Processing objective and question order effects on the causal relation between memory and judgment in performance appraisal: The tip of the iceberg.

This study extends the research on information processing in performance appraisal judgments. A critical aspect of this research is the relation between memory and judgment processes. Performance appraisal researchers have traditionally assumed that performance judgments are based on memory for specific behaviors; implicit in this assumption is the idea that as memory for specific behaviors improves, judgmental accuracy should also improve. The authors elaborate the circumstances under which performance ratings are more or less likely to be based on previously formed judgments as opposed to memory for specific information. Results indicate that the causal relation between memory and judgment is driven by contextual factors at the time ratings are required as well as at the time information is encoded. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Developmental differences in implicit and explicit memory performance

Performance of preschool, elementary school, and college students was compared on a series of perceptual and conceptual implicit and explicit memory tasks that followed perceptual or conceptual processing during study. As expected, performance on the conceptual explicit memory task improved across age groups. In contrast, performance on the perceptual explicit memory task as well as that on both types of implicit memory tasks showed no developmental change. Also, perceptual processing during study led to better memory performance than conceptual processing for both the perceptual implicit and perceptual explicit tasks and conceptual processing during study led to better memory performance on the conceptual explicit memory task. Performance on the conceptual implicit memory task, in contrast, was affected equally by both types of study processing. The results are discussed in terms of transfer-appropriate processing (Roediger & Blaxton, 1987b) and unitization and grouping processes (Graf & Schacter, 1989).     

Schematic effects of social attitudes on information processing and recall.

Examined the proposal that social attitudes have schematic effects on the processing of attitude-relevant information. It was predicted that (a) such attitudes schemata would be bipolar, with information organized around "agree" and "disagree" poles; (b) attitude-relevant information would be more easily processed and, hence, judged more readily if it fits these schematic poles; and (c) schematic fit would also facilitate recall of attitude-relevant information. 23 undergraduates were asked to make pro/anti and agree/disagree ratings of 54 attitude statements on 3 issues. Ratings and decision times were recorded. The next day, Ss engaged in a free-recall task. Both schematic hypotheses were supported: Faster judgments and higher recall were found with items that were extremely agreed or disagreed with than with items that elicited less extreme agree/disagree ratings. It is shown that these effects are not due to idiosyncracies of either individual items or individual Ss. (26 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stereotypic personality inferences following objective versus subjective judgments of beauty.

In 2 experiments, 120 male college students were led to believe either that their judgments of female targets' attractiveness were caused by the women's physical characteristics (objective judgments) or that these judgments were the result of their own personal preferences (subjected judgments). It was hypothesized that if the attractiveness stereotype rests on perceiver's implicit assumption that beauty constitutes a reliable and unbiased criterion from which to infer other characteristics (personality traits), then stereotyping would be less extreme when attractiveness was seen as subjective. Although manipulation checks showed that objectivity–subjectivity was effectively manipulated, Ss in all conditions made personality inferences that were consistent with the attractiveness stereotype (i.e., significantly more favorable for attractive than unattractive targets). Results suggest that utilization of the attractiveness stereotype to generate personality predictions is covert and not amenable to influence by perceivers' conscious attributions about the cause of their attractiveness judgments. (French abstract) (9 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Egocentric pattern projection: How implicit personality theories recapitulate the geography of the self.

Five studies demonstrated egocentric pattern projection, in that the implicit personality theories (IPTs) that participants held about other people tended to recapitulate the terrain of their own personality. To the extent that participants believed they possessed 2 traits to a similar degree within themselves, they tended, through their judgments of others and estimates of population parameters, to claim that the 2 traits were positively correlated in other people; and if they believed they possessed 2 traits to a dissimilar degree within themselves, they tended to claim that the 2 traits were negatively correlated in other people. Further evidence showed that information about the self plays a causal role in the construction of implicit theories, making a unique contribution to the shape of IPTs over and above that of information about another person. The relevance of these data for recent controversies over egocentric social judgment is discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Aging and impression formation: the impact of processing skills and goals

Two studies assessed age differences in representations and judgments about people. Our specific interest was in examining how presumed age-related changes in processing efficiency and motivation affected performance in an impression formation task. Consistent with age-related declines in processing efficiency, we found that increasing age was associated with: (a) no change in the processing of evaluative information; (b) less use of specific traits to organize impressions; (c) poorer memory for behavioral information, especially when it contradicted expectations; and (d) less systematic relationships between memory and judgments. We also found, however, that more meaningful task goals and a focus on individual behaviors resulted in reduced age differences in the nature of representations about the target person.     

Children's use of frequency information for trait categorization and behavioral prediction.

Two experiments examined young children's use of behavioral frequency information to make behavioral predictions and global personality attributions. In Experiment 1, participants heard about an actor who behaved positively or negatively toward 1 or several recipients. Generally, children did not differentiate their judgments of the actor on the basis of the amount of information provided. In Experiment 2, the actor behaved positively or negatively toward a single recipient once or repeatedly. Participants were more likely to make appropriate predictions and attributions after exposure to multiple target behaviors and with increasing age. Overall, children's performance was influenced by age-related positivity and negativity biases. These findings indicate that frequency information is important for personality judgments but that its use is affected by contextual complexity and information-processing biases. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Predicting self-efficacy and performance during skill acquisition.

Ss completed 7 trials of a complex computer task that simulated the job of an air traffic controller. Performance was calculated by combining points for the number of planes landed minus penalty points. Throughout the trials, Ss completed questionnaires assessing their self-efficacy goals, expected performance, and the degree to which certain judgments required more or less cognitive processing. The results show that during skill acquisition people report reductions in their cognitive processing for working on the task and for making self-efficacy judgments. Also, on early trials, self-efficacy is a better predictor of performance than are expected score or goals, whereas the reverse is true for later trials. The discussion focuses on understanding motivational processes during skill acquisition. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Bonuses, goals, and instrumentality effects.

Three experimental studies showed that bonuses based on end-of-period determinations of standards led to the setting of more challenging goals but lower performance than a control condition in which bonuses were based on the achievement of self-set goals. Performance differences between the bonus and control conditions were not mediated by levels of self-set goals or goal commitment as predicted by goal theory. However, self-set goals and self-efficacy were significant predictors of performance within both the bonus and control conditions. Changes in performance under the end-of-period bonus condition in Study 3 were fully mediated by judgments of instrumentality. Participants in the end-of-period bonus condition were less certain of receiving a bonus, and this negatively affected their performance. Implications for the use of appraisal ratings to allocate bonuses and for the design of bonus schemes for management are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Multiple uses of performance appraisal: Prevalence and correlates.

Performance appraisal is used in organizations for a variety of purposes. However, little empirical research has been conducted to determine (a) the extent to which performance appraisal is used for each of several purposes in industry, (b) the extent to which appraisal data may be used for multiple and possibly conflicting uses within the same organization, and (c) organizational correlates of these uses. A survey questionnaire designed to answer these questions was mailed to 243 members of Division 14 of the American Psychological Association who were employed in industry. A factor analysis of the 106 completed questionnaires indicated four general uses of information from performance appraisals. The use of performance appraisal to simultaneously make distinctions between and within individuals is common. Canonical correlation analyses indicated that organizational characteristics were significantly related to uses of performance appraisal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Judgments of frequency of social stimuli: How schematic is person memory?

Three experiments explore the hypothesis that people encode information about the surface features of social stimuli in addition to schematic information. Undergraduate women were given an impression formation set and then viewed masculine and feminine adjectives said to describe a female student. Experiment 1 demonstrated that judgments of the total number of masculine adjectives were greater when the student was described as having liberated sex-role attitudes than when she had conventional attitudes. Experiment 2 demonstrated that subjects' judgments of the frequency of specific, individual adjectives were quite accurate, and that their specific judgments of the frequency were unaffected by the liberated and conventional schemata. Experiment 3 showed that priming of specific frequency information failed to reduce the effect of schemata on global judgments of frequency. Implications of the dissociation between specific and global judgments of frequency are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Using a knowledge-and-appraisal model of personality architecture to understand consistency and variability in smokers' self-efficacy appraisals in high-risk situations.

The present research used idiographic methods for identifying intraindividual, cross-contextual patterns of consistency and variability in self-efficacy appraisal among smokers. Building on a knowledge-andappraisal model of personality architecture, the authors assessed (a) schematic self-knowledge, (b) beliefs about the relevance of high-risk smoking-related situations to those schematic attributes, and (c) appraisals of self-efficacy for smoking avoidance in specific contexts. The idiographic assessments of situational and self-knowledge robustly predicted patterns of intraindividual consistency and variability in self-efficacy appraisal. A response-time measure revealed that speed in making positive self-appraisals varied systematically across schema-relevant contexts. Results speak to the field's need for assessment strategies to detect, and theoretical models to explain, within-person, across-context variations in self-efficacy for avoiding addictive behaviors. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit and explicit memory in amnesia: An analysis of data-driven and conceptually driven processes.

The extent to which data-driven and conceptually driven processing determines amnesic patients' differential performance on implicit and explicit tasks was investigated. In 2 data-driven tasks, words that looked visually similar to target words were used as cues for a graphemic production task (implicit) and a graphemic cued-recall task (explicit). In 2 conceptually driven tasks, words semantically related to the target words were used as cues for both a production task and a cued-recall task. The nature of the task instructions consistently determined amnesic patient performance, regardless of the nature of the processing required. Thus, the distinction between implicit and explicit tasks captured the performance of amnesic patients better than did the distinction between data-driven and conceptually driven processes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An investigation of the implicit control of the processing of negative pictures.

The implicit control of emotion processing was investigated by varying encoding instructions for both negative and neutral pictures while measuring psychophysiological responses. Participants made comparative judgments about consecutive pictures for blocks of neutral or negative content. The highly specified judgment task was designed to minimize variance in the implementation of implicit control of processing. Affective modulation of startle amplitude was significantly reduced during judgments involving nonnegative content (how "planned" an image was compared to its predecessor), compared to those that involved negative content (how "frightening" an image was compared to its predecessor), indicating successful implicit control of processing. The more attenuated affect modulation was, the less anxious individuals became during the task, suggesting that the implicit control of emotion processing is significantly associated with emotional experience. These data provide convergent evidence for a companion neuroimaging study because of the similar neural substrates thought to underlie affective modulation of startle. This supports the view that higher-level top-down pathways modulate activation of the amygdala. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

No effect of inversion on attentional and affective processing of facial expressions.

The decrease in recognition performance after face inversion has been taken to suggest that faces are processed holistically. Three experiments, 1 with schematic and 2 with photographic faces, were conducted to assess whether face inversion also affected visual search for and implicit evaluation of facial expressions of emotion. The 3 visual search experiments yielded the same differences in detection speed between different facial expressions of emotion for upright and inverted faces. Threat superiority effects, faster detection of angry than of happy faces among neutral background faces, were evident in 2 experiments. Face inversion did not affect explicit or implicit evaluation of face stimuli as assessed with verbal ratings and affective priming. Happy faces were evaluated as more positive than angry, sad, or fearful/scheming ones regardless of orientation. Taken together these results seem to suggest that the processing of facial expressions of emotion is not impaired if holistic processing is disrupted. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perpceptual transfer in stem-completion and fragment-completion tests.

Provides a direct test of the transfer-appropriate processing framework as it applies to performance on 2 implicit memory tasks and also identifies the component processes that are engaged on these memory tasks. The general strategy involved employing study tasks that mimicked the processing that appears to occur during the memory task. Ss included 408 undergraduates. Performance on a stem-completion task was not consistently enhanced by a study task in which Ss selected potential word endings for the three-letter stems. However, inducing Ss to engage in a letter-substitution task during encoding enhanced priming on a fragment-completion test, relative to the standard Read condition. Consistent with the transfer-appropriate processing framework, the letter-substitution task showed evidence of optimizing perceptual priming effects, as additional manipulations of perceptual similarity had no further effect on performance on the implicit test. The data suggest that the Read condition does not induce maximum perceptual processing, whereas a letter-by-letter substitution strategy mimics the processes used to complete word fragments on an implicit test. Ss may not normally solve word stems by generating possible word endings and then selecting among these alternatives. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Getting from situations to emotions: Appraisal and other routes.

Comments on the original article by S. Siemer and R. Reisenzein (see record 2007-02169-001) regarding the process of emotion inference. When processing situational information, people can reach emotional conclusions without explicitly registering corresponding appraisals. Does this mean that appraisal cues must be guiding inference in less obvious ways? If one assumes that the emotional meaning of any situation depends on the protagonist's relation to what is happening, then emotion inference can never entirely bypass relational information. However, not all relational information is specifically appraisal-based. Further, actual emotion causation, like emotion inference, can involve explicit or implicit appraisals or even no appraisals at all. Indeed, humans do not first learn to associate emotions with situations by extracting appraisal information. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)