Medical errors became a common topic of conversation with the release of the Institute of Medicine's "To Err Is Human" in November of 1999. This release reported that as many as 98,000 people die each year from inpatient medical errors. Putting this into perspective, deaths from medical errors surpassed deaths from breast cancer, motor vehicle accidents, and AIDS. Furthermore, medication errors...

In the wake of corporate transgressions and scandals, how do apologizers’ expressed emotions affect investors’ perceptions of the organization in question? We analyzed the market effects of normative versus deviant facial affect expressed during apologies for corporate wrongdoing. Archival data revealed that the expression of deviant affect was associated with decreased investor confidence in t...

Interpersonal forgiving was conceptualized in the context of a 2-factor motivational system that governs people's responses to interpersonal offenses. Four studies were conducted to examine the extent to which forgiving could be predicted with relationship-level variables such as satisfaction, commitment, and closeness; offense-level variables such as apology and impact of the offense; and soci...

In this study, participants (n = 196) read a vignette about an imaginary romantic partner cheating on them by having sex with another person and responded to a series of questions assessing variables associated with forgiveness. Method of discovering how the infidelity occurred and the frequency of cheating occurrence were manipulated between participants, while the presence or absence of an ap...

Based upon a theoretical framework of politeness and face-threatening acts (FTAs), an ethnographic investigation of naturally occurring apologies and politeness strategies in Cuernavaca Spanish was accomplished. Using a modified version of BlumKulka et al.’s (1989) Cross-Cultural Speech Act Realization Project Coding Manual for Apologies and a corpus of (200) naturally occurring apology events,...

People tend to show some types of interpersonal behavior after feeling gratitude: reciprocal behavior, expression of apology, expression of thanks, and prosocial behavior. We examined the mechanism of these behaviors in 304 undergraduate students who were presented with three types of situations that produce gratitude: receiving help, receiving gifts, or imposing on others. We asked participant...

We propose to use a model of personal space to initiate communication while passing a human thereby acknowledging that humans are not just a special kind of obstacle to be avoided but potential interaction partners. As a simple form of interaction, our system communicates an apology while closely passing a human. To this end, we present a software architecture that integrates a social-spaces kn...