Women's language: Uncertainty or interpersonal sensitivity and emotionality?

Six differences in linguistic behavior in same-sex and mixed-sex problem-solving groups were explored. Small groups of all women, all men, and mixed sex were run and videotaped. Linguistic behavior was assessed through a content analysis of four syntactic categories: intensifiers, modal constructions, tag questions, and imperative constructions in question form. Support was found for the hypothesis of Key (1975) and Lakoff (1975) that women, as compared with men, use more linguistic categories that connote uncertainty. Support was also found for these authors' hypotheses that (1) women use more linguistic forms that connote uncertainty when men are present than when men are absent, and (2) men are more likely to interrupt women than women are likely to interrupt men. The results are discussed from the perspectives of women's role (supportive behavior and minority status) and women's culture (interpersonal sensitivity and emotionality).This report is a revision of a paper presented at the Pioneers for Century III Conference, Cincinnati, Ohio, April 1976.     

Social media and interpersonal relationships: for better or worse?

Social media challenge--or have already redefined--conventional boundaries of public and private, personal and professional, friendship, and social relations generally. Here, I consider how these developments may affect professionalism, the physician-patient relationship, and our cultural experiences in a wholly different and unexpected way.     

Redefining unforgiveness: Exploring victims’ experiences in the wake of unforgiven interpersonal transgressions

This study explored victims’ experiences in the aftermath of unforgiven offenses. Semi-structured interviews with 13 individuals discussing two unforgiven offenses revealed considerable variability in the experiences of unforgiveness, suggesting that unforgiveness may be more multifaceted than previously believed. In addition to the negative emotions and rumination previously posited to characterize unforgiveness, novel themes emerged describing unforgiving cognitions (e.g., the offense is unforgiveable) and construals of the offender. Participants varied along each dimension, resulting in a range of outcomes (e.g., forgiveness, lingering personal distress, finding peace without forgiving). Implications for conceptualizing unforgiveness and counseling those who struggle with unforgiven offenses are discussed.     

Perceived interpersonal sources of life satisfaction in Chinese and American students: Cultural or gender differences?

This study evaluated cultural and gender differences in perceived interpersonal sources of life satisfaction between 341 Chinese and 222 American college students. Comparative analyses indicated overall lower life satisfaction in Chinese, than in Americans. However, Chinese, compared to Americans, reported greater life satisfaction derived from perceived sources involving the self, parents, teachers and peers. Results of regression analyses indicated that, for both Chinese and Americans, the self and parents were unique sources associated with life satisfaction. However, for Americans, close friends also emerged as an additional unique source. When gender differences were examined, additional nuances were found within each cultural group. Thus, some evidence for both cultural and gender differences in perceived interpersonal sources of life satisfaction across Chinese and Americans was found. Some implications of the present findings are discussed.     

Who is in Need of Victim Support?: The Issue of Accountable, Empirically Validated Selection and Victim Referral

The tremendous growth in victim-oriented laws granting various rights to crime victims, which emerged worldwide during the last two decades, has initiated a renewed research interest in the varied aspects of the needy victims concept. Highly sophisticated theoretical models, indicating various risk factors (e.g. external control, upward relative risk assessments) and protection factors (hardiness, behaviour attributions), were developed to explain which crime victims are in need of victim support. The practical validity of these models is relatively low: at the police level there are simply no resources to conduct lengthy diagnostic interviews with crime victims. This article aims to bridge the gap between sophistication and mundane selection of needy victims. The focus is on a simple selection instrument, namely the victim's psychological condition prior to the victimization. Analyses suggest that low pre-victimization well-being constitutes a central risk factor, predicting a delayed deterioration in post-victimization well-being, and longer term psychological distress, which is manifest ten months after the victimizing incident. The traffic light model is discussed as a simple selection tool, which might be used during the witness interview. Such a model may also be used by defense attorneys to examine if clients were appropriately assessed as needing support after describing their experiences to the police. For the prosecutor's office the traffic light model offers an instrument to predict which victims might benefit from a personal interview with the prosecutor. Some implications of low well-being for studies on repeat victimizations are discussed, inter alia in terms of a potential mood congruence bias, that might result in inflated estimates of multiple victimizations.     

The role of attentional biases in PTSD: is it interference or facilitation?

Although attentional biases have been demonstrated in individuals with posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), the cognitive methodologies used have not allowed for disambiguation of two types of attentional biases. It remains unclear if PTSD involves difficulty disengaging attention from threatening stimuli (interference) or facilitated detection. To differentiate between attentional interference and facilitation, 57 male Vietnam-era veterans (30 High PTSD and 27 Low PTSD) completed a visual search task with a lexical decision component. High PTSD veterans who engaged in the interference task first showed increased interference to threat-relevant words relative to Low PTSD veterans. However, no evidence was found for facilitated detection of threatening stimuli in PTSD.     

Rational or uncommitted? Depression and indecisiveness in interpersonal decision making

Two studies were run which tested the prediction that clinically depressed persons, known for difficulties in making a decision, would process predecisional information relevant to an interpersonal choice in a more impartial, less biased way than non-depressed persons. Both studies provided confirmation for this hypothesis. In each case, the depressed group focused less on specific alternatives, asked more criterion-based questions, and made decisions on the basis of information which was more evenly distributed over alternatives, thus conforming less to biasing, dominance structuring processes, than non-depressed participants. The depressed and non-depressed participants did not differ, however, in evaluative aspects of their decisions, suggesting a relative independence of affective and informational aspects of predecisional processes. The question arises: are depressed patients less biased and hence more rational when making decisions or are they just indifferent and uncommitted? The data have been discussed with reference to research on effortful versus automatic information processing in depression.     

Protection,payback, or both? Emotional and motivational mechanisms underlying avoidance by victims of transgressions

In the wake of an interpersonal offense, victims often feel motivated to avoid their perpetrators, and the more severe the offense, the more pronounced this motivation is. On the surface, avoidance appears to serve a self-protective function such that victims, compelled by a sense of fear and apprehension, withdraw from their wrongdoers to prevent further harm. However, avoidance might also serve a retaliatory purpose in which victims shun their offenders out of anger and hostility, using interpersonal aloofness as a means of payback. In the present pair of studies, we examined victims’ self-reports of recent offense experiences and tested the mediating roles of fear and anger in the relationship between offense severity and avoidance motivations. Study 1 revealed that anger, not fear, was the emotion that mediated this relationship. Study 2 replicated this finding and also showed that the link between anger and avoidance was mediated both by revenge and self-protection motives, which demonstrates the complex nature of avoidance following a transgression.     

Nice or smart? Task relevance of self-characteristics moderates interpersonal projection

Two studies investigated the impact of trait relevance to a specific task on people's projection of their characteristics onto a cooperative partner. We either measured (Study 1) or manipulated (Study 2) the relevance of a trait to a specific cooperative task. In both studies, participants first rated themselves on a list of traits. Then they imagined completing a cooperative task with an unknown partner. Finally, they rated the partner on the same list of traits. In Study 1, we found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings and the idiosyncratic measure of trait relevance. In Study 2, participants rated the self and the partner on competence and warmth traits while completing an intellectual or a social task. We found partner ratings to be positively influenced by self ratings more on competence than on warmth in the intellectual task, but more on warmth than on competence in the social task. These results suggest that people project onto others in a way that maximizes their chances to succeed in cooperation.     

(Not) Thinking about you: Differences in victims’ and perpetrators’ self-focus after interpersonal and intergroup transgressions

We tested the hypothesis that, following a transgression, victims and perpetrators differ in their focus of attention. In three studies (total N = 740), we manipulated participants’ social role (victim vs. perpetrator) in a hypothetical scenario (Studies 1 and 2) and in a perceived real conflict (Study 3) in an interpersonal (Studies 1 and 2) and an intergroup (Study 3) context. Results from all studies confirmed that victims show a stronger self-focus than perpetrators. Moreover, results suggest victims’ higher self-focus as a predictor of willingness to reconcile. Participants’ self-focus mediated the effect of social role on reconciliation intentions as a single mediator (Study 2), or in sequence with their motivation to consider the other party's needs (Study 3). Overall, the present research suggests that victims and perpetrators differ in their focus of attention, and that this difference has important theoretical and practical implications for reconciliation between individuals and between groups.     

Social anxiety and attentional biases: A top-down contribution?

Selective attention toward threatening facial expressions has been found to precipitate and maintain symptoms of social anxiety. However, the automaticity of this bias is under debate. In the present study, we aimed to test whether top-down (controlled) engagement and disengagement of attention toward threatening faces is associated with social anxiety. This was examined by testing the impact of a secondary working memory (WM) load on attentional biases. In a variation of the dot-probe task, participants’ attention was initially cued to the left or right of fixation before an upright face paired with an inverted face was presented (displaying a disgust or neutral expression), and participants responded to a subsequently presented probe. The task was performed under no-load, low-load (one-digit memory task), and high-load (six-digit memory task) conditions. Social anxiety was not found to be associated with delayed disengagement from threat. However, surprisingly, high social anxiety was associated with an engagement bias away from threat, whereas low social anxiety was associated with a bias toward threat. These results were unaffected by the WM load manipulation. This indicates that engagement with threatening facial expressions has minimal contributions from top-down mechanisms, since it is likely that orienting to facial expressions occurs relatively automatically.     

Does perpetrator punishment satisfy victims' feelings of revenge?

Criminal victimization often provokes strong feelings of revenge. Two studies were conducted to investigate whether legal punishment of the perpetrator reduces victims' feelings of revenge. A cross‐sectional study of 174 crime victims revealed that punishment severity does not predict feelings of revenge at a time several years after the trial. A longitudinal study of 31 crime victims revealed that, for the time interval from a few weeks before the trial to a few weeks after the trial, punishment severity significantly predicts a decrease in feelings of revenge; nevertheless intraindividual and interindividual stability of these feelings was high. Taken together, results of the two studies suggest that perpetrator punishment only partially, and moreover only transitorily, satisfies victims' feelings of revenge. Therefore, satisfaction of victims' feelings of revenge cannot be taken as empirical justification for tightening of sentencing norms. Aggr. Behav. 30:62–70, 2004. © 2004 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Bad Woman, Bad Victim? Disentangling the Effects of Victim Stereotypicality, Gender Stereotypicality and Benevolent Sexism on Acquaintance Rape Victim Blame

Based on the assertion that previous research may have inadvertently confounded two stereotypes, we considered the impact of benevolent sexism on rape victim blame in the context of independent manipulations of gender and the perceived genuineness (victim stereotypicality) of an acquaintance rape victim. We predicted that for blame, benevolent sexism may be independently positively associated with gender and victim counter-stereotypicality. Following pilot work, 120 Australian undergraduates read an acquaintance rape scenario. Results indicated that benevolent sexism was only positively associated with blame of the gender counter-stereotypical victim when that victim was also counter-stereotypical in terms of victim stereotypes. This result indicates a more moderate role than previously indicated for benevolent sexism in accounting for rape victim blame.     

Definition and classification of cancer: Monothetic or polythetic?

Since the microbiological revolution, most infectious diseases have been defined and classified according to an etiologic criterion, i.e. the identification of single, external “necessary” causes (for example, Mycobacterium for tuberculosis). This is not the case with cancer. Not only external “necessary” causes of cancer have not been identified, but also the morphological classification cannot be based on univocal criteria. Although “neoplasia” and “anaplasia” appear to be universal attributes of cancer, these events are only quantitative. Neoplastic growth can be fast or slow (development may take weeks or years), and tissue pathologies are difficult to detect from normal tissue in some cancers but are obvious in others. Common special properties of anaplasia appear to be concealed in the wide range of morphologies. In the absence of a coherent morphological definition, and of external necessary causes (such as bacteria for infectious diseases), a mechanistic definition could be adopted. However, unless molecular biology discovers specific mechanistic steps in carcinogenesis, which indicate the existence of “necessary” events in carcinogenesis, we cannot adopt a univocal (monothetic) definition of cancer. The alternative is to use a polythetic definition, according to Wittgenstein's model of a “long rope twisted together out of many shorter fibres.”     

Adaptive and maladaptive components of rumination? Diagnostic specificity and relation to depressive biases

The present study investigated the validity of the two-factor solution of items selected from the Rumination Scale of the Response Style Questionnaire proposed by Treynor, Gonzalez, and Nolen-Hoeksema (2003). In the first part of this study we used samples of currently depressed (MDD), formerly depressed (FD), socially anxious (SP), and healthy control participants to examine whether the brooding and reflective pondering components differentiate participants with an anxiety disorder from participants with depression. In the second part of this study we examined whether these components of rumination were differentially related to cognitive biases in depression. Overall, the MDD group exhibited higher brooding scores than did all other groups; SP and FD groups did not differ from each other but obtained higher brooding scores than did the control participants. Only the MDD and the control groups differed on the reflective pondering factor. Importantly, brooding and reflective pondering were differentially related to cognitive biases. Specifically, the correlation between brooding/reflective pondering and memory bias was not significant when depressive symptoms were partialed out. The correlation between brooding and attentional bias for sad faces, however, remained significant even when current depressive symptoms were taken into account. In sum, our results support the formulation that rumination is composed of an adaptive reflective pondering factor and a maladaptive brooding factor.     

Valence, comparison focus and self-positivity biases: does it matter whether people judge positive or negative traits?

The present research questions whether mere valence affects self-other comparisons in the domain of trait characteristics. While some previous studies have reported greater positivity bias for the self when traits were positive than when traits were negative, we suggest that this is an ambiguous finding, because valence and content were confounded. When we unconfounded content and valence, valence had no effect on the magnitude of self-positivity bias displayed. We also replicate several findings for our unconfounded set of traits. Firstly, comparing others to the self, rather than comparing the self to others, lowered self-positivity for positive and negative traits (focus effect). Secondly, extremely positive and negative traits triggered greater positivity bias than did more moderately evaluated ones. Finally, we suggest that comparative self-positivity biases may be based on a general positivity bias.