Passionate love and the misattribution of arousal.

Two studies provide evidence that misattribution of arousal facilitates romantic attraction. In Exp I, arousal of 54 male undergraduates was manipulated through exercise. Arousal Ss liked an attractive female confederate more and an unattractive female less than did controls. In Exp II, arousal of 66 Ss was manipulated in a positive (comedy tape) or negative (mutilation tape) way; other Ss heard a nonarousing tape (textbook excerpt). Results replicate the interaction found in Exp I: Valence of initial arousal did not affect attraction to the confederate. Salience of plausible labels for arousal is hypothesized to mediate the misattribution effect. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Motivational biases in causal attributions of arousal.

Two studies hypothesized that the desire to seek ambiguity as to the cause of a particular state of arousal will increase if either that arousal state or its source is potentially threatening to self-esteem. In Exp I, 22 high- and 21 low-sex-guilt male undergraduates (as determined by the Mosher Forced Choice Sex Guilt Inventory) were shown either an arousing erotic movie or a nonarousing movie; in Exp II, 28 high- and 28 low-guilt females were led to believe that they were very aroused by pictures of nude men. Ambiguity was introduced into both situations by means of a bogus, nonthreatening, alternative arousal source (a placebo). Results indicate that high-guilt Ss were actively involved in the process of determining which source was arousing them. More importantly, this involvement appeared to be motivated by ego-defensiveness. In both experiments, when high-guilt Ss were confronted by an erotic stimulus, they chose to attribute arousal to the bogus source—and thus create ambiguity as to the actual cause and nature of their arousal—more than did low-guilt Ss. (23 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Perceptions of unity and distinctiveness as determinants of attraction.

Reinforcement theories of attraction have difficulty in accommodating the findings that individuals met in a negative context are sometimes liked more than individuals met in a positive context and that the sequence of positive and negative affect can often influence attraction more than the proportion of positive to negative affect. To understand these effects, one may have to consider how an individual's organization of information within a context affects evaluations. Two experiments were conducted with 178 undergraduates in which the relationship between 2 strangers was manipulated. Results suggest that (1) generalization of affect occurred when the 2 strangers were perceived as a unit and (2) when the 2 strangers were perceived as distinct from one another, the valence of one was compared to that of the other, and a contrast effect emerged. (55 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Neighborhood effects using a partial priming methodology: Guessing or activation?

K. Pugh, K. Rexer, M. Peter, and L. Katz (1994) found longer lexical-decision latencies to 4-letter words when an ambiguous letter (one from which neighbors could be formed) was delayed than when an unambiguous letter (one from which no neighbors could be formed) was delayed. They suggested that this was due to competition between partially activated words. However, K. I. Forster and D. Shen (1996) suggested that this effect may be due to participants' generating hypotheses on the basis of the previewed trigram. The authors conducted 2 experiments that used a partial priming methodology and found that lexical decision latencies were longer to words preceded by ambiguous trigrams than unambiguous trigrams when (a) the target was the highest frequency member in its neighborhood and (b) the prime was masked and presented for 60 ms. These results are inconsistent with Forster and Shen's prediction of no effect of prime ambiguity under these conditions, and they indicate that the ambiguity effect was not due to hypothesis generation on the basis of the partial primes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousal and attraction: A response-facilitation alternative to misattribution and negative-reinforcement models.

Previous explanations of arousal-attraction phenomena have focused on misattribution and reinforcement processes. Two studies were conducted to test an alternative response-facilitation explanation of these findings. In general, both studies followed previous methods, with the addition of conditions in which Ss' attention was directed to the actual source of their arousal. Study 1 was based on the fear-arousal method used by D. G. Dutton and A. P. Aron (see record 1975-03016-001) and found enhanced attraction to a confederate in high-fear-arousal subjects. Contrary to the misattribution model, the focus-of-attention manipulation had no effect on attraction. Study 2 used a nonthreatening source of arousal (exercise) and also included a focus-of-attention manipulation. Contrary to the misattribution model, arousal facilitated sexual attraction even when subjects' attention was directed to the actual arousal source. Although the results of Study 1 are consistent with a negative-reinforcement model, the findings from Study 2, and from several other studies in the area, are not. The simple response-facilitation model best explains these results and provides a parsimonious alternative explanation for several other sets of data. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Phonological ambiguity and lexical ambiguity: Effects on visual and auditory word recognition.

Three experiments in Serbo-Croatian were conducted on the effects of phonological ambiguity and lexical ambiguity on printed word recognition. Subjects decided rapidly if a printed and a spoken word matched or not. Printed words were either phonologically ambiguous (two possible pronunciations) or unambiguous. If phonologically ambiguous, either both pronunciations were real words or only one was, the other being a nonword. Spoken words were necessarily unambiguous. Half the spoken words were auditorily degraded. In addition, the relative onsets of speech and print were varied. Speed of matching print to speech was slowed by phonological ambiguity, and the effect was amplified when the stimulus was also lexically ambiguous. Auditory degradation did not interact with print ambiguity, suggesting the perception of the spoken word was independent of the printed word. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Heuristic processing can bias systematic processing: Effects of source credibility, argument ambiguity, and task importance on attitude judgment.

High- and low-task-importance Ss (367 undergraduates) read a strong or weak unambiguous message or an ambiguous message that was attributed to a high- or low-credibility source. Under low task importance, heuristic processing of the credibility cue was the sole determinant of Ss' attitudes, regardless of argument ambiguity or strength. When task importance was high and message content was unambiguous, systematic processing alone determined attitudes when this content contradicted the validity of the credibility heuristic; when message content did not contradict this heuristic, systematic, and heuristic processing determined attitudes independently. Finally, when task importance was high and message content was ambiguous, heuristic and systematic processing again both influenced attitudes. Yet, source credibility affected persuasion partly through its impact on the valence of systematic processing, confirming that heuristic processing can bias systematic processing when evidence is ambiguous. Implications for persuasion and other social judgment phenomena are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Politeness and conditional reasoning: Interpersonal cues to the indirect suppression of deductive inferences.

A successful theory of conditional reasoning requires an account of how reasoners recognize the pragmatic function a conditional statement is meant to perform. Situations in which it is ambiguous whether a conditional statement was meant to add information or to correct a mistake are discussed in this article. This ambiguity has direct consequences on the way reasoners update their beliefs and derive conclusions. In an analysis of ambiguity from the perspective of politeness theory, the authors suggest that any contextual factor that increases the face threat of a correction will encourage reasoners to construe the ambiguous conditional as a correction. This construal will impact their beliefs about the piece of information that is ambiguously corrected, and their beliefs will affect the deductive conclusions they are willing to draw. This nested mediation structure was observed in 2 experiments. The first experiment manipulated the threat level of a correction through the portrayed personality of the person being corrected; the second experiment manipulated the affective distance between the corrector and the corrected. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effortfulness and flexibility of dispositional judgment processes.

Two experiments investigated situational information is used to identify behavior (assimilative identification) and to adjust dispositional inferences from the identified behavior (inferential adjustment). Participants heard an ambiguous or unambiguous evaluation of a job candidate by an evaluator who was under situational pressure to present either a positive or negative evaluation. In Experiment 1 participants were under low or high cognitive load. In Experiment 2 the situational information was either validated or invalidated. Results showed that cognitive load and invalidation eliminated the use of situational information for inferential adjustment. Behavior ambiguity determined the use of situational information for assimilative identification. The results suggest that the use of situational information for assimilative identification is resource independent but inflexible, whereas inferential adjustment is flexible but resource dependent. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The bystander-effect: A meta-analytic review on bystander intervention in dangerous and non-dangerous emergencies.

Research on bystander intervention has produced a great number of studies showing that the presence of other people in a critical situation reduces the likelihood that an individual will help. As the last systematic review of bystander research was published in 1981 and was not a quantitative meta-analysis in the modern sense, the present meta-analysis updates the knowledge about the bystander effect and its potential moderators. The present work (a) integrates the bystander literature from the 1960s to 2010, (b) provides statistical tests of potential moderators, and (c) presents new theoretical and empirical perspectives on the novel finding of non-negative bystander effects in certain dangerous emergencies as well as situations where bystanders are a source of physical support for the potentially intervening individual. In a fixed effects model, data from over 7,700 participants and 105 independent effect sizes revealed an overall effect size of g = –0.35. The bystander effect was attenuated when situations were perceived as dangerous (compared with non-dangerous), perpetrators were present (compared with non-present), and the costs of intervention were physical (compared with non-physical). This pattern of findings is consistent with the arousal-cost-reward model, which proposes that dangerous emergencies are recognized faster and more clearly as real emergencies, thereby inducing higher levels of arousal and hence more helping. We also identified situations where bystanders provide welcome physical support for the potentially intervening individual and thus reduce the bystander effect, such as when the bystanders were exclusively male, when they were naive rather than passive confederates or only virtually present persons, and when the bystanders were not strangers. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Children's responses to ambiguous messages and their understanding of ambiguity.

Conducted 4 experiments to investigate whether a total of 212 young children (aged 4 yrs 6 mo to 7 yrs 3 mo) could respond differently to ambiguous and unambiguous messages if they were prevented from pointing at the potential referents. The exact nature of the bias that was operating was examined in the final 2 experiments, which investigated whether the differential responding to ambiguous and unambiguous messages was based on an understanding of ambiguity or on an awareness of certainty and uncertainty about the interpretation of ambiguous and unambiguous messages. It was found that Ss were more likely to respond differently to ambiguous and unambiguous messages if they were prevented from pointing at the potential referents. It was also found that the improvement in differential responding was not accompanied by an improvement in verbal judgments of message quality, and the differential responses were closely related to judgments of certainty and uncertainty about the interpretation of the message. Ss who did not know that verbal messages could be ambiguous could nevertheless respond differently to ambiguous and unambiguous messages by attending to their own certainty or uncertainty about the interpretation of those messages. They were more likely to do that when they were prevented from pointing at the potential references. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intimacy, arousal, and small group crowding.

Tested an intimacy-arousal model of small group crowding. This model proposed that increased density produces its effect on crowding by increasing the level of intimacy between people, which in turn precipitates arousal. Under the appropriate circumstances, that type of arousal is labeled as crowding. An experiment with 129 male undergraduates manipulated the variables of level of gaze, expected compatibility, and room size in a small group setting. As hypothesized, increased gaze produced evidence of increased arousal on 2 measures. Further, a predicted Gaze Level?×?Expected Compatibility interaction was found on the ratings of crowding and confinement, with the most negative reactions occurring in the high gaze/low expected compatibility condition. The effect of room size per se was minimal compared to the interactive effects of intimacy and situational expectancy. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Arousal and causal attribution.

Two experiments involving a total of 114 male undergraduates investigated whether arousal increased the impact of salient information on causal attributions and decreased the impact of nonsalient information. In Exp 1, salience was manipulated by instructions that directed Ss' attention to different types of information. Arousal was manipulated by the presence or absence of white noise. As expected, the impact of salient information on causal attributions increased with arousal. In Exp 2, emotional arousal (anger) decreased the perceived impact of a nonsalient person in a social interaction. Both effects were most pronounced for Ss with lower chronic levels of arousal. (French abstract) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The perceptual and inferential effects of situational inducements on dispositional attribution.

On the basis of a two-stage attribution model (Trope, 1986), we predicted that behavioral ambiguity increases the situation's contextual effect on the perception of behavior but decreases the situation's subtractive effect on the attribution of behavior. Three experiments with undergraduate subjects were designed to test these predictions. In Experiment 1 we presented ambiguous and unambiguous emotional reactions to different emotion-eliciting situations and measured subjects' emotion identification and dispositional attribution. In Experiment 2 we extended the test of the model to attribution of causality to the situation and to the actor's personality. In Experiment 3 we tested the predictions with respect to voluntary action. Subjects heard an actor's ambiguous or unambiguous evaluative statements about a likable or a dislikable person. On the basis of this information, subjects indicated their perceptions and attributions of the actor's evaluative statements. Despite differences in stimulus materials, design, and measures, results of all three experiments confirmed the predictions of the two-stage model. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Interpretation and arousal in the counseling process.

We tested whether level of arousal affects the delivery of interpretations. Sixty undergraduate participants were assigned to high or low arousal or to control conditions. Participants in arousal conditions received a 30-min counseling interview for procrastination, which included two interpretations. Arousal was manipulated by interventions made before the interpretations, either confrontations (high arousal) or reflections (low arousal). Galvanic skin response measures confirmed the arousal manipulation (p?p?p?     

From lynching to gay bashing: the elusive connection between economic conditions and hate crime

Two experiments (n = 48 and n = 45) investigated the effects of caffeine-induced arousal on differential classical conditioning of eyeblink (experiment 1) and autonomic (experiment 2) responses. Three groups of human subjects received double-blind administration of 0, 2, and 4 mg/kg oral caffeine (groups 0, 2, and 4, respectively). Twenty minutes after caffeine administration, a differential classical conditioning procedure was in effect. Physiological and subjective arousal was assessed by readings of blood pressure, skin conductance level, and a questionnaire, administered before caffeine administration, and after the conditioning procedure. The results showed increased indexes of physiological arousal in groups 2 and 4. In experiment 1, differential classical eyeblink conditioning was observed in groups 0 and 4, whereas no differential conditioning was seen in group 2. In experiment 2, differential classical conditioning was seen in group 0, whereas caffeine-induced arousal masked acquisition of conditioned skin conductance responses in group 4. This group displayed increased resistance to extinction compared to the other groups. Group 2, which had an intermediate level of arousal, did not display differential conditioning in either experiment. Taken together, the results indicate that small increases in arousal may be detrimental to learning, and larger increases in arousal may reverse this effect.     

Effects of context on the immediate interpretation of unambiguous nouns.

Effects of prior sentential context on the interpretation of unambiguous nouns were investigated in 2 cross-modal priming experiments. Exp 1 showed that a prior priming context affects word interpretation during lexical access by facilitating the recovery of contextually relevant aspects of meaning and inhibiting the recovery of irrelevant aspects. Exp 2 showed that lexical decision on a visual word related to an aspect of meaning of an unambiguous noun is facilitated only by a sentential context containing the noun and priming that aspect. Such facilitation occurs neither when the unambiguous noun is replaced by a substitute noun in the same sentential context, nor when the unambiguous noun occurs in a sentence priming an aspect of its meaning unrelated to the visual word. Furthermore, neither of these 2 conditions produced effects on lexical decision reliably different either from each other or from a sentential context completely unrelated to the visual word. Findings argue against the context-independent model of lexical access and support the hypothesis that lexical access may be affected by prior sentential context. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Resolving ambiguous behavioral intentions by means of involuntary prioritization of gaze processing.

Anticipation of others' actions is of paramount importance in social interactions. Cues such as gaze direction and facial expressions can be informative, but can also produce ambiguity with respect to others' intentions. We investigated the combined effect of an actor's gaze and expression on judgments made by observers about the end-point of the actor's head rotation toward the observer. Expressions of approach gave rise to an unambiguous intention to move toward the observer, while expressions of avoidance gave rise to an ambiguous behavioral intention (as the expression and motion cues were in conflict). In the ambiguous condition, observers overestimated how far the actor's head had rotated when the actor's gaze was directed ahead of head rotation (compared to congruent or lagging behind). In the unambiguous condition the estimations were not influenced by the gaze manipulation. These results show that social cue integration does not follow simple additive rules, and suggests that the involuntary allocation of attention to another's gaze depends on the perceived ambiguity of the agent's behavioral intentions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Semantic ambiguity effects in word identification.

The influence of semantic ambiguity on word identification processes was explored in a series of word naming and lexical-decision experiments. There was no reliable ambiguity effect in 2 naming experiments, although an ambiguity advantage in lexical decision was obtained when orthographically legal nonwords were used. No ambiguity effect was found in lexical decision when orthographically illegal nonwords were used, implying a semantic locus for the ambiguity advantage. These results were simulated by using a distributed memory model that also produces the ambiguity disadvantage in gaze duration that has been obtained with a reading comprehension task. Ambiguity effects in the model arise from the model's attempt to activate multiple meanings of an ambiguous word in response to presentation of that word's orthographic pattern. Reasons for discrepancies in empirical results and implications for distributed memory models are considered. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inferred evaluation and the relation between attitude similarity and interpersonal attraction.

This research examines the possibility that the relation between attitude similarity and attraction is mediated by people's attributions of the other's evaluation of them. Using the hypothetical stranger paradigm, we manipulated subject/stranger similarity and the stranger's evaluation of the subject. Auxiliary dependent variables tapped subjects' (N?=?226) estimates of the extent to which they were in agreement with the stranger and their perception of the stranger's evaluation of them. The results demonstrated significant effects for both manipulated variables on attraction. Partial correlational analyses demonstrated that the similarity–attraction relation was mediated by subjects' inferences of the stranger's evaluation of them; holding inferred evaluation constant strongly attenuated the similarity–attraction association. Moreover, the inferred evaluation–attraction relation was unaffected when attitude similarity was partialed from it. The correlational pattern is contrary to that put forward by Byrne (1971) and suggests a reconsideration of the conventional interpretation of the similarity–attraction relation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)