Detecting the trustworthiness of novel partners in economic exchange.

Because trusting strangers can entail high risk, an ability to infer a potential partner's trustworthiness would be highly advantageous. To date, however, little evidence indicates that humans are able to accurately assess the cooperative intentions of novel partners by using nonverbal signals. In two studies involving human-human and human-robot interactions, we found that accuracy in judging the trustworthiness of novel partners is heightened through exposure to nonverbal cues and identified a specific set of cues that are predictive of economic behavior.

Context explains divergent effects of anger on risk taking.

The emotion anger is typically associated with increased risk taking. However, anger also produces increased probability estimates that emotionally congruent negative events will occur. This latter finding suggests that the general assumption that anger always increases risky decision making may be subject to caveat.

Gratitude: prompting behaviours that build relationships.

The emotion gratitude is argued to play a pivotal role in building and maintaining social relationships. Evidence is accumulating that links gratitude to increases in relationship satisfaction. Yet, there is currently little evidence for how gratitude does this.

Emotion guided threat detection: expecting guns where there are none.

Five experiments examine whether the ability of emotions to influence judgments of threat extends to a very basic process inherent in threat detection: object recognition. Participants experiencing different emotions were asked to make rapid judgments about whether target individuals were holding guns or neutral objects. Results across 4 experiments supported the hypothesis that anger increases the probability that neutral objects will be misidentified as ones related to violence, but not the converse.

Gratitude as moral sentiment: emotion-guided cooperation in economic exchange.

Economic exchange often pits options for selfish and cooperative benefit against one another. Decisions favoring communal profit at the expense of self-interest have traditionally been thought to stem from strategic control aimed at tamping down emotional responses centered on immediate resource acquisition. In the present article, evidence is provided to argue against this limited view of the role played by emotion in shaping prosociality.