Papers by Danielle M Shore
Humans make many important decisions in social environments. Social judgements of interaction par... more Humans make many important decisions in social environments. Social judgements of interaction partners based on the cues they send likely influence those decisions, by shaping expectations about the utility or subjective desirability of interacting with those partners. Here I examine how subtle differences in social utility judgements shape the influence social cues have on the decision-making process, in a series of three broad questions. The first of these relates to the intrinsic value of specific social cues. Anecdotally, cues such as smiles carry value as social rewards. Using a novel application of expected utility theory in an economic game, I show that relative to polite smiles, participants value genuine smiles to the extent that they are willing to forgo the chance to win money for the chance to see these social rewards. This suggests that genuine smiles have value as social cues and increase the utility of the interaction partners who display them. In social interaction, people receive many different types of social cues. These include, static appearance-based cues such as facial trustworthiness, dynamic expressions such as smiles, and the social decisions an interaction partner makes. These cues sometimes conflict-for example, when an untrustworthy face smiles genuinely. My second question addresses how these cues interact during social decision-making. I investigated how conflicting cues modulate social utility in an investor-trustee game. Surprisingly, unfavourable appearance-based judgements biased investment behaviour long after people had learned the value of a face based on behaviour. Interestingly, a smile present at the time of feedback eliminated this bias. This suggests when more stable cues (appearance and behaviour) conflict, dynamic cues (expressions) are powerful modulators of social utility. My final question considered one mechanism for understanding how social cues shape decision-making. Specifically, social cues may bias the allocation of attention during social interactions, thereby shaping the social information people acquire. I examined how appearance- and behaviour-based judgements altered the allocation of attention to social stimuli. Strong appearance-based judgements (positive and negative) enhanced stimulus 10 / recognition but only positive behaviour-based judgements altered involuntary allocation of attention to stimuli. This suggests that behaviour-based social utility judgements alter pre-attentive processing, and consequently bias attention distribution. Taken together, these findings suggest that appearance, facial expression and behaviour cues all contribute to social utility, and this utility guides decision-making in social environments. 11EThOS - Electronic Theses Online ServiceGBUnited Kingdo
Cognitive, Affective, & Behavioral Neuroscience, Jul 6, 2017
Accurate assessment of trustworthiness is fundamental to successful and adaptive social behavior.... more Accurate assessment of trustworthiness is fundamental to successful and adaptive social behavior. Initially, people assess trustworthiness from facial appearance alone. These assessments then inform critical approach or avoid decisions. Individuals with Williams syndrome (WS) exhibit a heightened social drive, especially toward strangers. This study investigated the temporal dynamics of facial trustworthiness evaluation in neurotypic adults (TD) and individuals with WS. We examined whether differences in neural activity during trustworthiness evaluation may explain increased approach motivation in WS compared to TD individuals. Event-related potentials were recorded while participants appraised faces previously rated as trustworthy or untrustworthy. TD participants showed increased sensitivity to untrustworthy faces within the first 65-90 ms, indexed by the negative-going rise of the P1 onset (oP1). The amplitude of the oP1 difference to untrustworthy minus trustworthy faces was correlated with lower approachability scores. In contrast, participants with WS showed increased N170 amplitudes to trustworthy faces. The N170 difference to low-high-trust faces was correlated with low approachability in TD and high approachability in WS. The findings suggest that hypersociability associated with WS may arise from abnormalities in the timing and organization of early visual brain activity during trustworthiness evaluation. More generally, the study provides support for the hypothesis that impairments in low-level perceptual processes can have a cascading effect on social cognition.
Smiles provide information about a social partner's affect and intentions during social interacti... more Smiles provide information about a social partner's affect and intentions during social interaction. Although always encountered within a specific situation, the influence of contextual information upon smile evaluation has not been widely investigated. Moreover, little is known about the reciprocal effect of smiles on evaluations of their accompanying situations. In this research, we assessed how different smile types and situational contexts affected participants' social evaluations. In Study 1, 85 participants rated reward, affiliation, and dominance smiles embedded within either enjoyable, polite, or negative situations. Context had a strong effect on smile ratings, such that smiles in enjoyable contexts were rated as more genuine and joyful, as well as indicating less superiority than those in negative contexts. In Study 2, 200 participants evaluated the contexts that these smiles were perceived within (rather than the smiles themselves). Although situations paired with reward (vs. affiliation) smiles tended to be rated more positively, this effect was absent for negative situations. Ultimately, the findings point toward the bidirectional relationship between smiles and contexts, which comprises both the facial appearance and the nature of the situation.
Affective Science
This study investigated interpersonal effects of regulating naturalistic facial signals on cooper... more This study investigated interpersonal effects of regulating naturalistic facial signals on cooperation during an iterative Prisoner’s Dilemma (IPD) game. Fifty pairs of participants played ten IPD rounds across a video link then reported on their own and their partner’s expressed emotion and facial regulation in a video-cued recall (VCR) procedure. iMotions software allowed us to auto-code actors’ and partners’ facial activity following the outcome of each round. We used two-level mixed effects logistic regression to assess over-time actor and partner effects of auto-coded facial activity, self-reported facial regulation, and perceptions of the partner’s facial regulation on the actor’s subsequent cooperation. Actors were significantly less likely to cooperate when their partners had defected on the previous round. None of the lagged scores based on auto-coded facial activity were significant predictors of cooperation. However, VCR variables representing partner’s positive regulatio...
Cognition, Oct 1, 2013
Research shows that social judgments influence decision-making in social environments. For exampl... more Research shows that social judgments influence decision-making in social environments. For example, judgments about an interaction partners' trustworthiness affect a variety of social behaviors and decisions. One mechanism by which social judgments may influence social decisions is by biasing the automatic allocation of attention toward certain social partners, thereby shaping the information people acquire. Using an attentional blink paradigm, we investigate how trustworthiness judgments alter the allocation of attention to social stimuli in a set of two experiments. The first experiment investigates trustworthiness judgments based solely on a social partner's facial appearance. The second experiment examines the effect of trustworthiness judgments based on experienced behavior. In the first, strong appearance-based judgments (positive and negative) enhanced stimulus recognizability but did not alter the size of the attentional blink, suggesting that appearance-based social judgments enhance face memory but do not affect pre-attentive processing. However, in the second experiment, in which judgments were based on behavioral experience rather than appearance, positive judgments enhanced pre-attentive processing of trustworthy faces. This suggests that a stimulus's potential benefits, rather than its disadvantages, shape the automatic distribution of attentional resources. These results have implications for understanding how appearance-and behavior-based social cues shape attention distribution in social environments.
Emotion, Jun 1, 2019
Intergroup exchanges are an integral part of social life but are compromised when one group pursu... more Intergroup exchanges are an integral part of social life but are compromised when one group pursues its interests at another group's expense. The present research investigates whether expressing emotion can mitigate the negative consequences of such actions. We examine how emotions communicated by either an ingroup or outgroup member following an ingroup member's breach of trust affect other ingroup members' feelings of guilt and pride, and subsequent allocation of resources. In both studies, groups of participants played a tworound trust game with another group. In round one, they observed a member of their own group failing to reciprocate a trusting move by the outgroup. In Study 1 (N = 85), an outgroup member then communicated anger or disappointment, whereas in Study 2 (N = 164), an ingroup member then communicated happiness or guilt. Comparisons with noemotion control conditions revealed that expressions of outgroup anger and ingroup guilt increased participants' allocations to an outgroup member in round two. The effect of an outgroup member's anger expression was mediated by participants' diminished feelings of pride about the ingroup action, whereas the effect of an ingroup member's guilt expression was mediated by participants' own feelings of guilt. Taken together, these findings support a social appraisal approach and highlight the roles that pride and guilt can play in shaping intergroup resource allocations.
Cognition & Emotion, Oct 30, 2017
A social partner's emotions communicate important information about their motives and intentions.... more A social partner's emotions communicate important information about their motives and intentions. However, people may discount emotional information that they believe their partner has regulated with the strategic intention of exerting social influence. Across two studies, we investigated interpersonal effects of communicated guilt and perceived strategic regulation in trust games. Results showed that communicated guilt (but not interest) mitigated negative effects of trust violations on interpersonal judgements and behaviour. Further, perceived strategic regulation reduced guilt's positive effects. These findings suggest that people take emotionregulation motives into account when responding to emotion communication.
The contraction and relaxation of facial muscles in humans is widely assumed to fulfil communicat... more The contraction and relaxation of facial muscles in humans is widely assumed to fulfil communicative and adaptive functions. However, to date most work has focussed either on individual muscle movements (action units) in isolation or on a small set of configurations commonly assumed to express “basic emotions”. As such, it is as yet unclear what information is communicated between individuals during naturalistic social interactions and how contextual cues influence facial activity occurring in these exchanges. The present study investigated whether consistent patterns of facial action units occur during dyadic iterative prisoners’ dilemma games, and what these patterns of facial activity might mean. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we identified three distinct and consistent configurations of facial musculature change across three different datasets. These configurations were associated with specific gameplay outcomes, suggesting that they perform psychologically meaningful context-related functions. The first configuration communicated enjoyment and the second communicated affiliation and appeasement, both indicating cooperative intentions after cooperation or defection respectively. The third configuration communicated disapproval and encouraged social partners not to defect again. Future work should validate the occurrence and functionality of these facial configurations across other kinds of social interaction.
Emotion, 2011
Humans show remarkable ability to adapt their social behavior to suit the changing requirements o... more Humans show remarkable ability to adapt their social behavior to suit the changing requirements of their interactions. An interaction partner's social cues, particularly facial expressions, likely play an important role in motivating and reinforcing this behavioral adaptation. Over three studies, we test a key aspect of this idea. Specifically, we ask how the reinforcement value of facial expressions compares to that of nonsocial feedback and to what degree two frequently occurring expressions (genuine and polite smiles) differ in reinforcement value. Our findings show that social feedback is preferred over nonsocial feedback and that genuine smiles are preferred over polite smiles. Based on a logistic model of our data, we show that both monetary and social values of stimuli contribute significantly to participants' decisions. Indeed, participants were willing to sacrifice the chance of a monetary reward to receive a genuine smile and produced inflated estimates of the value of genuinely smiling faces. These findings suggest that genuine smiles, and potentially other social cues, may be useful social reinforcers and therefore important in the control of social behavior on a moment-to-moment basis during interaction.
The contraction and relaxation of facial muscles in humans is widely assumed to fulfil communicat... more The contraction and relaxation of facial muscles in humans is widely assumed to fulfil communicative and adaptive functions. However, to date most work has focussed either on individual muscle movements (action units) in isolation or on a small set of configurations commonly assumed to express “basic emotions”. As such, it is as yet unclear what information is communicated between individuals during naturalistic social interactions and how contextual cues influence facial activity occurring in these exchanges. The present study investigated whether consistent patterns of facial action units occur during dyadic iterative prisoners’ dilemma games, and what these patterns of facial activity might mean. Using exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, we identified three distinct and consistent configurations of facial musculature change across three different datasets. These configurations were associated with specific gameplay outcomes, suggesting that they perform psychologically ...
Within a societal landscape in which mental healthcare support providers are categorically overst... more Within a societal landscape in which mental healthcare support providers are categorically overstretched, the present study compared the effects of providing different kinds of support as an initial step to developing strategies for decreasing the cumulative emotional burden of support provision for support providers. While socio-affective support strategies are concerned with making support-seekers feel better, cognitive strategies are focused on problem-solving and providing logistical support. In the present study, participants completed a single-session online study to examine whether support strategy (cognitive versus socio-affective support) influenced emotional exhaustion from before to after providing support to multiple individuals who discussed negative life experiences. Participants were assigned to either a cognitive support, socio-affective support, or no support control condition; watched five videos from the Stanford Emotional Narratives Database of pre-recorded indiv...
In social decision-making tasks, facial expressions are informative signals that indicate motives... more In social decision-making tasks, facial expressions are informative signals that indicate motives and intentions. As people are aware that their expressions influence partner behavior, expressions may be strategically regulated in competitive environments to influence a social partner's decisionmaking. In this work, we examine facial expressions and their strategic regulation within the context of an iterated prisoner's dilemma. Utilizing video-cued rating procedures, we examine several key questions about the functionality of facial expressions in social decision-making. First, we assess the extent to which emotion and expression regulation are accurately detected from dynamic facial expressions in interpersonal interactions. Second, we explore which facial cues are utilized to evaluate emotion and regulation information. Finally, we investigate the role of context in participants' emotion and regulation judgments. Results show that participants accurately perceive facial emotion and expression regulation, although they are better at recognizing emotions than regulation. Using automated expression analysis and stepwise regression, we constructed models that use action units from participant videos to predict their video-cued emotion and regulation ratings. We show that these models perform similarly and, in some cases, better than participants do. Moreover, these models demonstrate that game state information improves predictive accuracy, thus implying that context information is important in the evaluation of facial expressions.
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Humans show remarkable ability to adapt their social behavior to suit the changing requirements o... more Humans show remarkable ability to adapt their social behavior to suit the changing requirements of their interactions. An interaction partner’s social cues, particularly facial expressions, likely play an important role in motivating and reinforcing this behavioral adaptation. Over three studies, we test ak ey aspect of this idea. Specifically, we ask how the reinforcement value of facial expressions compares to that of nonsocial feedback and to what degree two frequently occurring expressions (genuine and polite smiles) differ in reinforcement value. Our findings show that social feedback is preferred over nonsocial feedback and that genuine smiles are preferred over polite smiles. Based on al ogistic model of our data, we show that both monetary and social values of stimuli contribute significantly to participants’ decisions. Indeed, participants were willing to sacrifice the chance of am onetary reward to receive ag enuine smile and produced inflated estimates of the value of gen...
2019 8th International Conference on Affective Computing and Intelligent Interaction (ACII), 2019
In social decision-making tasks, facial expressions are informative signals that indicate motives... more In social decision-making tasks, facial expressions are informative signals that indicate motives and intentions. As people are aware that their expressions influence partner behavior, expressions may be strategically regulated in competitive environments to influence a social partner's decisionmaking. In this work, we examine facial expressions and their strategic regulation within the context of an iterated prisoner's dilemma. Utilizing video-cued rating procedures, we examine several key questions about the functionality of facial expressions in social decision-making. First, we assess the extent to which emotion and expression regulation are accurately detected from dynamic facial expressions in interpersonal interactions. Second, we explore which facial cues are utilized to evaluate emotion and regulation information. Finally, we investigate the role of context in participants' emotion and regulation judgments. Results show that participants accurately perceive facial emotion and expression regulation, although they are better at recognizing emotions than regulation. Using automated expression analysis and stepwise regression, we constructed models that use action units from participant videos to predict their video-cued emotion and regulation ratings. We show that these models perform similarly and, in some cases, better than participants do. Moreover, these models demonstrate that game state information improves predictive accuracy, thus implying that context information is important in the evaluation of facial expressions.
British Journal of Health Psychology, 2020
Facial palsy (FP) affects an estimated 100,000 people in the United Kingdom (Facial Palsy UK, 201... more Facial palsy (FP) affects an estimated 100,000 people in the United Kingdom (Facial Palsy UK, 2012). It is characterised by facial muscle weakness resulting from damage to the facial nerve and is associated with congenital conditions, such as Moebius syndrome, and acquired conditions, such as Bell's palsy, Ramsay Hunt syndrome, trauma affecting the facial nerve, and acoustic neuroma. FP can cause a range of issues including: corneal exposure leading to blindness; visual disturbance; problems with facial function, leading to difficulties with facial expression, eating, drinking, hearing and/or speaking (Shindo, 1999). Current treatment options include: injections of Botulinum Toxin A (Filipo, Spahiu, Covelli, Nicastri, & Bertoli, 2012); static and dynamic surgical procedures (Ghali, MacQuillan, & Grobbelaar, 2011) and facial therapy focusing on rehabilitating function and appearance (van Landingham, Diels, & Lucarelli, 2018). Options to protect the ocular surface include eyelid repositioning surgery, eyelid loading with weights and tear duct surgery (Schrom, Buchal, Ganswindt, & Knipping, 2009). Changes in facial function and appearance due to FP, as well as uncertainty about recovery, can result in anxiety, social isolation and concealment of facial appearance, with individuals with FP also reporting low self-esteem, high levels of self-consciousness and concerns about mood (Norris et al., 2019). These psychosocial difficulties may reflect the impact of FP on the use of the face to express emotions, a skill which is crucial for communication (Coulson, O'Dwyer, Adams, & Croxson, 2004). The visible difference associated with FP is often made more apparent by difficulties in facial movement with many affected avoiding facial expression of emotion (Bradbury, Simons, & Sanders, 2006). Others can interpret this absence of expression negatively, leading to greater avoidance of social interactions by individuals with FP. These parallel issues lead to a combined challenge of being unable to express oneself and stigma for having a visible facial difference (Bogart, Tickle-Degnen, & Joffe, 2012). Objectives No paper has systematically reviewed the literature investigating the psychosocial impact of FP. Instead, previous reviews have focused on observer perceptions (Nellis, Ishii, Boahene, & Byrne, 2018) and the quality of patient-reported outcome measures (Ho et al., 2012). This review aims to provide a deeper understanding of FP by 1) systematically reviewing the impact of FP on levels of psychological distress, social function and quality of life (QoL) and 2) determining the demographic factors (e.g. age, duration of FP, aetiology, gender etc.) associated with poorer psychosocial outcomes. Methods Protocol and registration Inclusion criteria and methods for study selection were specified in advance and documented in a BLINDED-registered protocol (DETAILS BLINDED FOR SUBMISSION).. Information sources Studies were identified by searching electronic databases and by scanning the reference lists of included studies. Literature search strategies were developed using medical subject headings (MeSH) and text words related to FP and psychosocial outcomes. The following databases were searched: MEDLINE (1946 onwards), CINAHL (1985 onwards), Embase (1974 to present), PsychInfo (1806 onwards) and AMED (1985 onwards). The search terms in Table 1 were used to search all databases (see Figure S1 for an example of the MEDLINE (OVID) search strategy). Study selection Eligibility assessment on titles, abstracts and full text-articles of potential studies identified by the search was carried out independently and in a standardised way by the first and second authors. Any discrepancies were discussed and resolved by consensus, along with a third reviewer (last author). Data collection The authors adhered to the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines in designing and reporting of studies (Moher, Liberati, Tetzalff, & Altman, 2009). A standardised data extraction form was designed and information was extracted from each study on: (1) characteristics of participants (including age, gender and diagnosis); (2) study methodology and design; (3) outcome measures used and (4) psychosocial outcomes.
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Papers by Danielle M Shore