Beyond the evil empire: Horseplay and aggression

The dominant mode of studying the antecedents of human aggression in psychology has been to look for these precursors in negative life events, for example, being physically punished, observing models using aggressive means, or experiencing forms of privation or frustration. In contrast, within the ethological literature, certain playful activities, in particular “play fighting,” have been interpreted as crucial precursors of later social activities, both aggressive and nonaggressive. Among humans, horseplay, which may be considered synonymous with play fighting, has only rarely been mentioned in psychological literature and scarcely ever in relation to aggression. Within this study, college students rated the extent to which they had engaged in horseplay and in aggressive acts with same-sex friends and boyfriends or girlfriends over the past 3 years. Analyses indicated that a broad range of playful and aggressive activities was reported by a large proportion of the sample. Results also indicated strong relationships between the tendency to horseplay and to aggress. The relationship was strongest for men with men friends and for women with boyfriends. In general, having steady relationships increased the likelihood that both horseplay and aggressive acts would occur. Weekend alcohol consumption was related to playful activities; heavier use correlated with greater aggressive activities of men with men only. The study suggests that it is useful to broaden the base for conceptualizing aggression to take into account the ways in which playful and friendly activities can facilitate those that are regarded as antisocial and aggressive.     

Reexamining the acquisition of sex roles: A social interactionist approach

Recent empirical information has challenged existing theories of early sex-role acquisition and stimulated theoretical interest in this process. A social interactionist theory of early sex-role development is outlined, which incorporates the insights of existing theories while moving beyond their limitations. This theory stresses the influence of sex labels on social interactions, social interactional experience on the acquisition of gender identity, and the active participation of the child in his or her own sex-role development. The differences and similarities between the social interactionist and other theories of sex-role development are noted. The necessity for observational studies of naturally occurring interactions and theoretical responsiveness to the findings of such studies is also noted.     

Anxious attachment and relationship processes: an interactionist perspective

Relationship processes in adult romantic relationships have been vastly studied under the aegis of attachment theory. Attachment theory is interactionist in nature, proposing that individual differences in levels of both attachment avoidance and anxiety predict an individual's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors in contexts that activate attachment concerns. A growing body of research is beginning to systematically test the conditions in which individual differences in attachment orientations both predict and fail to predict relationship processes. In this article, we focus on anxious attachment and review a program of research showing that the potentially destructive relationship processes typically observed in highly anxious individuals do not always appear in neutral or benign contexts, or when security needs are met. We argue that research needs to more thoroughly investigate the conditions that should, or should not, activate attachment concerns and thus result in links between individual differences in attachment orientations and relationship processes.     

Strains in experimental social psychology: a textual anaylsis of the development of experimentation in social psychology

A textual analysis of post-World War II social psychology methodology manuals and handbook chapters on "methods" indicates that the introduction of the experimental method was enforced and gradually strengthened through the use of scientific rhetoric and the minimization of alternative research strategies. As a consequence, by the 1960s experimentation had become such an established identifying feature of psychological social psychology that the acceptability of ideas in the field came to depend largely on the ability of authors to couch them in the language of the experiment. Text writers continually shored up the defenses of scientific legitimacy and denigrated all other types of argument. We explore three sources of tension or strains evident as contradictions in these texts: (1) between a rational experimenter's carefully following prescribed, logic-generated scientific practices and the investigator's artfully or intuitively designing research; (2) between social psychologists' missionary activities of proselytizing the experiment as the primary research method and social psychologists' apologies and insecurities expressed about using experiments; and (3) between the treatment of participants as docile and submissive versus portraying them as underhanded and damaging to the outcome of the research. In addition, we briefly reexamine the strain (4) between sober scientific experimentation and a playful "fun and games" approach to experimentation (Lubek & Stam, 1995).     

Role-playing as an experimental strategy in social psychology

It is argued that the efficacy of role playing as an experimental strategy should be assessed in terms of its ability to resolve the problems of experimentation in social psychology. Via an epistemological and methodological analysis of the laboratory experiment in social psychology, it is argued that ‘active-experimental’ role playing constitutes a promising experimental strategy, because it can potentially overcome the fundamental experimental problem that arise in virtue of the relational nature of social psychological phenomena. It is stressed that in the end the question of the efficacy of role playing as an experimental strategy is an empirical one, but also that most empirical evaluations are inadequate for two reasons. Most of the role playing groups lack realism and involvement, and the congruence of results in role playing studies of deception experiments (whose validity is questionable) is uncritically taken as both the standard and the criterion for the efficacy of role playing. Both role playing and deception techniques should be assessed in terms of their capacity to achieve experimental realism.     

Beyond good and evil: the time-course of neural activity elicited by specific picture content

The present study examined electrocortical evidence for a negativity bias, focusing on the impact of specific picture content on a range of event-related potentials (ERPs). To this end, ERPs were recorded while 67 participants viewed a variety of pictures from the International Affective Picture System. Examination of broad categories (i.e., pleasant, neutral, unpleasant) found no evidence for a negativity bias in two early components, the N1 and the Early Posterior Negativity (EPN), but revealed that unpleasant images did elicit a larger late positive potential (LPP) than pleasant pictures. However, images of erotica and mutilation elicited comparable LPP responses, as did affiliative and threatening images. Exciting (i.e., sports) images and disgusting images elicited smaller LPPs than other emotional images, similar to neutral images containing people-which were associated with the largest LPPs among neutral pictures. When these three anomalous categories (exciting, disgusting, and scenes with people) were excluded, unpleasant images no longer elicited a larger LPP than pleasant images. Thus, including exciting images in pleasant ERP averages disproportionately reduces the LPP. The present findings are discussed in light of the motivational significance of specific picture subtypes.     

Social spatial cognition: social distance dynamics as an identifier of social interactions

We suggest that socio-spatial behavior, which is an interaction between social and spatial cognition, can be viewed as a set of excursions that originate and end in close proximity to another individual(s). We present an extension of earlier studies that perceived spatial behavior in individual animals as a series of excursions originating from a particular location. We measured here the momentary distance between two individuals (social distance) to differentiate among eight possible types of social excursion originating in a state of proximity between excursion-participants. The defined excursion types are based on whether or not the excursion initiator also concludes the excursion, whether or not the excursion starts and ends at the same location, and the dynamics of the distance between excursion participants. We validated this approach to socio-spatial behavior as a set of excursions using it to analyze the behavior of the two sexes in rodents, of normal vs. stereotyped rats, as well as of different rodent species. Each of these groups displays a prevalent excursion type that reflects a distinct social dynamics. Our approach offers a useful and comprehensive tool for studying socio-spatial cognition, and can also be applied to distinguish among different social situations in rodents and other animals.

     

Shareability: The social psychology of epistemology

Psychologists and cognitive scientists interested in the nature of internal representations of human knowledge often use observable regularities or structures to infer what the innate constraints on those representations must be like. It is possible, however, that certain structures might come about only when a group of people share a knowledge domain. Furthermore, it is possible that there are analyzable constraints on knowledge structures that emerge when knowledge is being shared. Such constraints are referred to in this paper as “shareability” constraints. A number of examples of observable structures in human knowledge are discussed in terms of shareability constraints. An attempt is made to determine which sorts of structures are most shareable, and how those structures may differ from the sorts of structures that are easily represented by the individual mind but not easily shared between minds.     

Personally and socially constructing selves: Toward an increasingly social constructive psychology

Advances in Personal Construct Psychology (Vol. 1) by G. J. Neimeyer and R. A. Neimeyer (Eds.) Greenwich, CT: JAI Press, 1990     

Situations matter: teaching the Lewinian link between social psychology and rehabilitation psychology

A little-recognized fact is that social psychology and rehabilitation psychology share a common theoretical ancestry in the situation perspective of Kurt Lewin. Theory and research in both fields assumes that situational influences often override the impact of personal factors, including dispositions. Situational analyses led to the development of a variety of cognitive explanations capturing people's phenomenal accounts for the causes of behavior and concomitant interpretation of social problems. Teachers can explore reasons why, despite the fields' having a shared theoretical perspective and topics of common interest (e.g., attitudes, prejudice, discrimination), little scholarly intradisciplinary contact currently occurs between them.     

Social psychology and social networks: Individuals and social systems

Social psychology and social network research are both centrally concerned with human sociality. Despite some historically significant interactions between the two, these areas of investigation have not been usefully deployed together in recent research endeavours. The present paper attempts to bring out some points of both theoretical and methodological contentions, to characterize the gap between them, to traverse briefly the trajectories of their historical development, and to provide some concrete instances of these differences. Intellectual resources available to Asian social psychology are reviewed, which may help bridge the gap between the two areas of research. We conclude by calling for a greater integration of social psychology and social network perspectives in future research.