Can Perceivers Identify Likelihood to Sexually Harass?

We investigated how men who differ in theirlikelihood to sexually harass (LSH) are perceived bythemselves and others. In Study 1, 36 Caucasian maleparticipants, who were paid for their participation, were videotaped being interviewed by asubordinate female. Participants rated her performanceand then responded to self-report attitudinal andpersonality scales. Higher LSH men reported moretraditional attitudes toward women's roles, a less femininepersonality, and lower competency ratings for the femaleinterviewer. Study 2 investigated whether participantscould differentiate between high and low LSH men from videoclips. Eighty-one male and 76female Caucasian participants, who were fulfilling acourse requirement, rated high LSH men (compared to lowLSH men) as (1) higher in LSH, (2) more masculine, (3) less feminine, and (4) more traditionaltoward women's roles than low LSH men. Implications ofthis ability to detect likelihood to sexually harass arediscussed.     

Improving condom use intentions and behavior by changing perceived partner norms: an evaluation of condom promotion videos for college students.

OBJECTIVE: To examine the effectiveness of 2 condom promotion videotapes on self-efficacy, intentions, and behavior. DESIGN: Two hundred twenty college students completed social-cognitive and behavioral measures and were then randomly assigned to receive one of two 30-min condom promotion videotapes (male or female student presenters) or to a wait-list control condition. Participants who watched 1 of the videotapes completed immediate posttest measures, and 85% of participants completed a 4-month follow-up. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Self-efficacy for condom use, intentions to use condoms, use of condom during last sex, and consistent condom use over the last month. RESULTS: Participants who received either video reported greater self-efficacy to refuse to have unprotected sex and intentions than controls at follow-up. Individuals who received either video were more likely than controls to report using a condom during last sex with a regular partner, and those who watched the female presenter were more likely to report consistent condom use. CONCLUSION: Participants benefited in terms of self-efficacy and intentions from receiving either video, but both men and women benefited more in terms of condom use behavior from receiving the female video. Future research is needed to determine whether opposite-sex speaker videos could be beneficial with a larger (and more sexually active) sample and whether these effects are maintained over time.     

Who Says It's Sexual Harassment? The Effects of Gender and Likelihood to Sexually Harass on Legal Judgments of Sexual Harassment1

The effects of participants’ gender and propensity to sexually harass were examined in a sexual harassment case in which the gender of the harassers and victim were manipulated systematically. Male and female participants scoring either high or low on the Likelihood to Sexually Harass (LSH) scale (Pryor, 1987) reviewed an ostensibly real hostile work environment case and made judgments about the case. When participants were the same gender as the victim, individual differences in LSH failed to influence their judgments. When the participants’ gender was the opposite of the victim's, those low in LSH perceived the behaviors as more likely to be sexual harassment than those high in LSH. These results are discussed and their implications considered.     

Empathic Blushing in Friends and Strangers

Three volunteers watched a previously recorded video of one of them singing, as cheek sensors monitored their blushing. When performers watched videotapes of their performance, they blushed significantly more than strangers, but not more than their own friends, watching with them. Friends and strangers did not differ significantly in blushing, however. Skin conductance arousal responses of performers and friends, but not performers and strangers, or friends of performers and strangers, were correlated. In a second experiment, strangers who sang before watching another person sing blushed more than strangers who did not sing first, or who sang and then watched a neutral video. This suggests that performing the embarrassing act may have predisposed people to blush, perhaps empathically, later. No gender differences were seen in blushing. Embarrassability questionnaire scores did not correlate with blushing. Empathic accuracy, and associative learning, are proposed to account for the results.     

Motivation and Self‐Control: Implicit Motives Moderate the Exertion of Self‐Control in Motive‐Related Tasks

Using a dual‐task paradigm, two experiments tested whether aroused implicit motives would moderate the exertion of self‐control in motive‐related tasks. In Study 1, 67 participants first watched a power dialogue and were then asked to either enact the dialogue or simply reproduce it by writing it down. In Study 2, 74 participants performed either the frustrating or the simple version of an achievement‐related sensorimotor task. Participants who were high (compared to low) on the implicit power motive and had exerted power over another person subsequently showed more success at controlling their emotional responses (Study 1). Participants who were high (compared to low) on the implicit achievement motive and who had mastered a frustrating sensorimotor task scored better on a subsequent Stroop task (Study 2). Participants in the control conditions did not differ in self‐control performance regardless of their level of implicit motives. These studies provide evidence that aroused implicit motives regulate how much self‐control is exerted when performing motive‐related tasks that require self‐control.     

Increasing positive intergroup contact

We tested an intervention designed to correct negative expectations about inter-racial interactions, increase the positivity of those interactions, and increase inter-racial friendships. In Study 1 (n = 58) White college students watched videotapes depicting an inter-racial friendship and either did or did not write about a similar experience. Participants who wrote about a similar experience expected and actually had a more positive inter-racial interaction. In Study 2 (n = 99) White college students watched videotapes depicting an inter-racial or same-race friendship and either did or did not write about a similar experience. Those who saw the inter-racial video and wrote about a similar experience had a more positive inter-racial interaction and initiated more inter-racial friendships in the following weeks than participants in the other conditions.     

The World Wide Wait: Exploring Physiological and Behavioral Effects of Download Speed

ABSTRACT

When people use humorous media content, their behavior and assessments of the content may depend on the emotional expressions (e.g., laughter) of those around them. In a laboratory experiment in which 80 participants watched a movie clip with a confederate who either laughed or remained silent, we identified two parallel processes. The confederate’s laughter induced behavioral responses in our participants (laughing or smiling). Through those responses, a corresponding appraisal of the media content was generated: The content was rated funnier in comparison to situations in which the confederate did not laugh. This effect corresponds to emotional contagion processes and was especially pronounced in introverts. Additionally, participants who were low in conscientiousness directly elevated their funniness ratings (more than their own emotional expressions would suggest) when the confederate laughed. Those who were high in conscientiousness, however, lowered their ratings of the content’s funniness in the presence of a laughing confederate. This finding suggests the existence of an additional cognitive process that links confederate’s laughter and participant’s content ratings beyond automatic contagion. Participants with low conscientiousness use the confederate’s laughter as a heuristic cue for the content’s funniness, while highly conscientious participants discount the confederate’s laughter as a cue for content funniness.     

Impersonal Sex Orientation and Multitasking Influence the Effect of Sexual Media Content on Involvement With a Sexual Character

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether responses to sexual media content depend on personal and situational factors. Specifically, we studied the role of the personal factor impersonal sex orientation (IS) and the situational factor multitasking in the effect of sexual media content on involvement with the character, a concept that has received increasing attention as an explanation of sexual media effects. College-aged women who were low or high in IS watched a neutral scene or a sex scene. Half of the participants in the neutral and sex condition had to multitask (a tone detection task) while viewing the scene. In the sex condition, participants high in IS were more involved with the character than participants low in IS. Multitasking resulted in opposite patterns of involvement with the character in the sex condition: Participants high in IS became less involved with the character, whereas participants low in IS became more involved with the character.     

Facial expressive behaviors of high self-monitors are less sex-typed

The present study compared the expressive behavior of high and low self-monitoring men and women. Silent excerpts from videotapes of standardized interviews were shown to naive judges. Three dimensions of the target persons' facial expressive behaviors were rated by separate groups of judges. Each excerpt was rated as more happy or unhappy, and as more excited or relaxed, and as more spontaneous or controlled. The ratings of the expressive behavior of high self-monitoring targets were less consistent with social stereotypes and past research findings comparing men's and women's expressive behaviors than were ratings of low self-monitors. These findings are discussed in terms of the origins of sex differences in expressive behavior and in terms of the constructs of self-monitoring and psychological androgyny.The authors wish to express their appreciation to students in experimental social psychology at the College of Charleston who aided in all phases of this research.     

Videotape reconstruction of emotions and cognitions related to shyness

This study tested predictions of the self-presentational approach to situational and dispositional shyness within a broader perspective. Forty subjects who were high in self-rated dispositional shyness and 30 subjects who were low in self-rated dispositional shyness watched videotapes of their interaction with a confederate of the experimenter in various situations, including apprehension of evaluation and positive feedback provided by the confederate. The subjects' free verbal responses to particular events during these situations were content-analyzed. Compared with the group lower in shyness, the shy subjects (a) recalled more fear of social evaluation (including fear of positive evaluation) but did not more often report other kinds of fear, (b) had more negatively biased thoughts about the impression made on their partner but not more impression-related thoughts in general, and (c) showed more negatively biased reactions to the positive feedback of their partner. These results support the self-presentational view that fear of being socially evaluated is pivotal to dispositional shyness. However, some unexpected findings suggest that social evaluative situations also arouse fears of having to evaluate others; this would limit self-presentational explanations of situational shyness in these situations.     

The effects of confederate influence and confidence on the accuracy of crime judgements

Building on recent work which has investigated social influences on memory and remembering, the present experiment examined the effects of social pressure and confederate confidence on the accuracy and confidence of eyewitnesses. Sixty undergraduate participants watched a video of a staged mugging and then answered questions about the video out loud in the presence of either one or three confederates who had also watched the film with them. Unbeknownst to the participant, the confederate(s) always gave incorrect responses to four out of the eight questions. Participants and confederates were also asked to give confidence scores out loud for each of their answers. Again, unbeknownst to the participant, the confederate(s) always expressed either high or low confidence scores for the incorrect information, depending on condition. Participants gave fewer correct answers, and were less confident, in the presence of three, as opposed to one, confederates. Participants were also more confident, yet no more accurate, when the confederate(s) gave high, as opposed to low, confidence scores. Thus the presumed independence of evidence given by multiple witnesses cannot be safely assumed.     

Completing Coyne's Cycle: Dysphorics' Ability to Detect Deception

We tested the prediction, derived from Coyne's (1976b) interpersonal model of depression, that dysphoric individuals would be more sensitive than nondysphoric individuals to false reassurances and phoniness. In Part 1 of a two-part study, dysphoric and nondysphoric individuals watched videotapes of discussants talking about paintings they liked and disliked with an art student who had created some of the paintings herself. As predicted, the dysphorics were more accurate than the nondysphorics at discerning when the discussants really did like the paintings only when the discussions were about disliked paintings that were the art student's own work. The Part 2 stimuli were audiotaped lies and truths conveyed by men and women to attractive same-sex and opposite-sex targets. The dysphorics tended to be more accurate than the nondysphorics at identifying the truths and lies told to opposite-sex targets, and they were significantly more accurate at identifying the opposite-sex communications than the same-sex ones.     

Feeling grateful to God: A qualitative inquiry

There is an expanding literature on the psychological and relationship effects of positive disclosure, whereby people who disclose about good things that happen to them benefit from this disclosure. Extending this research, we focused on what people identify as positive information about themselves and why they disclose this content to others. College students (190 men and 219 women) described what they considered to be a positive experience, feeling, or private aspect of themselves and whether or not they had disclosed this information to close others (mother, father, same-sex friend, and dating/intimate partner). They also described their reasons for disclosing and/or not disclosing to these relationship targets. Based on participants’ open-ended responses, we constructed taxonomies of positive information about the self and the reasons for and against disclosing this content. The research documents how different relationship contexts affect the disclosure of positive information and the reasons for these disclosure decisions.     

Presence and television.

Film and a number of emerging entertainment technologies offer media consumers an illusion of nonmediation known as presence. To investigate the possibility that television can evoke presence, 65 undergraduate students were shown brief examples of rapid point‐of‐view movement from commercially available videotapes on a television with either a small screen (12 inches [30.5 cm], measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches [116.8 cm]). Participants' responses were measured via a questionnaire and a computer‐based recording of arousal (electrodermal activity). Viewers of both televisions reported an enjoyable sense of physical movement, excitement, involvement, and a sense of participation. Furthermore, as predicted, participants who watched the large screen television thought the movement in the scenes was faster, experienced a greater sense of physical movement, enjoyed the movement to a greater extent, found the viewing experience more exciting, and were more physiologically aroused. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Intrinsic motivation and attentional capture from gamelike features in a visual search task

In psychology research studies, the goals of the experimenter and the goals of the participants often do not align. Researchers are interested in having participants who take the experimental task seriously, whereas participants are interested in earning their incentive (e.g., money or course credit) as quickly as possible. Creating experimental methods that are pleasant for participants and that reward them for effortful and accurate data generation, while not compromising the scientific integrity of the experiment, would benefit both experimenters and participants alike. Here, we explored a gamelike system of points and sound effects that rewarded participants for fast and accurate responses. We measured participant engagement at both cognitive and perceptual levels and found that the point system (which invoked subtle, anonymous social competition between participants) led to positive intrinsic motivation, while the sound effects (which were pleasant and arousing) led to attentional capture for rewarded colors. In a visual search task, points were awarded after each trial for fast and accurate responses, accompanied by short, pleasant sound effects. We adapted a paradigm from Anderson, Laurent, and Yantis (Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 108(25):10367-10371, 2011b), in which participants completed a training phase during which red and green targets were probabilistically associated with reward (a point bonus multiplier). During a test phase, no points or sounds were delivered, color was irrelevant to the task, and previously rewarded targets were sometimes presented as distractors. Significantly longer response times on trials in which previously rewarded colors were present demonstrated attentional capture, and positive responses to a five-question intrinsic-motivation scale demonstrated participant engagement.     

College Men’s Concerns About Sharing Dormitory Space with a Male-to-Female Transsexual

We examined male college students’ attitudes toward sharing dormitory space with a male-to-female (MTF) transsexual. Participants read three scenarios, in a sequence of either increasing or decreasing contact with the transsexual, in which they imagined sharing dormitory space with a MTF transsexual as a roommate, in the bathroom, and at a residence hall meeting, after each of which they answered open-ended questions about how they would feel or act, or what they would do if they were a resident advisor, in the imagined scenarios. Participants then rated statements measuring their attitudes toward transsexuals and toward masculine norms. Whether they imagined increased or decreased contact, participants expressed comparable transphobia, and made numerous negative and neutral statements and fewer positive statements about how they would feel or act. However, many students made positive statements about how they would act toward the transsexual, particularly in the roommate situation. Adherence to masculine norms and transphobia were so highly positively correlated that they apparently measured a common attitude, but regression analyses indicated that transphobia mediated the association between adherence to masculine norms and frequencies of positive, negative and neutral responses to the open-ended questions. Men who were Christian, from middle to high SES families, and heterosexual were more transphobic and adhered more to masculine norms than those who were nonChristian, from lower SES families, and gay, respectively. Black and white men were equally transphobic and adhered equally to masculine norms. The men’s recommendations when imagining themselves as a resident advisor typically concerned making connections between the men and the transsexual and controlling the situation.     

Judgments of communicative intent in conversation

In conversation people make specific statements that are intended to accomplish some particular social action (e.g., to praise, criticize or sympathize). To communicate effectively, people must consensually perceive the intentions of each other’s messages. In this research we examined the degree of consensus in judgments of communicative intent. Participants engaged in separate, brief conversations with three friends, watched videotapes of their interactions, and judged the communicative intent of 6 randomly selected statements. Observers also judged these statements under one of three conditions: audio-visual, audio, or text. Analyses showed that participants agreed strongly in their judgments of intent and that observers also agreed in their judgments, but not as much as participants.     

Transitions: Negotiating Sexual Decision Making in the Life of Students Attending a Christian University

This exploratory study analyzes the responses of 80 open-ended online surveys to examine the sexual beliefs and behaviors of college students aged 18–22 attending a Christian university in the northeastern region of the USA. This study investigates the transitions the participants encountered in relationship to their sexual beliefs and behaviors. The findings of this study indicate that many students at the beginning, middle, or end of their college transition are committed to abstaining from sexual intercourse until marriage. However, there is also a large minority of students who have not made this commitment. Although well over half of the participants self-reported that they would abstain from sexual intercourse until marriage, more than a third are comfortable with, are engaging in, or are contemplating premarital sex.     

How the quality of third parties' settlement solutions is affected by the relationship between negotiators

Observers watched videotapes of people negotiating. In half of the videotapes, the negotiators had a negative relationship; in the other half, the negotiators had a positive relationship. Some observers believed that the relationship was a genuine reflection of how the parties felt about one another; others were told that the behavior of negotiators was strategic (i.e., used by parties to gain advantage). Following the tape, observers recommended a settlement. Observers' suggestions were most efficient when the negotiators' relationship was positive and genuine; observers proposed significantly worse solutions when negotiators' relationships were negative and genuine. The authors advise mediators to focus on the issues rather than the emotional tone and to avoid the correspondence bias when observing conflicts among parties with negative relationships.