Government and industry organizations have declared information privacy and security to be major obstacles in the development of consumer‐related e‐commerce. Risk perceptions regarding Internet privacy and security have been identified as issues for both new and experienced users of Internet technology. This paper explores risk perceptions among consumers of varying levels of Internet experience and how these perceptions relate to online shopping activity. Findings provide evidence of hypothesized relationships among consumers’ levels of Internet experience, the use of alternate remote purchasing methods (such as telephone and mail‐order shopping), the perceived risks of online shopping, and online purchasing activity. Implications for online commerce and consumer welfare are discussed.

People who are more avoidant of pathogens are more politically conservative, as are nations with greater parasite stress. In the current research, we test two prominent hypotheses that have been proposed as explanations for these relationships. The first, which is an intragroup account, holds that these relationships between pathogens and politics are based on motivations to adhere to local norms, which are sometimes shaped by cultural evolution to have pathogenneutralizing properties. The second, which is an intergroup account, holds that these same relationships are based on motivations to avoid contact with outgroups, who might pose greater infectious disease threats than ingroup members. Results from a study surveying 11,501 participants across 30 nations are more consistent with the intragroup account than with the intergroup account. National parasite stress relates to traditionalism (an aspect of conservatism especially related to adherence to group norms) but not to social dominance orientation (SDO; an aspect of conservatism especially related to endorsements of intergroup barriers and negativity toward ethnic and racial outgroups). Further, individual differences in pathogen-avoidance motives (i.e., disgust sensitivity) relate more strongly to traditionalism than to SDO within the 30 nations.political ideology | pathogens | disgust | culture | evolutionary psychology T he costs imposed by pathogens on their hosts have spurred the evolution of complex antipathogen defenses, many of which are behavioral (1, 2). In humans, such defenses range from the proximate avoidance of pathogen cues to the execution of complex rituals, often with far-reaching consequences (3). At the individual level, functionally specialized psychological mechanisms detect pathogen cues and motivate avoidance of physical contact with pathogens [e.g., via the emotion of disgust (4)]. These mechanisms, which have been collectively referred to as the behavioral immune system, influence, among other things, mate preferences (5, 6), dietary preferences (7), and person perception (8) (summarized in Significance Pathogens, and antipathogen behavioral strategies, affect myriad aspects of human behavior. Recent findings suggest that antipathogen strategies relate to political attitudes, with more ideologically conservative individuals reporting more disgust toward pathogen cues, and with higher parasite stress nations being, on average, more conservative. However, no research has yet adjudicated between two theoretical accounts proposed to explain these relationships between pathogens and politics. We find that national parasite stress and individual disgust sensitivity relate more strongly to adherence to traditional norms than they relate to support for barriers between social groups. These results suggest that the relationship between pathogens and politics reflects intragroup motivations more than intergroup motivations.

The Federal Trade Commission has declared the privacy and security of consumer information to be two major issues that stem from the rapid growth in e-commerce, particularly in terms of consumer-related commerce on the Internet. Although prior studies have assessed online retailer responses to privacy and security concerns with respect to retailers' disclosure of their practices, these studies have been fairly general in their approaches and have not explored the potential for such disclosures to affect consumers. The authors examine online retailer disclosures of various privacy-and security-related practices for 17 product categories. They also compare the prevalence of disclosures to a subset of data from a consumer survey to evaluate potential relationships between online retailer practices and consumer perceptions of risk and purchase intentions across product categories.

Over the last ten years, Oosterhof and Todorov's valence-dominance model has emerged as the most prominent account of how people evaluate faces on social dimensions. In this model, two dimensions (valence and dominance) underpin social judgments of faces. Because this model has primarily been developed and tested in Western regions, it is unclear whether these findings apply to other regions. We addressed this question by replicating Oosterhof and Todorov's methodology across 11 world regions, 41 countries, and 11,570 participants. When we used Oosterhof and Todorov's original analysis strategy, the valence-dominance model generalized across regions. When we used an alternative methodology to allow for correlated dimensions we observed much less generalization. Collectively, these results suggest that, while the valence-dominance model generalizes very well across regions when dimensions are forced to be orthogonal, regional differences are revealed when we use different extraction methods, correlate and rotate the dimension reduction solution.

The psychometric properties of Davis’ (1980) Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI) in Chile were assessed. The IRI was applied to a sample of 435 college students. Appropriate internal consistencies and test-retest stability resulted. The instrument’s validity was evidenced by the interrelations among the scales, in addition to its correlations in the predicted direction to other related psychological constructs, and sex differences emerged in three of its dimensions. A confirmatory factor analysis corroborated the theoretical structure of the IRI in Chile, and the suitability of both the four-factor model and a second order factor that integrates three of the dimensions . The implications and comparison of the results with other adaptations of the IRI are discussed.

This chapter highlights and discusses the role of women’s competitive ornamentation as one of the relevant, and so far overlooked, ancestral selective pressures in the evolution of artistic propensities. The authors critically discuss how and why sex differences and sexual selection processes acting on women have been disregarded for more than a decade. The authors review available convergent evidence about sex differences in aesthetics and artistic propensities showing that, overall, women outnumber men. Then the authors propose and show evidence that higher women’s inclination toward artistic domains, including ornamentation of body, behavior, and objects/places, can serve as a social arena for attracting/maintaining mates and dealing with rivals, primarily through self-promotion via competitive ornamentation. The chapter concludes by developing connections with related theories that broaden the scope of the field and highlight predictions for future research.

Despite universal health care coverage in Spain, men, immigrants and people infected through drug use or heterosexual contact seem to be experiencing difficulties in gaining timely access to HIV care.

Perceptual judgements and acoustic analyses of affective prosody during sentence repetition were examined in four patients with transcortical aphasias and in two normal controls. Although all aphasic patients had a relative preservation of sentence repetition, perceptual ratings revealed that they repeated using correct affective intonation significantly less frequently than normal control subjects. Acoustic analysis revealed that patients with transcortical aphasias were unable to impart angry and happy intonation during repetition, producing flat intonation contours in most sentences. Restricted modulation of FO and flat declinations of repeated utterances were found in patients with transcortical aphasias caused by lesions within the left perisylvian language area as well as outside this area. These findings suggest that repetition of affective prosody in transcortical aphasias is usually disrupted regardless of the intrahemispheric location (perisylvian or extraperisylvian) of the lesion, and that an adequate repetition of affective prosody may require bilateral, simultaneous hemispheric processing.