The Business School of the Manchester Metropolitan University is one of the largest business schools in the UK comprising more than 150 academic staff organised into eleven thematic research groups. The Working Paper Series brings together research in progress from across the Business School for publication to a wider audience and to facilitate discussion. Working Papers are subject to a peer r...

Since Aaron Wildavsky proposed in 1987 that cultural orientations such as egalitarianism and individualism frame public perceptions of technological risks, a body of empirical research has grown to affirm the risk-framing effects of personality and culture (Dake, 1991; Gastil et al., 2005; Kahan, 2008). Most of these studies have focused on relatively mundane risks, however, such as handguns, n...

Three studies (two conducted in Israel and one in the United States) examined associations between self-rated dispositional happiness and tendencies to treat memories of positive and negative events as sources of enhanced or attenuated happiness through the use of "endowment" and "contrast." Although participants generally endorsed items describing happiness-enhancing tendencies more than happi...

Motivational tendencies to happy and angry faces are well-established, e.g., in the form of aggression. Approach-avoidance reactions are not only elicited by emotional expressions, but also linked to the evaluation of stable, social characteristics of faces. Grounded in the two fundamental dimensions of face-based evaluations proposed by Oosterhof and Todorov (2008), the current study tested wh...

High-risk behavior in adolescents is associated with injury, mental health problems, and poor outcomes in later life. Improved understanding of the neurobiology of high-risk behavior and impulsivity shows promise for informing clinical treatment and prevention as well as policy to better address high-risk behavior. We recruited 21 adolescents (age 14-17) with a wide range of high-risk behavior ...

Two studies tested the prediction that more positive intergroup contact would be associated with reduced aggressive intergroup action tendencies, an effect predicted to occur indirectly via reduced intergroup threat perceptions, and over and above well-established effects of contact on intergroup attitudes. Study 1, using data based on a cross-section of the general population of eight European...

BACKGROUND Sex differences are present in many neuropsychiatric conditions that affect emotion and approach-avoidance behavior. One potential mechanism underlying such observations is testosterone in early development. Although much is known about the effects of testosterone in adolescence and adulthood, little is known in humans about how testosterone in fetal development influences later neur...