Client attributes and the eye of the beholder.

Rated 30 male and female, black and white, 16-57 yr. old psychiatric outpatients on 11 personality attributes which have been considered as related to outcome of therapy. Only 1 of the correlations between the attributes and therapist, client, and Rorschach Psychological Functioning Scale ratings of outcome was significant at the .05 level. Some attributes, however, were related to social class and to severity of impairment-neither of which was related to outcome. Findings suggest that outcome is affected by the attitudes and beliefs of therapists concerning prognosis for lower-class and severely disturbed clients: therapists who believe they can help such clients can often do so. (18 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Convergences and challenges in the search for consistency.

Reviews critiques of traditional trait and psychodynamic approaches of the 1960's, outlining trends in research and discussing directions most suitable for further study. One line of research investigated how psychological situations and the specific mental representations of rewards in the delay of gratification paradigm systematically influence the developing child's ability to defer immediate gratification for larger delayed consequences. The nature of the competence basic for this ability in relation to coherence over time and cross-situational discriminativeness in self-control is discussed. In related directions, analyses of naturally occurring social behavior reveal links between the temporal stability of prototypic behavioral features and the perception of consistency in personality. Global, situation-free consistencies are neither expected nor obtained: Discriminative facility rather than rigidity characterizes adaptive behavior. Consideration of the competency requirements of situations in relation to the competency levels of the persons in them allows some specific predictability of relative behavioral consistency from situation to situation. (60 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Value revelations: Disclosure is in the eye of the beholder.

In interpersonal interactions ranging from job interviews to romantic dates, it is common for people to tell each other about what they care about and value. Six experiments explored the general hypothesis that people view their disclosures about what they value as more revealing of themselves than do others. This effect is demonstrated across a variety of contexts, ranging from the brief and anonymous to the more in-depth and social. A source of it is explored in actors' feeling that their most important values are especially important to them. Studies suggest that this feeling involves actors' sense of the intensity with which they hold their values, as opposed to their beliefs about the uniqueness of those values. Studies also show that actors' tendency to view value disclosures as more revealing than do observers is somewhat specific to value disclosures--that is, actors do not view their relatively off-the-cuff responses (Study 4) or their disclosures of their nonvalues (Study 6) as more revealing. Implications of this research for self-other differences and for interpersonal intimacy are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

To predict some of the people some of the time: In search of moderators.

This study tested the prediction that 3 variables—self-reported trait relevance, consistency, and observability—would moderate correlations between self-ratings and peer ratings. These predictions received considerable support when the 3 moderators were measured by ranking procedures (i.e., rank ordering traits in terms of their standing on each moderator) and very litle support when the 3 moderators were measured by rating scales (i.e., rating each trait in terms of its standing on each moderator). The advantage of the ranking measure may indicate an advantage for moderators that distinguish among traits across or within individuals (intertrait and intraindividual moderators) as opposed to moderators that distinguish among individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Not only in the eye of the beholder: Tactile information can affect aesthetic evaluation.

The study tested if evaluation of Aesthetic quality is influenced by tactile information and whether the evaluation process is affected more by one modality (vision) than another (touch). Tactile sensing and visual appreciation were compared with combined visual and tactile sensing of surface textures. Three kinds of plastic textures on the outside of a DVD container and three sample swatches of the textures used on the DVDs were used in the study. Three DVD containers were presented visually to the participants. This was followed by a blind haptic evaluation (i.e., the participants could only feel but not see the swatches) of the three different textured swatches, and then by combined visual and tactile evaluation of the three differently textured DVDs. One hundred and twelve participants took part in all 3 evaluations. A regression analysis showed that in 2 of the 3 conditions tested, overall Aesthetic evaluation was influenced both by vision and touch. To what extent the modalities influenced the evaluation depended upon which of the textures had been evaluated. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Racial and ethnic harassment and discrimination: In the eye of the beholder?

The nature, rate, and higher-order relationships among facets of racial/ethnic harassment (REH) and discrimination (RED) were examined across five racial/ethnic groups in a sample of 5,000 US military personnel. Using a hierarchical, multigroup confirmatory factor analysis approach, results suggest that the nature of REH and RED do not differ by race, with behavioral items equally representing REH and RED across the different groups. Further, higher-order relationships among the facets of REH and RED do not vary across race, with a single second-order factor accounting for the relationships. This single factor is theorized to represent a root intergroup prejudice that leads to harassment and discrimination. However, as anticipated, individuals from minority groups generally reported higher levels of REH and RED once measurement equivalence has been established. Together, the results suggest that both intergroup prejudice (which is multidirectional) and racism (which originates in powerful groups against other groups) are operating in REH and RED experiences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In the eye of the beholder: Views of psychological well-being among middle-aged and older adults.

Although the topic of psychological well-being has generated considerable research, few studies have investigated how adults themselves define positive functioning. To probe their conceptions of well-being, interviews were conducted with a community sample of 171 middle-aged (M?=?52.5 years, SD?=?8.7) and older (M?=?73.5 years, SD?=?6.1) men and women. Questions pertained to general life evaluation, past life experiences, conceptions of well-being, and views of the aging process. Responses indicated that both age groups and sexes emphasized an "others orientation" (being a caring, compassionate person and having good relationships) in defining well-being. Middle-aged respondents stressed self-confidence, self-acceptance, and self-knowledge, whereas older persons cited accepting change as an important quality of positive functioning. In addition to attention to positive relations with others as an index of well-being, lay views pointed to a sense of humor, enjoying life, and accepting change as criteria of successful aging. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beyond déjà vu in the search for cross-situational consistency.

Recent efforts to resolve the debate regarding the consistency of social behavior are critically analyzed and reviewed in the light of new data from 63 college students. Even with reliable measures, based on multiple behavior observations aggregated over occasions, mean cross-situational consistency coefficients were of modest magnitude; in contrast, impressive temporal stability was found. Although aggregation of measures over occasions is a useful step in establishing reliability, aggregation of measures over situations bypasses rather than resolves the problem of cross-situational consistency. Congruent with a cognitive prototype approach, it is proposed and demonstrated that the judgment of trait consistency is strongly related to the temporal stability of highly prototypic behaviors. In contrast, the global impression of consistency may not be strongly related to highly generalized cross-situational consistency, even in prototypic behaviors. Thus, the perception and organization of personality consistencies seem to depend more on the temporal stability of key features than on the observation of cross-situational behavioral consistency, and the former may be easily interpreted as if it were the latter. (65 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Acceptance is in the eye of the beholder: Self-esteem and motivated perceptions of acceptance from the opposite sex.

Social risk elicits self-esteem differences in signature social motivations and behaviors during the relationship-initiation process. In particular, the present research tested the hypothesis that lower self-esteem individuals' (LSEs) motivation to avoid rejection leads them to self-protectively underestimate acceptance from potential romantic partners, whereas higher self-esteem individuals' (HSEs) motivation to promote new relationships leads them to overestimate acceptance. The results of 5 experiments supported these predictions. Social risk increased activation of avoidance goals for LSEs on a word-recall task but increased activation of approach goals for HSEs, as evidenced by their increased use of likeable behaviors. Consistent with these patterns of goal activation, even though actual acceptance cues were held constant across all participants, social risk decreased the amount of acceptance that LSEs perceived from their interaction partner but increased the amount of acceptance that HSEs perceived from their interaction partner. It is important to note that such self-esteem differences in avoidance goals, approach behaviors, and perceptions of acceptance were completely eliminated when social risk was removed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Person memory: Personality traits as organizing principles in memory for behaviors.

In 3 experiments, a total of 96 undergraduates studied and recalled sentences describing behaviors while performing a laboratory impression-information task. Recall was high for behaviors that were incongruent with a personality-trait impression for a character, whereas recall was much lower for behaviors that were congruent or neutral with reference to the impression. Set size, the number of congruent and incongruent behaviors attributed to the character, was shown to be a major determinant of this result. The smaller the size of the incongruent set, the higher the probability of recalling an item from the set. There was no tendency for behaviors to cluster by trait category in recall output protocols. This result is interpreted as evidence that a simple analogy to hierarchical noun categories, studied in many verbal learning experiments on organization of memory, did not apply to the present results. Three theoretical analyses—an associative network model, a depth-of-processing model, and a schema model—are reviewed in light of these results. (56 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit theories of intelligence as exemplar stories of success: Why intelligence test validity is in the eye of the beholder.

Children and adolescents observe stories of success in their environment and from these stories, they identify people who serve as role models or exemplars of success. The individuals then form potentially fairly complex implicit theories of what it is that leads people to success and try to follow the precepts of their own implicit theories. These implicit theories may be prosocial, asocial, or antisocial and may depart from what conventional academic kinds of situations value. The same implicit theories that may lead individuals to believe that they are acting intelligently might lead an establishment to conclude that the individuals are not acting intelligently. However, intelligence tests are validated almost exclusively against the societally approved criteria, giving the tests an appearance of validity that they may not have within a given sociocultural group. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Further déjà vu in the search for cross-situational consistency: A response to Mischel and Peake.

W. Mischel and P. Peake (see record 1983-05642-001) criticized recent proposals for addressing the issue of cross-situational variability in behavior. The present author argues that Mischel and Peake misrepresent the links between the empirical studies they discuss and the methodological or conceptual strategies they criticize. In particular, they distorted the raison d'être of the author and D. C. Funder's (see record 1979-28632-001) template-matching technique and misapprehended the author and A. Allen's (see record 1975-04252-001) argument for an idiographic, or person-centered, approach to personality. (15 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Solving compare problems: An eye movement test of Lewis and Mayer's consistency hypothesis.

According to A. Lewis and R. E. Mayer's (1987) simulation model for understanding compare problems, students make more comprehension errors when the order of the terms in the relational statement is not consistent with the preferred order. Three eye movement experiments, designed to test a number of hypotheses directly derived from this model, are discussed. The 1st experiment with university students solving 1-step compare problems revealed no evidence in favor of the model; the data of the 2nd experiment with 3rd graders, on the other hand, provided good support. To explain the results of the 1st experiment, a 3rd experiment was carried out in which university students were given a set of 2-step compare problems. The results from that study also fit with the model well, suggesting that the model holds true only when the task puts some cognitive demands on the S. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Once more: Is beauty in the eye of the beholder? Relative contributions of private and shared taste to judgments of facial attractiveness.

Misconstruing the meaning of Cronbach's alpha, experts on facial attractiveness have conveyed the impression that facial-attractiveness judgment standards are largely shared. This claim is unsubstantiated, because information necessary for deciding whether judgments of facial attractiveness are more influenced by commonly shared or by privately held evaluation standards is lacking. Three experiments, using diverse face and rater samples to investigate the relative contributions of private and shared taste to judgments of facial attractiveness, are reported. These experiments show that for a variety of ancillary conditions, and contrary to the prevalent notion in the literature, private taste is about as powerful as shared taste. Important implications for scientific research strategy and laypeople's self-esteem are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality traits and persistence of interest in teaching as a vocational choice.

MMPI scores were compared for "persistent" and "nonpersistent" male and female college students. "Persistent" meant completion of a program of teacher preparation and acceptance of a teaching position after graduation; "nonpersistent" meant making application for admission to a teacher preparation program but not enrolling in the program. Significant differences between persistent and nonpersistent females in mean scores were found on five of nine MMPI scales, but only one significant difference was found for the male groups. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

In the eye of the beholder: Perceived, actual, and peer-rated similarity in personality, communication, and friendship intensity during the acquaintanceship process.

The authors examined associations of perceived similarity, actual similarity, and peer-rated similarity in personality with friendship intensity during the acquaintanceship process in a naturalistic setting. Self- and peer-rated personality data were gathered from undergraduates (mean age = 18.9) at 5 time points during the first year of university using a round-robin design. Whereas perceived similarity and peer-rated similarity in personality were concurrently associated with more friendship intensity for just-acquainted individuals, actual similarity in personality was not. Further, bidirectional cross-lagged associations between perceived similarity and friendship intensity were found. Peer-rated similarity was also associated with increases in friendship intensity, and this association was mediated by communication frequency. These results indicate that specific types of similarity in personality are differentially associated with friendship intensity during early phases of acquaintanceship in a real-life setting. Further, insight was provided in the direction of causality between similarity and attraction: Perceived and peer-rated similarity seem to breed friendship intensity, whereas friendship intensity seems to breed perceived similarity only. Finally, peers’ expectations seem to affect individuals’ communicative behaviors, which in turn affect friendship formation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Person categories and social perception: Testing some boundaries of the processing effect of prior knowledge.

Investigated whether stereotypic knowledge would influence social perception in a more realistic setting. In Exp I, 96 undergraduates watched a videotape of a target woman identified either as a waitress or a librarian; Ss more accurately remembered features of the woman that were consistent with their prototype of a waitress (librarian) than features that were inconsistent. The prototype-consistency effect did not interact with the delay time before recognition memory was assessed. In Exp III, 56 Ss learned the occupational information either before or after watching the tape. The prototype-consistency effect from Exp I was replicated. In addition, knowing the target's occupation while watching her led to increased accuracy for both consistent and inconsistent information. The probable role of both encoding and retrieval processes in contributing to this effect is noted. Perceivers' stereotypic prior knowledge influenced their memory of a target person's behavior even in a realistic person-perception situation. Conditions that favor the memorability of consistent vs inconsistent information are discussed. (28 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Personality traits: Fact or fiction? A critique of the Shweder and D'Andrade systematic distortion hypothesis.

According to R. A. Shweder and R. G. D'Andrade (1980; see also PA, Vol 64:9282), covariation in memory-based ratings of people's behavior is determined more by semantic relations between behavior categories than by actual co-occurrence. They claim therefore that the existence of personality traits is largely a fiction. Contrary to this hypothesis, it is argued that semantics are logically implicated in both the observation and recall of behavior and that support for this assumption can be found if immediate encodings of behavior are as sensitively scaled as subsequent memory-based ratings. Results of a study with 8 graduate students support this conclusion. When immediate encodings were scaled across all behavior categories, the relation between semantics and memory was completely explained by the role of semantics in the immediate encoding of behavior. However, when immediately encoded behavior was simply identified (rather than scaled), support for systematic distortion was obtained. Previous support for the systematic distortion hypothesis may therefore be attributed to the use of too simple a coding scheme for the measurement of immediate behavior. Implications for the existence of personality traits and for personality measurement are discussed. (40 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Working memory capacity and the top-down control of visual search: Exploring the boundaries of "executive attention".

The executive attention theory of working memory capacity (WMC) proposes that measures of WMC broadly predict higher order cognitive abilities because they tap important and general attention capabilities (R. W. Engle & M. J. Kane, 2004). Previous research demonstrated WMC-related differences in attention tasks that required restraint of habitual responses or constraint of conscious focus. To further specify the executive attention construct, the present experiments sought boundary conditions of the WMC-attention relation. Three experiments correlated individual differences in WMC, as measured by complex span tasks, and executive control of visual search. In feature-absence search, conjunction search, and spatial configuration search, WMC was unrelated to search slopes, although they were large and reliably measured. Even in a search task designed to require the volitional movement of attention (J. M. Wolfe, G. A. Alvarez, & T. S. Horowitz, 2000), WMC was irrelevant to performance. Thus, WMC is not associated with all demanding or controlled attention processes, which poses problems for some general theories of WMC. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Stereotypes help people connect with others in the community: A situated functional analysis of the stereotype consistency bias in communication.

Communicators tend to share more stereotype-consistent than stereotype-inconsistent information. The authors propose and test a situated functional model of this stereotype consistency bias: stereotype-consistent and inconsistent information differentially serve 2 central functions of communication--sharing information and regulating relationships; depending on the communication context, information seen to serve these different functions better is more likely communicated. Results showed that stereotype-consistent information is perceived as more socially connective but less informative than inconsistent information, and when the stereotype is perceived to be highly shared in the community, more stereotype-consistent than inconsistent information is communicated due to its greater social connectivity function. These results highlight the need to examine communication as a dynamic and situated social activity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)