Across four studies, the current paper demonstrates that smiles are associated with lower social status. Moreover, the association between smiles and lower status appears in the psychology of observers and generalizes across two forms of status: prestige and dominance. In the first study, faces of fashion models representing less prestigious apparel brands were found to be more similar to a canonical smile display than the faces of models representing more prestigious apparel brands. In a second study, after being experimentally primed with either high or low prestige fashion narratives, participants in the low prestige condition were more likely to perceive smiles in a series of photographs depicting smiling and non-smiling faces. A third study of football player photographs revealed that the faces of less dominant (smaller) football players were more similar to the canonical smile display than the faces of their physically larger counterparts. Using the same football player photographs, a fourth study found that smiling was a more reliable indicator of perceived status-relevant personality traits than perceptions of the football players' physical sizes inferred from the photographs.

To date, affective computing research has acknowledged individual differences with regard to detecting affect, yet little research has explored how these individual differences may determine the degree to which affective computing is successful in manipulating the affect of specific computer users. The current study used individual difference measures to predict how much an individual can be influenced by a hedonic computing paradigm: a simple trivia game. Female participants responded in a greater way to positive affective feedback about their performance than did men. Moreover, several personality traits, including neuroticism, narcissism, self-esteem, and extraversion, augmented the degree to which affect changed as a result of playing the game. The results are consistent with the gender differences hypothesis, and the authors conclude that individual differences, particularly gender and personality traits, play a large role in the potential impact of computing platforms and would be useful in personalizing the affective nature of the human-computer interaction.

No abstract

No abstract

E-mail communication is fraught with problems of inaccurate encoding and decoding of information due to the relative lack of emotional cues. In our experiment, we investigated whether having e-mail senders rate the intended friendliness levels of their own messages before they write them would make them generate replies that were indeed friendlier. This manipulation was intended to make the senders more aware of their decision to write friendly or unfriendly e-mail messages and subsequently compel them to follow through with their friendly intention, or to make them question their decision to be unfriendly. However, our results show no significant main effect of our manipulation. Instead, the tone of the original e-mail stimulus and the context surrounding the e-mail message were much stronger influences in determining the friendliness of the e-mail reply that people generate.