The Role of Temporal Comparison, Social Comparison, and Direct Appraisal in the Elderly's Self-Evaluations of Health

Elderly persons (n= 91) were interviewed about self- perceptions of physical health and the contribution of social comparison, temporal comparison, and direct appraisal to these judgments. Consistent with previous studies, self-assessments tended to be mainly positive (67% reported their health as “good” or “excellent”), though tempered somewhat by the individual's objective physical condition (i.e., number of chronic diseases or disabilities). Independent of objective health, respondents' ratings were more negative if they mentioned thinking about past or anticipated health. Respondents were more concerned about their health if they thought about their past or anticipated health or mentioned comparing with a specific other person. Direct feedback had no effect on health ratings. Among those who reported social comparison, ratings were more positive when worse-off others were mentioned. Temporal comparisons may be associated with more negative ratings because the elderly's past health is likely to have been better and their future (anticipated) health can be expected to become worse. If using temporal and social comparison information is associated with more negative assessments then what accounts for the generally positive self-assessments? We propose that the elderly compare themselves with a cognitively constructed stereotypical standard of the frail elderly rather than with a specific other. Because few elderly actually “fit” this stereotype, most elderly feel they are doing well.     

维度比较:个体内不同领域的比较

维度比较是指个体将自身某一目标领域的能力与自身标准领域的能力相比较的过程,它是继社会比较和时间比较之后又一重要比较方式。当比较领域性质差异较大,即当比较领域之间进行"远比较"时,会发生强烈的对比效应。随着比较领域性质差异逐渐缩小,即当比较领域之间进行"近比较"时,对比效应会逐步减小,甚至会发生同化效应。维度比较和社会比较都对自我概念具有显著影响,但社会比较的作用明显大于维度比较。未来研究应考虑进一步扩展维度比较的应用范围、加强和其它比较方式的整合、改善其研究方法。     

A Best Practices Guide to Intersectional Approaches in Psychological Research

This paper serves as a “best practices guide” for researchers interested in applying intersectionality theory to psychological research. Intersectionality, the mutually constitutive relations among social identities, presents several issues to researchers interested in applying it to research. I highlight three central issues and provide guidelines for how to address them. First, I discuss the constraints in the number of identities that researchers are able to test in an empirical study, and highlight relevant decision rules. Second, I discuss when to focus on “master” identities (e.g., gender) versus “emergent” identities (i.e., White lesbian). Third, I argue that treating identity as a process situated within social structural contexts facilitates the research process. I end with a brief discussion of the implications for the study of intersectionality.     

The cumulative record of research on “fear of success”

Based on the collected findings of over 100 studies assessing “fear of success,” the following questions were addressed: (a) Do females show more “fear of success” imagery than do males? (b) Do males respond to a cue depicting an achieving female with more “fear of success” imagery than do females? (c) Have the proportions of “fear of success” imagery elicited by men and women in response to verbal cues changed over the last decade? (d) What are the correlates of “fear of success”? (e) What is the relationship between “fear of success” imagery and performance in different kinds of situations (e.g., female achievement behavior in competition with men)? The answers seemed crudely to be (a) no, (b) no, (c) decreased, (d) few, and (e) unclear due to the many differences in the designs used.     

Phenomenological Analysis and its Contemporary Significance

Can a phenomenologically-founded sociology contribute to the understanding of social change? By reference to the structure of the lifeworld as it has been analyzed by Husserl and Schutz, I argue that human action is formed by temporal, spatial, and social dimensions. These are objectified by a social semantics through which they gain their intersubjective cultural shape. From this perspective, I investigate changes in the temporal, spatial, and social dimensions of this semantics, as they occur in the present transformation of post-socialist societies. Finally, I consider whether these changes mark a return to Western patterns and whether they confirm the thesis of “the end of history.”     

Dimensional comparisons: Much is known about the effects,less about the processes

Dimensional comparisons are comparisons between different domains. They are well known in educational psychology. Here, they explain the seemingly paradoxical finding that students' math and verbal self-concepts of ability usually show correlations close to zero, although students' math and verbal achievements show strong positive correlations. This finding can be explained by the fact that students overemphasize potential differences between their math and verbal achievements when they form their self-concepts. However, dimensional comparisons also take place and affect self-evaluations outside the educational context, and the number of studies examining dimensional comparisons in different contexts has significantly increased during the last few years. This paper provides an up-to-date overview of findings on dimensional comparisons. It presents findings from studies that have examined effects of dimensional comparisons (as most studies dealing with dimensional comparisons have done so far), as well as studies that have focused on an understanding of the psychological processes involved in dimensional comparison (which relatively few studies have done so far). It is hoped that this paper will help broaden awareness of dimensional comparisons and stimulate further research on this type of comparison, especially in disciplines other than educational psychology.     

The Importance of Social Versus Temporal Comparison Appraisals Among Older Adults1

It has been suggested that social comparisons become less frequent and less important to one's self-evaluation, and temporal comparisons become more frequent and more important to self-evaluation in later life. In this study, the influence of social and temporal comparison appraisals on global self-ratings in 3 domains (health, income, and memory) was assessed among individuals ranging in age from 53 to 90 years. Although social comparison appraisals were significantly related to self-ratings in all 3 domains, temporal comparison appraisals were only related to self-rated memory. There was also no evidence that the effect of social or temporal comparison appraisals on self-evaluations differed with age among our sample of middle-aged and older adults. Social comparison appraisal appears to be a viable mechanism by which esteem can be preserved in old age, despite increasing loss and impairment.     

Naming solids and nonsolids: Children's default construals

Four experiments used a free-naming task to examine children's and adults' default construals of solids and nonsolids. In Experiment 1,4-year-old children viewed entities presented in familiar geometric shapes (e.g., square, triangle), without touching them. One half saw solids (e.g., a square made of wood); the other half saw nonsol ids matched carefully in shape (e.g., a square with the same dimensions but made of peanut butter). To tap their default construals, children were simply asked, “What is that?” Answers varied sharply with the type of stimulus. If the entity was solid, children tended to provide an individual-related word (e.g., “a square”), even if they also knew a substance-related word (e.g., “wood”). But if the stimulus was nonsolid, children tended to give a substance-related word (e.g., “peanut butter”), even if they also knew an individual-related word (e.g., “a square”). These words were usually common nouns produced in appropriate sentential contexts, suggesting that 4-year-olds represented the words as naming kinds. The same pattern of results obtained in Experiments 2 and 3, which were modified replications of Experiment 1. The results of Experiment 4 replicated the main findings of Experiment 1 using adults as participants. The studies suggest that, as a default, 4-year-olds conceptualize solids and nonsolids in (a) fundamentally distinct, (b) kind-based (rather than perceptual property-based), and (c) adult-like ways.     

Teaching Clinical Psychology Trainees about Weight Bias

Abstract

As an assistant professor who teaches clinical psychology trainees about social aspects of behavior, I devote one week to the topic of weight bias. In this class, I rely on the research literature to challenge common myths about “obesity,” demonstrate the pervasiveness and harm of weight bias, and offer recommendations to trainees to apply to their own professional and personal lives. I encourage trainees to shift focus from weight and weight loss to health and well-being and to engage in self-reflection on the role of weight bias in their interactions with others. Here, I describe my weight bias seminar and outline common questions and my responses to them (e.g., Do you actually believe that “obese” people can be healthy?). Weight bias is a neglected topic in most clinical psychology training programs. Weight bias must be addressed in clinical psychology programs to produce culturally competent graduates who are aware of diversity issues.     

Teaching children with autism to mand for social information

We replicated Shillingsburg et al. (2018) by teaching children with autism to mand for social information while analyzing the variables influencing the emission of mands. We presented questions about a social partner that were known and observable (e.g., “What is Robin doing?”), known but unobservable (i.e., questions for which an intraverbal response had previously been taught, such as, “Where does Robin work?”), or unknown (e.g., “What is Robin's favorite food?”). Correct answers were reinforced across all conditions. During treatment, we prompted children to mand for information from the social partner following only unknown questions. All children acquired mands for social information and answered previously unknown questions correctly after manding for social information and 3 of 4 participants emitted mands to novel social partners, including a peer with autism.     

Problems in the neighbourhood: Formulating noise complaints across dispute resolution services

When people are in dispute with their neighbours, there are multiple routes to resolution, and different services have a range of remits to support it. This article explores how noise complaints are reported to dispute resolution mediation and local council environmental services in the United Kingdom. A collection of 315 recorded telephone calls were transcribed and analysed using discursive psychology, underpinned by conversation analytic methods. Analysis focused on how the same kinds of noise complaint were formulated for the remit and provision of the service called. In mediation calls, callers directly attributed the source of the noise to the agent of its production (e.g., “it's about the neighbour”). However, reference to “the neighbour” was typically omitted (at least initially) in calls to environmental health services (e.g., “I need to speak to someone about disturbance”). This comparative analysis of different settings reveals the significance of service remit for the design of complaints and the relevance of attributing cause in making a case for aid. Comparing two settings provides a propitious opportunity to demonstrate that noise is not a physically objective phenomenon or neutral category but institutionally formulated social conduct.     

Public Space

“Public space” is the space where individuals see and are seen by others as they engage in public affairs. Hannah Arendt links this space with “public freedom.” The being of such freedom, she asserts, depends on its appearing. It consists of “deeds and words which are meant to appear, whose very existence hinges on appearance.” Such appearance, however, requires the public space. Reflecting on Arendt’s remarks, a number of questions arise: What does the dependence of freedom on public space tell us about the nature of freedom? How does public freedom relate to the freedom of a private individual? Does the latter also depend on its appearing? Which is generatively prior: freedom or public space, i.e., the actions that publicly manifest freedom or the space required for their appearance? How does public power shape this space? In this article, I approach these questions through a phenomenological study of public space.     

Afterword: Elaborating Health and Medicine’s Publics

This essay argues that medical and health humanists interested in the rhetorical work of publics can extend their research by attending to embodiment and infrastructure. In addition to discussing how such strategies are illustrated in the essays appearing in this special issue, I relate them to the rhetorical study of personal health records (PHRs) as described in consumer-directed arguments. I conclude by posing two questions to health and medical humanists: “How do discursive constructions of publics and more specific instantiations of embodied experiences mutually shape each other?” and “What do the infrastructures of health and medical users look like and involve in their enactment?”     

Lexically guided retuning of letter perception

Participants made visual lexical decisions to upper-case words and nonwords, and then categorized an ambiguous N–H letter continuum. The lexical decision phase included different exposure conditions: Some participants saw an ambiguous letter “?”, midway between N and H, in N-biased lexical contexts (e.g., REIG?), plus words with unambiguous H (e.g., WEIGH); others saw the reverse (e.g., WEIG?, REIGN). The first group categorized more of the test continuum as N than did the second group. Control groups, who saw “?” in nonword contexts (e.g., SMIG?), plus either of the unambiguous word sets (e.g., WEIGH or REIGN), showed no such subsequent effects. Perceptual learning about ambiguous letters therefore appears to be based on lexical knowledge, just as in an analogous speech experiment (Norris, McQueen, & Cutler, 2003) which showed similar lexical influence in learning about ambiguous phonemes. We argue that lexically guided learning is an efficient general strategy available for exploitation by different specific perceptual tasks.     

Not Very Smart,thus Moral: Dimensional Comparisons Between Academic Self-Concept and Honesty

Three studies explored the influence of self-evaluation in one domain (e.g., the academic domain) on self-evaluation in another domain (e.g., morality), assuming a process of intra-personal dimensional comparisons (i.e., comparisons between self-evaluations in two different domains). A pre-study with N = 143 university students replicated the Muhammad Ali effect, that is, the tendency to rate one's own honesty higher than one's own intelligence. As suggested in our assumptions regarding dimensional comparisons, Study 1 (N = 70) then showed that low self-concept students rated their honesty slightly more positive than high self-concept students. More important, in Study 2 (N = 64) participants who just experienced academic failure in an experimental task rated their honesty slightly more positive than students who experienced academic success. Therefore, it was demonstrated that academic outcome influenced self-concept in a non-academic domain. Results are discussed with regard to their implications for the extension of the I/E model.     

“Should I Also Make a Garden Out of the Desert?”: Camus' Story of Janine

This article explores Albert Camus’ short story “The Adulterous Woman” as a nature-based initiation into deeper complexity. Rich with archetypal and alchemical imagery, we are taken through a day in the life of Janine, where we can see, reflected in her experience, those places that beckon to greater authenticity within ourselves. The image of the desert invites us to consider, for Janine, the same kinds of questions that Jung asked in The Red Book: “Why is my self a desert? Have I lived too much outside of myself in men and events? Why did I avoid my self? Was I not dear to myself? But I have avoided the place of my soul” (2009, par. 72).     

The Emerging Church in Transatlantic Perspective

Is the Emerging Church movement (ECM) a single transnational movement? Or is it a series of parallel religious orientations framed by nationally specific contexts? Cross‐national comparisons of the many manifestations of the ECM remain scarce, especially as the development of the ECM across the globe (e.g., in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand) is most certainly affected by divergent histories and socioreligious landscapes. Focusing on a comparative analysis of the United Kingdom and the United States, I trace how these different cultural contexts determine variant patterns of ECM identity formation. Overall, a global perspective on the ECM calls for a theorization of the national development of religious movements and takes seriously the cultural and historical experiences that shape both its emergence in particular nations and the differentiated development of distinctive manifestations of ECM identity.     

The Effect of Evidential Impact on Perceptual Probabilistic Judgments

In a series of three behavioral experiments, we found a systematic distortion of probability judgments concerning elementary visual stimuli. Participants were briefly shown a set of figures that had two features (e.g., a geometric shape and a color) with two possible values each (e.g., triangle or circle and black or white). A figure was then drawn, and participants were informed about the value of one of its features (e.g., that the figure was a “circle”) and had to predict the value of the other feature (e.g., whether the figure was “black” or “white”). We repeated this procedure for various sets of figures and, by varying the statistical association between features in the sets, we manipulated the probability of a feature given the evidence of another (e.g., the posterior probability of hypothesis “black” given the evidence “circle”) as well as the support provided by a feature to another (e.g., the impact, or confirmation, of evidence “circle” on the hypothesis “black”). Results indicated that participants’ judgments were deeply affected by impact, although they only should have depended on the probability distributions over the features, and that the dissociation between evidential impact and posterior probability increased the number of errors. The implications of these findings for lower and higher level cognitive models are discussed.     

社会比较：对比效应还是同化效应

社会比较直接影响人类的自我评价,对其产生两种相反的效应,即对比效应和同化效应。本文系统地回顾了社会比较的对比效应和同化效应的相关研究;并从关注自我、关注比较目标和关注自我与比较目标之间的关系三个不同方面,阐述了对社会比较效应产生调节作用的各种不同因素;最后,从一种整合和信息的视角,阐述了产生对比效应和同化效应的心理机制——选择性通达（SA）模型     

Different answers to different audiences: effects of social context on the accuracy-informativeness trade-off

Research on conversational exchanges shows that people attempt to optimise their responses’ relevance when they definitely know the correct answer (e.g., “What time is it?”). However, such certainty is often unavailable while speakers may still be under social pressure to provide an answer. We investigated how social context influences the informativeness level when answering questions under uncertainty. In three experiments, participants answered difficult general-knowledge questions placed in different social contexts (formal vs. informal). Participants generated their answers, then they were presented with a given context, and decided on the number of alternative responses they wanted to provide (single, with one alternative vs. plural, with several alternatives) and whether the answer should be reported or withheld (report option). Participants reported more answers in the informal context. In the formal context, single answers were preferred, and they were more frequently reported. We conclude that social context influences the level of informativeness in a conversation, affecting achievable accuracy. Our results also show the joint influence of the confidence and the social context on willingness to share information.