Do Our Facebook Friends Make Us Feel Worse? A Study of Social Comparison and Emotion

People often compare themselves to others to gain a better understanding of the self in a process known as social comparison. The current study discusses how people engage in a social comparison process on Facebook, and how observing content from their Facebook friends may affect their emotions. A 2 (comparison direction) × 2 (relational closeness) × 2 (self‐esteem) between‐subjects experiment was conducted with 163 adult participants. The results revealed a significant 3‐way interaction such that people with high self‐esteem would be happier receiving positive information than negative information from their close friends, but the effect would be the opposite if the information was from a distant friend. There was no such difference for people with low self‐esteem.     

Is It What You Do,or When You Do It? The Roles of Contingency and Similarity in Pro‐Social Effects of Imitation

Being imitated has a wide range of pro‐social effects, but it is not clear how these effects are mediated. Naturalistic studies of the effects of being imitated have not established whether pro‐social outcomes are due to the similarity and/or the contingency between the movements performed by the actor and those of the imitator. Similarity is often assumed to be the active ingredient, but we hypothesized that contingency might also be important, as it produces positive affect in infants and can be detected by phylogenetically ancient mechanisms of associative learning. We manipulated similarity and contingency between performed and observed actions in a computerized task. Similarity had no positive effects; however, contingency resulted in greater enjoyment of the task, reported closeness to others, and helping behavior. These results suggest that the pro‐social effects of being imitated may rely on associative mechanisms.     

What Do People Want to Feel and Why?: Pleasure and Utility in Emotion Regulation

ABSTRACT— It is typically assumed that people always want to feel good. Recent evidence, however, demonstrates that people want to feel unpleasant emotions, such as anger or fear, when these emotions promote the attainment of their long-term goals. If emotions are regulated for instrumental reasons, people should want to feel pleasant emotions when immediate benefits outweigh future benefits, but when future benefits outweigh immediate benefits, people may prefer to feel useful emotions, even if they are unpleasant. In this article, I describe an instrumental account of emotion regulation, review empirical evidence relevant to it, and discuss its implications for promoting adaptive emotional experiences.     

Do Jews Feel Like Outsiders in America? The Impact of Anti‐Semitism,Friendships, and Religious Geography

While once the archetypical outsiders, most Jews today do not feel like outsiders in the United States. Using the 2001 National Jewish Population Survey, we examine the factors that differentiate those who feel like outsiders from those who do not. We find that feeling like an outsider is largely associated with having experienced anti‐Semitism, the number of Jews living nearby, the proportion of a respondent's friends’ that are Jewish, and whether Jews identify with some branch of Judaism versus those who identify as ethnic Jews. Although the effects of discrimination on feeling like an outsider are unsurprising, the smaller but persistent effect of geographic context deserves more attention. Jews feel less like outsiders when they live in places where they can and do have more contact with other Jews. The increased within‐group ties that are possible in areas of greater Jewish concentration appear to facilitate psychological integration into the larger community.     

What Must You Know and Do to Get Good Outcomes With DBT?

Because little research has been conducted on which therapist-client interactions lead to intermediate and end-point improvements in Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), we have a small evidence-base from which to specify what therapists must know and do in order to obtain good outcomes using DBT. As with other evidence-based practices, dissemination of DBT has defaulted to assumptions and methods from the “psychotherapy technology model,” which emphasizes transfer of the validated treatment package from the research clinic to routine settings with high fidelity (Morgenstern & McKay, 2007). However, serious limitations of the psychotherapy technology model require pursuit of alternative complementary models to guide dissemination. One complementary approach is to use well-designed practice-based training research. In this approach, therapists learn modular competencies linked to a highly structured yet flexible clinical decision-making framework. Modular training of therapist competencies emphasizes the continuity of the component therapist strategies across evidence-based protocols rather than emphasizing the packages or manuals as separate and distinct. Key hypotheses about the change processes responsible for client change and the associated treatment strategies used to influence these change processes should be specified and measured at the level of client, therapist, and service delivery setting. Adopting this approach may offer advantages that apply to the dissemination and implementation of DBT and other evidence-based practices (EBPs).     

Acting Superior But Actually Inferior?: Correlates and Consequences of Workplace Arrogance

Accounts of arrogant employees abound, yet there is little systematic research on arrogance within organizations. In response to this oversight, this article presents the findings from four studies. In Studies 1 and 2, the authors developed the Workplace Arrogance Scale and found support for its convergent and discriminant validity. In Study 3, the Workplace Arrogance Scale was included as part of a 360-degree performance feedback survey. Results revealed that there was satisfactory agreement between self- and other-ratings of arrogance. The authors also found that arrogance was negatively related to self- and other-rated task performance. Findings from Study 4 suggested that arrogance is negatively related to cognitive ability and self-esteem. The authors conclude by discussing the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.     

Affective Synchrony in Dual‐ and Single‐Smoker Couples: Further Evidence of “Symptom‐System Fit”?

Couples in which one or both partners smoked despite one of them having a heart or lung problem discussed a health-related disagreement before and during a period of laboratory smoking. Immediately afterwards, the partners in these 25 couples used independent joysticks to recall their continuous emotional experience during the interaction while watching themselves on video. A couple-level index of affective synchrony, reflecting correlated moment-to-moment change in the two partners' joystick ratings, tended to increase from baseline to smoking for 9 dual-smoker couples but decrease for 16 single-smoker couples. Results suggest that coregulation of shared emotional experience could be a factor in smoking persistence, particularly when both partners in a couple smoke. Relationship-focused interventions addressing this fit between symptom and system may help smokers achieve stable cessation.     

Do You Know What I Feel? Partners' Predictions and Judgments of Each Other's Emotional Reactions to Emotion-Eliciting Situations

The goal of the present study was to investigate empathic accuracy in couples, specifically the partners' ability to predict each other's emotional reactions to social situations. For this, 36 French Canadian couples aged from 18 to 34 years predicted their own reactions as well as their partner's reactions to a series of emotional situations. They then role-played these emotional situations while being videotaped. At a later time, the taped role-play segments were rated by the role-play actors themselves, by their partners, and by 5 individuals who did not know the actors. Results revealed high levels of empathic accuracy when we compared the partners' predictions of each other's reactions. However, when these predictions were compared with the participants' self-evaluations of their role-plays or with evaluations by individuals who did not know the actors, partners showed a positive bias in that they predicted more appropriate and fewer inappropriate reactions to the social situations for their partners than were self-rated by the partners themselves or rated by individuals who did not know the actors. Finally, the existence of couple-specific private meaning systems could not be confirmed in the present context as the evaluations of emotional expressions by unknown others, the actors' partners, and the actors themselves were largely congruent.     

What Do Mothers Make Adolescents Feel Guilty About? Incidents,Reactions, and Relation to Depression

We found mothers’ history of depression and symptoms of depression among their adolescent children were both associated with the type of events that mothers made adolescents feel guilty about and with the mothers’ reactions to those events. Adolescents (20 male, 23 female) described incidents in which their mothers made them feel guilty and what happened afterward. Offspring of mothers with (versus without) a history of depression more often reported guilt when not at fault and over failing to meet maternal needs; reactions did not resolve matters and involved unregulated maternal emotions. Adolescents of mothers without a depression history more often felt guilty about specific events (e.g., breaking rules, bad grades) and reactions resulted in closure (through discipline, apologies, or forgiveness). Adolescents’ depressive symptoms were more severe when incidents were unresolved and involved maternal emotions and less severe when incidents were specific. In addition, maternal use of self-serving forms of guilt induction related to adolescent and parent depression.     

Why Do Men Benefit More from Marriage Than Do Women? Thinking More Broadly About Interpersonal Processes That Occur Within and Outside of Marriage

In this commentary we return to the original question of Wanic and Kulik??s paper, ??Why do men benefit more from marriage than do women??? We suggest that trying to understand why women suffer more than men in marriage (from conflict or for any other reason) will not, by itself, answer the question. The answers are certainly multifaceted and complex, and there is little reason to pit one possible answer against another. We highlight that when examining gender differences in health in marriage it is important to (a) consider the helpful processes in combination with hurtful ones, b) take a broad view on this question including many types of social processes, and c) consider processes that occur outside of marriage as well as those that occur inside of marriage.     

Is What You Feel What They See? Prominent and Subtle Identity Signaling in Intergroup Interactions

Individuals often signal group affiliations to others, and the display of such identity signals is frequently rather subtle. While prior work has focused on understanding an individual's choices of subtle versus prominent signals, in this work, we look at the downstream consequences of such choices. Specifically, we explore how the prominence of identity signals may affect one's behavior in intergroup interactions. Drawing from literature on processing fluency, we propose that the use of difficult to process (subtle) identity signals in intergroup interactions leads signalers to experience identity threat, lowering confidence in their identity and leading them to engage in behaviors to recover from this experience. Across three different identity domains (college affiliation, political affiliation, and brand loyalty), we show that when individuals use difficult to process identity signals, they derogate out‐group members in communication and behave less cooperatively in intergroup interactions. We find that these effects depend upon the observability of the signals by out‐group members and only occur for individuals who are highly identified with the in‐group. We also find that the effects are attenuated when behavior towards members of the out‐group is made public. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

What Is and Why Do We Need Philosophy of Physics?

Philosophy of physics is a small but thriving research field situated at the intersection between the natural sciences and the humanities. However, what exactly distinguishes philosophy of physics from physics is rarely made explicit in much depth. We provide a detailed analysis in the form of eleven theses, delineating both the nature of the questions asked in philosophy of physics and the methodology with which they are addressed.     

Why Don't You Just Show Me? Performance interviews for skill‐based promotions

Despite the high skill levels needed to cope with complex technical systems and the pace of technological change, there remain persistent skill gaps in the United States workforce. Organizations are increasingly relying on skill‐based programs to encourage and foster employee skill development. Unfortunately, many questions remain about how to make skill‐based promotions. Drawing from research on performance testing and structured interviewing, as well as work that examines broader issues of performance prediction and candidate reactions, we outline the development and empirical test of a performance interview that can be used for skill‐based promotions. Such interviews allow employees to demonstrate their skills on the job, and thus may be more accepted by employees. We first discuss seven design principles that form the conceptual foundation for the performance interview, followed by the specific steps practitioners can follow to develop a performance interview. Finally, using a sample of 230 auto parts manufacturing employees, we provide empirical evidence for the high reliability, validity, and positive candidate reactions to the performance interview.     

Do You Think You're Sexy,Tall, and Thin? The Prediction of Self‐Rated Attractiveness,Height, and Weight

Research suggests that self‐reports of personal attributes, including physical characteristics, are often distorted. The present study examined discrepancies between self‐ and observer or actual reports of attractiveness, height, and weight, and investigated the role of esteem and gender role scales in the prediction of such discrepancies. Results indicated that attractiveness discrepancies were predicted by high esteem and traditional gender roles, height discrepancies were predicted by agency, and weight discrepancies were predicted by personal efficacy. Results also indicated that esteem and gender role characteristics are important in the perception of self‐relevant information.     

Why Do White Americans Oppose Race‐Targeted Policies? Clarifying the Impact of Symbolic Racism

Measures of symbolic racism (SR) have often been used to tap racial prejudice toward Blacks. However, given the wording of questions used for this purpose, some of the apparent effects on attitudes toward policies to help Blacks may instead be due to political conservatism, attitudes toward government, and/or attitudes toward redistributive government policies in general. Using data from national probability sample surveys and an experiment, we explored whether SR has effects even when controlling for these potential confounds and whether its effects are specific to policies involving Blacks. Holding constant conservatism and attitudes toward limited government, SR predicted Whites' opposition to policies designed to help Blacks and more weakly predicted attitudes toward social programs whose beneficiaries were racially ambiguous. An experimental manipulation of policy beneficiaries revealed that SR predicted policy attitudes when Blacks were the beneficiary but not when women were. These findings are consistent with the claim that SR's association with racial policy preferences is not due to these confounds.     

Why Do People Save? Attitudes to,and Habits of Saving Money in Britain

This study investigates the relationship between demographic (age, sex, education, vote, and income), psychological beliefs (alienation, Protestant Work Ethic, and conservatism), and attitudes toward, as well as habits of, saving money, in Britain. Over 250 people from a variety of backgrounds completed a number of standardized self-report measures. A factor analysis of the attitude toward saving scale revealed five clearly interpretable factors, which were later computed into five subscale scores. Analysis of variance showed that age and education most differentiated subjects' attitudes toward saving. A canonical correlational analysis showed age, vote, income, and alienation were clearly related to various attitude toward saving factors. Analysis of the saving habits questionnaire showed that sex, age, and income were among the most important discriminators of saving habits. These results are discussed in terms of economic socialization and various social policy decisions are considered.     

Yes,But Are They Happy? Effects of Trait Self‐Control on Affective Well‐Being and Life Satisfaction

Does trait self‐control (TSC) predict affective well‐being and life satisfaction—positively, negatively, or not? We conducted three studies (Study 1: N = 414, 64% female, M_age = 35.0 years; Study 2: N = 208, 66% female, M_age = 25.24 years; Study 3: N = 234, 61% female, M_age = 34.53 years). The key predictor was TSC, with affective well‐being and life satisfaction ratings as key outcomes. Potential explanatory constructs including goal conflict, goal balancing, and emotional distress also were investigated. TSC is positively related to affective well‐being and life satisfaction, and managing goal conflict is a key as to why. All studies, moreover, showed that the effect of TSC on life satisfaction is at least partially mediated by affect. Study 1's correlational study established the effect. Study 2's experience sampling approach demonstrated that compared to those low in TSC, those high in TSC experience higher levels of momentary affect even as they experience desire, an effect partially mediated through experiencing lower conflict and emotional distress. Study 3 found evidence for the proposed mechanism—that TSC may boost well‐being by helping people avoid frequent conflict and balance vice‐virtue conflicts by favoring virtues. Self‐control positively contributes to happiness through avoiding and dealing with motivational conflict.