The vertical dimension of interpersonal relations (relating to dominance, power, and status) was examined in association with nonverbal behaviors that included facial behavior, gaze, interpersonal distance, body movement, touch, vocal behaviors, posed encoding skill, and others. Results were separately summarized for people's beliefs (perceptions) about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and for actual relations between verticality and nonverbal behavior. Beliefs/perceptions were stronger and much more prevalent than were actual verticality effects. Perceived and actual relations were positively correlated across behaviors. Heterogeneity was great, suggesting that verticality is not a psychologically uniform construct in regard to nonverbal behavior. Finally, comparison of the verticality effects to those that have been documented for gender in relation to nonverbal behavior revealed only a limited degree of parallelism.

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Three studies examine associations between relationship social comparison (RSC) tendencies, insecurity, and perceived relationship quality. Study 1 (68 females, 9 males) showed that RSC was associated with self-esteem, anxious and avoidant attachment styles, and relationship insecurity. RSC associations with anxious attachment and insecurity, but not avoidant attachment, held when controlling for self-esteem. Study 2 (322 females, 95 males) showed that RSC was associated with intimacy, satisfaction, investment, commitment, and relationship alternatives. RSC associations held when controlling for general comparison tendencies for all except investment. Study 3 (61 females, 11 males) showed that RSC was associated with changes in relationship insecurity and satisfaction over time, and that insecurity mediated the relationship between RSC and satisfaction.

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This article discusses the ethical and methodological issues associated with boredom experienced by human participants during psychological experiments. Ways are suggested in which informed consent, briefing, and debriefing can be used to prevent or remedy boredom induced during experiments. We address methodological and ethical concerns, and we discuss the advantages of the proposed approach for experimenters' practice and training of undergraduate students. Future directions for much needed research on these topics are also emphasized.

To test the hypothesis that lower social status is associated with more smiling, the authors used newspaper photographs and their associated news stories as the basis for scoring the smiling and relative social status of the 2 individuals in each photograph. Independent raters judged smiling and 5 dimensions of relative status for 496 individuals in 248 newspaper photographs. There was no relation between status and smiling, although status and smiling were both related to other variables such as gender, age, and story valence. These findings add to a growing body of evidence that there is no generalized relation between smiling and status.