Are Americans more individualistic and less collectivistic than members of other groups? The authors summarize plausible psychological implications of individualism–collectivism (IND-COL), metaanalyze cross-national and within-United States IND-COL differences, and review evidence for effects of IND-COL on self-concept, well-being, cognition, and relationality. European Americans were found to be both more individualistic—valuing personal independence more—and less collectivistic—feeling duty to in-groups less—than others. However, European Americans were not more individualistic than African Americans, or Latinos, and not less collectivistic than Japanese or Koreans. Among Asians, only Chinese showed large effects, being both less individualistic and more collectivistic. Moderate IND-COL effects were found on self-concept and relationality, and large effects were found on attribution and cognitive style. To contemporary Americans, being an individualist is not only a good thing; it is a quintessentially American thing. However, the term individualism itself appears to have its roots outside of the North American continent, namely in the French Revolution. It appears that individualism was first used to describe the negative

Guided by interpersonal deception theory and the principle of interactivity, this investigation examined whether communication modalities differentially affect the extent to which group members develop trust or are vulnerable to manipulation and deceit, based on the degree of interactivity the modalities afford. According to the principle of interactivity, involvement and mutuality should increase as one moves from text, to audio and audiovisual (AV) modalities, to face-to-face (FtF) communication. Under nondeceptive circumstances, greater interactivity should elicit corresponding increases in trust and credibility; under deceptive circumstances, it should produce greater truth biases and inaccurate detection of deceit. This effect should be partly mitigated in text and audio modalities due to the presence of diagnostic deception indicators Pairs were assigned to a truthful or deceptive condition in one of three mediated conditions, or in a face-to-face condition. In the deceptive condition, one member of each pair was enlisted to deceive during the interaction. Following discussion, participants rated their communicative behavior and the credibility of the truthful or deceptive actor. Truth bias and accuracy in judging deceptive information was calculated. Results are compared to previous findings from face-to-face deception. Implications for collaborative technologies are advanced.

Based on Fredrickson’s ((1998). What good are positive emotions? Review of General Psychology, 2, 300–319.; (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56, 218–226) broaden-and-build theory and Aron and Aron’s ((1986). Love as expansion of the self: Understanding attraction and satisfaction. New York: Hemisphere) self-expansion theory, it was hypothesized that positive emotions broaden people’s feelings of self–other overlap in the beginning of a new relationship. In a prospective study of first-year college students, we found that, after 1 week in college, positive emotions predicted increased self–other overlap with new roommates, which in turn predicted a more complex understanding of the roommate. In addition, participants who experienced a high ratio of positive to negative emotions throughout the first month of college reported a greater increase in self–other overlap and complex understanding than participants with a low positivity ratio. Implications for the role of positive emotions in the formation of new relationships are discussed.

Recent developments in humanoid robotics have made possible a vision of robots in everyday use in the home and workplace. However, little is known about how we should design social interactions with humanoid robots. We explored how cooperation versus competition in a game shaped people's perceptions of ASIMO. We found that in the co-operative interaction, people found the robot more sociable and more intellectual than in the competitive interaction while people felt more positive and were more involved in the task in the competitive condition than in the co-operative condition. Our poster presents these findings with the supporting theoretical background.

Self-perception theory posits that people sometimes infer their own attributes by observing their freely chosen actions. We hypothesized that in addition, people sometimes infer their own attributes by observing the freely chosen actions of others with whom they feel a sense of merged identity—almost as if they had observed themselves performing the acts. Before observing an actor’s behavior, participants were led to feel a sense of merged identity with the actor through perspective-taking instructions (Study 1) or through feedback indicating that their brainwave patterns overlapped substantially with those of the actor (Studies 2-4). As predicted, observers incorporated attributes relevant to an actor’s behavior into their own self-concepts, but only when they were led to feel a sense of merged identity with the actor and only when the actor’s behavior seemed freely chosen. These changes in relevant self-perceptions led observers to change their own behaviors accordingly. Implications of these vicarious self-perception processes for conformity, perspective-taking, and the long-term development of the self-concept are discussed.

This experiment varied whether individuals interacted with virtual representations of themselves or of others in an immersive virtual environment. In the selfrepresentation condition, half of the participants interacted with a selfrepresentation that bore photographic resemblance to them, whereas the other half interacted with a self-representation that bore no resemblance to them. In the other-representation condition, participants interacted with a representation of another individual. The experimental design was a 2 (Participant Gender) x 3 (Agent Identity: high-similarity self-representation vs. low-similarity self-representation vs. other representation). Overall, participants displayed more intimacy-consistent behaviors for representations of themselves than others. Implications of using immersive virtual environment technology for studying the self are discussed.

me a hug’: the effects of touch and autonomy

‘Give me a hug’: the effects of touch and autonomy on people's responses to embodied social agents

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the experience of power increases interpersonal forgiveness