Coordination of knowledge in communication: Effects of speakers' assumptions about what others know.

Two pairs of studies examined effects of perspective taking in communication, using a 2-stage methodology that first obtained people's estimates of the recognizability to others of specific stimuli (public figures and everyday objects) and then examined the effects of these estimates on message formulation in a referential communication task. Ss were good at estimating stimulus identifiability but were biased in the direction of their own knowledge. The amount of information in a referring expression varied inversely with the perceived likelihood that addressees could identify the target stimulus. However, effects were less strong than anticipated. Although communicators do take others' knowledge into account, the extent to which they do so involves a trade-off with other sorts of information in the communicative situation. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How 14- and 18-month-olds know what others have experienced.

Fourteen- and 18-month-old infants observed an adult experiencing each of 2 objects (experienced objects) and then leaving the room; the infant then played with a 3rd object while the adult was gone (unexperienced object). The adult interacted with the 2 experienced objects in 1 of 3 ways: by (a) sharing them with the infant in an episode of joint engagement, (b) actively manipulating and inspecting them on his or her own as the infant watched (individual engagement), or (c) looking at them from a distance as the infant played with them (onlooking). As evidenced in a selection task, infants of both ages knew which objects had been experienced by the adult in the joint engagement condition, only the 18-month-olds knew this in the individual engagement condition, and infants at neither age knew this in the onlooking condition. These results suggest that infants are 1st able to determine what adults know (have experienced) on the basis of their direct, triadic engagements with them. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Trait-inferential relationships and judgments about the personalities of others.

Discusses the effects of trait-inferential relationships, defined in terms of perceived probabilities of joint occurrence, on the perception of the personalities of others. 216 male and female undergraduates served as judges predicted the targets' responses to personality statements, highly or lowly inferentially related to the target information. Judges made a greater number of trait-inference judgments, were more certain, and were more willing to make a prediction on high-inferential than on low-inferential statements. Female judges were more inferentially "accurate" and thus more certain of their predictions than male judges. Other aspects of the data suggest that judges may have experienced conflict on statements that were inferentially negatively related to the target information, but frequently endorsed by others. A secondary analysis of the data indirectly supported this interpretation. (French summary) (26 ref.) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental illness stigma and the fundamental components of supported employment.

Purpose/Objective: The success of supported employment programs will partly depend on the endorsement of stigma in communities in which the programs operate. In this article, the authors examine 2 models of stigma--responsibility attribution and dangerousness--and their relationships to components of supported employment-help getting a job and help keeping a job. Research Method/Design: A stratified and randomly recruited sample (N=815) completed responses to a vignette about "Chris," a person alternately described with mental illness, with drug addiction, or in a wheelchair. Research participants completed items that represented responsibility and dangerousness models. They also completed items representing 2 fundamental aspects of supported employment: help getting a job or help keeping a job. Results: When participants viewed Chris as responsible for his condition (e.g., mental illness), they reacted to him in an angry manner, which in turn led to lesser endorsement of the 2 aspects of supported employment. In addition, people who viewed Chris as dangerous feared him and wanted to stay away from him, even in settings where people with mental illness might work. Conclusions/ Implications: Implications for understanding supported employment are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Do people know how others view them? An empirical and theoretical account.

Meta-accuracy is the extent to which people know how others see them. Following D. A. Kenny and L. Albright (1987), it is shown how the social relations model (SRM) can be used to investigate meta-accuracy. The results from 8 SRM studies involving 569 Ss are reviewed. We argue that people determine how others view them not from the feedback that they receive from others but from their own self-perceptions. Consistent with this argument are the findings that (1) people overestimate the degree of consistency in the ways that different targets view them and (2) people are better at understanding how others generally view them than how they are uniquely viewed by specific individuals. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Mental representations of the self, significant others, and nonsignificant others: Structure and processing of private and public aspects.

Using prior research on self and social inference (e.g., S. M. Andersen, 1984) and significant-other representations in social perception (S. M. Andersen & S. W. Cole, 1990), the present study examined a dual-factor conceptualization of self–other differences based on perspective differences and emotional-motivational relevance. Both factors were assumed to contribute to how private versus public aspects of the self, significant others, and nonsignificant others are structured in memory. In an idiographic-nomothetic design, participants' response latencies in completing sentences to characterize private and public aspects of each person were measured, and participants rated how well a pooled, randomized set of these predicates described each aspect of each person. Evidence showed differences in featural richness (availability), distinctiveness, and free-retrieval latency (accessibility) supporting the dual-factor conceptualization of self–other differences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Intuitions about situational correction in self and others.

People's attributional phenomenology is likely to be characterized by effortful situational correction. Drawing on this phenomenology and on people's desire to view themselves more favorably than others, the authors hypothesized that people expect others to engage in less situational correction than themselves and to make more extreme dispositional attributions for constrained actors' behavior. In 2 studies, people expected their peers to make more extreme dispositional inferences than they did themselves for a situationally constrained actor's behavior. People's expectation that they engage in more situational correction than their peers was diminished among Japanese participants, who have less desire to view themselves as superior to their peers (Study 3), and among participants who were led to view dispositional attributions more favorably than situational attributions (Study 4). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Hearing and believing hearsay.

The scientific study of the reliability and credibility of hearsay is long overdue. The behavioral assumptions on which the legal doctrine of the hearsay rule and its exceptions rest have never been rigorously and scientifically tested. This commentary examines the empirical studies presented in this theme issue and their implications for reconsidering and reforming the hearsay rule and its exceptions. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Confiding in others and illness rate among spouses of suicide and accidental-death victims.

Surveyed 19 spouses (mean age 37.5 yrs) of suicide and accidental death victims (representing a 61.3% response rate of all relevant cases that occurred in 1982 in a metropolitan county) concerning their health and coping strategies approximately 1 yr after their spouse's death. Results show that the more Ss discussed their spouse's death with friends and the less that they ruminated about the death, the fewer were the increases in health problems reported. A significant negative correlation was found between confiding and ruminating. Effects were independent of Ss' self-reported number of close friends. It is suggested that the sudden death of a spouse is associated with increased health problems irrespective of the cause of death, but that confiding appears to play a central role in the coping and health process. (19 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The internal working models concept: What do we really know about the self in relation to others?

The internal working models concept is the foundation for understanding how attachment processes operate in adult relationships, yet many questions exist about the precise nature and structure of working models. To clarify the working models concept, the authors evaluate the empirical evidence relevant to the content, structure, operation, and stability of working models in adult relationships. They also identify 4 theoretical issues that are critical for clarifying the properties of working models. These issues focus on the central role of affect and goals in working models, the degree to which working models are individual difference or relational variables, and the definition of attachment relationships and felt security in adulthood. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Some factors affecting the amount of information sought about others.

This investigation examined the effects upon the amount of information that Ss would seek about others of: (a) the sex of the S; (b) whether the information was all positive, all negative, or ambivalent; and (c) the sex of the other person. The results indicate that female Ss seek more information than males, that Ss seek more ambivalent than univalent information, and that less information is sought when the other person is a woman than when the other is a man. The valence of the final impression was clearly related to the valence of the information that Ss received, although male Ss formed a highly negative impression of women who were described in ambivalent terms. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Magical thinking about illness virulence: Conceptions of germs from "safe" versus "dangerous" others.

AIDS-related research has documented overreactions to casual contact and underreactions to sexual risk. This contradiction is explained by "magical contagion," a principle of thinking common in traditional societies, wherein contagion is considered socially discriminating, such that harmfulness depends on the nature of the relationship between source and recipient. In Study 1, 100 undergraduate participants drew germs described as their own, a stranger's, their lover's, or a disliked peer's. Lovers' germs were depicted as less threatening than disliked peers' germs. In Study 2, scenarios described contact with a flu-infected lover, stranger, or disliked peer. New undergraduate participants (N?=?133) rated how likely they were to become ill and how severely. Although likelihood ratings did not differ, severity ratings followed a linear trend, effects of lover contact being least severe and contact with disliked peer most severe. Behavioral implications of the blurring of feelings about germ source with estimates of germ virulence are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Thinking about ourselves and others: Self-monitoring and social knowledge.

124 undergraduates were administered the Self-Monitoring Scale and asked to respond to personality traits for themselves or another person. Ss with high self-monitoring scores were particularly skilled at constructing informative images of individuals who were prototypic examples of each of a variety of trait domains; low self-monitoring Ss were particularly skilled at constructing informative images of their characteristic selves in each trait domain. (22 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Care of others and self: A suicidal patient's impact on the psychologist.

Professional psychologists can be profoundly affected by their patients and must know how to take care of themselves physically and emotionally while delivering effective treatment. In this paper, I examine the effects of one patient on my personal and professional lives. Over the course of 2 years, the patient experienced numerous losses and became deeply depressed. Her symptoms included suicidal urges and self-harm (cutting). I describe the impact of the patient's life events on the therapy and on me as the therapist. I enumerate self-care strategies that preserved my ability to treat the patient without becoming distressed or impaired by the demands of the case. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2011 APA, all rights reserved)     

Introduction to special section: Mental retardation and mental illness.

Historically, the perceived relation between mental illness and mental retardation has undergone substantial changes. During the past 2 centuries, clinical observations and systematic research addressing these 2 constructs have developed along separate lines. Consequently, the pathogenesis and treatment of psychopathology, emotional disorders, and behavior problems experienced by individuals with mental retardation have not been the purview of mainstream clinical psychology. This article initiates a special section on mental retardation and mental illness to provide up-to-date summaries of various key clinical and research issues regarding this population (i.e., individuals with "dual diagnoses"). (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Beliefs of children and adults about feeling stares of unseen others.

Three studies investigated participants' beliefs about feeling the stares of an unseen other, which was apparently first examined by E. B. Titchener ( 1898 ) . Results showed that most adults believed they could feel the unseen stares of another. Young children frequently responded similarly, although across age there were some increases in beliefs about feeling unseen stares. Several aspects of participants' theories about feeling stares from an unseen other were also studied. Findings suggested participants believed that in order to feel stares, some cognitive maturity was required, it was important to have seen the starer, and thinking on the part of the starer was not important. Participants also believed that stares of animals could be felt. The age trends present a challenge to traditional developmental theories of cognition, which generally assume more rational behavior with advances in age, and they suggest broadening the bases for conceptualizing theories of mind. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)