Gender‐Related Psychological Characteristics and Situational Determinants of Psychophysiological Stress Reactivity1

This study examined the influence of gender‐related psychological characteristics and situational demands on physiological and affective responses to stressful tasks. While physiological and affective responses were monitored, 44 medical students (26 men, 18 women) performed an emotion‐oriented speech task and an action‐oriented speech in a counterbalanced design. Conventionally masculine instrumental and feminine expressive characteristics were measured using the Personal Attributes Questionnaire. Systolic blood pressure and respiratory reactions to the action‐oriented task were positively associated with expressivity. Expressivity was also associated with greater subjective tension during the action‐oriented task, and with perceptions of greater task difficulty. The results are consistent with the notion that physiological and affective stress reactions in men and women are determined in part by traditionally gender‐related psychological characteristics, with greater reactions when the situational demands are not congruent with preferred modes of behavior.     

The Effects of Social Influence on Perceptual and Affective Reactions to Scenes of Sexual Violence1

In 2 experiments, we examined the effect of social influence (discussion and modeling) on men's and women's perceptual and affective reactions to a sexually violent film scene depicting gang rape. In Experiment 1, women who discussed the film rated the perpetrators as more responsible compared to participants in all other conditions. Men who did not discuss the film reported higher levels of positive affect compared to participants in all other conditions. In Experiment 2, men and women were affected by the social influence manipulation similarly. As predicted, participants differed in their attributions of responsibility depending on a confederate's response to the film scene. Participants who heard a confederate say that the men in the film were responsible for the rape rated these men as relatively more responsible than did participants in a neutral confederate condition or in a condition in which the confederate said that the woman in the film was responsible for the rape.     

Patterns of emotion-specific appraisal,coping, and cardiovascular reactivity during an ongoing emotional episode

The authors examined emotion-specific patterns of appraisal, coping, and cardiovascular reactivity during real ongoing emotional episodes. In this study, 109 participants performed a neutral opinion-expression task, where a confederate elicited anger, shame, or pride using verbal and nonverbal behavior. The authors assessed cognitive appraisals, emotional reactions, coping, outcomes (state self-esteem and outcome satisfaction), and cardiovascular reactivity. Results indicated substantial and theoretically consistent differences between the 3 emotions (and differences from a nonemotion condition) for cognitive appraisals, self-reported coping, behavioral coping, self-esteem, and cardiovascular reactivity. The results are discussed in relation to their implications for emotion theory and for psychological and physical health. Overall, the results suggest that researchers can study emotion-related issues using authentic emotional reactions.     

Influence of Sexually Degrading Music on Men's Perceptions of Women's Dating‐Relevant Cues

This study examined the influence of manipulated and naturalistic exposure to sexually degrading music on young men's perceptions of women's dating‐relevant affective cues. Three hundred ninety‐seven undergraduate heterosexual men completed an affect‐identification task in which they judged whether women communicated sexual interest, friendliness, sadness, or rejection. Either sexually degrading popular music, non‐sexually degrading popular music, or no music played on headphones. Participants completed questionnaires assessing music‐listening habits and rape‐supportive attitudes. Manipulated exposure to degrading music did not affect men's sensitivities to or biases for women's cues. In contrast, men who reported greater naturalistic exposure to rap and hip‐hop music and who endorsed more rape‐supportive attitudes were more likely to perceive women's positive affect as sexual interest, if the women were provocatively dressed. On balance, these findings are largely inconsistent with theoretical expectations regarding the deleterious effects of sexually degrading music on attitudes and concurrent social perception. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Your heart makes my heart move: Cues of social connectedness cause shared emotions and physiological states among strangers

Two experiments tested the hypothesis that cues of social connectedness could lead even new interaction partners to experience shared emotional and physiological states. In Experiment 1, a confederate prepared for a stress-inducing task. Participants who had been led to feel socially connected to the confederate reported feeling greater stress than participants who had not. In Experiment 2, a confederate ran vigorously in place. Socially-connected participants had greater cardiovascular reactivity (heart rate and blood pressure) than controls. Each study held constant exposure to the confederate. The results suggest that the sharing of psychological and physiological states does not occur only between long-standing relationship partners, but can also result from even subtle experiences of social connectedness. These findings illustrate the dynamic and fluid ways in which important aspects of self can change in response to cues of social relatedness.     

Affective reactivity of language symptoms, startle responding, and inhibition in schizophrenia

The speech of some schizophrenia patients becomes markedly more disordered when negative affect is aroused. The authors tested associations between affective reactivity of speech and responsiveness and inhibition on an acoustic startle task in a sample of 27 outpatients. Patients whose language was reactive to negative affect showed significantly higher initial startle amplitudes than those whose language was not reactive. However, they also showed greater habituation to repeated startle stimuli over trials, even after differences in initial amplitudes were controlled statistically. These findings suggest that affective reactivity of speech is associated with higher initial startle responsiveness but also with greater habituation and, conversely, that patients who are relatively nonreactive to excitatory affective and sensory stimuli are also less reactive to inhibitory input.     

Discrimination and unfair treatment: relationship to cardiovascular reactivity among African American and European American women.

This study examined the relationship of cardiovascular reactivity to both interpersonal mistreatment and discrimination in a community-based sample of African American and European American women (N=363) in midlife. Subtle mistreatment related positively to diastolic blood pressure (DBP) reactivity for African American participants but not their European American counterparts. Moreover, among the African American participants, those who attributed mistreatment to racial discrimination exhibited greater average DBP reactivity. In particular, these women demonstrated greater DBP reactivity to the speech task, which bore similarities to an encounter with racial prejudice but not to a nonsocial mirror tracing task. These findings are consistent with the hypothesis that racial discrimination is a chronic stressor that can negatively impact the cardiovascular health of African Americans through pathogenic processes associated with physiologic reactivity.     

The Effect of Nonverbal Behaviors Associated With Sexual Harassment Proclivity on Women's Performance

We explored whether exposure to nonverbal behaviors that mirror those used by men with sexual harassment proclivity (i.e., high dominance and/or high sociosexual nonverbal behaviors) leads women to perceive those men as potential sexual harassers and lowers women's actual performance on the job. In our first experiment, women's performance was negatively affected when they interacted with a task administrator enacting dominant nonverbal behaviors. The women also perceived the dominant task administrator as more sexual. In our second experiment, viewers rated the task administrator enacting dominant nonverbal behaviors as more likely than the less dominant task administrator to show gender-based attention, social attention, and sexually harassing behaviors. Taken together, our findings suggest an association between perceptions of dominance and sexuality.     

Women's Reactions to Miscarriage: The Role of Attributions,Coping Styles,and Knowledge1

This study examined 72 women's retrospectively reported reactions to miscarriage, including depression, stress, and anxiety. The buffering role of women's attributional explanations for the event, the significance of the loss of the baby, coping strategies, and women's knowledge of miscarriage were also assessed. Correlational analyses revealed that women's attributions were tied to their reactions, in that the more women blamed their own character or doctor, the more severely they reacted. Coping strategies accounted for a large portion of the variance (64%), whereby women who used cognitive restructuring as a strategy suffered less adverse reactions than did those who used social withdrawal or wishrul thinking. Women's knowledge before miscarriage, rather than after, accounted for 6% of the variance in their reactions. Examining the interrelations of these variables revealed that the amount of women's knowledge before miscarriage was related to less wishful thinking, and their knowledge after the event was related to less problem avoidance. Women's attributions were also related to their coping strategies: Blaming one's character, behavior, or doctor were positively related to self-criticism and social withdrawal, and negatively related to support from doctors and significant others. The implications of these findings for interventions to facilitate adjustment to miscarriage and future research are discussed.     

Self‐ambivalence and reactions to success versus failure

People differ in the extent to which their self‐evaluations fluctuate in response to positive and negative events. This research tests whether self‐ambivalence predicts this self‐evaluative reactivity. Participants first completed measures of self‐ambivalence and baseline self‐esteem. Next, they were induced a success or failure experience in a cognitive task and finally rated their cognitive self‐evaluations (task‐specific ability, state self‐esteem) and affective reactions (self‐feelings, mood). Self‐ambivalence was associated with stronger effects of the success/failure manipulation on cognitive self‐evaluations but not on affective reactions, with baseline self‐esteem controlled. Possible underlying mechanisms are discussed. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The role of stranger harassment experiences in college women's perceived possibility of gender crimes happening to them

The present study examined the relation between stranger harassment experiences and college women's perceived possibility of gender and nongender crimes happening to them. Undergraduate women attending a British university completed self‐report measures of stranger harassment and self‐objectification (i.e., self‐surveillance and body shame), and then evaluated four vignettes of various crimes on the severity of the crime and the likelihood of the crime happening to them. Results indicated that stranger harassment is a common experience for these British university women. Serial mediation analyses revealed a direct effect of stranger harassment on perceived likelihood of rape and perceived likelihood of intimate partner violence, and an indirect effect of stranger harassment on rape through self‐surveillance, whereas stranger harassment and indices of self‐objectification were unrelated to perceived likelihood of human trafficking and burglary. Discussion is centered on the role of objectifying experiences in perceptions of gender crimes where sexual and physical harm to women's bodies is emphasized, and the potential impact for those women on the receiving end of unwanted sexual objectification.     

Cross‐level,three‐way interactions among work‐group climate,gender, and frequency of harassment on morale and withdrawal outcomes of sexual harassment

We examined the effects of gender and work‐groups' perceptions of climate for sexual harassment on the relationship between individuals' sexual harassment experiences and job‐related outcomes (namely, job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, work withdrawal, and job withdrawal). Drawing from a variety of theories, we proposed that a beneficial climate would buffer men from negative outcomes, but would intensify negative outcomes for women. Significant three‐way interactions were found for job satisfaction, affective organizational commitment, and job withdrawal. Results indicated that beneficial work‐group climate perceptions buffered men from decrements in job satisfaction and work withdrawal, but intensified decrements in all three outcomes for women. Implications for research and practice are discussed.     

Men's memory for women's sexual‐interest and rejection cues

The current work characterizes young men's memory for young women's heterosocially relevant affective cues (e.g. sexual interest and rejection) and examines characteristics of both the woman being perceived and the male perceiver as predictors of memory. Undergraduate men (n = 232) completed similarity‐ratings and recognition‐memory tasks with photos of undergraduate women who varied in attractiveness, provocativeness of clothing and expression of sexual interest. Participants also completed a control memory task and a measure relevant to the risk of exhibiting sexually aggressive behaviour, as well as indicating how many serious relationships they had experienced. Multilevel regression techniques revealed that (a) men's memory for women's sexual interest improved when women were sexually interested at encoding, attractive and dressed provocatively; (b) men who reported more frequent serious relationships showed better memory for women's sexual interest and (c) men at risk of exhibiting sexually aggressive behaviour showed worse memory for women's sexual interest. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Spontaneous emotion regulation during evaluated speaking tasks: associations with negative affect, anxiety expression, memory, and physiological responding

In these studies, the correlates of spontaneously using expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal during stressful speeches were examined. Spontaneous emotion regulation means that there were no instructions of how to regulate emotions during the speech. Instead, participants indicated after the speech to what extent they used self-motivated expressive suppression or reappraisal during the task. The results show that suppression is associated with less anxiety expression, greater physiological responding, and less memory for the speech while having no impact on negative affect. In contrast, reappraisal has no impact on physiology and memory while leading to less expression and affect. Taken together, spontaneous emotion regulation in active coping tasks has similar consequences as experimentally induced emotion regulation in passive tasks.     

Acknowledging Sexual Harassment: A Test of Alternative Models

Few victims of sexual harassment acknowledge that their experience constitutes sexual harassment. In this study, we examined five general models gleaned from the literature on observers' or laypersons' perceptions of sexual harassment to examine their efficacy in explaining victims' acknowledgment processes: type-of-harassing experience; personal characteristics of the target/observer; and affective consequences of the event(s), attributions, and power (status) of the offender. Data were collected in a campus-wide survey of students, faculty, and staff at a large midwestern university (N = 1,147), which measured incidence rates of eight forms of sexual harassment and the situational characteristics of, responses to, and consequences of the most dramatic experience. Results from single-model and multiple-model hierarchical logistic regression analyses partially support each of the models. The following general model emerged: Individuals who experience unwanted sexual attention are more likely than others to acknowledge being sexually harassed if (a) they perceived their experience as part of a larger problem in their environment, (b) they had a strong emotional reaction to it, (c) the perpetrator was a superior, (d) they were sensitive to the issue of sexual harassment (e.g., they were women instead of men). However, differences in this pattern emerged across various subsamples. This research warrants further theoretical development on victimization acknowledgment processes.     

Moderating effects of rumination and gender on context‐specific aggression

Angry rumination has been linked previously to increased aggression. The effects of trait rumination on men and women's emotional and aggressive responses under different cueing contexts were examined. Aggressive behavior, not resulting from direct insult or provocation, was indexed by a laboratory paradigm that measured the intensity and the duration of shocks delivered to a putative “employee”. Frustration about, and cognitive focus on, the employee's poor performance was manipulated through the cover story and procedures; however, half the participants were exposed to a fearful/distracting stressor (stress focused) whereas the other half were not (confederate focused). Emotional responses and evaluations of the confederate were also assessed. Results indicated that rumination enhanced the effects of context, so that it related to greater fear and sadness in the stress‐focused context and to increased aggression and motives to aggress in the confederate‐focused context. These effects, however, were more robust for women than men. Ruminative men tended to show more hostile behaviors and motives across both conditions. Mechanisms for the effects of rumination on aggression, and gender differences in these processes, are discussed. Aggr. Behav. 00:1–17, 2005. © 2005 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Race,psychosocial vulnerability and social support differences in inner-city women's symptoms of posttraumatic stress disorder

Background/Objectives: Inner-city Black women may be more susceptible to posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) than White women, although mechanisms underlying this association are unclear. Living in urban neighborhoods distinguished by higher chronic stress may contribute to racial differences in women's cognitive, affective, and social vulnerabilities, leading to greater trauma-related distress including PTSD. Yet social support could buffer the negative effects of psychosocial vulnerabilities on women's health. Methods/Design: Mediation and moderated mediation models were tested with 371 inner-city women, including psychosocial vulnerability (i.e., catastrophizing, anger, social undermining) mediating the pathway between race and PTSD, and social support moderating psychosocial vulnerability and PTSD. Results: Despite comparable rates of trauma, Black women reported higher vulnerability and PTSD symptoms, and lower support compared to White Hispanic and non-Hispanic women. Psychosocial vulnerability mediated the pathway between race and PTSD, and social support moderated vulnerability, reducing negative effects on PTSD. When examining associations by race, the moderation effect remained significant for Black women only. Conclusions: Altogether these psychosocial vulnerabilities represent one potential mechanism explaining Black women's greater risk of PTSD, although cumulative psychosocial vulnerability may be buffered by social support. Despite higher support, inner-city White women's psychosocial vulnerability may actually outweigh support's benefits for reducing trauma-related distress.     

Social Anxiety–Linked Attention Bias to Threat Is Indirectly Related to Post-Event Processing Via Subjective Emotional Reactivity to Social Stress

Attention bias to threat (e.g., disgust faces) is a cognitive vulnerability factor for social anxiety occurring in early stages of information processing. Few studies have investigated the relationship between social anxiety and attention biases, in conjunction with emotional and cognitive responses to a social stressor. Elucidating these links would shed light on maintenance factors of social anxiety and could help identify malleable treatment targets. This study examined the associations between social anxiety level, attention bias to disgust (AB-disgust), subjective emotional and physiological reactivity to a social stressor, and subsequent post-event processing (PEP). We tested a mediational model where social anxiety level indirectly predicted subsequent PEP via its association with AB-disgust and immediate subjective emotional reactivity to social stress. Fifty-five undergraduates (45% female) completed a passive viewing task. Eye movements were tracked during the presentation of social stimuli (e.g., disgust faces) and used to calculate AB-disgust. Next, participants gave an impromptu speech in front of a video camera and watched a neutral video, followed by the completion of a PEP measure. Although there was no association between AB-disgust and physiological reactivity to the stressor, AB-disgust was significantly associated with greater subjective emotional reactivity from baseline to the speech. Analyses supported a partial mediation model where AB-disgust and subjective emotional reactivity to a social stressor partially accounted for the link between social anxiety levels and PEP.     

Effects of Importance of Issues,Gender, and Power of Contenders on Conflict Management Style

Abstract

The effects of employee turnover on the productivity of those who remain were examined. In a laboratory investigation, subjects completed a proofreading task. A confederate quit the task during a break, citing either illness or dissatisfaction and a desire for greater rewards elsewhere as the reasons for his or her departure. The subjects then worked on a second proofreading task, after which they completed a questionnaire about their attitudes toward the study. The subjects who were exposed to the dissatisfied confederate proofread significantly less material on the second task than the subjects who were exposed to the ill confederate did. The findings are interpreted in terms of equity theory: A departing colleague can arouse inequity in a stayer that results in a drop in productivity.