Getting along and getting ahead: Empirical support for a theory of protective and acquisitive self-presentation.

Study 1, with 386 undergraduates, demonstrated that the Concern for Appropriateness Scale and the Revised Self-Monitoring Scale (SMS—R) developed by the 1st 2 authors (see record 1984-27678-001) were orthogonal and that they were predictably related to measures of self-esteem, social anxiety, shyness, and sociability. Study 2, with an additional 249 Ss, showed that Ss high in concern for appropriateness tended to describe their own drug use as due to inducement by others, whereas Ss who scored high on the SMS—R tended to describe their drug use as self-initiated. (29 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Formal operational reasoning and the primacy effect in impression formation.

Investigated the relationship between level of cognitive development and the primacy effect in impression formation. 48 concrete operational and formal operational 8th graders were presented with blocks of information (photographs) about a target individual and were asked to write an impression. When the information was presented in 2 internally consistent but mutually contradictory blocks, impressions produced by concrete operational Ss contained a significantly greater proportion of evaluative statements in the same evaluative direction as the 1st block of information presented (the primacy effect) than did impressions produced by formal operational Ss. Results support the argument that the processing and organizing abilities measured in "objective" cognitive tasks are also used in social cognition. (10 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention and automaticity in the processing of self-relevant information.

Studied the neglected aspect of social cognition: the way people select information for further processing from the vast amount available in social environments. A dichotic listening task was used in which 141 undergraduate Ss attended to or ignored self-relevant stimuli. It was found that self-relevant information required fewer attentional resources when presented to the attended channel, but more when presented to the rejected channel, relative to neutral words. This differential capacity allocation occurred despite Ss' lack of awareness of the contents of the rejected channel. Results support the existence and interaction of the 2 processes of attention in social information processing: a control process that regulates the contents of conscious awareness and an automatic process that attracts attention to stimuli without conscious intent. (70 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Need for cognition and desire for control as moderators of extrinsic reward effects: A person?×?situation approach to the study of intrinsic motivation.

74 Ss in extrinsic-reward or no-reward conditions completed a brainstorming task and then were left alone with the option to engage in additional versions of this task. If the Need for Cognition (NFC) Scale taps intrinsic motivation for effortful cognition (J. T. Cacioppo and R. E. Petty, 1982), the optional task engagement of high-NFC Ss, but not low-NFC Ss, should be undermined by extrinsic reward. Results confirmed this hypothesis, but regression analyses showed that NFC scores' moderation of reward effects was due to their covariation with scores on the Desire for Control Scale (J. M. Burger and H. M. Cooper, 1979). The data suggest that (1) NFC involves intrinsic motivation for effortful cognitive processing, (2) NFC may predict such processing mainly in contexts with minimal extrinsic incentives for processing, and (3) control motivation may be related causally both to extrinsic undermining effects and to individual differences in NFC. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Level of processing as a determinant of hypnotic hypermnesia.

Reconceptualized the distinction between those situations in which one can and cannot expect to observe hypnotic hypermnesia using the levels-of-processing theory of memory, as proposed by F. I. Craik and R. S. Lockhart (see record 1973-20189-001). In Study 1, 20 hypnotized Ss (high hypnotizables), relaxed/motivated Ss (high hypnotizables), and 20 simulating Ss (low hypnotizables) processed lists of words matched for meaningfulness and imagery value at "deep" or "shallow" levels. As predicted, the hypnotized group recalled more deeply but not more shallowly processed stimuli than the control groups. In Study 2, these findings were replicated with 30 undergraduates using improved experimental procedures and were extended to a recognition situation. In neither study was the observed hypnotic enhancement accompanied by an increment in errors. It is concluded that cognition at the time of processing is critical in rendering a stimulus amenable to hypnotic hypermnesia. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Social cognition and adjustment in children at risk for psychopathology.

This study tested two models of how social cognition affects the link between child adjustment and two family risk factors, maltreatment and parental psychopathology. The mediation model proposed that social cognition mediates the link between the risk factors and maladjustment. The compensation model proposed that social cognition compensates for the risk factors. Social cognitive measures were social problem-solving competency and hostile attributional and response biases. In 83 Ss (7 to 14 years of age), maltreatment, but not parental psychopathology, predicted aggression and peer rejection. The adjustment of Ss with a disturbed parent depended on maltreatment status. Risk status did not predict social cognition, so the mediation model was not supported. Consistent with the compensation model, Ss with high social cognitive skills were better adjusted regardless of risk status. Implications for high-risk research are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of text structure on use of cognitive capacity during reading.

The demand that text processing imposes on learners' cognitive capacity was measured with a secondary-task technique; the meaning of the textual materials was held constant while several structural (surface) variables were manipulated. Exp I (36 undergraduates) showed that text versions with simplified vocabulary and syntax (but equivalent content) required less cognitive capacity to process than standard versions. Exp II (96 Ss) revealed that the reduction in use of cognitive capacity was due primarily to syntactic factors. Exp III (72 Ss) demonstrated that texts containing signals about idea importance and relations required less cognitive capacity to process than texts with approximately the same propositional content but no such signals. Measures of total inspection time and content recall were also secured. In general, findings indicate that aspects of the surface structure of text made demands on Ss' cognitive processing capacity. (44 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of performance expectancy and self-focused attention on social interaction.

Investigated the impact of performance expectancies and self-focused attention on social performance in mixed-sex dyads of 48 undergraduate men with self-reported moderate social anxiety on a modified Social Avoidance and Distress Scale. Ss were divided into 2 groups on the basis of their high or low performance expectancies. Ss were asked to respond to several self-report questionnaires before and after making a telephone call lasting 4–5 min to a female confederate for the purpose of getting acquainted. Results show that half of the Ss in each expectancy group performed in the presence of a self-focusing stimulus (video-camera). When anxiety level was controlled for, focus of attention alone had a very limited effect on performance. Expectancy had a significant influence on social performance, but only if Ss were self-focused. Thus confident Ss were rated by judges as more socially skilled than were doubtful Ss, but only when the camera was present. The interaction between these variables parallels previous research by C. S. Carver et al (see record 1980-32489-001) and Carver and M. F. Scheier (see record 1980-25774-001) and supports the self-regulation model of Carver and Scheier (1983). (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of need for cognition on message evaluation, recall, and persuasion.

Studied the relation among need for cognition (NFC), message processing, and persuasion. 57 pairs of undergraduates holding approximately the same attitude toward instituting senior comprehensive exams but differing widely in their scores on a NFC scale participated in Exp I. Ss read a set of either strong or weak arguments supporting the recommendation that senior comprehensive exams be instituted. Results reveal that argument quality had a greater impact on the message evaluations and source impressions provided by Ss high than by those low in NFC and that Ss high in NFC reported expending more cognitive effort and recalled more message arguments regardless of argument quality. The findings from Exp I were replicated in Exp II (110 female undergraduates) with a different topic (i.e., raising student tuition) and cover story. The inclusion of a postcommunication attitude measure revealed that the attitudes of Ss high in NFC were more affected by argument quality than those of Ss low in NFC. These studies document a reliable difference among individuals in their tendency to derive information from and elaborate on externally provided message arguments. (39 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

An integration–theoretical analysis of cultural and developmental differences in attribution of performance.

R. Singh et al (see record 1980-32377-001) proposed that American and Indian college students differ in their beliefs on how motivation and ability determine performance. Americans follow a multiplying rule, which implies that effort will be more effective with persons of high than of low ability. In contrast, Indians follow an equal-weight averaging, which implies that effort will be equally effective with persons of low and high ability. The present study tested this cultural-difference hypothesis using 120 Ss from 5 age groups: children 6–7, 8–9, 10–11, and 12–23 yrs old and college students 17–29 yrs old. As predicted, the Ss averaged information about past performance, motivation, and ability when predicting student performance. There was no support for the American finding that Performance?=?Motivation?×?Ability. Developmental differences appeared at the level of integrational capacity. These results illustrate the potential power of information integration theory for cross-cultural and cross-age comparisons in social perception and cognition. (17 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of source magnification of cognitive effort on attitudes: An information-processing view.

In Exp I 120 undergraduates viewed a videotape of 1 or 3 speakers presenting 1 or 3 arguments in favor of a counterattitudinal position. The 3-source/3-argument message produced significantly more persuasion than any of the other conditions, which did not differ from each other. It is suggested that each time a speaker appears, the recipient "gears up" to process the message and that if either speaker or argument is repeated, further thinking about the arguments is minimal. Exp II (30 Ss) excluded an alternative to this processing interpretation by showing that Ss exposed to the multiple-source/multiple-argument message did not infer that the pool of proproposal arguments was larger than that inferred by other Ss. In Exp III (100 Ss), Ss exposed to 3 compelling arguments purportedly produced by 3 different persons generated more positive thoughts and were more persuaded than Ss who read the same high quality arguments presumably generated by 1 person. However, Ss exposed to 3 weak arguments purportedly produced by 3 different persons generated more negative thoughts and were less persuaded than Ss who read the same low quality arguments attributed to 1 source. Overall, results indicate that increasing the number of sources of a message increases thinking about the message content. This increased thinking can result in either increased or decreased persuasion, depending on the cogency of the message arguments. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Effects of order of presentation, primacy, and physical attractiveness on attributions of ability.

Conducted 4 experiments with 720 undergraduates to determine if physical attractiveness interacts with or negates the primacy effect found by E. E. Jones et al (see record 1969-06853-001). Results demonstrate that attractive Ss received uniformly high attributions regardless of performance. Unattractive Ss, however, received attributions similar to those received by Ss who had no physical-attractiveness stimuli presented. Physical attractiveness had an effect only when presented before performance. When presented after performance, attributions received by attractive-stimulus Ss were not significantly different from attributions received by unattractive-stimulus Ss, as had been the case when attractiveness was presented before performance. Results support D. Newston (see record 1974-11048-001) and Newston and R. J. Rindner's (1979) hypothesis that perceivers may stop processing information once a point of sufficient subjective information is reached. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Constructing mental representations of objects from successive views.

Investigated the effects of complexity on processing objects by testing 3 graduate students and 7 staff members on a 3-dimensional analog of J. Hochberg's (1968) aperture viewing paradigm, the orthogonal slices task developed by J. Metzler and R. N. Shepard (1974), and a sequence matching task. In Exp I, Ss constructed, transformed, and compared mental representations of Shepard-Metzler figures varying in the number of component parts. Findings show that processing time increased with complexity. The results of Exp II show no effects of complexity on processing time when Ss merely judged the equivalence of the patterns used in Exp I presented in sequence. Rather, constructed mental representations appeared to preserve some of the spatial character of the corresponding objects. This conclusion was strengthened by the results of recognition tasks that showed that discrimination of constructed objects from appropriate distractors was better after Ss did the 1st (orthogonal slices) task than after they did the 2nd (sequence matching) task. (25 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Inadequacy of voice recognition as a demonstration of self-deception.

R. C. Gur and H. A. Sackeim (see record 1980-25654-001) argued that Ss deceived themselves when they failed to recognize their own voices on playback from a tape recorder. It is suggested that even though Ss may not consciously recognize their own voices, a heightened physiological response implies that true recognition did in fact occur at some other level of cognitive processing. The present study with 30 female Australian undergraduates showed that results similar to those arrived at by Gur and Sackeim can also be produced when Ss attempt to recognize the voice of a familiar "other." These results suggest that self-deception is not the main factor operating to produce the heightened physiological response. (6 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Categorization of individuals on the basis of multiple social features.

Five experiments used a name-matching paradigm developed by S. E. Taylor et al (1978) to investigate how people use the immediately apparent features of others as a basis of social categorization. Ss were more likely to categorize targets according to their sex than their race but also tended to categorize using a single subordinate category that represented sex and race simultaneously. Racially prejudiced Ss categorized to greater degree by race than did nonprejudiced Ss, but manipulations of construct accessibility and processing goals did not influence categorization by race or sex. Processing goals did influence the use of clothing style as a categorization feature. Results are discussed in terms of the functional utility of person features as a basis of categorization and the effects of categorization on social stereotyping and prejudice. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mindlessness or mindfulness: A partial replication and extension of Langer, Blank, and Chanowitz.

Four studies examined whether verbal behavior is mindful (cognitive) or mindless (automatic). All studies used the experimental paradigm developed by E. J. Langer et al (see record 1979-23568-001). In Studies 1–3, experimenters approached Ss at copying machines and asked to use it first. Their requests varied in the amount and kind of information given. Study 1 (82 Ss) found less compliance when experimenters gave a controllable reason ("… because I don't want to wait") than an uncontrollable reason ("… because I feel really sick"). In Studies 2 and 3 (42 and 96 Ss, respectively) requests for controllable reasons elicited less compliance than requests used in the Langer et al study. Neither study replicated the results of Langer et al. Furthermore, the controllable condition's lower compliance supports a cognitive approach to social interaction. In Study 4, 69 undergraduates were given instructions intended to increase cognitive processing of the requests, and the pattern of compliance indicated in-depth processing of the request. Results provide evidence for cognitive processing rather than mindlessness in social interaction. (16 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Attention, similarity, and the identification–categorization relationship.

A unified quantitative approach to modeling Ss' identification and categorization of multidimensional perceptual stimuli is proposed and tested. Two Ss identified and categorized the same set of perceptually confusable stimuli varying on separable dimensions. The identification data were modeled using R. N. Shepard's (see record 1959-05134-001) multidimensional scaling-choice framework, which was then extended to model the Ss' categorization performance. The categorization model, which generalizes the context theory of classification developed by D. L. Medin and M. M. Schaffer (see record 1979-12633-001), assumes that Ss store category exemplars in memory. Classification decisions are based on the similarity of stimuli to the stored exemplars. It is assumed that the same multidimensional perceptual representation underlies performance in both the identification and categorization paradigms. However, because of the influence of selective attention, similarity relationships change systematically across the 2 paradigms. Findings provide some support for the hypothesis that Ss distribute attention among component dimensions so as to optimize categorization performance and that Ss may have augmented their category representations with inferred exemplars. Results demonstrate that excellent predictions of categorization performance can be made given knowledge of performance in an identification paradigm. (51 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Understanding Others: The Face and Person Construal.

The face is a critical stimulus in person perception, yet little research has considered the efficiency of the processing operations through which perceivers glean social knowledge from facial cues. Integrating ideas from work on social cognition and face processing, the current research considered the ease with which invariant aspects of person knowledge can be extracted from faces under different viewing and processing conditions. The results of 2 experiments demonstrated that participants extracted knowledge pertaining to the sex and identity of faces in both upright and inverted orientations, even when the faces were irrelevant to the task at hand. The results of an additional experiment, however, suggested that although the extraction of person knowledge from faces may occur unintentionally, the process is nonetheless contingent on the operation of a semantic processing goal. The authors consider the efficiency of person construal and the processes that support this fundamental facet of social-cognitive functioning. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Pervasive influence of social schemata.

Ss placed human figures cut from felt on a field under free response instructions and then reconstructed displays of the figures in a judgment task where the figures were presented with a fixed separation and replaced by the Ss. Next the Ss attempted to replace human statuettes while blindfolded. Finally, a word association test was administered. Those Ss who kept man and woman figures together in free placements made the largest errors of replacing man-woman pairs of figures closer together than they replaced other pairs in both the visual and nonvisual reconstructions. These Ss were significantly more likely to give "man" and "woman" as reciprocal verbal associations. The same social schema was aroused by the specific social content whether the stimuli were visual, nonvisual, or verbal. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)