Pancultural self-enhancement.

The culture movement challenged the universality of the self-enhancement motive by proposing that the motive is pervasive in individualistic cultures (the West) but absent in collectivistic cultures (the East). The present research posited that Westerners and Easterners use different tactics to achieve the same goal: positive self-regard. Study 1 tested participants from differing cultural backgrounds (the United States vs. Japan), and Study 2 tested participants of differing self-construals (independent vs. interdependent). Americans and independents self-enhanced on individualistic attributes, whereas Japanese and interdependents self-enhanced on collectivistic attributes. Independents regarded individualistic attributes, whereas interdependents regarded collectivistic attributes, as personally important. Attribute importance mediated self-enhancement. Regardless of cultural background or self-construal, people self-enhance on personally important dimensions. Self-enhancement is a universal human motive. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

New developments in cold spray based on higher gas and particle temperatures

In cold spraying, bonding is associated with shear instabilities caused by high strain rate deformation during the impact. It is well known that bonding occurs when the impact velocity of an impacting particle exceeds a critical value. This critical velocity depends not only on the type of spray material, but also on the powder quality, the particle size, and the particle impact temperature. Up to now, optimization of cold spraying mainly focused on increasing the particle velocity. The new approach presented in this contribution demonstrates capabilities to reduce critical velocities by well-tuned powder sizes and particle impact temperatures. A newly designed temperature control unit was implemented to a conventional cold spray system and various spray experiments with different powder size cuts were performed to verify results from calculations. Microstructures and mechanical strength of coatings demonstrate that the coating quality can be significantly improved by using well-tuned powder sizes and higher process gas temperatures. The presented optimization strategy, using copper as an example, can be transferred to a variety of spray materials and thus, should boost the development of the cold spray technology with respect to the coating quality. This article was originally published inBuilding on 100 Years of Success, Proceedings of the 2006 International Thermal Spray Conference (Seattle, WA), May 15–18, 2006, B.R. Marple, M.M. Hyland, Y.-Ch. Lau, R.S. Lima, and J. Voyer, Ed., ASM International, Materials Park, OH, 2006.     

Calcium-related changes of enzyme activities in energy metabolism of cultured embryonic chick myoblasts and myotubes

Changes in activity of enzymes involved in energy metabolism have been determined in unfused, fused as well as in fusion-inhibited chick embryo muscle cells in vitro. Functionally related enzymes which supposedly are coded by "gene clusters" show a similar degree and rate of enzyme activity increase. Hexokinase and glucose-6-phosphate dehydrogenase reveal only slight activity changes during muscle cell development under the conditions studied. The elevation of phosphofructokinase can be distinguished from that of the other glycolytic enzymes by its higher rate of increase and from that of phosphorylase by its time-course of activity change. The Ca2+ dependence of the phosphorylase activity increase runs parallel to myoblast fusion rate. Experiments in which calcium was removed from cultures which had reached the final morphological state of mature myotubes 24 h after onset of fusion show that increases of enzyme activities are irreversible and that these increases proceed at unchanged rates. Experimental evidence suggest that although fusion and enzyme syntheses may be uncoupled, both are similarly triggered by being dependent on Ca2+ concentration.     

Memory for in-group and out-group information in a minimal group context: The self as an informational base.

The authors argue that persons derive in-group expectancies from self-knowledge. This implies that perceivers process information about novel in-groups on the basis of the self-congruency of this information and not simply its valence. In Experiment 1, participants recalled more negative self-discrepant behaviors about an in-group than about an out-group. Experiment 2 replicated this effect under low cognitive load but not under high load. Experiment 3 replicated the effect using an idiographic procedure. These findings suggest that perceivers engage in elaborative inconsistency processing when they encounter negative self-discrepant information about an in-group but not when they encounter negative self-congruent information. Participants were also more likely to attribute self-congruent information to the in-group than to the out-group, regardless of information valence. Implications for models of social memory and self-categorization theory are discussed. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Implicit and explicit prejudice and interracial interaction.

The present research examined how implicit racial associations and explicit racial attitudes of Whites relate to behaviors and impressions in interracial interactions. Specifically, the authors examined how response latency and self-report measures predicted bias and perceptions of bias in verbal and nonverbal behavior exhibited by Whites while they interacted with a Black partner. As predicted, Whites' self-reported racial attitudes significantly predicted bias in their verbal behavior to Black relative to White confederates. Furthermore, these explicit attitudes predicted how much friendlier Whites felt that they behaved toward White than Black partners. In contrast, the response latency measure significantly predicted Whites' nonverbal friendliness and the extent to which the confederates and observers perceived bias in the participants' friendliness. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Helping and the avoidance of inappropriate interracial behavior: A strategy that perpetuates a nonprejudiced self-image.

Investigated the view that racial prejudice among White Americans today is often expressed in subtle, indirect, and rationalizable ways. Whites may therefore regard themselves as unprejudiced and nondiscriminatory as they continue to disadvantage minorities. It was hypothesized that Whites would be less helpful to Blacks only when normative guidelines within the situation suggest that the failure to help would be justifiable and not necessarily inappropriate. However, Whites would not discriminate against Blacks when the failure to help would be clearly inappropriate. In the present experiment, the normative guidelines regarding the appropriateness of helping was varied by manipulating the causal locus of the recipient's need (internal or external) and the source of the helping request (the recipient or a 3rd-party observer). Supportive of the hypotheses, Ss' (130 White female university students) helping behavior discriminated against Black recipients only in the condition in which the recipients' needs were caused by their failure to work hard and the requests were issued by the recipients themselves (i.e., when the failure to help would not be regarded as particularly inappropriate). (46 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

Reducing intergroup bias: Elements of intergroup cooperation.

The authors examined the potentially separable contributions of 2 elements of intergroup cooperation, interaction and common fate, and the processes through which they can operate. The manipulation of interaction reduced bias in evaluative ratings, which supports the idea that these components are separable, whereas the manipulation of common fate when the groups were interacting was associated with lower bias in nonverbal facial reactions in response to contributions by in-group and out-group members. Whereas interaction activated several processes that can lead to reduced bias, including decategorization, consistent with the common in-group identity model (S. L. Gaertner, I F. Dovidio, P. A. Anastasio, B. A. Bachman, & M. C. Rust, 1993) as well as M. Hewstone and R. J. Brown's (1986) group differentiation model, the primary set of mediators involved participants' representations of the memberships as 2 subgroups within a superordinate entity. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

The "I," the "we," and the "when": A meta-analysis of motivational primacy in self-definition.

What is the primary motivational basis of self-definition? The authors meta-analytically assessed 3 hypotheses: (a) The individual self is motivationally primary, (b) the collective self is motivationally primary, and (c) neither self is inherently primary; instead, motivational primacy depends on which self becomes accessible through contextual features. Results identified the individual self as the primary motivational basis of self definition. People react more strongly to threat and enhancement of the individual than the collective self. Additionally, people more readily deny threatening information and more readily accept enhancing information when it pertains to the individual rather than the collective self, regardless of contextual influences. The individual self is the psychological home base, a stable system that can react flexibly to contextual influences. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)     

How Do Logical Inference Rules Help Construct Social Mental Models?

Starting from recent approaches in mental model research, it is argued that (1) logical inference rules are used in order to construct mental cliques from learned sentiment relations, and (2) social context cues (operationalized as primes) play a crucial role in activating such rules. Transitivity and antitransitivity are taken as examples, and are shown as core constituents of such models. In a first experiment, priming was achieved by announcing the sorting of fictitious persons in either two or three cliques. Thirty-one subjects studied eight sets of sentiment relations among these persons that either did or did not satisfy their primed clique expectations. They showed longer study times and more requests for additional information in the case of inconsistent fits between prime and set. Their sorting solutions also showed clear priming effects. A second experiment (n = 30) showed that when undergoing a recognition test after seeing the relation sets, subjects tended to confuse model-consistent distractors with information they had actually seen. In a third experiment (n = 30) the results from Experiment 1 were replicated using more realistic learning materials.