Counterfactual thinking is associated with regulatory focus in a way that explains previous empirical incongruities, such as whether additive counterfactuals (mutations of inactions) occur more or less frequently than subtractive counterfactuals (mutations of actions). In Experiment 1, regulatory focus moderated this pattern, in that additive counterfactuals were activated by promotion failure, whereas subtractive counterfactuals were activated by prevention failure. In Experiment 2, additive counterfactuals evoked a promotion focus and expressed causal sufficiency, whereas subtractive counterfactuals evoked a prevention focus and expressed causal necessity. In Experiment 3, dejection activated additive counterfactuals, whereas agitation activated subtractive counterfactuals. These findings illuminate the interconnections among counterfactual thinking, motivation, and goals.

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Smiling individuals are usually perceived more favorably than non-smiling ones—they are judged as happier, more attractive, competent, and friendly. These seemingly clear and obvious consequences of smiling are assumed to be culturally universal, however most of the psychological research is carried out in WEIRD societies (Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic) and the influence of culture on social perception of nonverbal behavior is still understudied. Here we show that a smiling individual may be judged as less intelligent than the same non-smiling individual in cultures low on the GLOBE’s uncertainty avoidance dimension. Furthermore, we show that corruption at the societal level may undermine the prosocial perception of smiling—in societies with high corruption indicators, trust toward smiling individuals is reduced. This research fosters understanding of the cultural framework surrounding nonverbal communication processes and reveals that in some cultures smiling may lead to negative attributions.

Regrets are stronger following atypical than following normal behaviour. No studies have tested this effect for both intrapersonal normality (consistency within a person) and interpersonal normality (consistency between people) simultaneously. The present research examined whether the impact of violating the two kinds of normality on regret varies across cultures, using a manipulation of mutability crossed with that of norm violation. Among Korean participants (but not Americans) the impacts of mutability on regret were stronger when the intrapersonal rather than the interpersonal norm was violated, which was interpreted in terms of the greater collectivist emphasis in Korea than in the USA.

This research documented a linguistic norm account of direction of comparison asymmetry effects in relational judgments (e.g., seeing hyenas as more similar to dogs than dogs are similar to hyenas). The asymmetry effect is magnified by discrepancies in prominence between subject and referent, and has previously been explained using Tversky's (1 977) feature-matching model. Given a linguistic norm to place more prominent objects in the referent position, violation of this norm might reduce sentence clarity, which then weakens the magnitude of subsequent relational judgments. This research showed that clarity perceptions predict the magnitude of relational judgments independently of the cognitive manipulation of the features of the compared objects. The pattern of findings suggests that a linguistic norm interpretation may account for variance in relational judgments independently of Tversky's (1977) feature-matching model. Is Canada similar to the United States? Is the United States similar toCanada? Across many experimental demonstrations, questions such as these differing only in the order of objects to be compared have yielded various answers. Many see greater similarity when the question is phrased as in the first case rather than the second case. Differences in the prominence or centrality of the two comparison objects predicts this asymmetry: Individuals tend to see greater similarity when a less promi nent object is compared to a more prominent object than vice versa (Tversky, 1977). Logically, no such asymmetries should exist, spurring various theoretical attempts to account for them. For present purposes,