Conspicuous displays of consumption and benevolence might serve as "costly signals" of desirable mate qualities. If so, they should vary strategically with manipulations of mating-related motives. The authors examined this possibility in 4 experiments. Inducing mating goals in men increased their willingness to spend on conspicuous luxuries but not on basic necessities. In women, mating goals b...

While drawing on a limited field of articles and chapters on courage, the editors of The Psychology of Courage: modern research on an ancient virtue have postulated a viable history of the evolution of courage in psychology and chosen a select set of articles which advocate the influence of some of the more modern approaches to psychological thought, while relying only slightly on the historica...

Socio-technical systems thinking has predominantly been applied to the domains of new technology and work design over the past 60 years. Whilst it has made an impact, we argue that we need to be braver, encouraging the approach to evolve and extend its reach. In particular, we need to: extend our conceptualization of what constitutes a system; apply our thinking to a much wider range of complex...

We hypothesized that gelotophobia (the fear of being laughed at), gelotophilia (the joy of being laughed at), and katagelasticism (the joy of laughing at others) relate differently to character strengths. In Study 1 (N = 5,134), self-assessed gelotophobia was primarily negatively related to strengths (especially to lower hope, zest, and love), whereas only modesty yielded positive relations. Ge...

This study describes a first exploration of the construct of courage in youths. Children aged 8-13 years were invited to report on the most courageous action that they had ever performed during their life. In addition, the Courage Measure for Children (CM-C) was construed as an index of children's level of personal courage, and this scale was administered in two samples of school children (Ns b...

This article presents a new tool—the Wilderness Courage Scale. The Wilderness Courage Scale is a scale that diagnoses undertaking activity in dangerous natural environments, despite personal fears. The validity of the Wilderness Courage Scale was tested using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. The results of factor analyses verified the one-factor structure. The questionnaire’s inter...