Voice of a woman: influence of interaction partner characteristics on cycle dependent vocal changes in women.

Introduction: Research has shown that women's vocal characteristics change during the menstrual cycle. Further, evidence suggests that individuals alter their voices depending on the context, such as when speaking to a highly attractive person, or a person with a different social status. The present study aimed at investigating the degree to which women's voices change depending on the vocal characteristics of the interaction partner, and how any such changes are modulated by the woman's current menstrual cycle phase.

Human Prosocial Preferences Are Related to Slow-Wave Activity in Sleep.

Prosocial behavior is crucial for the smooth functioning of the society. Yet, individuals differ vastly in the propensity to behave prosocially. Here, we try to explain these individual differences under normal sleep conditions without any experimental modulation of sleep.

Face coverings increase apparent honesty and cooperativeness.

People readily make inferences about trait-like characteristics of another person's face. Since the recent global COVID-19 pandemic, the widespread use of hygienic face masks has led to large proportions of the face being covered. We investigated the effect of face masks on the inference of prosocially relevant characteristics, namely cooperativeness and honesty.

Face masks have a limited effect on the feeling of being looked at.

Introduction: Wearing face masks has been promoted as an effective measure to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Because face masks cover a major part of the face, they have detrimental effects on various aspects of social cognition. Yet, a highly important feature of the face is not occluded by face masks: the eyes.

I spy with my little eye: The detection of changes in emotional faces and the influence of facial feedback in Parkinson disease.

Background And Purpose: Parkinson disease (PD) is a progressive neurodegenerative disorder that affects the motor system but also involves deficits in emotional processing such as facial emotion recognition. In healthy participants, it has been shown that facial mimicry, the automatic imitation of perceived facial expressions, facilitates the interpretation of the emotional states of our counterpart. In PD patients, recent studies revealed reduced facial mimicry and consequently reduced facial feedback, suggesting that this reduction might contribute to the prominent emotion recognition deficits found in PD.

The Cone of Direct Gaze: A Stable Trait.

Direct eye gaze is a potent stimulus in social interactions and is often associated with interest and approach orientation. Yet, there is remarkable variability in the range of gaze lines that people accept as being direct. A measure that is frequently used to quantify the range of gaze angles within which an observer assumes mutual gaze is the cone of direct gaze (CoDG).

Feeling of guilt explains why people react differently to resource depletion warnings.

Despite insistent warnings from climate scientists, the global environmental situation is further deteriorating. To date, only very few studies have investigated the impact of warnings on sustainable decision-making in controlled laboratory settings. Moreover, the few existing studies mainly looked at average warning reactions rather than taking individual differences into account.

Effects of posed smiling on memory for happy and sad facial expressions.

The perception and storage of facial emotional expressions constitutes an important human skill that is essential for our daily social interactions. While previous research revealed that facial feedback can influence the perception of facial emotional expressions, it is unclear whether facial feedback also plays a role in memory processes of facial emotional expressions. In the present study we investigated the impact of facial feedback on the performance in emotional visual working memory (WM).

Content matters: Cyclic effects on women's voices depend on social context.

Women's voices reportedly sound more attractive during the fertile days compared to the non-fertile days of their menstrual cycle. Here we investigated whether the speech content modulates the cyclic changes in women's voices. We asked 72 men and women to rate how interested they were in getting to know the speaker based on her voice.

Pleasant body odours, but not genetic similarity, influence trustworthiness in a modified trust game.

Identifying trustworthy partners is an important adaptive challenge for establishing mutually cooperative relationships. Previous studies have demonstrated a marked relationship between a person's attractiveness and his apparent trustworthiness (beauty premium). Kin selection theory, however, suggests that cues to kinship enhance trustworthiness.

Out of Focus: Facial Feedback Manipulation Modulates Automatic Processing of Unattended Emotional Faces.

Facial expressions provide information about an individual's intentions and emotions and are thus an important medium for nonverbal communication. Theories of embodied cognition assume that facial mimicry and resulting facial feedback plays an important role in the perception of facial emotional expressions. Although behavioral and electrophysiological studies have confirmed the influence of facial feedback on the perception of facial emotional expressions, the influence of facial feedback on the automatic processing of such stimuli is largely unexplored.

Increased sensitivity to social exclusion during the luteal phase: Progesterone as resilience factor buffering against ostracism?

A woman's social behaviour reportedly varies across the menstrual cycle. In this study, we estimated changes in sensitivity to social exclusion across the menstrual cycle and scrutinized the related role of progesterone. Forty-nine naturally cycling women played a virtual ball-tossing game (Cyberball) to manipulate social inclusion.

TV vs. YouTube: TV Advertisements Capture More Visual Attention, Create More Positive Emotions and Have a Stronger Impact on Implicit Long-Term Memory.

In an experiment, effects of commercials that are either shown within a TV program or embedded in YouTube videos were compared. These two media environments have not yet been compared empirically in terms of their advertising impact. A within-subjects design and a multi-method approach were used ( = 36).

Compassionate faces: Evidence for distinctive facial expressions associated with specific prosocial motivations.

Compassion is a complex cognitive, emotional and behavioural process that has important real-world consequences for the self and others. Considering this, it is important to understand how compassion is communicated. The current research investigated the expression and perception of compassion via the face.

The scent of attractiveness: levels of reproductive hormones explain individual differences in women's body odour.

Individuals are thought to have their own distinctive body odour which reportedly plays an important role in mate choice. In the present study we investigated individual differences in body odours of women and examined whether some women generally smell more attractive than others or whether odour preferences are a matter of individual taste. We then explored whether levels of reproductive hormones explain women's body odour attractiveness, to test the idea that body odour attractiveness may act as a chemosensory marker of reproductive fitness.

Timing is crucial: Some critical thoughts on using LH tests to determine women's current fertility.

Naturally cycling women reportedly go through a variety of psychological and behavioural changes over menstrual cycle. Evolutionary informed scholars have interpreted such changes as maximising reproductive success. However, concerns have been raised regarding this ovulatory shift hypothesis, since recent studies have yielded inconsistent findings.

Reactive aggression tracks within-participant changes in women's salivary testosterone.

The relation between testosterone and aggression has been relatively well documented in men, but it is less well understood in women. Here we assessed the relationship between salivary testosterone and reactive aggression (i.e.

Theta resting EEG in TPJ/pSTS is associated with individual differences in the feeling of being looked at.

Direct eye gaze is a powerful stimulus in social interactions, yet people vary considerably in the range of gaze lines that they accept as being direct (cone of direct gaze, CoDG). Here, we searched for a possible neural trait marker of these individual differences. We measured the width of the CoDG in 137 healthy participants and related their individual CoDG to their neural baseline activation as measured with resting electroencephalogram.

Men's preferences for women's body odours are not associated with human leucocyte antigen.

Body odours reportedly portray information about an individual's genotype at the major histocompatibility complex (MHC, called human leucocyte antigen, HLA, in humans). While there is strong experimental support for MHC-associated mating behaviour in animals, the situation in humans is more complex. A lot of effort has been spent on testing HLA-associated odour preferences of women.

Spatial But Not Oculomotor Information Biases Perceptual Memory: Evidence From Face Perception and Cognitive Modeling.

Recent research put forward the hypothesis that eye movements are integrated in memory representations and are reactivated when later recalled. However, "looking back to nothing" during recall might be a consequence of spatial memory retrieval. Here, we aimed at distinguishing between the effect of spatial and oculomotor information on perceptual memory.

Do women tend while men fight or flee? Differential emotive reactions of stressed men and women while viewing newborn infants.

Infant care often is carried out under stressful circumstances. Little is known about differences in caretaking motivation between men and women under stress. In the present study, stress was induced in 40 participants (21 women, 19 men) by means of the cold pressor stress test, 40 (22 women, 18 men) serving as controls.

Putting Up a Big Front: Car Design and Size Affect Road-Crossing Behaviour.

Previous research suggests that people tend to see faces in car fronts and that they attribute personality characteristics to car faces. In the present study we investigated whether car design influences pedestrian road-crossing behaviour. An immersive virtual reality environment with a zebra crossing scenario was used to determine a) whether the minimum accepted distance for crossing the street is larger for cars with a dominant appearance than for cars with a friendly appearance and b) whether the speed of dominant-looking cars is overestimated as compared to friendly-looking cars.

Can women detect cues to ovulation in other women's faces?

Recent research suggests that men find portraits of ovulatory women more attractive than photographs of the same women taken during the luteal phase. Only few studies have investigated whether the same is true for women. The ovulatory phase matters to men because women around ovulation are most likely to conceive, and might matter to women because fertile women might pose a reproductive threat.