Behaviour change interventions: getting in touch with individual differences, values and emotions

Affective synchrony: individual differences in mixed emotions.

Most models of affect suggest either inverse or null associations between positivity and negativity. Recent work has highlighted situations that sometimes lead to mixed positive-negative affect. Focusing on the counterpart to these situational factors, the authors explore the individual-difference tendency toward mixed emotions, which they term affective synchrony. In five studies, the authors ...

Individual Differences and Task Behaviour

The Interactive Social Book Search track at CLEF has run the same experiment, task, and interface for two years. This provides an opportunity to study the individual differences between two separately recruited participant cohorts, rather than between sub-sets of a single cohort. Overall the results show no significant differences in how the participants used the three main stages of the interf...

In touch with your emotions: oxytocin and touch change social impressions while others' facial expressions can alter touch.

Interpersonal touch is frequently used for communicating emotions, strengthen social bonds and to give others pleasure. The neuropeptide oxytocin increases social interest, improves recognition of others' emotions, and it is released during touch. Here, we investigated how oxytocin and gentle human touch affect social impressions of others, and vice versa, how others' facial expressions and oxy...

Interventions that change clinician behaviour:

Individual differences in gelotophobia and responses to laughter-eliciting emotions

Gelotophobes (individuals with a fear of being laughed at) have even been found to express less joy and more contempt towards joyfully smiling/laughing faces compared to non-gelotophobes. However, it is unclear whether the lower levels of joy and higher levels of contempt are related to joy per se or only to those elements of joy associated with laughter. Thus, this study investigated the verba...