Naturalistic social cognition: Methodology, assessment, and validation.

Developed the expanded dyadic interaction paradigm, a research paradigm for the study of naturalistic social cognition, and examined whether the paradigm can be used to obtain reliable and valid measures of the actual thoughts and feelings that individuals experience in unstructured dyadic interactions. The paradigm's utility in empirically revealing the ways in which social behavior and social cognition are related in unstructured, dyadic interactions was also assessed. Data from 31 female and 29 male undergraduates provide evidence for the interrater reliability and the construct validity (i.e., face and content validity, concurrent validity, divergent and convergent validity) of the thought and feeling measures obtained by this procedure. The degree of Ss' behavioral involvement in their interactions was related to a number of thought–feeling indices (e.g., total number of entries, percentage of positive partner entries), and its relations with the percentages of positive, neutral, and negative entries were further moderated by internal correspondence and private self-consciousness. Some parallels in the behavioral and thought–feeling correlates of gender were noted (e.g., females' affective tone of their thoughts and feelings was more positive and less negative than that of males). (72 ref) (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2010 APA, all rights reserved)