Political orientation and the perceptual effects of an anticipated interaction.

"… to shed further light on the conditions favoring similarity and complementarity in social preference, an experiment was designed to investigate the perception of a political stimulus person… by Ss varying in the strength of their own political orientation… . measured… by… political [scales]… . Ss were led to anticipate interacting with one of the stimulus persons, while in a control condition… there would be no expectation of ever meeting the SP." The results indicated that, "people with a strong need to manipulate their social enviornment tend to devalue others with similar orientation when a competetive interaction is anticipated." 15 refs. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpersonal perception in group therapy: A social relations analysis.

Although group therapists have emphasized the importance of interpersonal perception and feedback during therapy, there has been little systematic research on how group members form impressions of one another. D. J. Kiesler's (see record 1983-30243-001) interpersonal circle provided a framework for studying interpersonal perception and relations. 27 women and 18 men from 9 time-limited therapy groups reported their impressions of their fellow group members using the Impact Message Inventory, and they also completed 2 self-report scales. A social relations analysis of this data indicated that Ss' perceptions included both assimilation and consensus. There was also a relationship between how Ss saw themselves before therapy and how they were seen by other group members. The results demonstrated the utility of the social relations model for group therapy research and provided modest support for Kiesler's interpersonal circle. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of modeling on behavior related to hyperactivity.

In an examination of social modeling, differences between hyperactive and nonhyperactive 6–10 yr old boys in their play and responses to models were assessed. Both groups of 16 Ss were observed before viewing any models and then after having seen a "slow," nonhyperactivelike model and a "fast," hyperactivelike model. Judges' observations of various objective and subjective measures were used to assess differences between groups as well as the effects of models on Ss' activities. Hyperactive Ss were found to behave differently during play even before viewing any model. In addition, they generally responded more to the guidelines suggested by the model, especially the fast one, than did the nonhyperactive Ss. (20 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Ideal traits and terms of address for male and female college professors.

Examined students' perceptions of college professors' ideal traits to ascertain possible influences of sex-role stereotyping (Exp I) and the terms of address students use with their professors in public and private contexts (Exp II). In Exp I, 20 undergraduates compiled a list of 34 ideal traits of professors divided among 5 categories: intellect, professionalism, communication ability, openness, and nurturing. Another 127 Ss were divided into 3 groups, each of which assigned the ideal traits to a male, female, or unspecified-sex professor. Only slight differences in the assignment of openness and nurturing traits to male and female professors were found, and there was no significant difference between male and female Ss who assigned the traits. In Exp II, 72 Ss were asked how they would address each of their professors in private and in public. Few contextual differences were found; however, female professors, especially those in the 26–33 age group, were addressed by first names more often than their male colleagues. Also, female Ss used the familiar terms more often than male Ss. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality correlates of susceptibility to biasing information.

Asked 113 undergraduates to score 2 drawings, one allegedly made by a high-status child and the other by a disadvantaged child. The difference between the scores that each S attributed to the 2 drawings (compared to the objective base level) was the S's bias score. High-bias Ss (with bias scores 1 standard deviation or more above the overall mean bias) described themselves as more reasonable than no-bias Ss (bias scores of zero) and as less emotionally extreme in the directions of toughness, tenderness, and level of enthusiasm. This pattern is interpreted as reflecting the need system suggestive of the dogmatic personality. In a 2nd study with 179 undergraduates, no differences were found between the extreme-bias groups in responses to self-report questionnaires and the Embedded Figures Test or in political views. However, high-bias Ss responded more extremely than no-bias Ss to direct questions pertaining to their political ideology, independent of its content and direction, in line with the conception of dogmatism as a style of thinking independent of ideological content. (21 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

On going to the counselor: Contributions of life stress and social supports to the decision to seek psychological counseling.

Studied life stresses and social supports in 100 17–27 yr old college students to specify how these factors contributed to the decision of 50 Ss to seek psychological counseling. Life stress was measured with a life events checklist that yielded scores on the number and perceived impact of events. Social support was measured with a network size index that yielded scores on the number of potential and actual providers of support in each of 6 support categories. Results show that Ss who sought counseling reported no more negative events than their peers, but they reported greater impact of these events, fewer positive events, less family closeness, less frequent speaking to their parents, and more family history of seeking counseling. Ss who sought counseling reported having fewer available supports in 5 of the 6 categories of support. It is suggested that given equal numbers of stressful events, the likelihood of seeking counseling increases as social supports decrease. (53 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Differential perception of certain jobs and people by managers, clerks, and workers in industry.

"… describes the use of the semantic differential for the study of how certain jobs and certain people are perceived by various groups of industrial Ss… . Five jobs and 6 people were rated on 38 scales of corresponding semantic differentials by 156 Ss representing various groups in industry." Supervisors considered successful and unsuccessful by vice-presidents were both considered successful by subordinates. "… the most significant variable in the perception of jobs is the level of the job… . the managers make finer discriminations between jobs than do the workers… . The findings suggest that management ought to consider the tendency of workers to value their jobs more than management values them, in its communication to them." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality and patterns of adherence and nonadherence to the social clock.

Illustrated how the concepts of "social clock project" and "pattern" may be applied by examining the results of a questionnaire administered at college graduation; scores from the California Psychological Inventory administered in college, 5 yrs after graduation, and 21–23 yrs after graduation; and questionnaires administered during the 2 follow-up periods to 104 42–45 yr old women. Results show that personality characteristics were related to life outcomes across the 1st 20 yrs of adulthood. 70 Ss who had their 1st child by age 28 were on the feminine social clockwork; 20 Ss were late adherents, having their 1st child after age 28; remaining Ss followed neither social clock pattern, or they followed a masculine occupational clock. It is suggested that, having described social clock projects and their normative time parameters, the relative goodness of fit between individuals' needs and the ecology of nested contexts in which they feel they must try to gratify them can be examined. (76 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's judgments of their own and their peers' academic competence.

A standardized open-ended interview was used to study how 96 4–8 yr old children judged their own and their classmates' abilities. Ss were asked to explain how they knew who in their class was best and who was worst at various tasks and who was the best and who was the worst thinker. Ss also rated themselves and their classmates on how smart each was and explained their ratings. Content analyses of responses revealed that younger Ss, particularly males, were more likely than older Ss to refer to sociability in their ability judgments; they were less likely to base their judgments on social comparisons or on the difficulty level of the task. Ss at all age levels frequently explained ability judgments in terms of effort or work habits, although work habits tended to be referred to less by preschool-age Ss than by older Ss. Ss' ratings of their own ability declined with grade; ratings for peers were lower than self-ratings and did not change as a function of grade level. Self-ability ratings of Ss in kindergarten through the 3rd grade and their ratings of classmates were significantly correlated to teacher ratings of relative academic standing. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stress and coping among university counselors: A minority perspective.

78 university and college ethnic minority counselors identified on a questionnaire the types of on-the-job stress they encounter and the availability of self-help networks and/or other mechanisms used to cope with such stressors. The responses from Ss who indicated they had an adequate self-help network were compared with responses from Ss who felt that their self-help network was inadequate. Ss with inadequate self-help networks indicated they were experiencing more on-the-job stress, perceived the university as less supportive of their role as a "minority" counselor, and identified more conflict of role definition between themselves and their supervisors than Ss with adequate self-help networks. Both groups of Ss indicated that they preferred to rely primarily on themselves for support when experiencing stress but that they would also turn to a professional associate, family member, or work associate to help them cope with job-related stress. Implications for the training of minority persons as counselors are discussed, and strategies are suggested for facilitating the development of viable self-help networks. (27 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attributions of responsibility for group tasks: The egocentric bias and the actor–observer difference.

In each of 3 experiments it was demonstrated that under certain conditions individuals who work on a task in a dyad will tend to attribute greater responsibility for a positive outcome to their partners than to themselves. In Exp I 56 college students, who had qualifying scores on the Beck Depression Inventory, working in dyads on a crossword puzzle attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves for an outcome they were led to believe was quite good, thus contradicting the expected "egocentric bias" effect. This was true across depression categories. In Exp II, 100 college students working in dyads on the puzzle attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves for a positive outcome when asked immediately after the task to make the attribution. However, Ss attributed greater responsibility to themselves than to their partners when asked to make the attribution 3 days later, thus replicating the egocentric bias effect. Half of the 30 dyads in Exp III believed they were being videotaped while working on the puzzle, whereas the other half did not. "Videotaped" Ss attributed more responsibility for the positive outcome to themselves than to their partners, whereas the nonvideotaped Ss attributed more responsibility to their partners than to themselves when both groups were asked to give their attributions immediately after the task. The relationship between the egocentric bias effect and the actor–observer difference phenomenon is discussed. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Conceptual behavior in pigeons: Categories, subcategories, and pseudocategories.

In 3 experiments with a total of 16 Ss, we explored how pigeons learn to classify diverse pictures of cats, flowers, cars, and chairs and later how they accurately categorize brand-new pictures from these classes. Using a 4-key forced-choice procedure, Ss in Exp 1 discriminated individual examples within each of the categories from one another (subcategory training); nevertheless, errors were disproportionately conceptual in nature, with Ss more likely to confuse examples within a given category than between different categories. Ss in Exp 2 trained to classify pictures into human language categories (category training) learned far faster and more completely than Ss trained to sort the same pictures into totally arbitrary groupings (pseudocategory training). Finally, in Exp 3, category-trained and subcategory-trained Ss were tested on normally oriented pictures, on left–right reversals, and on top–bottom reversals. Subcategory-trained Ss responded less accurately on both kinds of reversed pictures and less accurately on top–bottom than on left–right reversals; category-trained Ss were less affected by both types of picture reversals, only top–bottom reversals decrementing their performance. Results suggest that many words in our language denote clusters of related visual stimuli, which pigeons also see as highly similar. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Age and forgetfulness: Perceivers' impressions of targets' capability.

In a person perception paradigm, 72 young and 72 old adult Ss listened to tape recordings of a nonforgetful, moderately forgetful, or highly forgetful female target person being interviewed for a volunteer job. Ss then rated their opinion of the target's memory and how likely they would be to assign the target to easy and difficult tasks. Overall, Ss gave higher memory opinion ratings to old than to young targets. As expected, they were more likely to assign tasks to nonforgetful than to forgetful targets. However, they were more egalitarian than was hypothesized in their task assignment ratings for forgetful young vs forgetful old targets. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Body partonomy: How children partition the human body.

Concepts of 7 body parts and their relationships were assessed among 94 Ss from 4 age groups (3, 4, and 5 yrs and undergraduates) and 10 additional adults. The youngest Ss tended to assume that each familiarly labeled part was distinctly identified and unrelated to other labeled parts, and they exhibited peculiarly underextended conceptions of the body and face. This tendency is similar to J. Anglin's (1977) report that children are less likely to include familiarly named objects in superordinate categories. Older Ss recognized "parts of" relations at all levels of the hierarchy, but tended to have greater difficulty with nonimmediate relations between parts of parts of parts. Discussion focuses on differences between classificatory, collective, and partonomic hierarchies. It is suggested that the development of partonomic concepts is less a product of inherent conceptual complexity and more a product of experience and perceptual boundaries. (14 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The effect of patient and clinician ideology on clinical judgment: A study of ideological countertransference.

Examined the influence of patient and clinician values on clinical judgment, using 363 clinical psychologists. Ss each rated 2 case histories. One case had been altered to reflect 1 of 4 conditions (right-wing [RW] religious, RW political, left-wing [LW] religious, or LW political), and the other case reflected no ideological commitment. Cases with "extreme" ideologies were rated more negatively on 4 clinical judgment decisions. Unexpectedly, ideological cases were almost 3 times more likely to be diagnosed obsessive-compulsive and were less likely to be diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder than nonideological cases. Clinicians need to be sensitive to issues of "ideological countertransference." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferring the characteristics of other people: Categories and attribute accessibility.

Investigated how the social inference process operates once a perceiver has activated a particular social category. Three models were tested in an RT paradigm. These models make differing predictions about how the degree of category–attribute association affects the speed and confidence with which an inference is made. In Phase 1, 37 undergraduates assessed the degree of association between a series of life-style attributes and 2 occupational prototypes. In Phase 2, 12 Ss made yes–no judgments about whether these attributes were true of a prototypical category member, and their response latencies and confidence levels were recorded. The "differential accessibility plus contradictions" model was strongly supported. This model states that perceivers make affirming inferences more quickly and confidently about highly associated attributes. When perceivers infer that an attribute is not true of a typical category member, low-associate characteristics can be rejected more quickly and confidently. Inter-S agreement was greater for highly associated attributes. Implications for social perception are discussed. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The impact of gender-role identity on women's self-esteem, lifestyle satisfaction and conflict.

541 female college students were screened on the Bem Sex-Role Inventory and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale. Ss scoring in the "feminine"/traditional (TD) or "masculine"/nontraditional (NNT) categories on both tests provided data on their self-esteem, lifestyle satisfaction, and anxiety/conflict over their TD/NNT life choices. TD Ss scored significantly lower on self-esteem and lifestyle satisfaction and higher on anxiety/conflict. Results were interpreted in terms of the differential (i.e., higher) social value attributed to masculine/NNT vs feminine/TD traits and behaviors. Furthermore, the value of intrinsic rewards that accrue to women who lead their lives according to their own preferences and beliefs, regardless of social costs, was explored. Demographically, in comparison to the TD Ss, the NNT Ss were older and were more likely to be married. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Infants' reactions to perceptual paradox during mother–infant interaction.

36 3-mo-old infants interacted with their mothers under conditions in which they could see and hear their mothers (correlated auditory plus visual information: A?+?V), see but not hear their mothers (V), and hear but not see their mothers (A); the latter 2 conditions are termed perceptual paradox. The interactions were videotaped, and the Ss' behavior was judged by naive observers who used a subjective 7-point rating scale of infant affect. For 2 groups of Ss, 3 1-min presentations of the A?+?V condition were alternated with 3 1-min presentations of either A (Group 1) or V (Group 2) conditions. In both groups, Ss were judged as being more distressed during unimodal presentations than during bimodal presentations. In a 3rd group, unimodal (A) presentations were alternated with unimodal (V) presentations. Ss in this group were significantly more distressed when they could hear but not see their mothers than when they could see but not hear their mothers. Results demonstrate the suitability of global subjective ratings of affective state in studies of infant perception. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)