Quality and acceptance of problem solutions by members of homogeneous and heterogeneous groups.

Though previous work by Hoffman (see 34: 954) had demonstrated that higher quality solutions to problems were produced by heterogeneous groupings of people (in terms of personality) than homogeneous, the present research was prompted by the question as to the generalizability of the findings. This study attempts to find where the results relate to situations which enhance group differences in terms of value or attitude held. Even on problems designed to produce emotional conflict, the heterogeneous groups proved to be more effective in problem solving. From Psyc Abstracts 36:04:4GE01H. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Epistemic motives and cultural conformity: Need for closure, culture, and context as determinants of conflict judgments.

Three studies support the proposal that need for closure (NFC) involves a desire for consensual validation that leads to cultural conformity. Individual differences in NFC interact with cultural group variables to determine East Asian versus Western differences in conflict style and procedural preferences (Study 1), information gathering in disputes (Study 2), and fairness judgment in reward allocations (Study 3). Results from experimental tests indicate that the relevance of NFC to cultural conformity reflects consensus motives rather than effort minimization (Study 2) or political conservatism (Study 3). Implications for research on conflict resolution and motivated cultural cognition are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arab and Israeli counseling trainees: A comparison of ethnically homogeneous and heterogeneous groups.

The study compared Arab and Jewish trainees in ethnically homogeneous and heterogeneous groups, in 1 counselor training program in Israel. The 60 participants were divided into 4 conditions: Jewish trainees in homogeneous and heterogeneous groups (n=15 in each), and Arab trainees in homogeneous and heterogeneous groups (n=15 in each). Functioning in the group was measured through group climate (engagement, conflict, and avoidance), group intimacy, self-disclosure, and regret of disclosure. Results indicated cultural differences only on self-disclosure, with Arabs scoring lower than Jews on several dimensions. Group composition differences were mainly indicated on the climate measure, with higher scores in the heterogeneous group on conflict and avoidance, and lower scores on regret of feeling exposure. Culture-by-group interactions were found for engagement, self-disclosure, and regret after disclosure about self, with Arabs in heterogeneous groups scoring higher on the first 2 and lower on the third. These results recommend placing Arab trainees in heterogeneous groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Understanding Responses to Political Conflict: Interactive Effects of the Need for Closure and Salient Conflict Schemas.

Two studies examined the relationship between the need for cognitive closure and preferences for conflict-resolution strategies in 2 different samples of elite political actors. Although research has suggested that high need for closure should be associated with competitiveness, the authors argue that this relationship should be strongest among political actors with a hostile conflict schema, or representation of what a conflict is and how it should be dealt with. The authors provide evidence for this hypothesis using archival survey data on American foreign-policy officials' attitudes toward international conflict at the height of the Cold War (Study 1) and their own data on the relationship between the need for closure and conflict-strategy preferences among samples of activists from 2 political parties in Poland: a centrist party with a reputation for cooperativeness and an extremist party with a reputation for confrontation (Study 2). The broader implications of these findings are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do you two know each other? Transitivity, homophily, and the need for (network) closure.

The authors investigate whether need for closure affects how people seek order in judging social relations. In Study 1, the authors find that people who have a high need for closure (NFC) were more likely to assume their social contacts were connected to each other (i.e., transitivity) when this was not the case. In Studies 2 and 3, the authors examine another form of order in network relations—racial homophily—and find that high-NFC participants were more inclined to believe that 2 individuals from the same racial category (e.g., African American) were friends than two racially dissimilar individuals. Furthermore, high-NFC individuals were more likely to make errors when judging a racially mixed group of people; specifically, they recalled more racial homophily (racially similar people sitting closer together) than had actually appeared. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Need for approval and the conditioning of verbal hostility in asthmatic children.

A verbal operant conditioning paradigm was employed to test the hypothesis that the differential conditionability of hostile and neutral verbalizations is related to the need for social approval. Approval-motivated Ss were generally more effectively conditioned than relatively nonapproval-oriented children. Contrary to predictions, approval-motivated children were more effectively conditioned to hostile than to neutrally toned verbalizations. Nonapproval Ss viewed hostile responses as having minimal reinforcement value. These results were closely related to degree of awareness of the reinforcement contingencies. (22 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Categorization and communication in the face of prejudice: When describing perceptions changes what is perceived.

In the face of prejudice against an ingroup, common ground for communication exists when people use similar social categories to understand the situation. Three studies tested the hypothesis that describing perceptions of prejudice can fundamentally change those perceptions because communicators account for the common ground in line with conversational norms. When women (Study 1), African Americans (Study 2), and Americans (Study 3) simply thought about suspected prejudice against their ingroup, categorization guided their perceptions: Participants assimilated their views of the prejudiced event toward the perceptions of ingroup members but contrasted away from the perceptions of outgroup members. Conversely, when participants described their perceptions, they contrasted away from the given category information and actually arrived at the opposite perceptions as those who merely thought about the prejudiced event. Study 3 identified an important qualification of these effects by showing that they were obtained only when participants could assume their audience was familiar with the common ground. Implications are discussed for understanding the role of communication in facilitating and inhibiting collective action about prejudice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Self-subjugation among women: Exposure to sexist ideology, self-objectification, and the protective function of the need to avoid closure.

Despite extensive evidence confirming the negative consequences of self-objectification, direct experimental evidence concerning its environmental antecedents is scarce. Incidental exposure to sexist cues was employed in 3 experiments to investigate its effect on self-objectification variables. Consistent with system justification theory, exposure to benevolent and complementary forms of sexism, but not hostile or no sexism, increased state self-objectification, self-surveillance, and body shame among women but not men in Experiment 1. In Experiment 2, we replicated these effects and demonstrated that they are specific to self-objectification and not due to a more general self-focus. In addition, following exposure to benevolent sexism only, women planned more future behaviors pertaining to appearance management than did men; this effect was mediated by self-surveillance and body shame. Experiment 3 revealed that the need to avoid closure might afford women some protection against self-objectification in the context of sexist ideology. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Need for cognition, task difficulty, and the formation of performance expectancies.

In the present article, the authors analyze how performance expectancies are generated and how they affect actual performance. The authors predicted that task difficulty would affect performance expectancies only when cognitive motivation (i.e., need for cognition [NFC]) and cognitive capacity are high. This should be the case because analyzing task difficulty is a process requiring cognitive capacity as well as cognitive motivation. The findings supported the expected NFC × Difficulty interaction for the formation of performance expectancies (Study 1, Study 2), but only when cognitive capacity was high (Study 2). The authors also predicted that expectancies would affect actual performance only if the task is difficult and if task difficulty is taken into account when the expectancy is generated. This hypothesis was supported: Significant relations between performance expectancies and actual performance were found only for difficult tasks and for participants higher in NFC. Studies 5 and 6 showed clear evidence that the NFC × Difficulty interaction could not be explained by differences in the use of task-specific self-concepts. The findings were robust across academic, social, and physical tasks. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bridging psychology and biology: the analysis of individuals in groups.

Biological systems are particularly prone to variation, and the authors argue that such variation must be regarded as important data in its own right. The authors describe a method in which individual differences are studied within the framework of a general theory of the population as a whole and illustrate how this method can be used to address three types of issues: the nature of the mechanisms that give rise to a specific ability, such as mental imagery; the role of psychological or biological mediators of environmental challenges, such as the biological bases for differences in dispositional mood; and the existence of processes that have nonadditive effects with behavioral and physiological variables, such as factors that modulate the response to stress and its effects on the immune response. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The Social Cognition of Immigrants' Acculturation: Effects of the Need for Closure and the Reference Group at Entry.

Three studies found support for the notion that immigrants' acculturation to the host culture is interactively determined by their need for cognitive closure (A. W. Kruglanski & D. M. Webster, 1996) and the reference group they forge on their arrival. If such reference group is fashioned by close social relations with coethnics, the higher the immigrants' need for closure, the weaker their tendency to assimilate to the new culture and the stronger their tendency to adhere to the culture of origin. By contrast, if the reference entry group is fashioned by close relations with members of the host country, the higher their need for closure, the stronger their tendency to adapt to the new culture and the weaker their tendency to maintain the culture of origin. These findings obtained consistently across 3 immigrant samples in Italy, 1 Croatian and 2 Polish, and across multiple different measures of acculturation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trying to understand the different pieces of the construct validity puzzle of assessment centers: An examination of assessor and assessee effects.

This study examined the effects of assessor-related factors (i.e., type of assessor) and assessee-related factors (i.e., type of assessee profile) on the construct validity of assessment center ratings. In particular, 3 types of assessors (26 industrial/organizational [I/O] psychologists, 20 managers, and 27 students), rated assessee performances that varied according to cross-exercise consistency (i.e., relatively inconsistent vs relatively consistent) and dimension differentiation (relatively undifferentiated vs relatively differentiated). Construct validity evidence was established for only 1 assessee profile and only in the I/O psychologist and managerial samples. More generally, these results indicate that 3 factors (poor design, assessor unreliability, and especially cross-situational inconsistent assessee performances) may explain why construct validity evidence is often not established in operational assessment centers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Valence in the adoption of solutions by problem-solving groups: Concept, method, and results.

This paper describes the development of a new observational system designed to provide data to test Hoffman's (see 36: 3CN29H) hypotheses concerning the adoption of solutions to problems in groups. Interobserver agreement in assigning members' statements to solution categories was relatively good in 20 3- and 4-man groups. 2 indexes of members' emotional attachment (valence) to solutions were strongly related to the adoption of the solutions by the group. The valence indexes correlated about .50 with members' rated satisfaction with the solution. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

What's good for the goose may not be as good for the gander: The benefits of self-monitoring for men and women in task groups and dyadic conflicts.

The authors posit that women can rely on self-monitoring to overcome negative gender stereotypes in certain performance contexts. In a study of mixed-sex task groups, the authors found that female group members who were high self-monitors were considered more influential and more valuable contributors than women who were low self-monitors. Men benefited relatively less from self-monitoring behavior. In an experimental study of dyadic negotiations, the authors found that women who were high self-monitors performed better than women who were low self-monitors, particularly when they were negotiating over a fixed pool of resources, whereas men did not benefit as much from self-monitoring. Further analyses suggest that high self-monitoring women altered their behavior in these negotiations--when their partner behaved assertively, they increased their level of assertiveness, whereas men and low self-monitoring women did not alter their behavior. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Group Belongingness and Procedural Justice: Social Inclusion and Exclusion by Peers Affects the Psychology of Voice.

The authors focus on the relation between group membership and procedural justice. They argue that whether people are socially included or excluded by their peers influences their reactions to unrelated experiences of procedural justice. Findings from 2 experiments corroborate the prediction that reactions to voice as opposed to no-voice procedures are affected more strongly when people are included in a group than when they are excluded from a group. These findings are extended with a 3rd experiment that shows that people who generally experience higher levels of inclusion in their lives respond more strongly to voice as opposed to no-voice procedures. It is concluded that people's reactions to procedural justice are moderated by people's level of inclusion in social groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

When distractors and to-be-remembered items compete for the control of action: A new perspective on serial memory for spatial information.

In serial memory for spatial information, performance is impaired when distractors are interpolated between to-be-remembered (TBR) stimuli (Tremblay, Nicholls, Parmentier, & Jones, 2005). The so-called sandwich effect, combined with the use of eye tracking, served as a tool for examining the role of the oculomotor system in serial memory for spatial information. Participants had to recall the order in which sequences of TBR locations were presented. In some trials, to-be-ignored blue dots were presented after each TBR location. Our results show that response locations shift toward the location of the distractors, and this deviation is related to the eye movement deviation toward the distractor location. These results suggest that TBR and to-be-ignored locations are encoded onto a common map that could lie within the oculomotor system. Interference in memory for spatial information is interpreted in light of a model of oculomotor behavior (Godijn & Theeuwes, 2002b). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

"Reasons to leave shiftwork and psychological and psychosomatic complaints of former shiftworkers": Correction to Frese and Okonek.

Reports an error in "Reasons to leave shiftwork and psychological and psychosomatic complaints of former shiftworkers" by Michael Frese and Klaus Okonek (Journal of Applied Psychology, 1984[Aug], Vol 69[3], 509-514). On p. 510, first column, third line from the bottom of the page, the N for the OR group should be 96, not 36. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1984-32942-001.) 191 male blue-collar workers who had previously worked nights and shifts were differentiated into 3 groups: a group that had left night- and shiftwork because of health reasons; another that left it for various other reasons; and a middle group that had a combination of health and other reasons for leaving. Ss completed measures of environmental and psychological stress, psychosomatic and other health complaints, and irritation and strain. Findings show that the 1st group had more health complaints than the one that left for other reasons. They were less skilled, had been unemployed less often, and were typically told by their physician to leave shiftwork. They had also stayed in shiftwork longer than the group that left shiftwork for other reasons. It is suggested that studies on former shiftworkers should differentiate between these groups so as not to underestimate the real problems of former shiftworkers who left for health reasons. (13 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

"When are social judgments made? Evidence for the spontaneousness of trait inferences": Correction to Winter and Uleman.

Reports an error in "When are social judgments made? Evidence for the spontaneousness of trait inferences" by Laraine Winter and James S. Uleman (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1984[Aug], Vol 47[2], 237-252). There are errors in the labeling of Figure 1 on p. 244. The ordinate percentages should be three times greater than indicated. In addition, the algebraic formula in the note for Table 2 on p. 245 is incorrect. The correct ordinate percentages and the correct algebraic formula are provided in the erratum. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 1985-01259-001.) Adapted E. Tulving and D. M. Thomson's (see record 2005-09647-002) encoding specificity paradigm for 2 recall experiments with 153 undergraduates to investigate whether Ss would make trait inferences without intentions or instructions at the encoding stage of processing behavioral information. Under memory instructions only, Ss read sentences describing people performing actions that implied traits. Later, Ss recalled each sentence under 1 of 3 cuing conditions: a dispositional cue (e.g., generous); a strong, nondispositional semantic associate to an important sentence word; or no cue. Results show that recall was best when cued by the disposition words. Ss were unaware of having made trait inferences. Interpreted in terms of encoding specificity, findings indicate that Ss unintentionally made trait inferences at encoding. It is suggested that attributions are made spontaneously, as part of the routine comprehension of social events. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

History of prevention and prevention groups: Legacy for the 21st century.

This article provides a context for this special journal issue devoted to the topic of evidence-based prevention groups. To begin, a history of the field of prevention is presented. Second, the authors highlight how prevention groups have evolved as part of the broader history of prevention. Finally, the authors discuss the implications of the history of prevention and prevention groups for future research and practice in the field of group work. The overall goal of this article is to provide a base of knowledge that practitioners and researchers may utilize to expand and advance the field of prevention group practice and research. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thinking about drinking: Need for cognition and readiness to change moderate the effects of brief alcohol interventions.

Research has demonstrated the efficacy of brief motivational interventions (BMI) and alcohol expectancy challenge (AEC) in reducing alcohol use and/or problems among college students. However, little is known about variables that may qualify the effectiveness of these approaches. The present analyses tested the hypothesis that need for cognition (NFC), impulsivity/sensation seeking (IMPSS) and readiness to change (RTC) would moderate the effects of BMI and AEC. Participants (N = 335) were heavy drinking college students enrolled in a randomized 2 × 2 factorial study of BMI and AEC. Latent growth curve analyses indicated significant interactions for BMI × NFC and AEC × RTC on alcohol use but not problems. Simple slopes analyses were used to probe these relationships and revealed that higher levels of NFC at baseline were associated with a stronger BMI effect on drinking outcomes over time. Similarly, higher levels of baseline RTC were associated with stronger AEC effects on alcohol use. Future preventive interventions with this population may profit by considering individual differences and targeting approaches accordingly. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)