The diverse literature on shame has led to disparate and often contradictory conclusions regarding the emotion's nature and consequences. The article proposes a motivational theory of shame that accounts for these discrepant findings. The first part of the article uses the concept of active avoidance to outline a dynamic motivational perspective in which shame is based initially in behavioral i...

Specific behavioral tendencies cause investors to deviate from optimal investing. We investigate three such tendencies in a simplified stock market. Subjects rarely follow the fully profit-maximizing strategy, most commonly by ignoring information and continuing to hold on to a stock regardless of its performance. The results support the predictions of the status quo bias, but not the ostrich e...

We studied 459 Ukrainian civil servants to determine how career network-building behavioral tendencies relate to network range and promotion speed. We identify two main behavioral tendencies for initiating social relationships: (a) networking within formal structured groups organized around activities created specifically to encourage members to form personal bonds (structured foci) and (b) ind...

This study examined whether exposure to pornography lead to aggression, utilizing pornographic video excerpts and measuring participants’ aggression by the number of human faces chosen as targets during a dart-throwing decision task. Male college students (n = 120) were randomly assigned into one of three experimental groups who viewed the sexually explicit material (nonviolent, sadomasochistic...

Antisocial individuals are characterized to display self-determined and inconsiderate behavior during social interaction. Furthermore, recognition deficits regarding fearful facial expressions have been observed in antisocial populations. These observations give rise to the question whether or not antisocial behavioral tendencies are associated with deficits in basic processing of social cues. ...

Asymmetrical patterns of frontal cortical activity have been implicated in the development and expression of aggressive behavior. Along with individual motivational tendencies, the ability to restrain one's impulses might be a factor in aggressive behavior. Recently, a role for the inhibitory cortical beta rhythm was suggested. The present study investigated whether individual differences in re...