopressin and is synthesised in the same hypothalamic nuclei, thus we hypothesised that patients with acquired central diabetes insipidus and anterior hypopituitarism would display an oxytocin deficiency. Moreover, psychol...

We comment on two articles on social referencing and social appraisal. We agree with Walle, Reschke, and Knothe’s (XXXX) argument that at one level of analysis, social referencing and social appraisal are functionally equivalent: In both cases, another person’s emotional expression is observed and this expression informs the observer’s own emotiona...

Human groups function because members trust each other and reciprocate cooperative contributions, and reward others’ cooperation and punish their non-cooperation. Here we examined the possibility that such third-party punishment and reward of others’ trust and reciprocation is modulated by oxytocin, a neuropeptide generally involved in social bondi...

Objectives: Previous studies have found that oxytocin (OXT) can improve the recognition of emotional facial expressions; it has been proposed that this effect is mediated by an increase in attention to the eye-region of faces. Nevertheless, evidence in support of this claim is inconsistent, and few studies have directly tested the effect of oxytoc...

The use of intranasal oxytocin (OT) in research has become increasingly important over the past decade. Although researchers have acknowledged a need for further investigation of the physiological effects of intranasal administration, few studies have actually done so. In the present double-blind cross-over study we investigated the longevity of a...

Salivary OT concentrations for Placebo and Oxytocin conditions. (DOCX)

Results of Shapiro-Wilks tests for normality for each saliva sample. (DOCX)

Level of formal education is an important divide in contemporary societies; it is positively related to health, well-being, and social attitudes such as tolerance for minorities and interest in politics. We investigated whether education-based identification is a common underlying factor of these education effects. Indeed, education-based identific...

Level of education is a predictor of a range of important outcomes, such as political interest and cynicism, social trust, health, well-being, and intergroup attitudes. We address a gap in the literature by analyzing the strength and stability of the education effect associated with this diverse range of outcomes across three surveys covering the p...

This article discusses contemporary social psychological approaches to (a) the social relations and appraisals associated with specific emotions; (b) other peoples impact on appraisal processes; (c) effects of emotion on other people; and (d) interpersonal emotion regulation. We argue that single-minded cognitive perspectives restrict our understan...

We tested the hypothesis that shared emotions, notably anger, influence the formation of new self-categories. We first measured participants' (N = 89) emotional reactions to a proposal to make university assessment tougher before providing feedback about the reactions of eight other co-present individuals. This feedback always contained information...

We offer the first empirical comparison of the pleasure in seeing (i.e., schadenfreude) and in causing (i.e., gloating) others’ adversity. In Study 1, we asked participants to recall and report on an (individual or group) episode of pleasure that conformed to our formal definition of schadenfreude, gloating, pride, or joy, without reference to an e...

In the present research, we examine the ways in which exposure to hostile sexism influences women's competitive collective action intentions. Prior to testing our main model, our first study experimentally induced high versus low levels of security-comfort with the aim of providing experimental evidence for the proposed causal link between these em...

We investigated how another person's emotions about resource allocation decisions influence observers' resource allocations by influencing the emotions that observers anticipate feeling if they were to act in the same way. Participants were exposed to an exemplar who made a fair or unfair division in an economic game and expressed pride or regret a...

Humans have a strong tendency to affiliate with other people, especially in emotional situations. Here, we suggest that a critical mechanism underlying this tendency is that socially sharing emotional experiences is in itself perceived as hedonically positive and thereby contributes to the regulation of individual emotions. We investigated the effe...

Dieses Kapitel gibt einen Überblick über die Forschungsmethoden in der Sozialpsychologie, von der Entwicklung einer Theorie bis zur Datenerhebung. Nach der Beschreibung dreier quantitativer Forschungsstrategien (Experiment, Quasiexperiment und Umfrageforschung) wird kurz auf qualitative Ansätze eingegangen; dabei wird der Schwerpunkt auf die Diskur...

When someone suffers a mishap, a setback or a downfall, we sometimes find ourselves experiencing schadenfreude - an emotion defined as deriving pleasure from another's misfortune. Schadenfreude is a common experience and an emotion which is seemingly inherent to social being. This book offers a comprehensive summary of current theoretical and empir...

Research on bullying has confirmed that social identity processes and group-based emotions are pertinent to children’s responses to bullying. However, such research has been done largely with child participants, has been quantitative in nature, and has often relied on scenarios to portray bullying. The present paper departs from this methodology by...

Research on the psychological aspects of breastfeeding has tended to focus on one of two issues: (i) the factors that determine parental choice of infant feeding method, or (ii) the consequences of breastfeeding for the child’s psychological development. This chapter will summarize the conclusions that can be drawn from research on these two issues...

Two somewhat distinct trends seem to have put schadenfreude on the scholarly and the popular agenda: (1) the academic (re)turn to emotion as a concept; and (2) the popular interest in seeing others suffer in the media. Recent media coverage has used the term “schadenfreude” to describe pleasure at the precipitous fall of celebrities; public rejoici...

Rationale, aims and objectives: Little is understood about how decision aids achieve their reported effects or their impact on the decision-making process. We aimed to evaluate the quality of decision aids for women choosing surgery for early breast cancer and to examine how their reported effects may reflect the contribution of components suggeste...

Women diagnosed with early breast cancer (stage I or II) can be offered the choice between mastectomy or breast conservation surgery with radiotherapy due to equivalence in survival rates. A wide variation in the surgical management of breast cancer and a lack of theoretically guided research on this issue highlight the need for further research in...

In three studies, we examined whether the anticipation of group‐based guilt and shame inhibits in‐group favoritism. In Studies 1 and 2, anticipated group‐based shame negatively predicted in‐group favoritism; in neither study did anticipated group‐based guilt uniquely predict in‐group favoritism. In Study 3, we orthogonally manipulated anticipated g...

In four studies, we report evidence that admiration affects intergroup behaviors that regulate social hierarchy. We demonstrate that manipulating the legitimacy of status relations affects admiration for the dominant and that this emotion negatively predicts political action tendencies aimed at social change. In addition, we show that greater warmt...

In two studies we examined whether and when anticipated group-based shame leads to less ingroup favoritism on the part of members of high-status groups in stable hierarchies. In Study 1 (n = 195) we measured anticipated group-based shame and found that it only negatively predicted ingroup favoritism in stable high-status groups. When anticipated gr...

Research has demonstrated that humans engage in various self-presentational behaviours in the context of mate attraction. We build and expand on these efforts by showing that female facial behaviour also responds to the manipulation of romantic motivation in ways congruent with the logic of evolutionary theory. Given that childbearing is an importa...

In three studies we examined whether the anticipation of group-based guilt, shame and anger predicts the desire to undertake collective action against a proposed ingroup transgression. In Studies 1 (N = 179) and 2 (N = 186), the relation between appraising a proposed ingroup transgression as illegitimate and collective action was mediated (or parti...

A key feature of facial behavior is its dynamic quality. However, most previous research has been limited to the use of static images of prototypical expressive patterns. This article explores the role of facial dynamics in the perception of emotions, reviewing relevant empirical evidence demonstrating that dynamic information improves coherence in...

Trust is a key aspect to human communication due to its link to co-operation and survival. Recent research by [Ballew and Todorov 2007] has shown that humans can generate an initial trustworthiness judgement based on facial features within 100ms. However, in that work, perceived trustworthiness has been studied solely in the context of facial infor...

Prior research found conflicting results concerning the relationship between depression and mental state decoding ability as assessed by the 'Eyes Test' developed by Baron-Cohen and colleagues. In some studies the relationship is negative, suggesting that depressed persons are worse than controls in decoding mental states on the basis of informatio...

Recent theories about the relation between emotion and behavior hold that social behavior is influenced not only by the experience of emotion, but also by the anticipation of emotion. We argue that anticipating future emotional states is an emotion regulation strategy when it leads to a change in behavior. In the current studies we examined how con...

Research with adults shows that negative ingroup behavior can affect identification with the group, but also that the way in which members respond to negative events is moderated by prior levels of identification. Research with children shows that how strongly they identify with a group influences how they react to group-level bullying. The authors...

Research on bullying increasingly focuses on social processes, showing that group membership affects children's responses to bullying scenarios. Additionally, correlational research has shown links between norms of cooperation and prosocial behaviour, and between competition and more aggressive forms of behaviour. This paper focuses on how children...

We investigated whether males use facial behavior strategically in order to increase their desirability as romantic partners. Participants were led to believe that a female research assistant who was either attractive or unattractive was observing them. Their task was to watch three short films: an excerpt from a horror film, a video of infants, an...

To undertake a quantitative evaluation of a theory-based, interactive online decision aid (BresDex) to support women choosing surgery for early breast cancer (Stage I and II), based on observations of its use in practice. Observational cohort study. Website log-files collected data on the use of BresDex. Online questionnaires assessed knowledge abo...

We examined social facilitation and emotional convergence in amusement, sadness, and fear in dynamic interactions. Dyads of friends or strangers jointly watched emotion-eliciting films while they either could or could not communicate nonverbally. We assessed three components of each emotion (expressions, appraisals, and feelings), as well as attent...

In six studies (N = 1045) conducted in three European countries, we demonstrate distinctions between causal responsibility, group-based guilt, and moral responsibility. We propose that causal responsibility is an antecedent of group-based guilt linking the ingroup to previous transgressions against the victim group. In contrast, moral responsibilit...

In two studies, we tested the hypothesis that not having a potentially group-defining attribute (e.g., in-group language) can affect social identification and support for group goals (e.g., national autonomy). Focusing on the Welsh minority in the UK, Study 1 provided evidence that Welsh language fluency predicted Welsh identification and support f...

Men and women differ in the regulation of their anger expressions. As the regulation of anger expressions often occurs in social interactions, where the pressure for emotion regulation is high, the social context can be considered as important in explaining these gender differences. In the present chapter, the association between the social context...

We consider how ingroup norms, identification and individual attitudes interact when a behaviour (heavy alcohol consumption) is defining of an ingroup identity. We sampled 115 students at a UK university, measuring ingroup identification and attitudes to heavy drinking before manipulating the ingroup drinking norm (moderate vs. heavy). Heavy drinki...

In this paper, I reflect on past papers published in the British Journal of Social Psychology (BJSP) that have played a role in the development of the theory of reasoned action (TRA) and the theory of planned behaviour (TPB). I focus on seven papers that fall into five categories: (1) those that critique the TRA/TPB for taking insufficient account...

Evidence attests to the efforts made by minority groups to defend and promote ‘distinctive’ attributes that potentially define the ingroup. However, these attributes are often only available to a prototypical minority within the minority category. In two studies we tested the hypothesis that, under certain conditions, large projected increases in t...

Social platforms such as MySpace, Facebook and Twitter have rekindled the initial excitement of cyberspace. Text-based, computer-mediated communication has been enriched with face-to-face communication such as Skype, as users move from desktops to laptops with integrated cameras and related hardware. Age, gender and culture barriers seem to have cr...

A study is reported which examined the effects of the presence of others, recording equipment, and a mirror on performance of a musical task. These three performance conditions were designed to test predictions derived from the mere presence, evaluation apprehension, and objective self-awareness accounts of social facilitation phenomena. The relati...

This study assesses the sufficiency of Ajzen's (1985) theory of planned behaviour in predicting intentions to commit each of three driving violations involving poor lane discipline: cutting across traffic to leave a motorway; weaving in and out of two lanes of slow-moving traffic; and overtaking on the inside. Behavioural intention was predicted re...

The present study examined the portrayal of men and women in a sample of British television advertisements, with a view to establishing whether men and women were depicted differently, and if so in what respects. One hundred and seventy advertisements were analysed by classifying the following attributes of their adult central figures: sex, mode of...