Self-Relevance as a Moderator of Self-Enhancement and Self-Verification

We examined the influence of self-esteem on reactions to favorable or unfavorable feedback. We also varied the relevance of this information for participants' self-image—the information was either low or high in self-relevance. When asked how important it was to personally perform well, low self-esteem persons were more likely to engage in self-enhancement in the low than in the high self-relevant context. This finding supports predictions derived from Swann and Schroeder's (1995) analysis. Furthermore, low self-esteem participants engaged in self-enhancement strategies to a greater extent than high self-esteem participants in the low self-relevant condition, whereas an opposite pattern was obtained in the high self-relevant condition. Our analysis bridges the gap between two opposing schools of thought—one that believes that low self-esteem persons will evidence especially strong self-enhancement tendencies and the other that believes that it is high not low self-esteem persons that will demonstrate especially strong self-enhancement tendencies. We discuss the importance of self-relevance for determining when self-enhancement and self-verification will and will not occur.     

Optimistic and pessimistic biases and comparative judgmental processes in Japan: Do people really compare themselves to their peers?

Studies on above-average and unrealistic-optimism effects have recently claimed that they are the consequence of an over-utilization of self-relevant and under-utilization of peer-relevant information, despite the assumption that people would refer to both themselves and their average peer to make a comparative judgment. However, there is a possibility that these tendencies are prevalent only in Western cultures. The present paper reports on three studies of comparative self-other judgments conducted with Japanese university students. The results consistently showed that participants tended to focus simply on their own abilities, traits, or the likelihood of experiencing future life events, without paying much attention to their peers. These findings suggest first that there is a consistent tendency for people to place a greater weight on the self than normative standards when considering their comparative position in a group, and that this tendency is independent of the size or direction of comparative biases.     

Judgments of Aggressive, Withdrawn and Prosocial Behavior: Perceived Control, Anger, Pity and Sympathy in Young Dutch Children

In two studies, we examined first- and second-grade children's judgments of aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial behavior by means of fictional scenarios. In study I, we compared judgments of fictional aggressive children with those of fictional withdrawn children. Aggressive children were perceived as more responsible for their behavior and elicited more feelings of anger, while withdrawn children were more likely to be chosen as a friend and elicited more feelings of pity. In study II, we compared judgments of fictional aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial children with each other. Again aggressive children elicited the strongest feelings of anger, while withdrawn children elicited the strongest feelings of pity. These withdrawn children were perceived as more similar to the prosocial children. In an attempt to test the ecological validity of our sympathy measure, we asked children to rate their peers on a three-point liking scale and checked the scores of those judged to be aggressive by their teachers. These aggressive children were found to receive the lowest liking scores. The results are discussed.     

P300 as an index of attention to self-relevant stimuli

Past work suggests that information related to the self receives ‘preferential access’ to the limited pool of attentional resources. However, these studies have been limited by their reliance on response-time measures, which require overt responding and represent the combined effects of multiple stages of information processing. One aim of the present study was to extend past work by obtaining a response-independent index of attention allocation sensitive to changes in discrete stages of information processing. An additional goal was to explore the potential time course of differential sensitivity to self-relevant cues. We assessed the P300, an ERP component that provides an index of attentional resources, evoked by autobiographical self-relevant stimuli (e.g., one’s own name). As expected, P300 was augmented for self-relevant stimuli relative to control stimuli. In addition, analyses of P300 latency indicate that the effects of self-relevance are present during higher-order stages of cognitive processing related to selective attention. These results complement and extend previous work on the role of self-relevance in the selection of material for further processing.     

Loneliness and stable friendship in rejected and nonrejected preschoolers

The purpose of this study was to examine the relationship of stable mutual friendship to self-reports of loneliness in preschoolers who had been nominated as rejected or nonrejected by their peers. Ninety-four 4- and 5-year-olds were classified into five peer status groups: controversial, neglected, average, popular, and rejected. In addition, the children were classified as having a stable mutual friendship, an unstable mutual friendship, or without mutual friends. Children in the rejected group rated themselves as lonelier than their neglected, popular, and average peers. However, rejected children who had a stable mutual friendship reported levels of loneliness that were similar to those of their nonrejected peers and less loneliness than those rejected children who lacked stable friendship. Loneliness in preschoolers is discussed in terms of the quality of their friendships and peer experience as well as their desire to be sociable.     

Pre-existing Perceptions of ADHD Predict Children’s Sociometrics Given to Classmates with ADHD

Considerable research documents that even young children possess stigma about mental illness, which may affect how they evaluate peers with mental health conditions. This study examined children’s pre-existing perceptions of Attention Deficit/Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) behaviors as predictors of their subsequent sociometric judgments of classmates with ADHD in a 2-week summer day camp. Participants were previously unacquainted children ages 6.8–9.8 years (113 typically-developing and 24 with ADHD; 48.2% boys; 81% White). Children initially more inclined to interact with a hypothetical classmate with ADHD gave fewer “dislike” nominations to real-life classmates with ADHD at camp. Children who initially believed that ADHD symptoms were uncontrollable gave more “dislike” nominations and lower liking ratings to classmates with ADHD when those classmates displayed severe ADHD symptoms. For children who had ADHD, their attribution of uncontrollability for ADHD symptoms predicted fewer “like” nominations and more “dislike” nominations given to classmates with ADHD. Lastly, children who initially reported they would help a hypothetical classmate with ADHD gave higher liking ratings to classmates with ADHD. These results were found after statistical control of the actual level of ADHD behaviors displayed by the classmates with ADHD. In summary, other children’s pre-existing or stigmatizing perceptions of ADHD behaviors may contribute, in part, to the substantial peer rejection typically experienced by ADHD populations. Findings have implications for understanding peer problems in children with this common mental health condition.     

Self-Relevance of Performance, Task Difficulty, and Task Engagement Assessed as Cardiovascular Response

Two experiments examined task engagement, quantified as cardiovascular (CV) response, under conditions of high self-relevance of performance (i. e., when performance had strong implications for the individual's self-definition and self-esteem). Experiment 1 involved a 2 (self-relevance) × 2 (task difficulty) design and revealed, in accordance with predictions derived from Brehm's energization model, that self-relevance per se does not result in high engagement, but that high self-relevance bound up with high task difficulty does. Experiment 2 involved three difficulty conditions (very easy, moderate, very difficult) under highly self-relevant performance conditions and revealed a curvilinear difficulty/engagement relationship. In both studies CV responses were independent of feeling states.     

Communicating Intentions Through Nonverbal Behaviors Conscious and Nonconscious Encoding of Liking

The fundamental components of interpersonal transactions at the nonverbal level often include the cognitively held intention of one person to increase or decrease affiliation with his or her partner, the encoding of this intention into behavioral displays, and the decoding of the behavioral displays by the other. Nonverbal encoding of relational information may be conducted at less than conscious levels of information processing although intentions may be held consciously. A study was conducted in which naive confederates were induced to either increase or decrease their displays of liking for their partner. It was found that confederates’intentions to show increased or decreased liking toward their partners were positively correlated with the partners’liking for the confederate. However, less than one quarter of the confederates could demonstrate an accurate conscious awareness of the behaviors they used and how they used them. Of this small number, those who were given the conscious intention of showing decreased liking demonstrated the most conscious awareness of their nonverbal behaviors.     

Use of trait information in the attribution of intentions by popular,average and rejected children

This study aimed to examine the extent to which children's sociometric status is related to the use of trait information. Therefore, 99 children (aged 4–6) were asked to make inferences about protagonists' future actions when positive or negative trait information was given. Results showed that rejected children were less affected by the protagonist's trait information than their more popular peers (average and popular) in both conditions. As well as their frequently reported hostile bias, rejected children also showed a positive bias. This suggests a general delay in social reasoning among rejected children, but can also be explained by a difference in their development of social cognition based on their atypical daily interactions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Self-relevance and wishful thinking: Facilitation and distortion in source monitoring

When making source attributions, people tend to attribute desirable statements to reliable sources and undesirable statements to unreliable sources, a phenomenon known as the wishful thinking effect (Gordon, Franklin, & Beck, 2005). In the present study, we examined the influence of wishful thinking on source monitoring for self-relevant information. On one hand, wishful thinking is expected, because self-relevant desires are presumably strong. However, self-relevance is known to confer a memory advantage and may thus provide protection from desire-based biases. In Experiment 1, source memory for self-relevant information was contrasted against source memory for information relevant to others and for neutral information. Results indicated that self-relevant information was affected by wishful thinking and was remembered more accurately than was other information. Experiment 2 showed that the magnitude of the self-relevant wishful thinking effect did not increase with a delay.     

Is there any "free" choice? Self and dissonance in two cultures

Four experiments provided support for the hypothesis that upon making a choice, individuals justify their choice in order to eliminate doubts about culturally sanctioned aspects of the self, namely, competence and efficacy in North America and positive appraisal by other people in Japan. Japanese participants justified their choice (by increasing liking for chosen items and decreasing liking for rejected items) in the standard free-choice dissonance paradigm only when self-relevant others were primed, either by questionnaires (Studies 1-3) or by incidental exposure to schematic faces (Study 4). In the absence of these social cues, Japanese participants showed no dissonance effect. In contrast, European Americans justified their choices regardless of the social-cue manipulations. Implications for cognitive dissonance theory are discussed.     

Friendship and similarities in social-cognitive and communication abilities: Social skill bases of interpersonal attraction in childhood

Although researchers have examined how different forms of similarity (e.g., demographic similarity, attitudinal similarity) affect interpersonal attraction, little work has focused on how similarities in social-cognitive abilities and communication skills affect attraction and relationship development. The present article suggests how the similarity/attraction literature and filter theories of relationship development can be integrated with research on social skills and cognitive development to provide a framework for understanding how similarities in levels of social skills may affect attraction and friendship formation in childhood. A study was carried out assessing how similarities in levels of social-cognitive and communication skills affected interpersonal attraction and friendship choices by children. It was hypothesized that children would be (a) attracted to and (b) more likely to form friendships with peers who had social-cognitive and communication skills similar in level to their own. Participants (92 grade school children) completed a battery of tasks providing assessments of four social-cognitive and five communication skills. Sociometric procedures were used to determine interpersonal attraction and friendship patterns. Results indicated that children were attracted to peers having social skill levels similar to their own. Moreover, pairs of friends had similar levels of skills related to the expression and management of emotional states.     

Target self-relevance speeds visual search responses but does not improve search efficiency

ABSTRACT

In a variety of contexts, arbitrarily associating one’s self with a stimulus improves performance relative to stimuli that are not self-associated, implying enhanced processing of self-associated stimuli (“self-relevance” effects). Self-relevance has been proposed to influence diverse aspects of cognition, including the perceptual prioritization of self-relevant stimuli (“self-prioritization” effects). We sought to elucidate the mechanisms of self-prioritization by using a visual search paradigm. In three experiments, subjects learned two stimulus-label combinations (SELF and OTHER), and then searched for one of those stimuli (cued by the label) on each trial, with a variable number of distractors present on each trial. We hypothesized that, if self-relevance enhances the perceptual salience of the stimuli pre-attentively, then the self-relevance of a target should result in improved search efficiency. In three experiments using conjunction-defined (Experiments 1–2) and feature-defined (Experiment 3) targets, we found that self-relevant targets were associated with overall faster responses than non-self-relevant targets (an intercept effect). However, the slopes of the search size by reaction time (RT) function were never significantly different between the self-relevant and non-self-relevant conditions, counter to the hypothesis that self-prioritization is pre-attentive. These results constitute novel evidence that self-relevance affects visual search performance, but they also cast doubt on the possibility that self-relevance enhances the perceptual salience of a target in a manner similar to physical manipulations. We propose that the self-relevance of a stimulus alters processing only after the self-relevant item has been attended.     

Malingering on the Personality Assessment Inventory: Identification of Specific Feigned Disorders

Summary: Two nonverbal methods for assessing degree of interpersonal attraction were explored. Twenty children ranging from 11 to 13 years of age were asked to select two liked and two disliked classmates of the same sex. On four different trials, subjects selected one geometric block to represent themselves and one to represent a pre-selected classmate, then placed the figures on a ruled board. Distance between objects was measured and found to be significantly related to degree of peer liking. In addition, subjects were asked to draw each of the four peers. The human figure drawings were rated for total pictorial detail which was found to vary strongly across magnitude of liking for female subjects, and for parts integration which was found to vary with degree of peer liking for both sexes. The degree of rated positive affective tone of drawings was also found to increase with liking. Implications for the use of these two interpersonal assessment techniques in clinical practice were discussed.     

Nonverbal assessment of interpersonal affect.

Two nonverbal methods for assessing degree of interpersonal attraction were explored. Twenty children ranging from 11 to 13 years of age were asked to select two liked and two disliked classmates of the same sex. On four different trials, subjects selected one geometric block to represent themselves and one to represent a pre-selected classmate, then placed the figures on a ruled board. Distance between objects was measured and found to be significantly related to degree of peer liking. In addition, subjects were asked to draw each of the four peers. The human figure drawings were rated for total pictorial detail which was found to vary strongly across magnitude of liking for female subjects, and for parts integration which was found to vary with degree of peer liking for both sexes. The degree of rated positive affective tone of drawings was also found to increase with liking. Implications for the use of these two interpersonal assessment techniques in clinical practice were discussed.     

Children’s Evaluation and Categorization of Transgender Children

Despite extant evidence of negative peer treatment of transgender adolescents and adults, little is known about how young children perceive transgender peers, particularly those who have socially transitioned or are living in line with their gender rather than sex at birth. Whereas children have been shown to be averse to gender nonconformity in peers, because many transgender children appear and behave in ways consistent with their expressed gender (but not their sex at birth), it is unclear how children evaluate these identities. In 2 studies, we investigated 5- to 10-year-old children’s (N_total = 113) preferences for transgender versus gender-“typical” peers who either shared their gender identity or did not. We also examined whether children categorized transgender peers by their sex or expressed gender, as it might inform their evaluations. Children preferred cisgender peers over transgender peers; however, they also liked peers of their own gender rather than the other gender (e.g., female participants preferred girls over boys), demonstrating that the oft-documented own-gender bias plays an important role even when children are reasoning about transgender peers. Children did not reliably categorize transgender peers by sex or gender; yet those who categorized transgender peers by their sex showed greater dislike of transgender peers. The current studies are the first to investigate cisgender children’s attitudes toward transgender children and suggest that perceptions of gender categorization and conformity play a role in children’s evaluations of transgender peers.     

Children's use of frequency information for trait categorization and behavioral prediction

Two experiments examined young children's use of behavioral frequency information to make behavioral predictions and global personality attributions. In Experiment 1, participants heard about an actor who behaved positively or negatively toward 1 or several recipients. Generally, children did not differentiate their judgments of the actor on the basis of the amount of information provided. In Experiment 2, the actor behaved positively or negatively toward a single recipient once or repeatedly. Participants were more likely to make appropriate predictions and attributions after exposure to multiple target behaviors and with increasing age. Overall, children's performance was influenced by age-related positivity and negativity biases. These findings indicate that frequency information is important for personality judgments but that its use is affected by contextual complexity and information-processing biases.     

Preferences and Children's Use of Gender-Stereotyped Knowledge About Musical Instruments: Making Judgments About Other Children's Preferences

A developmental model of gender-stereotype acquisition (Martin, 1989) proposes that by the age of 8 years children draw upon information about gender-stereotyped interests as well as other children's sex when deciding how much other children would like different activities; younger children rely on sex only when making such decisions. We examined whether the judgments that children made about other children's preferences were different from those that they made about their own preferences for masculine and feminine musical instruments. Three hundred twelve children aged 8–9 years ranked 6 instruments in order of preference, and rated on a 4-point scale how much they would like to play each one. Children were then asked to decide how much other children would like to play each instrument. Only girls' own preferences for feminine instruments differed according to the gender-stereotyping of their most-preferred instrument. Judgments about how much other children would like masculine and feminine instruments did not differ according to those children's gender-stereotyped interest. Children made stereotypical predictions about the preferences of children of unknown sex who played either a masculine or feminine instrument. Implications for a theoretical account of the development of children's gender-stereotypes are discussed.     

Similarity predicts liking in 3-year-old children

Two studies examined the influence of similarity on 3-year-old children’s initial liking of their peers. Children were presented with pairs of childlike puppets who were either similar or dissimilar to them on a specified dimension and then were asked to choose one of the puppets to play with as a measure of liking. Children selected the puppet whose food preferences or physical appearance matched their own. Unpacking the physical appearance finding revealed that the stable similarity of hair color may influence liking more strongly than the transient similarity of shirt color. A second study showed that children also prefer to play with a peer who shares their toy preferences, yet importantly, show no bias toward a peer who is similar on an arbitrary dimension. The findings provide insight into the earliest development of peer relations in young children.