Intimacy of Self-Disclosure and Response Processes as Factors Affecting the Development of Interpersonal Relationships

Abstract

This study examined the effects of low and increasing intimacy as patterns of self-disclosure and the effects of perspective taking and egocentrism as response styles on the development of a meaningful relationship. Subjects, 44 American female nursing students, responded to a stimulus form consisting of either 15 low-intimacy or increasing-intimacy, open-ended statements; trained confederates responded to their disclosures with either egocentric or perspective-taking behavior. Results of this study indicated that perceptions of the interaction and the potential for further relationship development were more positive under conditions of increasing intimacy; progression of disclosures seemed to produce perceptions leading to further relationship development. The positive effects of perspective taking were strongly supported. Results suggested that progressive self-disclosure combined with response to the other's disclosures in a perspective-taking manner increase the probability of relationship development.     

Egocentrism in sub-clinical depression

Depression is marked by rigid thinking and the inability to generate different and more positive views on the self. The current study conceptualises this a perspective-taking deficit, which is defined as a deficit in the ability to overcome one’s egocentrism. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals with depression are impaired in Theory of Mind reasoning and empathy – two social cognitions that involve cognitive and affective perspective-taking. Here, it was investigated whether these deficits generalise to visuo-spatial perspective-taking. To test this, a convenience sample (N?=?268; n?=?62 high depressive symptoms; n?=?206 healthy control participants) completed a test-battery including measures of cognitive and visuo-spatial perspective-taking and closely matched cognitive and visuo-spatial control tasks. The results showed that individuals exhibiting high levels of depressive symptoms were specifically impaired on both perspective-taking tasks but performed equally well on the control tasks. Interventions to combat rigid thinking in depression are discussed.     

Eye tracking reveals the cost of switching between self and other perspectives in a visual perspective-taking task

Previous studies have shown that while people can rapidly and accurately compute their own and other people’s visual perspectives, they experience difficulty ignoring the irrelevant perspective when the two perspectives differ. We used the “avatar” perspective-taking task to examine the mechanisms that underlie these egocentric (i.e., interference from their own perspective) and altercentric (i.e., interference from the other person’s perspective) tendencies. Participants were eye-tracked as they verified the number of discs in a visual scene according to either their own or an on-screen avatar’s perspective. Crucially in some trials the two perspectives were inconsistent (i.e., each saw a different number of discs), while in others they were consistent. To examine the effect of perspective switching, performance was compared for trials that were preceded with the same versus a different perspective cue. We found that altercentric interference can be reduced or eliminated when participants stick with their own perspective across consecutive trials. Our eye-tracking analyses revealed distinct fixation patterns for self and other perspective taking, suggesting that consistency effects in this paradigm are driven by implicit mentalizing of what others can see, and not automatic directional cues from the avatar.     

Médicaments princeps vs. marché concurrentiel. De la motivation obligatoire,au contrôle des motifs médicaux ?

Physicians are free to prescribe the drugs they consider the best for their patients, and simultaneously required to seek healthcare’ cost-effectiveness — especially after patents expiry. While the physician choice of a given molecule is indisputable, French pharmacists gradually gained a large power to choose the brands on chemicals’ and biologics’ competitive markets. In May 2018, the highest judicial Court decided the physician must expressly motivate his exclusive choice of a given brand, and can not simply refuse the brand’ substitution by pharmacists. This unprecedented requirement is extrapolable to all substitutable drugs in France (registered generics and biosimilars). It raises the possible examination of medical choice motives — but in our opinion, it finishes, rather than it opens the arms race between prescribers and mandatory health insurers in France.     

语言加工过程中的观点采择及其认知机制

观点采择是指个体从他人或他人所处情境出发, 想象或推测他人观点与态度的心理过程。对相关研究综述发现: (1)观点采择是否存在自我中心偏向依然存在争论; (2)观点采择自我中心偏向不是始终存在的, 其原因可能是个体受到时间压力和特定类型任务的要求; (3)他人存在影响观点采择自我中心偏向, 并且这种影响是自动化的, 不受任务类型的影响; (4)观点采择的认知机制主要包括交互对齐、记忆提取和概率计算。未来研究需要: (1)整合已实现的计算模型; (2)进一步探究观点采择能力与心理理论的关系; (3)探究观点采择中私有信息的作用; (4)提高观点采择研究的生态效度; (5)采用不同的技术手段进行汇聚性验证。     

Tailoring Social Competence Interventions for Children with Learning Disabilities

Challenges in social competence are common in children with Learning Disabilities (LDs), particularly those who present with co-occurring mental health challenges (LD + MH). Social competence calls upon a complex set of skills, including social skills, perspective-taking abilities, and an understanding of the social environment. Successful enactment of these skills necessitates behavioral and emotion regulation, an area of weakness for many youth with LD + MH. Using a mixed-method design, the present study assessed the efficacy of a social competence group program for children with LD + MH (mean age = 11.4 years) in which group size, content, and structure are tailored to the child’s level of emotion regulation, information processing abilities, and social competence goals. Quantitative measures completed by parents and coded behavioral observations completed pre- and post-treatment indicated significant gains in initiation and engagement in positive social interactions, foundational skills that support improvement in social competence. Qualitative interviews with parents, children and teachers suggested improvements in social self-concept, initiation, and emotion regulation. Tailoring treatment to the child’s information processing and emotion regulation abilities, as well as ‘in the moment’ feedback, supported gains made and contributed to participants having a positive social experience. Directions for future research are discussed.     

Imagery perspective and source monitoring in imagination inflation

The present experiments suggest that imagery perspective—first person (own) versus third person (observer’s)—influences source-monitoring judgments. Imagination inflation (Garry, Manning, Loftus, &; Sherman, 1996) occurs when imaginary experience with events is mistaken for real experience. In Experiment 1, the perspective used to visualize real past events depended on memory test wording (“remember doing?” vs. “happened to you?”). Experiment 2 manipulated the perspective used to visually imagine counterfactual events and showed that the effect on imagination inflation depended on memory test wording. Imagination inflation was most likely when memory test wording encouraged participants to visualize real events from the same perspective as they had used to imagine counterfactual ones. Imagination inflation may result not simply from having created imaginary representations of events, but also from having created representations that match the decision criteria used in source monitoring.     

Children use nonverbal cues from an adult to evaluate peers

What factors contribute to children’s tendency to view individuals as having different traits and abilities? The present research tested whether young children are influenced by adults’ nonverbal behaviors when making inferences about peers. In Study 1, participants (aged 5–6 years) viewed multiple videos of interactions between a “teacher” and two “students”; all individuals were unfamiliar to participants. In each clip, the students behaved similarly, but the teacher did not: She either smiled, nodded, touched, or shook her head at one student, and she looked at the other student with a neutral expression. In Study 1, children tended to infer that students who received more positive behaviors from the teacher were smarter, nicer, and stronger. Study 2 pitted differences in the teacher’s behavior against differences in the students’ performance. When asked who was smarter, children selected lower-performing students who received more positive nonverbal cues from the teacher rather than higher-performing students who received less positive cues. These findings indicate that an authority figure’s nonverbal behaviors can influence children’s inferences about others and shed light on one mechanism guiding young children’s evaluations of people in their social world.     

The Effect of a Majority Group’s Perspective-Taking on Minority Helping

The current study examines how perspective-taking impacts on a majority group’s support for the governmental actions to help minority groups. The contextual background of the current study is tense relations between Sunnis representing a Muslim majority and Ahmadis and Shiites representing Muslim minorities in Indonesia, the world’s largest Muslim population. The results (N = 200) demonstrated that strong perspective-taking than weak perspective-taking triggered a greater minority helping, but only among the majority who strongly identified with their nation, but not with Sunnis. Moreover, participants in the strong perspective-taking condition than those in the weak perspective-taking condition demonstrated a greater willingness to perceptually include minorities as a representative group of national citizens, but not as Muslims, and in turn this perceived inclusion mediated the effect of perspective-taking on minority helping. We also hypothesised and found that such a mediating role of perceived inclusion of minorities as national citizens was more pronounced when the national identification and not Sunni identification was high. Finally, the inclusion of Muslim minorities as national citizens and minority helping increased identity enhancement of national identity, but these effects were more pronounced when the majority strongly identified with their nation, but not with Sunnis. These findings suggest that the merits of perspective-taking in promoting help on behalf of minority groups is not generic, but limited to a specific domain of superordinate category to which these minority groups are included, and to the nature of group identification.     

Sociality,Expression, and This Thing called Language

Davidson’s well-known language skepticism—the claim that there is no such a thing as a language—has recognizably Gricean underpinnings, some of which also underlie his continuity skepticism—the claim that there can be no philosophically illuminating account of the emergence of language and thought. My first aim in this paper is to highlight aspects of the complicated relationship between central Davidsonian and Gricean ideas concerning language. After a brief review of Davidson’s two skeptical claims and their Gricean underpinnings, I provide my own take on how Davidson’s continuity skepticism can be resisted consistently with his rejection of the Gricean priority claim, yet without giving up some of Grice’s own insights regarding the origins of meaning.     

Intrapersonal curiosity: Inquisitiveness about the inner self

Intrapersonal Curiosity (InC) involves inquisitively introspecting to better understand one’s inner self. A pool of 39 face-valid InC items was administered to 1005 participants, along with other curiosity, personality, self-awareness, self-regulation, and psychological well-being scales. Three InC factors with good model fit were identified, from which four-item (α ≥ .89) subscales were developed: “Understanding one’s Emotions and Motives,” “Reflecting On one’s Past,” and “Exploring one’s Identity and Purpose.” InC correlated positively with other measures of curiosity, evidencing convergence; weak correlations to conceptually unrelated constructs demonstrated divergence. Higher InC scores corresponded to perceptions of having less available self-knowledge, heightened sensitivity to others’ expressions, a greater tendency to privately introspect, increased distress, and more concern about how to best cope with worry over self-relevant threats.     

Friendly or just polite? The effect of self-esteem on attributions

Studied the effect of a person's self-esteem on his inferences about another person's feelings toward him. Fifty-six mule and female college student subjects of high or low chronic self-esteem (median split; modified version of Janis and Field's ‘Feelings of Inadequacy Scale’) received either a negative or a positive evaluation of themselves. They were told that the evaluation had been written by another subject who had acted either under ‘sincere’ instructions, which allowed him to give his own opinion, or under ‘role-playing’ instructions, which assigned him to write either a positive or a negative evaluation. The subject's take was to decide under which instruction his evaluation had been written. It was predicted from a self-concistency logic that low self-esteem subjects would attribute negative evaluations to ‘sincere’ and positive evaluations to ‘role-playing’ instructions, while high self-esteem subjects would make the reverse attributions. A significant self-esteem × evaluation positivity interaction (p <.01) supported this prediction.     

Moral migration: Desires to become more empathic predict changes in moral foundations

Many people want to change their personality traits—and research on volitional change has documented their success in doing so. In the present study, we examine whether people also wish to change their levels of empathy, and whether these desires precede shifts in dispositional empathy and morality over a 15-week period. We recorded participants’ change goals, followed by weekly measurements of empathic concern and perspective-taking, as well as moral foundations. Results indicated that most participants wished to cultivate empathic concern and, especially, perspective-taking. Those who sought to develop these qualities tended to actually do so at a faster rate than their peers who did not—and, as a consequence, also drifted toward a characteristically liberal, individualizing morality.     

Age of avatar modulates the altercentric bias in a visual perspective-taking task: ERP and behavioral evidence

Despite being able to rapidly and accurately infer their own and other peoples’ visual perspectives, healthy adults experience difficulty ignoring the irrelevant perspective when the two perspectives are in conflict; they experience egocentric and altercentric interference. We examine for the first time how the age of an observed person (adult vs. child avatar) influences adults’ visual perspective-taking, particularly the degree to which they experience interference from their own or the other person’s perspective. Participants completed the avatar visual perspective-taking task, in which they verified the number of discs in a visual scene according to either their own or an on-screen avatar’s perspective (Experiments 1 and 2) or only from their own perspective (Experiment 3), where the two perspectives could be consistent or in conflict. Age of avatar was manipulated between (Experiment 1) or within (Experiments 2 and 3) participants, and interference was assessed using behavioral (Experiments 1–3) and ERP (Experiment 1) measures. Results revealed that altercentric interference is reduced or eliminated when a child avatar was present, suggesting that adults do not automatically compute a child avatar’s perspective. We attribute this pattern to either enhanced visual processing for own-age others or an inference on reduced mental awareness in younger children. The findings argue against a purely attentional basis for the altercentric effect, and instead support an account where both mentalising and directional processes modulate automatic visual perspective-taking, and perspective-taking effects are strongly influenced by experimental context.     

Listeners invest in an assumed other's perspective despite cognitive cost

We explored perspective-taking behavior in a visuospatial mental rotation task that requires listeners to adopt an egocentric or “other-centric” frame of reference. In the current task, objects could be interpreted relative to the point-of-view of the listener (egocentric) or of a simulated partner (other-centric). Across three studies, we evaluated participants’ willingness to consider and act on partner-specific information, showing that a partner’s perceived ability to contribute to collaborative mutual understanding modulated participants’ perspective-taking behavior, either by increasing other-centric (Study 2) or egocentric (Study 3) responding. Moreover, we show that a large proportion of participants resolved referential ambiguity in terms of their partner’s perspective, even when it was more cognitively difficult to do so (as tracked by online movement measures), and when the presence of a social partner had to be assumed (Studies 1 and 2). In addition, participants continued to consider their partner’s perspective during trials where visual perspectives were shared. Our results show that participants will thoroughly invest in either an other-centric or egocentric mode of responding, and that perspective-taking strategies are not always dictated by minimizing processing demands, but by more potent (albeit subtle) factors in the social context.     

女大学生中共情对自我中心和利他行为关系的调节作用

目的：考察在女大学生中特质与状态共情对个体自我中心特质与利他行为之间的关系。方法：研究一采用问卷调查考察特质共情对自我中心特质与利他行为倾向的调节作用; 研究二采用行为实验 (自我中心特质高或低的女大学生) 来考察启动的状态共情对真实利他行为的影响。结果：共情特质/状态会与自我中心特质交互作用来影响个体的利他行为/倾向。结论：高共情状态/特质的被试其自我中心会降低利他行为/倾向, 而低共情状态或特质的被试无此倾向。     

Making related errors facilitates learning,but learners do not know it

Producing an error, so long as it is followed by corrective feedback, has been shown to result in better retention of the correct answers than does simply studying the correct answers from the outset. The reasons for this surprising finding, however, have not been investigated. Our hypothesis was that the effect might occur only when the errors produced were related to the targeted correct response. In Experiment 1, participants studied either related or unrelated word pairs, manipulated between participants. Participants either were given the cue and target to study for 5 or 10 s or generated an error in response to the cue for the first 5 s before receiving the correct answer for the final 5 s. When the cues and targets were related, error-generation led to the highest correct retention. However, consistent with the hypothesis, no benefit was derived from generating an error when the cue and target were unrelated. Latent semantic analysis revealed that the errors generated in the related condition were related to the target, whereas they were not related to the target in the unrelated condition. Experiment 2 replicated these findings in a within-participants design. We found, additionally, that people did not know that generating an error enhanced memory, even after they had just completed the task that produced substantial benefits.     

Making remembering more memorable*

Memory retrieval is a cognitive operation that itself can be remembered or forgotten, with potentially important consequences. To study memory for prior remembering, we had participants first study target words (e.g., bark) alongside semantically related cue words (e.g., dog). Then, on Test 1, participants retrieved targets in response to either the study cue or a changed cue that was semantically related to a homograph of the target (e.g., birch). Finally, on Test 2, participants retrieved all targets in response to the original study cues, and participants judged whether targets were previously retrieved on Test 1. As in previous research, cue change on Test 1 rendered target retrievals less memorable, suggesting context changes harm memory for prior remembering. We hypothesised that the negative effect of context change could be ameliorated by reminding participants of the original study cues during Test 1. We had participants either retrieve (Experiments 1 and 3, Ns?=?46 and 62) or view (Experiment 2, N?=?118) the study cue following each target retrieval. Reminding significantly reduced the negative effect of cue change, with self-generation being especially potent. This indicates that reminding can make remembering more memorable in the face of context change.     

Perspective taking instructions and self-other overlap: Different motives for helping

In two studies (N’s = 57 and 115), we demonstrate that type of perspective-taking instruction (“imagine self” vs. “imagine other”) differentially affects two motives for helping: self-other overlap and empathic concern. Imagine-self instructions produce greater self-other overlap than imagine-target and objective instructions, while both types of perspective-taking instruction promote empathic concern relative to an objective condition. In Study 2, imagine-self instructions indirectly increased the likelihood of helping via empathic concern and self-other overlap, while imagine-target instructions led indirectly to greater helping only through empathic concern. We discuss how different perspective-taking instructions may implicate different emotional and motivational paths to increasing helping.     

Student autonomy and course value: The unique and cumulative roles of various teacher practices

High school students (N = 278) in 30 classrooms with ten teachers (grades 9 through 12) reported on teacher practices in a single course, autonomy need satisfaction, and value for that course. Using hierarchical linear modeling, results indicated that student perceptions of teachers providing choices and engaging in perspective-taking to a greater extent uniquely related to greater autonomy need satisfaction. Subsequent analyses suggested that students’ autonomy need satisfaction was greatest when they perceived that teachers also identified the importance and usefulness of coursework and considered students’ interests and opinions in course activities. Provision of choice and perspective-taking related to greater course value through autonomy need satisfaction, while identifying the importance and usefulness of course activities had only direct positive effects on course value. The pattern of total, direct, and indirect effects was slightly different depending on the component of course value. Results underscore the importance of including provision of choice in conceptualizations of teacher autonomy support.