Tag Archives: expectancy

Multiple Paths Toward Goals Can Motivate, then Derail Success

Szu-Chi Huang

Goal motivation changes as people move closer to their target, according to Stanford’s Szu-chi Huang and Ying Zhang of University of Texas.
Their work built on Heinz Heckhausen’s earlier studies of goal motivation.

Ying Zhang

In the first stages of effort, multiple paths toward the goal makes the target seem attainable, noted Huang and Zhang.

Albert Bandura

This perception of “self-efficacy,” belief in ability to achieve a goal, provides motivation to continue goal striving, reported Stanford’s Albert Bandura.

Clark Hull

When people are close to achieving a goal, a single goal path provides greater motivation. This observation is consistent with Clark Hull’s finding that motivation increases closer to the goal.

Sheena Iyengar

A single route to the finish reduces the “cognitive load” of considering different approaches, supporting Sheena Iyengar and Mark Lepper’s finding that “more choice is not always better.”

Peter Gollwitzer

These stages of goal pursuit are characterized by different mindsets.
“Deliberative Mindset” describes considering effort toward a goal whereas “Implemention Mindset” characterises planning actions toward a goal, according to NYU’s Peter Gollwitzer, Heinz Heckhausen, and Birgit Steller of University of Heidelberg.

Motivation toward a goal is also determined by:

Goal value,
Expectancy of success, based on probability, difficulty, sufficiency, necessity,

Nira Liberman

according to Tel Aviv University’s Nira Liberman and Jens Förster of Jacobs University of Bremen and Universiteit van Amsterdam.

Jens Förster

Similarly, Huang and Zhang demonstrated the motivational impact of number of choices.

Volunteers with fewer choices were more likely to achieve the goal of a in a study of incentive to claim a free yoghurt.
“…relatively rigid structures can often simplify goal pursuit by removing the need to make choices, especially when people are already well into the process,” explained Huang.

A practical application is that nonprofit organizations can benefit from changing contribution options when a fund-raising target is nearly met.
At that time, fewer and simpler ways to donate are likely to result in more participation in the campaign.

-*How do you maintain motivation when you are close to achieving a goal?

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Attractive Men May Appear Competent, But May Not Be Hired

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Sun Young Lee

Previous blog posts documented bias favouring attractive people for hiring, venture funding, and positive impressions by others.

Capable but less attractive individuals may encounter “workplace attractiveness discrimination,” reported Sun Young Lee of University College London, University of Maryland’s Marko Pitesa, Madan Pillutla of London Business School, and INSEAD’s Stefan Thau.

Marko Pitesa

Their studies found that people making employment decisions show systematic selection bias based on perceived attractiveness and organizational context.

This can occur when observers associate unrelated characteristics (gender, ethnicity, national origin, attractiveness) with expectations for work performance (“status generalization”).

Murray Webster

These assumptions may occur without conscious awareness or evidence, and can result in group inequalities, according to University of South Carolina’s Murray Webster and Martha Foschi.

James Driskell

In addition, these “status characteristics” significantly affected face-to-face interactions in group task experiments by Webster and University of South Carolina colleague James Driskell.

Martha Fosch

Likewise, decision makers associated attractiveness with competence in male candidates but not in female candidates in one of Lee’s studies.

People’s actions influenced by perceived attractiveness are examples of “interpersonal interdependence,” according to UCLA’s Harold Kelley and John Thibaut of University of North Carolina.

John Thibault

Lee’s group tested interpersonal interdependence and attractiveness by assigning male and female volunteers to simulated employment selection situations.
Participants “interviewed” and provided “hiring recommendations” for “job candidates.”
Interviewers were told they would be collaborating for shared team rewards BUT competing for recognition, promotions, commissions, and bonuses.

Madan Pillutla

Volunteers evaluated two similar resumes accompanied by photos of an “attractive” applicant and an “unattractive” candidate.
Next, assessors answered questions about the person’s competence, likely impact on the rater’s success, and their likelihood of recommending the candidate for the position.

When the decision-maker expected to cooperate with the candidate, male candidates who were perceived as more attractive were also:

-judged as more competent,
-seen as more likely to enable the evaluator’s career success,
-more frequently recommended for employment.

Stefan Thau

However, when decision makers expected to compete with the candidate, attractive male candidates were rates as less capable.
Evaluators less frequently recommended attractive male candidates for employment, suggesting a systematic bias to preserve the evaluator’s place in the workplace hierarchy.

Attractive and unattractive female candidates were judged as equally competent, but attractive male candidates were rated as much more competent than unattractive male candidates.

Subsequent studies provided evaluators with candidates’ age, race, education and headshot to consider in selecting their competitor or collaborator in a tournament task.
Decision-makers preferred attractive male or female candidates unless their personal outcomes were affected by the selection decision.

These studies suggest that attractiveness discrimination is “calculated self-interested behavior” in which men sometimes discriminate in favor and sometimes against attractive males.

-*How do you align with “calculated self-interest behavior” to mitigate bias?

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Positive Thinking+Mental Contrasting+WOOP Improve Performance

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Gabriele Oettingen

Positive thinking without an implementation strategy is ineffective wishful thinking, found NYU’s Gabriele Oettingen.
She advocated using “Mental Contrast” by identifying obstacles and ways to manage them, using a mnemonic, WOOP:

Wish,
Outcome,
Obstacle,
Plan.
Mental Contrast alone was effective when perceived probability of success was average or high.
Mental Contrast combined with Implementation Intentions (MCII), was associated with improved self-regulation and performance.

Andreas Kappes

Oettingen and University of London colleague Andreas Kappas reported two less effective approaches to goal engagement:

– Indulging – Thinking about the desired future state without considering obstacles and ways to overcome them,

– Dwelling – Thinking about the present reality without identifying future goals and ways to achieve them.

People who used these approaches were less committed to their goals than those who used Mental Contrast.
This was true even when success probabilities were high in interpersonal relations, academic achievement, professional achievement, health, life management experiences.

Volunteers who spent more time imagining working in a “dream job,” but had lower expectations of success, received fewer job offers and lower starting salaries, found Oettingen and Doris Mayer of University of Hamburg.

The research team differentiated the motivational impact of:

Positive expectations for future success->high effort->successful performance,
Positive fantasies when the probability of success is low->no increased effort.

Mental Contrast helped people disengage from unfeasible goals like reviving an ended relationship or achieving an unattainable professional identity.
When chances of success are low, people can use Mental Contrast to move on to more feasible goals.

When facing controllable and escapable tasks, people benefitted from Mental Contrast of fantasy vs reality.
However, when facing tasks that cannot be mastered such as terminal illness, Indulging in positive fantasies enabled people to maintain a positive outlook.

Volunteers increased performance when they linked a negative personal attribute (“impulsivity”) with its positive element (“creativity”).

Timur Sevincer

Participants showed greater effort-based creativity than those who were given no information or told that there’s no association between impulsivity and creativity.

This “silver lining theory” increased performance and enabled people to manage perceived negative attributes.

Mental Contrast between a desired future with a present reality also increased physiological activation measured by systolic blood pressure and grip strength.

This energy activation from mental processes can increase performance effort, concluded University of Hamburg’s A. Timur Sevincer and P. Daniel Busatta collaborating with Oettingen.

Philip Daniel Busatta

Coupling Mental Contrast with Implementation Intentions (MCII) helped economically-disadvantaged children convert positive thoughts about future outcomes into effective action, found University of Pennsylvania’s Angela Lee Duckworth, Teri A. Kirby of University of Washington with NYU’s Peter Gollwitzer and Oettingen.

Teri Kirby

Volunteers compared a desired future with potential obstacles, and developed if–then implementation intentions to mitigate obstacles.

More than 75 U.S. urban middle school 10 year olds were randomly assigned to learn either Mental Contrast with Implementation Intentions or a Positive Thinking strategy as a comparison.

Student volunteers who applied Mental Contrast with Implementation Intentions to their academic goals significantly improved their report card grades, attendance, and conduct.

Mental Contrast can increase motivation when used with Implementation Intentions.
An exception occurs when there is low probability of achieving goals.
In those cases, Indulging or Dwelling strategies are more effective in maintaining goal motivation.

How have you seen Mental Contrast affect your motivation and performance?

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Anxiety Undermines Negotiation Performance

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Maurice Schweitzer

Anxious negotiators make lower first offers, end negotiations earlier, and earn lower profits than calmer negotiation counterparts.

Harvard’s Alison Wood Brooks and Maurice E. Schweitzer of University of Pennsylvania found that these negotiations patterns occurred due to participants’ “low self-efficacy” beliefs.

Alison Wood Brooks

Brooks and Schweitzer induced anxious feelings or neutral reactions during “shrinking-pie” negotiation tasks.
Negotiators who reported feeling anxious expected to achieve lower profits, presented more cautious offers, and responded cautiously to proposals by negotiation counterparts.

Negotiators who achieved better outcomes managed their emotions with strategies including:

Julie Norem

Strategic optimism, by calmly expecting positive outcomes, according to University of Miami’s Stacie Spencer and Julie Norem of Wellesley,

Reattribution, by considering alternate interpretations of events.

Approaches with mixed results include:

Andrew Elliot

“Self-handicapping”, defined as creating obstacles to explain poor outcomes and preserve self-esteem, according to University of Rochester’s Andrew Elliott and Marcy Church of St. Mary’s University,
Defensive pessimism, marked by high motivation toward achievement coupled with negative expectations for future challenges, leading to increased effort and preparation, according to Wellesley College’s Julie Norem and Edward Chang of University of Michigan.

Edward Chang

Norem and Cantor concluded that defensive pessimists performed worse when told that that they could expect to perform well on anagram and puzzle tasks.

Defensive pessimism among university students was related to lower self-esteem, higher self-criticism, more pessimism, and frequent discounting of previous successful performances, according to Norem and Brown’s Jasmina Burdzovic Andreas.

Jasmina Burdzovic Andreas

However, they also found that self-esteem increased to almost the same levels as optimists during university years.
Pessimists’ precautionary countermeasures may have resulted in strong performance, which built credible self-esteem.

Defensive pessimism may be an effective approach to managing anxiety and performance motivation.

-*How do you manage anxiety in high-stakes negotiations?

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Least Skillful Performers May Have Greatest Illusions of Competence

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William Shakespeare

“The Foole doth thinke he is wise, but the wiseman knowes himselfe to be a Foole,” wrote William Shakespeare in As You Like It.
Charles Darwin decoded this observation with his update: “Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.”

Charles Darwin

Both view are applicable to the workplace and notoriously “clueless” players like Dilbert’s Pointy Haired Boss.

Pointy Haired Boss

Incompetent performance often results from ignorance of performance standards in both cognitive skills and physical skills, found Columbia’s David Dunning and Justin Kruger of NYU in a series of experiments.

David Dunning

Volunteers performed humor, grammar, and logic tasks, then viewed their performance scores and again estimated their performance rank.
Competent individuals accurately estimated their rank, whereas incompetent individuals overestimated their ranks despite actual feedback.

Dunning and Kruger posited that incompetent people:

Overestimate their skill levels,
Overlook other people’s skills,
Underestimate their lack of skill in relation to performance standards.

Justin Kruger

However, training may reverse this “insight blindness.”
Low-skill individuals in some cases can benefit from corrective feedback and recognize their original lack of skill after they participate in skill training.

The Dunning–Kruger effect describes unskilled individuals’ sense of “illusory superiority,” when they rate their ability as much higher than average although it is actually much lower than average.
In contrast, highly competent individuals miscalibrate other’s performance.

Joyce Ehrlinger

Kerri Johnson

These observations were validated by Washington State University’s Joyce Ehrlinger, Kerri Johnson of UCLA, and Cornell’s Matthew Banner.

People also demonstrate “illusory superiority” when they estimate their ability to identify deception and to infer intentions and emotions (interpersonal sensitivity), found Columbia’s Daniel R. Ames and Lara K. Kammrath of Wilfrid Laurier University.

Daniel Ames

Their results replicated previous findings that most people overestimate their social judgment and mind-reading skills, and showed that people who demonstrate least accurate social judgment and “mind-reading” significantly overestimate their relative competence.

Lara Kamrath

Ames and Kammrath suggested that these inaccurate self-assessments are based “in general narcissistic tendencies toward self-aggrandizement.”

Different tasks elicit differing degrees of the illusory superiority bias, according to University of Michigan’s Katherine A. Burson, Richard P. Larrick of Duke University, University of Chicago’s Joshua Klayman.

Katherine Burson

When performing moderately difficult tasks, best and worst performers provided similarly accurate estimates of their skills.
However, when they performed more difficult tasks, best performers provided less accurate skill estimates than worst performers.

Richard Larrick

Burson and team proposed that “noise-plus-bias” explains erroneous judgments of personal skill across competence levels.

Dunning and Ehrlinger showed that people’s views of themselves and their skill change when influenced by external cues.
They note that this effect can limit women’s participation in STEM careers (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics).

Joshua Klayman

The team found that women performed equally to men on a science quiz, yet participants underestimated their performance because they assigned low judgments to their general scientific reasoning ability.
This inaccurate underestimate of abilities can dissuade many women from entering STEM careers.

The Dunning–Kruger effect may be culturally limited because one study found that East Asians tend to underestimate their abilities due to norms of humility, and see underachievement as a chance to improve themselves and cooperate with others.

-*How do you mitigate overestimate and underestimates of your skill performance?
-*Where have you seen inaccurate performance estimate affect long-range career achievement?

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Power, Confidence Enhance Performance Under Pressure

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Sonia K. Kang

Role-based power can affect performance in pressure-filled situations, but has less impact on lower pressure environments, according to University of Toronto’s Sonia K. Kang, Adam D. Galinsky of Columbia University, University of California, Berkeley’s Laura J. Kray and Aiwa Shirako of Google.

Kang’s team assigned more than 130 volunteers to same-gender pairs in three negotiations experiments.
Half the participants acted as a “recruiter” (high-power role) or as a “job candidate” (low-power role) in negotiating salary, vacation time, and related benefits.

Adam Galinsky

Volunteers were told that performance either reflected negotiation ability or was unrelated to ability.
Participants in high power roles tended to perform better under pressure when they were told their negotiation performance was an accurate reflection of ability.
Kang attributed this result to participants’ higher expectations for success based on the higher power role.

Job candidates who thought their negotiation performance indicated their skill level performed significantly worse than those who thought that the exercise was a learning experience unrelated to their negotiating capabilities.

Claude Steele

Results were similar to Claude Steele of Stanford’s findings for stereotype threat and stereotype uplift, in which individuals from marginalized groups perform less effectively than members of higher-power groups, linked to negative self-attributions and expectations.
Low-power negotiators counteracted underperformance when they self-affirmed their performance.

Laura Kray

Kang and team concluded that “relative power can act as either a toxic brew (stereotype/low-power threat) or a beneficial elixir (stereotype/high-power lift) for performance… (because) performance in high pressure situations is closely related to expectations of behavior and outcome… Self-affirmation is a way to neutralize … threat.”

Aiwa Shirako

In another experiment, 60 male MBA students were paired as the “buyer” or “seller” of a biotechnology plant.
The sellers held a more powerful role in this situation, and were more assertive, reflected by negotiating a higher selling price, when they thought performance reflected ability.
In contrast, buyers performed worse when they thought negotiating performance reflected ability.

Kang’s team extended this scenario with 88 MBA students (33 male pairs and 11 female pairs), who were told the exercise would gauge their negotiating skills.
Before the negotiation, half of the participants wrote for five minutes about their most important negotiating skill, while the remaining half wrote about their least important negotiating skill.

Buyers who completed the positive self-affirmation performed significantly better in negotiating a lower sale price for the biotechnology plant, effectively reducing the power differences between the buyer and seller.

Based on these findings, Kang advocates writing self-affirmations rather than simply reflecting on positive self-statements about job skills and positive traits to enhance confidence and performance.

-*How do you mitigate differences in role-based power and confidence when performing under pressure?

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Perceived Personal Power Can Modify Time Perception, Perceived Stress

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Alice Moon

People’s subjective experience of time differ based on individual characteristics, which can influence feelings of control over time and coping with time demands.

Serena Chen

University of California Berkeley’s Alice Moon and Serena Chen evaluated more than 550 volunteers’ ratings of their perceived personal power and their perspectives on available time to accomplish goals.

Moon and Chen asked more than 100 participants to assume the role of a “manager” while sitting in a “high-power chair,” or the role of an “employee” while both groups rated their perceived personal resources of time and power.
Participants who played the more powerful role of “manager” reported that they had more time than “employee.”

Moon and Chen also primed more than 100 American adults to think of themselves in high-power or low-power positions, and asked them to rate statements about availability of time to achieve goals.

Even when participants did not actually have more available time, those who felt most powerful perceived greater control over their time, and greater time availability.
This is another example of the power of expectation exceeding the importance of an actual resource, competency, or experience.

Mario Weick

These findings support other reports that managers experience less stress than subordinates in organizations, attributable to their “position power.”

Ana Guinote

People who feel powerful tend to hold a significantly optimistic bias when predicting time required to complete task, reported University of Kent’s Mario Weick and Ana Guinote of University College London.

They attributed this unrealistic optimism to confident belief in personal self-efficacy accompanying subjective feelings of power in their evaluation of:

Actual power and time perception,
Induced feelings of power through priming,
Pre-existing personal self-perceptions.

Priyanka D. Joshi

This “planning fallacy” of underestimating task completion time often results from a narrow focus on the goal, coupled with the optimism bias that obscures potential obstacles and risks.

Nathanael Fast

Likewise, people who feel powerful also tend to feel more confident about the future, more aware of their “future self,” and more willing to wait for longer-term rewards, found University of Southern California ’s Priyanka D. Joshi and Nathanael J. Fast.

Specifically, participants assigned to high-power roles and to power priming instructions were less likely to display temporal discounting, or choosing smaller short-term rewards over larger goals that require a longer waiting period.

This suggests that people who feel powerful have a sense of abundance in other domains, including time and money.
As a result, feeling powerful enables people to forego current rewards, “delay gratification,” and make present investments to achieve potentially larger longer-term pay-offs.

-*How do you increase your personal experience of power and time perspective?

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Your Brain in Court: Cognitive Privacy, US Constitution and Neuroimaging

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Amanda Pustilnik

Neuroimaging techniques, like fMRI, present constitutional dilemmas for criminal law and criminal procedure, according to University of Maryland‘s Amanda Pustilnik.

These technologies raise questions about “cognitive privacy” in relation to “compelled, self-incriminating speech” under the United States Constitution’s Fifth Amendment and “unreasonable search and seizure” under the Fourth Amendment.

Neuroimagery technologies can measure brain blood flow to determine whether the person is making false statements, and can evaluate whether waveform brain activity indicates a person is familiar with an object like a face or weapon.

In addition, these measurement devices can alter brain processes, such as exposing the brain to powerful magnets, resulting in greater or lesser likelihood of offering truthful statements.

Recent Eighth Amendment challenges to execution by lethal injection and legislative restrictions on abortion based on putative fetal pain are additional examples of legal questions informed by neuroimaging technology.

In these cases, neuroimagery measurements can provide evidence of presence and degree of physical pain.
Previously, this subjective state has not been directly observable until pain neuroimaging procedures were developed and admitted as legal evidence.

Pustilnik proposed “embodied morality” to explain how moral concepts of legal rights and duties are informed by human physicality and constrained by observers’ limitations in empathic identification with the pain sufferer’s experience.

U.S. law applies unrealistic criteria to determining defendants’ mental states for criminal trials in light of neuroscientific evidence, she argued, noting that the law maintains “a false trichotomy” among cognition, emotion, and volition to determine whether a defendant was “capable of moral agency” in committing an illegal act.

This decision is based upon whether the admissible evidence demonstrates that the defendant acted with “purpose,” suggested by planning the act in advance and “knowledge” of the act, typically determined by the defendant’s statements.

Pustilnik cited examples of disorders in which emotional impairments and volitional impairments can modify cognition, including temporal lobe injury, drug addiction, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Jean Macchiaroli Eggen

In these situations, the defendant may provide an intelligible “explanation” of the act, yet may not be able to control the behavior, as in obsessive-compulsive disorder or drug addiction.
If the criteria of “intent” and “knowledge” are not fulfilled, a defendant may claim to have acted under “diminished capacity.”

To remedy this disconnect, Pustilnik recommends investigating whether the defendant “understands the wrongfulness of the act.”

Eric Laury

Widener University’s Jean Macchiaroli Eggen and Eric Laury of Minor and Brown echo Pustilnik’s observations and propose applying neuroimaging evidence to elements of tort law including knowledge, intent, negligence, and recklessness.

Bernard Baertschi

Critics of the admissibility of neuroimaging evidence like Bernard Baertschi of University of Geneva raise concerns that neuroimagery evidence injecting a systemic bias that influences jurors’ evaluations of defendants.

To test this claim, Nick Schweitzer and Michael Saks  of Arizona State University investigated decisions by nearly 1200 volunteers in a mock trial involving psychological, neuropsychological, neuroscientific, and neuroimage expert evidence.
Participants evaluated the defendant’s claim of Not Guilty by Reason of Insanity (NGRI).

Nick Schweitzer

Volunteers said neuroscience evidence was more persuasive than psychological and anecdotal family history evidence, but there was no significant effect for neuroimaging evidence.

The researchers also asked participants to apply different insanity standards, and neuroscience evidence remained most influential across all standards.

Michael Saks

Mock jurors who were not provided with a neuroimage said they believed neuroimagery would have been the most helpful evidence in evaluating the defendant, although those who actually received neuroimagery data did not judge this evidence as most valuable.
This is another example of forecasted judgments not correlating with actual judgments.

Neuroimaging skeptic Bernard Baertschi evaluated whether Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) is more reliable than the polygraph to determine whether a person is providing truthful statements.

He outlined technical, methodological, conceptual and legal issues that obscure the conclusion, including technical definitions of lying and legal concerns about potentially biasing effects of brain imaging evidence on lawsuits.
He concluded, “Mind-reading using fMRI is not ready for use in the courts.”

-*How much weight do you give neuroimaging data in evaluating a person’s behavior, credibility, and motivations?

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Body Language Conveys Emotions more Intelligibly than Facial Expressions

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Paul Ekman

Numerous studies, pioneered by Paul Ekman of University of California, San Francisco, argue that facial expressions provide an accurate, consistent, universal “tell” to underlying emotions.

However, body language more accurately conveys intense emotions than facial expressions, according to Hebrew University’s Hillel Aviezer,Yaacov Trope of NYU, and Princeton University’s Alexander Todorov.

Three groups of 15 people judged intense emotions, including pain, pleasure, victory, defeat, grief and joy, portrayed in stock photographs of:

facial expressions alone or
body language alone or
both facial and body expressions.

Hillel Aviezer

Volunteers assigned more accurate inferences of pictured emotion based on body language, alone or combined with facial expressions, than judgments based on facial context alone.

These results challenge presumption that the face best communicates feeling, yet most participants believe that they rely on facial expression was their most important cue in making inferences.

Yaacov Trope

More than half the volunteers reported that they use facial expression to judge underlying emotions, a bias labeled “illusory facial affect” by Aviezer and team.

Some participants did not view the photos, but heard a description of the content.
The vast majority – 80 percent – said they “would” rely solely on the face when determining the emotion.
The remainder said they would consider the face and body together, yet not one participant indicated that body language alone would be the most important guide to emotion.

Alexander Todorov

Another experiment presented volunteers with altered photos that combined one intense emotional expressed in the face with an opposing “peak” emotion portrayed by the body language.
Volunteers more often judged the emotion associated with the body, although they thought that facial expression was more indicative of underlying emotional experience.

A different condition demonstrated that most participants provided inaccurate judgments of six emotional states portrayed by faces alone: They judged positive facial expressions as negative more frequently than the actual negative expressions.

Aviezer, Trope, and Todorov argue that facial expressions can be ambiguous and subjective when viewed without the context of body, particularly during intense emotional expressions.

Jamin Halberstadt

Jamin Halberstadt of University of Otago explained Team Aviezer’s findings by noting “…bodily context is the expression of emotion…the face reveals a general intensity of feeling but doesn’t communicate what the person is feeling exactly. The body is where the valid information comes from during intense feelings.”

Piotr Winkielman

His expertise is based on earlier research with University of California at San Diego’s Piotr Winkielman, Paula Niedenthal of University of Wisconsin and University of Clermont-Ferrand’s Nathalie Dalle.
They demonstrated the important role of expectancy in reading, experiencing, and recalling emotions expressed by ambiguous facial photographs.

Paula Niedenthal

Halberstadt’s team used electromyography (EMG) to evaluate volunteers’ muscle mimicry responses and memory of photos portraying ambiguous faces when associated with emotion labels like “angry” or “happy”, and when the same photos were presented without labels.

Nathalie Dalle

Participants displayed more EMG activity associated with smiling when they viewed faces labeled “happy” than “angry,” and remembered faces labeled “happy” as happier than faced coded “angry” even though the photographed expressions were ambiguous.

When participants spontaneously mimicked emotions labeled with a specific affect label, they were more likely to remember this emotion.
Since the photos were ambiguous, this recall represents memory bias, based on expecting, then mirroring an expected emotion.

Body language’s greater accuracy than facial expression as a measure of emotion, has important implications for mission critical interrogation and security-screening techniques.

One example is the U.S. Transportation Security Administration’s Screening of Passengers by Observation Techniques (SPOT) program, which was based on Ekman’s facial expression research, but did not account for bodily expression as an indicator of underlying emotion.

Team Aviezer’s findings argue that emotion-screening procedures, as well as everyday workplace interactions, should evaluate both cues from both the body and the face to form most accurate judgments of others’ likely emotional states.

-*Which cues do you find most helpful in judging other people’s emotional states when interacting with them?

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Is Optimistic View of the Future Associated with Disabilities, Shorter Life Expectancy?

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Frieder Lang

Frieder Lang of the University of Erlangen-Nuremberg and German Institute for Economic Research and his colleagues challenged the robust, replicated finding that optimism is associated with positive health outcomes.

David Weiss

Lang with University of Zurich’s David Weiss and Denis Gerstorf of Humboldt-University of Berlin and German Institute for Economic Research examined data from 1993 to 2003 German Socio-Economic Panel household surveys.

Denis Gerstorf

The team collaborated with Gert Wagner of German Institute for Economic Research and Max Planck Institute for Human Development evaluated approximately ratings from 40,000 people 18 to 96 years old, concerning their current and predicted life satisfaction in five years.

Gert Wagner

Their disruptive finding is that participants who expected highest life satisfaction in five years were more likely to experience disability and death within the following decade.

Five years after the first interviews:

43 percent of participants were more satisfied with their lives than predicted,
25 percent predicted accurately
32 percent overestimated their life satisfaction with an optimistic bias.

Lang, Weiss, Gerstorf, and Wagner calculated that overestimating future life satisfaction was related to a 9.5 percent increase in reporting disabilities and a 10 percent increased incidence of death.

The youngest participants had the most optimistic outlook, whereas middle-aged adults made the most accurate predictions, but became more pessimistic over time.

Lauren Alloy

Older adults’ predictions of future life satisfaction may be more accurate, albeit less optimistic, consistent with Shelley Taylor, Ellen Langer, Lauren Alloy, Lyn Abramson and others demonstration of an “optimism bias” and “depressive realism.”

Lyn Abramson

In contrast to findings that higher income is associated with better health outcomes, Lang’s team found that stable, good health and income were associated with expecting a greater decline compared with those in poor health or with low incomes.
In contrast to other findings, higher income was related to a greater risk of disability.

Shelley Taylor

Lang and team concluded that the outcomes of optimistic, accurate or pessimistic forecasts may depend on age, available resources, and motivation to adopt health-improving behaviors.
They acknowledged that unrealistic optimism about the future may help people feel better when they are facing inevitable negative outcomes, such as terminal disease.

Neil Weinstein

Similarly, Neil Weinstein of Rutgers found that people may underestimate susceptibility to harm from a variety of hazards.
Close to 300 volunteers across age, gender, educational levels and occupational groups, demonstrated an optimism bias that they were less at risk than peers.

Weinstein hypothesized that optimism bias may be introduced when people extrapolate from their past experience to estimate their future vulnerability.
Therefore, volunteers future expectations may be biased because they tended not to expect problems they had not already experienced.

He demonstrated that these personal risk judgments were not correlated with volunteers’ actual objective risk factors, suggesting that volunteers did not modify their optimistic biases based on laboratory findings, physical examination, and reported health habits.
Positive illusions persist even in the face of contradictory evidence.

Eric Kim

These findings that optimistic bias may not be associated with positive health outcomes contrasts with findings from including University of Michigan’s Eric S Kim, Nansook Park, and Christopher Peterson, who found that “Dispositional Optimism” protects older adults from stroke.

George Patton

Similarly, George Patton and colleagues at Royal Children’s Hospital in Parkville, Victoria, Australia reported that optimism has a somewhat protective effect on adolescent health risks in a prospective study.

Eric Giltay

Yet another counterpoint to Lang and team’s work was offered by Eric Giltay and colleagues at Leiden University Medical Center Johanna Geleijnse, Frans Zitman, Brian Buijsse, and Daan Kromhout, who demonstrated that optimists typically report healthier habits, like less smoking and drinking alcohol, more physical activity and consumption of fruit, vegetables and whole-grain bread.

-*What do you make of these conflicting findings about optimism’s role in health outcomes?

-*How have you seen optimism relate to health outcomes: Does it seem to drive healthy behaviors and outcomes or poorer health?

Kathryn Welds, PhD | Curated Research + Commentary

Consulting Organizational Psychologist | Change Consultant | Leadership+Career Master Coach | Coach Supervisor+Mentor Coach |

Tag Archives: expectancy

Multiple Paths Toward Goals Can Motivate, then Derail Success

Attractive Men May Appear Competent, But May Not Be Hired

Positive Thinking+Mental Contrasting+WOOP Improve Performance

Anxiety Undermines Negotiation Performance

Least Skillful Performers May Have Greatest Illusions of Competence

Power, Confidence Enhance Performance Under Pressure

Perceived Personal Power Can Modify Time Perception, Perceived Stress

Your Brain in Court: Cognitive Privacy, US Constitution and Neuroimaging

Body Language Conveys Emotions more Intelligibly than Facial Expressions

Is Optimistic View of the Future Associated with Disabilities, Shorter Life Expectancy?

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