“Hey mom, look at me!”

The degree to which infant and maternal characteristics were related to maternal psychological distress and play competence was examined in 40 mother preterm and full-term dyads. Measures of maternal psychological distress, self-efficacy, infant temperament, and mother-infant interaction in a play situation, were obtained at 4 months corrected for prematurity. Results revealed that maternal self-efficacy was the strongest correlate of maternal psychological distress but was not related to maternal play competence. Interaction effects for unadaptable temperament and infant behavioral involvement were found in the regressions predicting both maternal psychological distress and maternal play competence. Mothers of more adaptable and less behaviorally involved infants reported greater psychological distress and exhibited greater play competence than mothers of more adaptable and involved infants. The results suggest that a lack of concordance between mothers' perceptions of their infants' behavior and actual behavioral experiences adversely affects mothers' affect and the quality of their play interactions.     

Attention, researchers! it is time to take a look at the real world

Theories of attention, too often generated from artificial laboratory experiments, may have limited validity when attention in the natural world is considered. For instance, for more than two decades, conceptualizations of "reflexive" and "volitional" shifts of spatial attention have been grounded in methodologies that do not recognize or utilize the basic fact that people routinely use the eyes of other people as rich and complex attentional cues. This fact was confirmed by our novel discovery that eyes will trigger a reflexive shift of attention even when they are presented centrally and are known to be spatially nonpredictive. This exploration of real-world attention also led to our finding that, contrary to popular wisdom, arrows, like eyes, are capable of producing reflexive shifts of attention—a discovery that brings into question much of the existing attention research. We argue that research needs to be grounded in the real world and not in experimental paradigms. It is time for cognitive psychology to reaffirm the difficult task of studying attention in a manner that has relevance to real-life situations.     

Leading organizational change in the ‘new’ South Africa

This paper reports on a two‐pronged qualitative research study that used leaders’ life stories and the case research method to understand the leadership of change in 14 South African organizations. We describe how leaders led the changes required to balance the imperatives emanating from South Africa's socio‐political changes and return the country to the international business arena, as well as the challenges created by years of inequality and neglect of the socio‐economic development of the majority of its population. We found that the leaders’ life stories played a significant role in how they perceived and responded to the change situation. Four themes summarizing the actions of the leaders – namely, their efforts to embrace change, to provide hope, to connect change to African values and culture, and to champion diversity – are described. The results of the study suggest that leaders’ life stories can be an important source of information about how they perceive, interpret, and respond to change.     

The flip side of the other‐race coin: They all look different to me

Poorer recognition of other‐race faces than own‐races faces has been attributed to a problem of discrimination (i.e., telling faces apart). The conclusion that ‘they all look the same to me' is based on studies measuring the perception/memory of highly controlled stimuli, typically involving only one or two images of each identity. We hypothesized that such studies underestimate the challenge involved in recognizing other‐race faces because in the real world, an individual's appearance varies in a number of ways (e.g., lighting, expression, hairstyle), reducing the utility of relying on pictorial cues to identity. In two experiments, Caucasian and East Asian participants completed a perceptual sorting task in which they were asked to sort 40 photographs of two unfamiliar identities into piles such that each pile contained all photographs of a single identity. Participants perceived more identities when sorting other‐race faces than own‐race faces, both when sorting celebrity (Experiment 1) and non‐celebrity (Experiment 2) faces, suggesting that in the real world, ‘they all look different to me'. We discuss these results in the light of models in which each identity is represented as a region in a multidimensional face space; we argue that this region is smaller for other‐race than own‐race faces.     

When accurate and inaccurate eyewitnesses look the same: a limitation of the ‘pop‐out’ effect and the 10‐ to 12‐second rule

Research has found support for a ‘pop‐out effect’ that occurs when witnesses who accurately identify a criminal from a lineup are faster and uses more automatic processing than inaccurate witnesses who misidentify a foil. We present evidence that this finding may not occur with biased lineups. Witnesses to a mock theft were asked to make a lineup identification and three types of witnesses were compared: (1) accurate witnesses who identified a thief, (2) inaccurate witnesses who misidentified a foil who was more similar looking to the thief than the other lineup foils and (3) inaccurate witnesses who misidentified a foil who was not more similar in appearance to the thief than the other lineup foils. Accurate witnesses who identified the thief and inaccurate witnesses who misidentified a foil more similar to the thief than the other lineup foils were indistinguishable; both were faster, used more automatic recognition processes and were more confident than inaccurate witnesses who identified other foils. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

We'll never get past the glass ceiling! Meta‐stereotyping,world‐views and perceived relative group‐worth

This article examines the implications of perceived negativity from members of a dominant outgroup on the world views and perceived relative group worth of members of disadvantaged groups. We hypothesized that concerns about the negative opinions a dominant outgroup is perceived to hold of the ingroup (i.e., meta‐stereotypes) would undermine group members' views about societal fairness. We expected this trend to be mediated by recall of previous personal experiences of discrimination. We further hypothesized that members' views about societal fairness would predict their perception of the ingroup's worth relative to the outgroup – such that undermined views about societal fairness would be associated with lower perceived ingroup worth relative to the outgroup. Taken jointly, results from two studies using two real intergroup contexts support these hypotheses and are discussed in terms of their implications for the social mobility of members of disadvantaged groups.