Jess was recently featured in an article published by the Globe and Mail where she outlines the utility of and differences between envy and jealousy. This article discusses the mechanisms behind social comparison as we move into a post-pandemic era, and whether envy and jealousy are helpful or detrimental to society.
Click the link to learn more about these emotions in the context of a pandemic!
Jess, Eric, and Zak published a new blog post in the Society for Personality and Social Psychology’s Character and Context Blog. In this post, they discuss the relationship between pride and social rank and their research investigating the causal direction of this association.
Check the post out in the link below!
Check out Jess’ feature on the second episode The Feelings Lab podcast, where she discusses the feeling of embarrassment alongside Dr. Alan Cowen, Dr. Dacher Keltner, Matt Forte, and Ali Kolbert!
A Facial-Action Imposter: How Head Tilt Infers Perception of Dominance From a Neutral Face
Picture this. You’re sitting in a job interview talking to someone who will help determine whether or not you get the job. They start asking you about something on your resume – a project you’re particularly proud of, one that you worked really hard on. You can’t help it: you start to lift your head a little higher, sit up straight, pull back your shoulders, puff out your chest. But will this nonverbal display of pride actually help you get the job?
It might. At the University of British Columbia’s Emotion & Self Lab, Jessica Tracy studies nonverbal expressions of pride. Her research shows that displays of pride like these automatically communicate high status, and being perceived as high status by your interviewer could certainly help you get the job.
Francesco Carta / Getty
By Sam Wong
We often say our sense of morality is guided by our gut feelings – and this may be truer than we realise. A set of experiments using the anti-nausea powers of ginger have provided the strongest evidence yet that bodily sensations play a key role in some of our moral judgements.
Previous studies have reported that the more disgusted people feel, the more wrong they judge moral infractions to be. However, it’s not clear whether feelings of disgust guide moral judgements, or if it …
Read the full article in the New Scientist here >>
Pride is the downfall of many a tragic hero. Mr Darcy has to let his go before he can earn Elizabeth Bennet’s love. Dante listed it as one of the seven deadly sins. And as the famous (and oft-misquoted) verse from Proverbs cautions us, it “goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall”.
There’s no question about it: we’re consistently told that pride makes us obnoxious at best and doomed at worst.
But pride may not entirely deserve this reputation as a destructive force. There’s new evidence that this emotion has an evolutionary function, and that it plays an important role in the way that we interact with the world….
Read the full article in BBC Future here >>
Goals in soccer games can be few and far between, which helps explain the delirious nature of most scoring celebrations. Some players yank off their jerseys or drop to their knees and glide across the turf in glee. They all often end up at the bottom of a pile of jubilant teammates.
Then there are the players who are presented with a goal-scoring opportunity and, for whatever reason, fail.
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When this happens, they all do the same thing: raise their hands and place them on their heads — apparently the universal gesture to signify, How in the world did I miss that?
…
The gesture signifies that “you know you messed up,” said
Jessica Tracy, a professor of psychology at the University of British Columbia. “It’s going to tell others, ‘I get it and I’m sorry, therefore you don’t have to kick me out of the group, you don’t have to kill me.’”
Read the full New York Times article here >>
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