No abstract

Humans have a bias for turning to the right in a number of settings. Here we document a bias in head-turning to the right in adult humans, as tested in the act of kissing. We investigated head-turning bias in both kiss initiators and kiss recipients for lip kissing, and took into consideration differences due to sex and handedness, in 48 Bangladeshi heterosexual married couples. We report a significant male bias in the initiation of kissing and a significant bias in head-turning to the right in both kiss initiators and kiss recipients, with a tendency among kiss recipients to match their partners’ head-turning direction. These interesting outcomes are explained by the influences of societal learning or cultural norms and the potential neurophysiological underpinnings which together offer novel insights about the mechanisms underlying behavioral laterality in humans.

The importance of the organizational police stress research has increased in recent times. One important measure of organizational police stress is the Organizational Police Stress Questionnaire (PSQ-Org; was McCreary & Thompson, 2006). The purpose of the present study was to translate the measure into Bangla and validate in Bangladeshi Culture. A total of 210 police officers participated in this survey. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the data from 160 participants (who provided complete responses) identified four factor structures for PSQ-Org with 14 items. The four factors for PSQ-Org namely 'Poor management and bureaucracy', 'Lack of manpower and resources', 'Feelings of excessive duty and being supervised' and 'Lack of leisure time and negative evaluations' together explained 55.14% of the total variance. The PSQ-Org showed moderate to high internal consistency (Cronbach's α =.80 for PSQ-Org; and .57 to .66 for its factors) strong translation validity and convergent validity. Thus, the Bangla version PSQ-Org appears to be a valid and reliable measure that can be used for further research in Bangladesh.

Decision making is one of the crucial aspects of our daily life. In terms of making any decision language plays a vital role either directly or indirectly. The purpose of the present study was to investigate the impact of Bangla language (native) and foreign language (English) on decision making. It was hypothesized that foreign language would show fewer decision biases. Total 80 participants (40 males, 40 females) took part in this experiment. Results from Chi-square test revealed that while making decisions in Bangla language under loss-frame 68.7% participants preferred to choose risk option over sure option. On the contrary in gain-frame only 29.9% participants preferred the risk option (χ2(1, N = 80) = 24.059, p < 0.001). This decision biasness was significantly minimized in English language. In loss-frame 56.1% participants preferred the risk option over sure option and in gain-frame 43.6% participants preferred the risk option, χ2(1, N = 80) = 2.502, p > 0.05. Dhaka Univ. J. Biol. Sci. 29(2): 191-199, 2020 (July)

Intimacy is an important component of interpersonal relationship. The Miller Social Intimacy Scale (MSIS) was developed (Miller & Lefcourt, 1982) to measure social intimacy, to quantify the degree of emotional closeness a person felt toward another person. The aim of this study was to translate the MSIS into Bangla and validate in Bangladeshi culture. Data were collected from 177 university students (77 females and 100 males) using survey method. Exploratory factor analysis (EFA) of the data from 172 participants (who provided complete responses) identified a two factor structure of the MSIS with 12 items. The Two factors namely 'Frequency' of intimate contact, and 'Intensity' of intimate relations together explained 49.20% of the total variance. The MSIS and its factors showed good internal consistency (Cronbach's α = .83 for the MSIS, .75, for 'Frequency' dimension and .79 for 'Intensity' dimension), strong convergent and discriminant validity. Thus, the Bangla version MSIS appears to be valid and reliable and therefore can be used in further research on interpersonal relationship of the people in Bangladesh.