Nonverbal behavior and self-presentation.

Because of special characteristics of nonverbal behaviors (e.g., they can be difficult to suppress, they are more accessible to the people who observe them than to the people who produce them), the intention to produce a particular nonverbal expression for self-presentational purposes cannot always be successfully translated into the actual production of that expression. The literatures on people's skills at using their nonverbal behaviors to feign internal states and to deceive are reviewed as they pertain to the question of whether people can overcome the many constraints on the translation of their intentions into expressions. The issue of whether people's deliberate attempts to regulate their nonverbal behaviors can be detected by others is also considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Behavior control and social responsibility.

"It is in the field of psychotherapy that the issues of the moral and ethical implications of behavior control first arose as a relevant problem." We "cannot avoid facing the issue of values." Psychology should "develop techniques of approaching experimentally the basic problem of social and ethical issues involved in behavior control." In connection with this, the psychologist-researcher "should undertake the task of contact with the public rather than leaving it to sensationalists and popularizers." Behavior control "represents a relatively new, important, and very useful development in psychological research." (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Internet paradox. A social technology that reduces social involvement and psychological well-being?

We present a method for estimating age- and time-specific HIV incidence using back-calculations of AIDS incidence data. Two-dimensional penalized likelihood is employed, using a flexible bivariate step function model of HIV incidence, together with a quadratic roughness penalty which leads to thin-plate spline smoothing. This allows incidence estimates to vary flexibly and smoothly in both age and time. We propose generalized cross-validation as a guide for choice of an appropriate level of smoothing and describe an EM algorithm for computing the estimates. We propose the method primarily for qualitative assessment of trends in age-specific incidence over time and apply it to a small Italian data set on men who have sex with men. The analysis suggests a trend over time of increasing relative incidence among younger individuals, consistent with incidence patterns observed in other countries.     

Nonverbal communication and counseling outcome.

Nonverbal abilities and behaviors and verbal–nonverbal (VB–NVB) congruence of both counselor and client were studied in relation to judgments by counselors and clients of counseling outcome. 40 university students were clients; 20 counseling or clinical psychology graduate students were counselors. 40 counseling dyads were videotaped during 30-min counseling sessions. NVB abilities were assessed by the Profile of Nonverbal Sensitivity and an encoding task. Raters judged the presence of 7 NVB behaviors for each 5-sec segment of the videotaped session. Congruence was measured through postsession recall by counselor and client of consistency of feelings expressed through VB and NVB channels of communication. Only VB–NVB congruence was significantly related to outcome, suggesting that the NVB dimension is important primarily as it interacts with the VB dimension. Recommendations are made for use of new methodologies in future research to examine the complex interactions involving NVB communication. (41 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Locus of control and social desirability.

Hypothesized that there would be a negative correlation between the Edward's Social Desirability Scale and Rotter's Internal-External Control Scale. 102 army mental health clinic outpatients, 218 army stockade prisoners, 99 alcoholic inpatients, and 48 new careers participants were administered both tests. All correlations were negative, ranging from -.7 to -.29, and were significant at the .025 level or greater. It is suggested that since internalizers feel that they have some control over reinforcements, they may try to influence the dispensers of these reinforcers by behaving in socially acceptable ways, while externalizers, who feel they have no control over reinforcements, may not be so motivated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Competence and affect in task involvement and ego involvement: The impact of social comparison information.

We investigated in two studies the impact of information about the effort and performance of others on students' anticipated affects and judgments of competence given success in task-involving and ego-involving contexts. Without social comparison information, competence and positive affects were judged higher when students were asked to imagine succeeding with high rather than low effort. This occurred for both task- and ego-involving contexts. When information about the effort of others was made available, it had a major impact on judgments of students imagining success with high effort in an ego-involving context. In this case, knowledge that others performed as well with less effort decreased perceived competence and increased negative affects. In the task-involving context, social comparison information did not significantly alter judgments of competence or affects. However, when information that others applied low effort was made highly salient, those imagining success with high effort in both task- and ego-involving contexts anticipated feeling less competence, fewer positive affects, and more negative affects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal cues for depression.

Presented 67 psychology faculty, graduates, and undergraduates with a silent videotape film of 5 depressed and 5 nondepressed psychiatric patients and asked them to identify which patients appeared depressed on the basis of nonverbal cues alone. Results show that depressed patients maintained eye contact for only about one-fourth of the time that nondepressed patients did. The mouth and angle of neck were also identified as salient nonverbal cues. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Psychotherapy talk as social control.

Describes a method for understanding the socialization process in psychotherapy based on a view of language as social policy. The discourse activity analysis system (DAAS) is presented as a framework for categorizing conversational turns. The DAAS is atheoretical in that it makes no reference to psychological states or therapeutic interventions. It is comprised of 10 mutually exclusive categories—topic shift initiation, topic-relevant act, initiatory turn, terminating turn, other metacommunication, topic-relevant response, off-topic act, off-topic response, repair initiation, and passing turn—that represent the active and passive functions of speakers' talk to introduce and sustain topics and manage the flow of dialog. An excerpt from an interview with a 26-yr-old female is presented that illustrates various discourse tactics that were used to correct the client's misconceptions about the therapy process and to enhance appropriate participation. Other uses of the DAAS are also discussed. (24 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Religious involvement and the social competence and adjustment of Indonesian Muslim adolescents.

This study assessed the relation between religious involvement and multiple indices of competence in 183 eighth- and ninth-grade Indonesian Muslim adolescents (M = 13.3 years). The authors assessed spirituality and religiosity using both parent and adolescent reports, and social competence and adjustment using multiple measures and data sources. Structural equation modeling analyses revealed that parent and adolescent reports of religiosity and spirituality yielded a single religious involvement latent variable that was related to peer group status, academic achievement, emotional regulation, prosocial behavior, antisocial/problem behavior, internalizing behavior, and self-esteem. The consistency of relations between religious involvement and competence may be in part attributable to the collectivist context of religion in West Java, Indonesia, within which people exhibit strong beliefs in Islam and religion permeates daily life. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of personal involvement: Thought-provoking implications for social loafing.

In previous research, the 2nd author and colleagues (see record 1980-30335-001) observed that individuals working together put out less effort than when they work alone; this phenomenon was termed social loafing (SL). Subsequent research by these authors (see record 1981-32831-001) suggested that SL arises, at least in part, because when participants work with others on tasks their individual outputs are lost in the crowd, and, thus, they can receive neither credit nor blame for their performance. The possibility that personal involvement in a task could moderate the SL effect was tested in the present experiment, which used a 2 (high/low involvement)?×?2 (high/low identifiability) factorial design across 3 replications with 224 undergraduates. The task involved thoughts generated in response to a counterattitudinal proposal. Replicating previous SL research, present results show that under conditions of low involvement, Ss whose outputs were identifiable worked harder than those whose outputs were pooled. However, when the task was personally involving, the SL effect was eliminated: Ss whose outputs were pooled worked as hard as those whose individual outputs could be identified. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal assessment of Piagetian concepts.

Reviews studies which attempt to reduce linguistic or other performance demands in the assessment of Piagetian concepts. It is argued that a precise diagnosis of cognitive skills is important for several reasons: for testing claims concerning the sequencing or concurrence of cognitive acquisitions, for assessing the effects of training or educational interventions, and for evaluating models of underlying process. In many of the studies reviewed, performance on the revised test proved no better than on standard Piagetian tests, and in many others a high level of performance was rendered suspect by methodological problems. Some studies, however, provided suggestive (although seldom conclusive) evidence that an understanding of concepts such as conservation and transitivity might emerge earlier than Piaget indicated. The point is stressed that nonverbal assessment is not inherently opposed to Piagetian theory. It is suggested that the effect of nonverbal studies may be to provide a firmer basis for the claim of nonlinguistic operational structures. (85 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Child custody resolution: A study of social science involvement and impact.

To explore the use of mental health professional expertise in the legal system, legal professionals' sources of social science information, and the legal profession's perspectives on the appropriate roles of mental health professionals in the process, we solicited information from attorneys and judges on (a) the extent to which they actively seek the involvement of mental health professionals in child custody cases, (b) the factors that influence such involvement, and (c) the degree to which these attitudes and practices are influenced by social science data or theory. Among the most striking features of these results was the report by the overwhelming majority of legal professionals that they did not consider either social science data or mental health professionals' involvement or recommendations in child custody cases as critical to their practice of family law. Specifically, mental health participation was rarely solicited, and when it was, this decision rested primarily on the paradigmatic regularities of the legal system or practical needs of the case rather than on a view that such involvement was central to the client's or child's mental health. The implications of these findings for collaboration between the mental health and legal disciplines in the area of family policy are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal behavior, gender, and influence.

Participants viewed a videotape of either a male or female confederate delivering a persuasive message using a high task, social, submissive, or dominant nonverbal style. Participants were influenced more after viewing the social and task styles than the dominant or submissive styles. Participants liked task and social confederates more than dominant confederates and considered submissive confederates to be less competent than the other 3 styles. Although both likableness and competence were predictive of influence, likableness was a more important determinant of influence for female than male speakers when the audience was male. Consequently, with a male audience, women exhibiting a task style were less influential and likable than men exhibiting that style. Men were not more influential than women when displaying dominance. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Affective and behavioral responses to health-related social control.

Social control has the potential to encourage engagement in a healthy lifestyle, but its effectiveness may depend on the nature of the influence attempt. Participants (N = 282) described a situation in which someone attempted to influence their health-related behavior. Experiencing positive social control was associated with a greater tendency to change the behavior and less ignoring/doing nothing, whereas negative social control was associated with a lesser tendency to change the behavior and more hiding of unhealthy behavior. These associations could be accounted for by affective responses to the social control attempts. Results emphasize the need to better understand the regulatory influence of relationships on health behavior and the conditions under which social control is most likely to have health-promoting effects. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Nonverbal behavior and perceived counselor attractiveness and persuasiveness.

Investigated the perception of counselor attractiveness and persuasiveness through the expression of nonverbal behavior. Ss were 20 male and 20 female psychology undergraduates. 2 male and female counselors were trained to portray "affiliative" manner and "unaffiliative" manner. In a repeated measures design, Ss saw 4 different counselors and then rated them on scales measuring perceived attractiveness and persuasiveness. Results indicate that counselors in the affiliative manner condition were perceived as significantly more attractive and persuasive than counselors in the unaffiliative condition. Ss attributed greater attractiveness and persuasiveness to the same nonverbal cues encoded into the roles. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Positive adjustment and involvement during aging and expectancy for internal control.

Analyzed data from a total of 92 60-85 yr old males and females to ascertain level of expectancy for control as well as the relationship between internal control and adaptive behavior. Assessments were made with Rotter's Internal-External Control Scale, indices of developmental adjustment and active involvement, and the Life Satisfaction Index measure of emotional adaptation. In several analyses it was found that (a) the elderly of the present sample manifested an exceptionally internal level of locus of control relative to most contemporary, younger groups; (b) degree of internal control related positively to all 3 indices of adjustment to the later years; and (c) for the variable of involvement, external females displayed the lowest level of adjustment, with a trend in the interaction between sex and degree of internal control similarly apparent in other variables as well. Verification of the theory of locus of control is discussed for later stages in the life span, as well as potential avenues for research to delineate the developmental nature of locus of control. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Classroom structure, work involvement, and social climate in elementary school classrooms.

Identified 2 behavioral dimensions of classroom structure: amount of child activity and proportion of activity controlled by the teacher. Four 30-min observations were conducted in 32 4th-, 5th-, and 6th-grade classrooms (267 children), and a social climate questionnaire (My Class Inventory) and the Test Anxiety Scale for Children were administered. An ANOVA showed that high-structured classrooms (low activity/high proportion controlled) had the most work involvement. Both high activity and low control were related to more active deviancy (disruption of others' work). Interaction effects obtained for passive deviancy (silent withdrawal from work) and reported intimacy. High-control classrooms had more friction. There were no interaction effects of classroom structure with child anxiety level or sex of child. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Grandmother involvement as a protective factor for early childhood social adjustment.

Despite high rates of grandmother involvement with young grandchildren, very little research has examined the associations between nonresidential grandmother involvement and grandchild social adjustment. The present study involved 127 families enrolled in the Family Transitions Project to consider the degree to which mother-reported maternal grandmother involvement buffered 3- and 4-year-old grandchildren from economic, parenting, and child temperamental risks for reduced social competence and elevated externalizing behaviors. Findings indicate that higher levels of mother-reported grandmother involvement reduced the negative association between observed grandchild negative emotional reactivity and social competence. Furthermore, higher levels of mother-reported grandmother involvement protected grandchildren from the positive association between observed mother harsh parenting and grandchild externalizing behaviors. These findings underscore the relevance of moving beyond the nuclear family to understand factors linked to social adjustment during early childhood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)