Helping as a function of empathic responses and sociopathy

The present study reports two experiments which investigated helping as a function of empathic anxiety (anxiety in response to modeled distress) and individual differences in sociopathic tendencies. The first experiment concerned the effects of empathic anxiety, sociopathy, and perceived similarity/dissimilarity to a distressed person on helping. As predicted, subjects who experienced high levels of empathic anxiety helped more than subjects who experienced low levels of empathic anxiety. High sociopathic subjects experienced lower levels of empathic anxiety and helped less than did low sociopathic subjects. However, a path analysis disclosed that sociopathy's relationship to helping was not due to (or mediated by) empathic anxiety. The similarity manipulation did not influence empathic anxiety or helping. In the second experiment, subjects were classified as primary or secondary sociopaths (based on their levels of trait anxiety). As in the first experiment, empathic anxiety and sociopathy were significantly related to helping. Primary sociopaths displayed less empathic anxiety than secondary sociopaths, but the two groups did not differ in their willingness to help. Thus, in neither study could the sociopath's behavior be explained by empathic anxiety. The discussion concerned empathy as a mediational variable in helping and the role of personality variables in helping. A post hoc explanation of the sociopath's behavior, based on Schwartz' theory of the characteristics of helpers, was proposed.     

The effects of self-monitoring and self-reported consistency on the consistency of personality judgments made by strangers and intimates

How consistent are strangers' and intimates' judgments of stimulus people's personalities, and how is this interjudge consistency affected by stimulus persons' assessed self-monitoring and self-reported behavioral consistency? To answer these questions, 38 stimulus subjects rated themselves on the personality dimensions of extraversion and anxiety and also rated their cross-situational consistency on these dimensions. Strangers, friends, mothers, and fathers of stimulus persons also rated them on extraversion and anxiety. The results indicated that: For judgments of anxiety there was lower interjudge consistency for high than for low self-monitoring stimulus subjects. For judgments of extraversion there was no difference in interjudge consistency for low and high self-monitoring stimulus subjects. The results also showed that anxiety was a more “private” trait in that intimates' but not strangers' judgments correlated with stimulus subjects' self-reported anxiety (r = .50 and r = .11, respectively), while extraversion was a more “public” trait in that both intimates' and strangers' judgments correlated with stimulus subjects' self-reported extraversion (r = .42 and r = .51, respectively). These results suggest that self-monitoring of stimulus persons affects interjudge consistency of peroonality judgments particularly for “private” traits such as anxiety, which are most subject to expressive control and inhibition.     

Spiral aftereffect duration as a correlate of impulsiveness

In a correlational analysis impulsiveness (Imp), assessed by means of a questionnaire concerned with speed of judgment and decision making, was found to be negatively related to spiral aftereffect (SAE) duration. However, this relationship was present only in a sample of subjects with high neuroticism scores. In this group SAE duration was also positively related to debilitating anxiety. A parallel was seen between Imp and Heymans' “Secondary function,” a personality dimension which was similarly operationalized in a visual aftereffect experiment. Some other SAE correlates are also discussed.     

Associative learning and imagery training in children

Two experiments are reported which examine imagery as a factor in children's learning to associate object pairs. The results of the first experiment indicated that presenting the objects in an interacting fashion greatly facilitated subsequent recognition performance. The outcome of Experiment II revealed that children can be trained to form their own interaction images. These findings are discussed in terms of their relevance to contemporary views of mediation in children's learning.     

The influence of mood on perceptions of social interactions

Interpreting our own and others' social behaviors is an important cognitive task in everyday life. Recent work in cognitive psychology suggests that temporary mood states may have a significant effect on the way information about common social events is processed. This study investigated how (a) a person's current mood, (b) the target of the judgments (self vs other), and (c) the characteristics of the social episode (formal-informal; intimate-nonintimate) influenced people's assessment of, and memory for, social behaviors. Subjects were videotaped while engaging in four different kinds of interactions with trained confederates. One day later subjects were hypnotized, and a happy, positive, or depressed, negative mood was induced. They then watched and rated their own and their partner's interactions on the videotape. Results showed strong mood influence on behavior assessments and recall memory, and significant effects due to target (self vs other) and the type of interaction episode. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for contemporary research on social cognition, and their relevance to cognitively based theories of social maladjustment and depression are considered.     

Personality and the effects of stress on recognition memory

The experiment examined the contribution of anxiety, extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism to recognition memory for pictures and words using a signal detection method. Independent groups of subjects performed a recognition memory task under one of four conditions (control, noise, threat, and reward) that was intended to capitalize on dispositions which characterize the personality dimensions. In an ego threat condition involving personal evaluation, introverts displayed a performance decrement relative to noise and reward conditions. Psychoticism was inversely related to performance in the noise and threat conditions and directly related in a reward condition. In general, J. A. Gray's (1981) model of anxiety and impulsiveness accommodates much of the data, but the mechanisms which mediate the influence of personality on memory performance are not clear.     

The accuracy of self-administration and scoring on Holland's Self-Directed Search

This study assesed the extent to which Ss commit various types of errors when completing Holland's Self-Directed Search (SDS) entirely on their own. Nearly all Ss made some type of error and approximately half of the Ss made errors which affected their final three-letter summary codes. Almost one-fifth of the Ss made errors resulting in an incorrect high-point code. Whether or not Ss made errors that affected their summary codes was unrelated to the extent to which they were interested in knowing more about occupations or academic majors they might like. Neither were such errors related to whether Ss felt the occupations suggested by their summary codes seemed reasonable. Only slightly over one-third the Ss actually did feel that the occupations seemed reasonable.     

Observational goals and schema activation: A theoretical framework for behavior perception

A framework for behavioral observation is described in which the processing of a stream of behavior is influenced by an individual's prior knowledge about behavior, organized into cognitive “schemas.” It is proposed that observational goals determine the selection of goal-relevant schemas which, in turn, influence the observer's processing of an actor's behavior. Subjects watched a series of videotaped sequences featuring a female actor with instructions either to form an impression of her or to remember the details of the tasks she engaged in. They were then asked to answer questions that were either consistent or inconsistent with these instructions. Subjects were also instructed to unitize the actions or events that occurred in the sequence (D. A. Newtson, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1973, 28 28–38). According to the unitizing measure, subjects observing with different goals attended to different behavioral features. Further, impression-forming subjects were apparently more influenced by their implicit theories of personality than were task-learning subjects when asked to give ratings of the actor's personality, and task-learning subjects were relatively more accurate in recalling task-related details. Implications of this framework and these results for research in behavioral unitization and implicit personality theory are discussed.     

Comparison of two models of similarity judgment

The conventional multidimensional distance model of similarity judgment was compared with a new model in which component differences are weighted and then averaged. To evaluate the models, qualitative and quantitative predictions were derived from Romney and D'Andrade's (1964) componential analysis of American kinship terms, and these predictions were tested by having subjects rate the similarity (in experiment 1) and the difference (in experiment 2) between all possible pairs of 12 kinship terms. In both experiments, violations of qualitative predictions for both a simple distance model and a simple averaging model revealed that the componential analysis was not sufficient to account for the data. However the averaging model was able to account for the data when the dichotomous dimension of lineality used by Romney and D'Andrade was replaced by a continuous dimension of immediacy or closeness of kin. In contrast, no comparable elaboration under the distance model was successful. These results were discussed in terms of the likely psychological processes underlying similarity judgment.     

The role of perceived physiological activity in affective judgments

This study assessed the physiological and cognitive effects of Valins' (Valins, S. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 1966, 4, 400–408) false heart rate procedure. Twenty-two male subjects were exposed to two feedback conditions during which measures of actual heart rate and skin conductance were obtained. In each condition, eight slides of nude females were presented; some slides were associated with false heart rate increases, while for other slides the feedback remained stable. In one condition, subjects were told that the heart rate was that of another subject; in the other condition, subjects were told that the feedback was their own heart rate. In both conditions, subjects judged the attractiveness of the slides from their own point of view and from the point of view of the other subject. Slides associated with false heart rate increases were rated as more attractive than stable slides when subjects (1) heard their own heart rate and rated their own attraction; (2) heard the other subject's heart rate and rated their own attraction; and (3) heard the other subject's heart rate and rated the other subject's attraction. Skin conductance responses and actual cardiac decelerations were greater when subjects heard what was allegedly their own heart rate and when the slides were accompanied by apparent cardiac acceleration. However, these actual physiological responses did not play a causal role in relation to the affective judgments. Instead, the relationship between perceived physiological changes and feelings of attractiveness was mediated by cognitive processes associated with informational and directive influences of the feedback.     

The control of social desirability in personality inventories: A study using the principal-factor deletion technique

The present study sought to investigate Paulhus' (1981) principal-factor deletion technique (PFDT), a factor analytic method for controlling for socially desirable responding. Adult subjects (N = 330) responded to both forms of the Eysenck Personality Inventory and a 32-item lie scale. Peer ratings of extraversion and neuroticism served as criterion measures. The factor deleted by PFDT more closely reflected neuroticism than impression management. Factors resulting from PFDT were considerably less valid and less content saturated than those emerging from an ordinary factor solution. The implications of these results are discussed from the perspectives of predictive and construct validity.     

Attachment anxiety and implicit self-concept of neuroticism: Associations in women but not men

Previous research has shown that adult attachment-related anxiety is associated with the explicit self-concept of neuroticism. It remains to be clarified whether attachment anxiety is related to the implicit self-concept of neuroticism. There is evidence that gender can moderate the strength of correlation between implicit and explicit measures. The Experiences in Close Relationships scale and the NEO Five-Factor Inventory (NEO-FFI) were administered to 106 healthy adults along with an Implicit Association Test assessing neuroticism. Attachment anxiety correlated with NEO-FFI neuroticism, regardless of gender. Attachment anxiety was correlated with neuroticism as measured by the IAT in women but not men. Results from multiple regression analysis showed that gender was a moderator of the relationship between attachment anxiety and implicit neuroticism. Our data suggest that in the associative network of women with high attachment anxiety associative representations of the self are more strongly linked to attributes of neuroticism compared to women with low attachment anxiety.     

Aptness in metaphor

We propose that in understanding a metaphor, an individual sees a concept from one class or domain in terms of its similarity in two different respects to a concept from another class or domain. The two kinds of similarity are within-domain similarity, or the degree to which two concepts occupy similar positions with respect to their own class or domain; and between-domain similarity, or the degree to which the classes or domains occupied by the concepts are themselves similar. To test this dual notion of similarity, we obtained ratings of the aptness of 64 metaphors from one group of subjects and ratings of their comprehensibility from another group of subjects. The terms of the metaphors had been scaled (based on the ratings of pretest subjects) to give measures of distance both within and between domains. Aptness of metaphors related positively to betweendomain distance, negatively to within-domain distance, and not at all to overall distance. Metaphors are thus perceived as more apt to the extent that their terms occupy similar positions within domains that are not very similar to each other. Comprehensibility also related to aptness. In a second experiment, subjects ranked a set of terms as possible completions for metaphors. For both groups of subjects in this experiment, the rank of an alternative's within-domain distance correlated with its relative popularity. Quantitative models, patterned after a model proposed by D. Rumelhart and A. A. Abrahamson (Cognitive Psychology, 1973, 5, 1–28) for analogical reasoning, afforded significant prediction of the choices of the group of subjects in which all the possible completions of a metaphor were from a single domain. The same models did not predict the choices of a group of subjects in which the possible completions of the metaphors were from different domains.     

Nonimmediate language style and inconsistency between private and expressed evaluations

It was hypothesized that certain language style variations would reflect apprehension about affirming the validity of communication content. Wiener and Mehrabian (Language within language: Immediacy, a channel in verbal communication. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts,1968) have identified a cluster of such variations called verbal nonimmediacy, which they describe as indicators of psychological distance between the communicator and his/her communication. Four experiments are reported. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that communication about positive manifestations of disliked traits and negative manifestations of liked traits was more nonimmediate than when positive manifestations of liked traits or negative manifestations of disliked traits were described. This was true both when one's own or another's personality traits were described. In Experiment 3, nonimmediacy was found to increase when communications involved clear fabrications about either one's liked or disliked traits. Experiment 4 showed that when self-regard was experimentally manipulated, low self-regard subjects showed more opinion conformity and nonimmediacy in their disclosures to a confederate than did high self-regard subjects.     

Trait anxiety,stress, and learning a test of Saltz's hypothesis

Behavioral predictions from Saltz's, Spence's, and Spielberger's interpretations of trait anxiety were tested in a complex verbal learning task. Fifty-three high-anxious and 52 low-anxious male college students were randomly distributed to test conditions of failure-stress, pain-stress, or neutral instructions. The learning data revealed that high-anxious-failure and low-anxious-pain Ss were disrupted and supported Saltz's hypothesis; self-reported anxiety (A-State scale, STAI) was observed only in high-anxious-failure Ss and supported Spielberger's theory of the arousal of state anxiety as a function of trait anxiety. However, the contradiction between self-reported anxiety and learning behavior in low-anxious-pain Ss indicated that the verbal report of these Ss was an inaccurate or insensitive index of arousal.     

Interpersonal cognitive self-focus as a function of neuroticism: Basal tendencies and priming effects

Self-focus is one mechanism that may account for the social-evaluative anxiety of individuals high in neuroticism. The present two studies (total N = 183) sought to cognitively model interpersonal self-focus. The cognitive task was a simple one in which participants simply categorized dyadic interpersonal pronouns, with reaction times as the dependent measure. When others engage us, the pronoun “me” refers to the other and the pronoun “you” refers to the self. Study 1 found a neuroticism by pronoun interaction on categorization time consistent with implicit interpersonal self-focus at high (but not low) levels of neuroticism establishing a basal tendency. Study 2 examined boundary conditions. Individuals high in neuroticism exhibited implicit self-focus particularly to the extent that they had been primed to think of themselves as submissive rather than dominant in their interpersonal interactions. Implications for understanding neuroticism, self-focus, and relationship functioning are discussed.     

The propensity to recall another's completed and uncompleted tasks as a consequence of varying social relationships

Two laboratory experiments are reported. Each investigates the bias that social relationships exert on a subject's propensity to recall another's completed and uncompleted tasks. Using closed circuit television, subjects in both experiments observed a bogus other working on a set of puzzles. The person working completed only one-half of the puzzles. In three of the six experimental conditions in both experiments, subjects believed that the remaining puzzles could be completed at a later time. In the first experiment, a subject's relationship to the other was determined by cooperative, competitive, or individualistic economic incentives. In the second, the relationship was determined simply by their similarity or dissimilarity on a bogus personality test. Utilizing a combination of Lewinian assumptions and contemporary theory about memory, we hypothesized that the opportunity to resume work would result in an increased propensity to recall uncompleted tasks in the competitive (or dissimilar) conditions and a decreased propensity to do so in the cooperative (or similar) conditions. Results confirmed this hypothesis. Additional data in both experiments suggest that subjects' relationships with the bogus other altered the accessibility of this information. Theoretical implications of these findings and their relationship to research on prosocial behavior are discussed.     

Cognitive Vulnerability to Emotional Symptoms: Reconsidering the Role of Worry and Rumination

The present study explored the pathways whereby cognitive variables (worry, rumination) may explain the relation between neuroticism and emotional symptoms in a community sample of adults (N?=?499). All participants completed a battery of questionnaires including measures of neuroticism, worry, rumination, anxiety and depression. Multiple mediation and moderated mediation analyses were used. Worry was a common pathway explaining the effect of neuroticism on both anxiety and depressive symptoms. The brooding subtype of rumination significantly mediated the relation between neuroticism and anxiety symptoms, but the reflection subtype did not have a mediating effect. Although worry by itself mediated the association between neuroticism and anxiety symptoms, it required a certain level of brooding to exert its mediating effect on the relation between neuroticism and depressive symptoms. The results are discussed in light of previous research and recent developments in treatment. Clinical implications and suggestions for future research are also discussed.     

An empirical test for Fishburn's additivity axiom

Three experiments were done to test the empirical relevance of Fishburn's (1967) additivity axiom, which says that people should be indifferent between pairs of gambles which satisfy certain conditions specified in the axiom. Each of the experiments consisted of two parts. In the first part, subjects had to evaluate consequences which were used in the second part as possible outcomes in a gamble. In the second part, subjects had to make choices among pairs of gambles. The experiments differed in respect to kinds of consequences and kinds of subjects used. Additivity analysis was applied to the data of the first part of each experiment, using a conjoint measurement model. A Monte Carlo study is included, which provides some hints for the evaluation of the stress coefficients obtained after applying additivity analysis to the empirical data matrices. The data of the second part of each experiment are discussed in respect to their relevance for Fishburn's (1967) additivity axiom. It was not strongly supported by the data, unless for a very restricted situation.