Nicholas O. Rule’s research while affiliated with University of Toronto and other places

The COVID-19 pandemic presented a series of challenges to organizations. Among those that successfully continued operating, the subsequent recovery period catalyzed pressure to redefine work structure after social distancing restrictions lifted. Here, we observed the benefits of transformational leadership in this historically unique context of organizational distress by applying an adjusted version of Ashkanasy and Dorris’s (Ashkanasy and Dorris in Annu Rev Organ Psych Organ Behav 4:67–90, 2017) framework for workplace emotions to a large, multi-campus university. We quantitatively content-analyzed semi-structured interviews of more than 300 divisional leaders and their staff from across the organization. Interviews occurred in the months following the first semester of continuous in-person service delivery, when most employees returned to working in employer-operated space. Despite disproportionate emphasis on negative and self-focused emotions, negative emotions clustered in individuals’ empathic recognition of others’ emotions; though efforts to regulate those emotions proved scant. Positive emotions primarily emerged in response to local leadership efforts to mitigate the negative emotions of students, staff, and faculty. This data pattern suggests that individuals experienced negative emotions, recognized others’ negative emotions, and appreciated leaders’ interventions to ameliorate those negative emotions. Strategies reminiscent of transformational leadership therefore productively addressed the negative impact of workplace stress imposed by the pandemic, helping to facilitate compliance and enthusiasm with return-to-work efforts. The findings thus illustrate how a transformational style of leadership can address individuals’ negative experiences during a period of pronounced existential stress.

Despite centuries of scientific (and sometimes pseudoscientific) interest in identifying criminals, research has not examined the perception and punishment of female criminals. Building on research describing how men’s facial appearance relates to juridic outcomes, we therefore investigated criminality inferences, their underlying cues, and hypothetical sentencing judgments from photos of female criminals. Participants categorized violent and nonviolent criminals significantly better than chance (Study 1) and aggression perceptions explained that detection (Study 2). Moreover, women who looked more aggressive received more severe hypothetical (Study 3a) and actual (Study 3b) sentences. Women’s facial appearance may therefore play an unintended and incidental role in perceptions of their criminality, illustrating how kernels of truth in social perception promote biases resulting from overgeneralization effects.

People ubiquitously smile during brief interactions and first encounters, and when posing for photos used for virtual dating, social networking, and professional profiles. Yet not all smiles are the same: subtle individual differences emerge in how people display this nonverbal facial expression. We hypothesized that idiosyncrasies in people’s smiles can reveal aspects of their personality and guide the personality judgments made by observers, thus enabling a smiling face to serve as a valuable tool in making more precise inferences about an individual’s personality. Study 1 (N = 303) supported the hypothesis that smile variation reveals personality, and identified the facial-muscle activations responsible for this leakage. Study 2 (N = 987) found that observers use the subtle distinctions in smiles to guide their personality judgments, consequently forming slightly more accurate judgments of smiling faces than neutral ones. Smiles thus encode traces of personality traits, which perceivers utilize as valid cues of those traits.

Whereas research has documented how atheists are perceived, none has considered their perceptibility. Atheists must first be identified as atheists in order to experience the stigma associated with them (i.e., as distrusted, disliked, and widely maligned). Although atheism is considered a concealable aspect of one’s identity, substantial research has found that a variety of ostensibly concealable attributes about a person are indeed legible from small and subtle cues. We merged these lines of inquiry here by considering the perceptibility of religious and spiritual (dis)belief. Studies 1A-1B showed that atheists could be reliably discerned from Christians based on brief glimpses of 100 standardized male faces. Experiment 2 replicated these results using female faces. Experiments 3 A-E then interrogated the facial features that support perceivers’ detection of atheism, showing that various parts of faces suffice for independently conveying atheism. Experiment 4 investigated and showed a potential mechanism for atheism detection – expressive suppression. Thus, across nine studies (N = 677), these data show robust evidence that atheists can be categorized from facial cues.

Despite the primacy of the face in social perception research, people often base their impressions on whole persons (i.e., faces and bodies). Yet, perceptions of whole persons remain critically underresearched. We address this knowledge gap by testing the relative contributions of faces and bodies to various fundamental social judgments. Results show that faces and bodies contribute different amounts to particular social judgments on orthogonal axes of social perception: Bodies primarily influence status and ability judgments, whereas faces primarily influence warmth-related evaluations. One possible reason for this may be differences in signal that bodies and faces provide for judgments along these two axes. To test this, we extended our investigation to social judgment accuracy, given that signal is a precondition to accuracy. Focusing on one kind of status/ability judgment—impressions of social class standing—we found that perceivers can discern individuals’ social class standing from faces, bodies, and whole persons. Conditions that included bodies returned higher accuracy, indicating that bodies may contain more signal to individuals’ social class than faces do. Within bodies, shape cued social class more than details of individuals’ clothing. Altogether, these findings highlight the importance of the body for fully understanding processes and outcomes in person perception.

Despite strong consensus about the basic features that make someone look objectively attractive, contextual variation may modulate subjective assessments. Here, we investigate how social group membership provides such a context, comparing attractiveness judgments between lesbian, gay, and bisexual (LGB) versus straight perceivers, and examining how these attractiveness judgments relate to beliefs about the target person’s sexual orientation. We indeed find that perceivers rate targets as more attractive when they believe the target’s sexual majority/minority status matches their own (Study 1). This association differs according to context, however: Although straight and LGB perceivers evaluate the components of facial attractiveness similarly (Study 2), straight men use attractiveness as a cue to sexual orientation (i.e., deeming unattractive women lesbians; Study 3) whereas LGB perceivers use sexual orientation as a cue to attractiveness (e.g., gay men rate men they believe are gay as more attractive than men they believe are straight; Studies 4 and 5). Thus, LGB identity seems to create a context in which sexual minority perceivers learn to attend to information about sexual diversity that straight perceivers may ignore. These findings highlight how group membership provides a lens for social perception, specifically pointing to how the contextual mindset of partner selection may transmute otherwise objective judgments, such as facial attractiveness.

While organisational crisis theory posits a predictable set of stages involving pre-planning and preparation, acute crisis response, adaptation and recovery, the prolonged and cyclical nature of public-health restrictions related to COVID-19 presented new challenges for institutions of higher education and conditioned students, faculty and staff to adopt a crisis mindset as their baseline. Consequently, moving from crisis to recovery posed unique obstacles at both individual (eg anxiety, exhaustion and post-traumatic stress) and organisational levels (eg transition logistics, labour market changes and student preparation). This paper describes an effort at a large, urban, research-intensive university to directly address the evolution from pandemic crisis to recovery and future resilience. The University Resilience Project recruited a team of senior staff charged with identifying and adopting promising practices created during the pandemic and decommissioning or archiving less useful policies, procedures and activities, with a view to strengthening the university's resilience. Over the course of more than 300 meetings with academic leaders, staff leaders and student leaders, team members created a space to share the experiences of COVID-19, reflect on successes and challenges over the crisis, and identify opportunities to enhance the resilience of the university. This work raised critical insights into the process of adapting to change in an institution of higher learning.

As our society ages, questions concerning the relations between generations gain importance. The quality of human relations depends on the quality of emotion communication, which is a significant part of our daily interactions. Emotion expressions serve not only to communicate how the expresser feels, but also to communicate intentions (whether to approach or retreat) and personality traits (such as dominance, trustworthiness, or friendliness) that influence our decisions regarding whether and how to interact with a person. Emotion Communication by the Aging Face and Body delineates how aging affects emotion communication and person perception by bringing together research across multiple disciplines. Scholars and graduate students in the psychology of aging, affective science, and social gerontology will benefit from this over-view and theoretical framework.