Debra Lieberman’s research while affiliated with University of Miami and other places

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Publications (63)


Emotional tears: What they are and how they work
  • Article

January 2025

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44 Reads

Evolution and Human Behavior

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Debra Lieberman

The Elements of Gratitude

May 2024

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3 Reads

This book provides a cutting-edge overview of emotion science from an evolutionary perspective. Part 1 outlines different ways of approaching the study of emotion; Part 2 covers specific emotions from an evolutionary perspective; Part 3 discusses the role of emotions in a variety of life domains; and Part 4 explores the relationship between emotions and psychological disorders. Experts from a number of different disciplines—psychology, biology, anthropology, psychiatry, and more—tackle a variety of “how” (proximate) and “why” (ultimate) questions about the function of emotions in humans and nonhuman animals, how emotions work, and their place in human life. This volume documents the explosion of knowledge in emotion science over the last few decades, outlines important areas of future research, and highlights key questions that have yet to be answered.


There are no beautiful surfaces without a terrible depth

October 2023

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57 Reads

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Fitouchi et al. persuasively argue against popular disgust-based accounts of puritanical morality. However, they do not consider alternative account of moral condemnation that is also based on the psychology of disgust. We argue that these other disgust-based accounts are more promising than those dismissed in the target article.


Emotional tears: What they are and how they work

April 2023

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46 Reads

Tears serve ophthalmic functions: They lubricate, nourish, and protect the cornea. Tearers produce tears non-permanently and at relatively low cost. And observers pay attention to the eyes of others and extract from eyes and faces a lot of information about others’ stable and transient characteristics, including their mental states. These background conditions may have led to the evolution in the human lineage of additional signaling functions in tears. Emotional tearing occurs during negative events (e.g., injuries) and positive events (e.g., achievements). Episodes of tearing appear to be united by tearers’ subjective imputation of negative or positive value to certain internal or external events. Knowing the degree to which things enhance or diminish one’s prospects—the value of things—is a pressing matter for humans and other organisms. Value information is produced for internal consumption, to be used by behavior-regulating mechanisms in the focal individual. But some value information is made available, in addition, to other people, through tearing and other forms of verbal and non-verbal communication. Tearing may function as an implicit plea for receivers to minimize the costs imposed on the tearer by nature, by third-parties, or by the receivers themselves—common when the tearer has lower formidability or wherewithal than receivers do. In addition, tearing may exhort receivers to infer and register which things the tearer values, positively or negatively. Here, we characterize tears, describe the game-theoretic logic of bargaining from a position of weakness, outline the computational systems that regulate the production of and responses to emotional tears, and review findings about emotional tearing that are relevant to the signaling hypothesis.




Evaluating Benefits, Costs, and Social Value as Predictors of Gratitude

March 2022

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58 Reads

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15 Citations

Psychological Science

Although much is known about cooperation, the internal decision rules that regulate motivations to initiate and maintain cooperative relationships have not been thoroughly explored. Here, we focus on how acts of benefit delivery and perceptions of social value inform gratitude, an emotion that promotes cooperation. We evaluated alternate information-processing models to determine which inputs and internal representations best account for the intensity with which people report experiencing gratitude. Across two experiments (Ns = 257 and 208), we tested 10 models that consider multiple variables: the magnitude of benefits conferred on beneficiaries, the magnitude of costs incurred by benefactors, beneficiaries' perception of how much benefactors value their welfare, and beneficiaries' value for the welfare of their benefactors. Across both studies, only beneficiaries' change in social valuation for their benefactors consistently predicted gratitude. Results point to the need for further research and contribute to the growing literature linking cooperation, social emotions, and social valuation.



If it quacks like a duck: The by-product account of music still stands

September 2021

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11 Reads

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3 Citations

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

Discerning adaptations from by-products is a defining feature of evolutionary science. Mehr, Krasnow, Bryant, and Hagen posit that music is an adaptation that evolved to function as a credible signal. We counter this claim, as we are not convinced they have dispelled the possibility that music is an elaboration of extant features of language.


Correlation coefficients for all variables tested in Experiments 1 and 2.
Evaluating benefits, costs, and social value as predictors of gratitude
  • Preprint
  • File available

September 2021

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287 Reads

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2 Citations

Although much is known about cooperation, the internal decision rules that regulate motivations to initiate and maintain cooperative relationships have not been thoroughly explored. Here, we focus on how acts of benefit delivery and perceptions of social value inform gratitude, an emotion that promotes cooperation. We evaluate alternate information-processing models to determine which inputs and internal representations best account for the intensity with which people report experiencing gratitude. Across two experiments (Ns = 257; 208), we test ten models that consider multiple variables: the magnitude of benefits conferred upon beneficiaries, the magnitude of costs incurred by benefactors, beneficiaries’ perception of how much benefactors value their welfare, and beneficiaries’ value for the welfare of their benefactors. Across both studies, only beneficiaries’ change in social valuation for their benefactors consistently predicted gratitude. Results point to future research and contribute to the growing literature linking cooperation, social emotions, and social valuation.

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Citations (46)


... That is, when exploitation risk is low and relationship value is high, then the forgiveness index is higher. Although prior work has examined the forgiveness index exclusively as a predictor of forgiveness (Billingsley et al., 2023;McCullough et al., 2014;Tan et al., 2017), it is possible that the forgiveness index is implicated in whether forgiveness begets healthy outcomes for forgivers. Indeed, research has called for work to explore the possibility that health consequences of forgiveness depend on exploitation risk and relationship value . ...

Reference:

An Exploratory Study of the Associations Between Epstein–Barr Virus Antibodies and Forgiveness Among Recipients of Relational Transgressions in the USA
Perceptions of relationship value and exploitation risk mediate the effects of transgressors' post-harm communications upon forgiveness
  • Citing Article
  • March 2023

Evolution and Human Behavior

... The cultivation of interpersonal gratitude is essential for promoting social and emotional development during emerging adulthood (Yang et al., 2024;Zhang et al., 2018). Recently, an increasing number of researchers have recognized that the elicitation of interpersonal gratitude depends not only on the effectiveness of the help received (Forster et al., 2022;Liu et al., 2020;Yang et al., 2024), but also on the recipient's comparative thinking about the help (Cheng et al., 2023;Nicuță & Constantin, 2021;Yamamoto & Higuchi, 2019). However, a limited number of empirical studies examining the impact of social comparison of received help on interpersonal gratitude have yielded inconsistent findings, and have yet to reveal the underlying mechanisms of this relationship. ...

Evaluating Benefits, Costs, and Social Value as Predictors of Gratitude
  • Citing Article
  • March 2022

Psychological Science

... A similar result was also found in a population-based study in Finland, in which the duration of childhood co-residence and the perinatal maternal association were associated with the quality of sibling relationships (Tanskanen et al., 2021). These studies suggest that altruism devoted to kin is dependent on cues available in the developmental environment of individuals, not being a direct effect of genes shared between siblings (Lieberman & Billingsley, 2021). For this reason, an evolutionary psychological perspective privileges the understanding of EPMs for a full comprehension of human behavior. ...

Kinship versus closeness: A commentary on and
  • Citing Article
  • October 2021

Evolution and Human Behavior

... The cultural courtship model does not explain all cultural displays, and the status competition model has not been well tested. Another perspective on cultural displays (including music) suggests that they serve no function and instead are a byproduct of high intelligence in humans or the general ability to adopt culture (Hodgson & Verpooten, 2015;Lieberman & Billingsley, 2021;Pinker, 2021). Steven Pinker made this famous statement about music: "I suspect that music is auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties" (1997, p. 534). ...

If it quacks like a duck: The by-product account of music still stands
  • Citing Article
  • September 2021

Behavioral and Brain Sciences

... In addition to these, researchers could examine whether meta-parenting (i.e., thinking about parenting; Hawk & Holden, 2006;Holden et al., 2017) influences the results. Moreover, perceived romantic partner characteristics (e.g., Farrell et al., 2015;Forster et al., 2021;Reyes & Clark, 2024), such as partner responsiveness, may matter for the proclivity to apologize and forgive in the romantic relationship. Perhaps partners who are perceived to be highly responsive are more likely to be forgiven. ...

Experimental evidence that apologies promote forgiveness by communicating relationship value

... Item inclusions and findings from such studies may provide further insights while expanding the list we used in this study. In particular, recent work has emphasized the role of embodied states (Cabbai et al., 2023;Fingerhut & Prinz, 2020;Kühnapfel et al., 2024) and social emotions (Sznycer et al., 2021), both of which would be valuable to incorporate in future investigations, especially in light of the Social-Negative outcome identified here. Some studies have also suggested potential cultural differences when it comes to attributed valence of specific feelings or how emotions might be reported (e.g., Keltner & Oatley, 2022;Masuda et al., 2008; but see also Zickfeld et al., 2019 for counter-argument); future work may consider exploring possible cultural effects further. ...

Forms and Functions of the Social Emotions
  • Citing Article
  • June 2021

Current Directions in Psychological Science

... Disgust sensitivity is positively correlated with food neophobia, suggesting that neophobia may in fact be an expression of this emotion, which in turn may reduce WTP for foods produced using these methods (Björklund and Hursti, 2004;Tybur et al., 2020). Moreover, neophobia is not limited to the food itself, but also to the technologies used to produce it (Song et al., 2022;Cox and Evans, 2008). ...

Behavioral Immune Trade-Offs: Interpersonal Value Relaxes Social Pathogen Avoidance

Psychological Science

... The purported improvement in interpretability has led to a proliferation of bifactor S − 1 models measuring dozens of broad and narrow psychological constructs, including depression (Heinrich et al., 2020), anxiety (Hoffmann et al., 2021), mood disorder (Peterson et al., 2022), externalizing disorders (Hand & Lonigan, 2022;Thöne et al., 2021), psychopathy (Olderbak et al., 2021), "general psychopathology" (Heinrich et al., 2021;Wendt et al., 2022), attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder and oppositional defiant disorders (Burns et al., 2020;Junghänel et al., 2020), intelligence (Eid et al., 2018), memory (Kofler et al., 2020), social skills (Panayiotou et al., 2022), selfefficacy (Backfisch et al., 2021), academic behaviors (Kittelman et al., 2021), perfectionism (Gäde et al., 2017), emotional intelligence (Simonet et al., 2021), forgiveness (Forster et al., 2020), activism and radicalism (Pavlovićet al., 2022), boldness , and circadian rhythms (Panjeh et al., 2022), among others. Particularly relevant to the current analysis is Eid's (2020) recommendation that "it is advisable to apply both the multidimensional model with correlated first-order factors and the bifactor S − 1 model" (p. ...

Forgiveness Takes Place on an Attitudinal Continuum From Hostility to Friendliness: Toward a Closer Union of Forgiveness Theory and Measurement

Journal of Personality and Social Psychology

... In past research, infants inferred relationships after they observed responses to distress and after seeing actions that implied saliva-sharing, both of which are cross-cultural and crossspecies cues of relationships (Cheney & Seyfarth, 1992;Fiske, 1992). In one study, 15-to 17-month-old toddlers used responses to distress to infer triadic closure: they expected that two small characters who had been comforted by the same large character, or two large characters who had comforted the same small character, would affiliate by approaching one another and coordinating their actions; (Billingsley et al., 2019). In another study, infants as young as 8 months predicted that individuals who shared saliva would be more likely to respond to one another's distress, compared to individuals who shared a toy or who touched one another in a non-affiliative way (Thomas, Woo, et al., 2022). ...

What evidence is required to determine whether infants infer the kinship of third parties? A commentary on Spokes and Spelke (2017)
  • Citing Article
  • October 2019

Cognition

... For example, Antfolk, Karlsson, et al. (2012) found that biological incest was viewed with more disgust than unrelated incest. Furthermore, disgust ratings for third-party incest are stronger if the raters themselves are related to one of the individuals (Antfolk et al., 2012(Antfolk et al., , 2018. ...

Opposition to Inbreeding Between Close Kin Reflects Inclusive Fitness Costs