Love and affectionate touch toward romantic partners all over the world.

Touch is the primary way people communicate intimacy in romantic relationships, and affectionate touch behaviors such as stroking, hugging and kissing are universally observed in partnerships all over the world. Here, we explored the association of love and affectionate touch behaviors in romantic partnerships in two studies comprising 7880 participants. In the first study, we used a cross-cultural survey conducted in 37 countries to test whether love was universally associated with affectionate touch behaviors.

Modernization, collectivism, and gender equality predict love experiences in 45 countries.

Recent cross-cultural and neuro-hormonal investigations have suggested that love is a near universal phenomenon that has a biological background. Therefore, the remaining important question is not whether love exists worldwide but which cultural, social, or environmental factors influence experiences and expressions of love. In the present study, we explored whether countries' modernization indexes are related to love experiences measured by three subscales (passion, intimacy, commitment) of the Triangular Love Scale.

Sex differences in human mate preferences vary across sex ratios.

A wide range of literature connects sex ratio and mating behaviours in non-human animals. However, research examining sex ratio and human mating is limited in scope. Prior work has examined the relationship between sex ratio and desire for short-term, uncommitted mating as well as outcomes such as marriage and divorce rates.

Affective Interpersonal Touch in Close Relationships: A Cross-Cultural Perspective.

Interpersonal touch behavior differs across cultures, yet no study to date has systematically tested for cultural variation in affective touch, nor examined the factors that might account for this variability. Here, over 14,000 individuals from 45 countries were asked whether they embraced, stroked, kissed, or hugged their partner, friends, and youngest child during the week preceding the study. We then examined a range of hypothesized individual-level factors (sex, age, parasitic history, conservatism, religiosity, and preferred interpersonal distance) and cultural-level factors (regional temperature, parasite stress, regional conservatism, collectivism, and religiosity) in predicting these affective-touching behaviors.

Universality of the Triangular Theory of Love: Adaptation and Psychometric Properties of the Triangular Love Scale in 25 Countries.

The Triangular Theory of Love (measured with Sternberg's Triangular Love Scale - STLS) is a prominent theoretical concept in empirical research on love. To expand the culturally homogeneous body of previous psychometric research regarding the STLS, we conducted a large-scale cross-cultural study with the use of this scale. In total, we examined more than 11,000 respondents, but as a result of applied exclusion criteria, the final analyses were based on a sample of 7332 participants from 25 countries (from all inhabited continents).

Sex Differences in Mate Preferences Across 45 Countries: A Large-Scale Replication.

Considerable research has examined human mate preferences across cultures, finding universal sex differences in preferences for attractiveness and resources as well as sources of systematic cultural variation. Two competing perspectives-an evolutionary psychological perspective and a biosocial role perspective-offer alternative explanations for these findings. However, the original data on which each perspective relies are decades old, and the literature is fraught with conflicting methods, analyses, results, and conclusions.

Contrasting Computational Models of Mate Preference Integration Across 45 Countries.

Humans express a wide array of ideal mate preferences. Around the world, people desire romantic partners who are intelligent, healthy, kind, physically attractive, wealthy, and more. In order for these ideal preferences to guide the choice of actual romantic partners, human mating psychology must possess a means to integrate information across these many preference dimensions into summaries of the overall mate value of their potential mates.

Tasteful Brands: Products of Brands Perceived to be Warm and Competent Taste Subjectively Better.

Using survey and experimental data, the present research examines the effect of brand perception on experienced taste. The content of brand perception can be organized along the two social perception dimensions of warmth and competence. We use these two dimensions to systematically investigate the influence of brand perception on experienced taste and consumer behavior toward food products.

Savouring morality. Moral satisfaction renders food of ethical origin subjectively tastier.

Past research has shown that the experience of taste can be influenced by a range of external cues, especially when they concern food's quality. The present research examined whether food's ethicality - a cue typically unrelated to quality - can also influence taste. We hypothesised that moral satisfaction with the consumption of ethical food would positively influence taste expectations, which in turn will enhance the actual taste experience.

Forecasting the Primary Dimension of Social Perception: Symbolic and Realistic Threats Together Predict Warmth in the Stereotype Content Model.

The Stereotype Content Model (SCM) posits two fundamental dimensions of intergroup perception, warmth and competence, predicted by social-structural dimensions of competition and status, respectively. However, the SCM has been challenged on claiming perceived competition as the socio-structural dimension that predicts perceived warmth. The current research improves by broadening warmth's predictor (competition) to include both realistic and symbolic threat from Integrated Threat Theory (Study 1).

Integrating The Stereotype Content Model (Warmth And Competence) And The Osgood Semantic Differential (Evaluation, Potency, And Activity).

We integrate two prominent models of social perception dimensionality. In three studies, we demonstrate how the well-established semantic differential dimensions of evaluation and potency relate to the stereotype content model dimensions of warmth and competence. Specifially, using a correlational design (Study 1) and experimental designs (Studies 2 and 3), we found that semantic differential dimensions run diagonally across stereotype content model quadrants.

Nations' income inequality predicts ambivalence in stereotype content: how societies mind the gap.

Income inequality undermines societies: The more inequality, the more health problems, social tensions, and the lower social mobility, trust, life expectancy. Given people's tendency to legitimate existing social arrangements, the stereotype content model (SCM) argues that ambivalence-perceiving many groups as either warm or competent, but not both-may help maintain socio-economic disparities. The association between stereotype ambivalence and income inequality in 37 cross-national samples from Europe, the Americas, Oceania, Asia, and Africa investigates how groups' overall warmth-competence, status-competence, and competition-warmth correlations vary across societies, and whether these variations associate with income inequality (Gini index).

Brands as Intentional Agents Framework: How Perceived Intentions and Ability Can Map Brand Perception.

Building on the Stereotype Content Model, this paper introduces and tests the Brands as Intentional Agents Framework. A growing body of research suggests that consumers have relationships with brands that resemble relations between people. We propose that consumers perceive brands in the same way they perceive people.

The Innuendo Effect: Hearing the Positive but Inferring the Negative.

Speakers can convey mixed impressions by providing only positive information. As a series of studies shows, when communicators omit information on a salient, relevant dimension of social perception, listeners make negative inferences about the target on that omitted dimension, despite directly receiving only positive information on another dimension (Studies 1 and 2a). These negative inferences mediated the effect of the innuendo manipulation on judgments about the target person's suitability for inclusion in one's group.

A question of compensation: the social life of the fundamental dimensions of social perception.

This research examines the impact of the compensation effect between the fundamental dimensions of warmth and competence on behavioral confirmation. In Experiment 1, participants were presented with 2 groups that varied on 1 of the 2 dimensions and asked to select the questions that they wanted to pose to learn more about the groups. Participants preferred to ask negative (positive) questions about the unmanipulated dimension to the high (low) group.

Compensation versus halo: the unique relations between the fundamental dimensions of social judgment.

Recent work on the relations between the two dimensions of social judgment, that is, warmth and competence, evidenced compensation such that a group seen more positively than another group on one dimension is seen less positively on the second. The authors examine the status of this compensatory relation by introducing a third dimension in the judgment context. Experiment 1 extends earlier work in a different population, comparing compensation as a function of whether warmth or competence is manipulated and competence or warmth is the unmanipulated dimension.