When are nonwords easy to see?

The influences of presentation mode (mixed vs. blocked trials) and target variability on the detection of targets in words and in random letter strings were examined. The results indicated that there was a substantial word superiority effect in mixed lists of words and nonwords, but that this effect was eliminated when pure lists of words and nonwords were compared. Also, target variability affected the shape of the serial position curve. When subjects searched repeatedly for a single target, the serial position curve had only a significant linear component. However, when the identity of the target varied from trial to trial, the serial position curve had a significant quartic component (i.e.. it was M-shaped). These results were interpreted in terms of strategies and feature learning.     

Sometimes stories sell: When are narrative appeals most likely to work?

Research has demonstrated that narratives can be effective in eliciting attitude change, especially when recipients become transported into the narrative. In three studies, we addressed whether some people are predisposed to be influenced by narratives and whether narrative and rhetorical appeals are differentially effective for different people. In Study 1, participants read an experimental or a control narrative, and completed measures of attitudes, need for affect (NFA), need for cognition (NFC), transportation, and transportability. The results revealed that NFA and NFC were positively correlated with transportation and transportability. In Study 2, participants read either a narrative appeal or a rhetorical appeal about cervical cancer and completed a measure of attitudes and the individual difference constructs. Study 3 was a replication of Study 2 using a different topic (organ donation). In both studies, the results revealed a consistent pattern of correlations among the individual difference measures. Further, we found that although the narrative and rhetorical appeals were judged to be of equal efficacy, the persuasiveness of the narrative appeal differed as function of individual differences in NFA and NFC. The implications for narrative persuasion are discussed. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

When are adaptive strategies most predictive of psychopathology?

In recent work, we showed that putatively adaptive emotion regulation strategies, such as reappraisal and acceptance, have a weaker association with psychopathology than putatively maladaptive strategies, such as rumination, suppression, and avoidance (e.g., Aldao & Nolen-Hoeksema, 2010; Aldao, Nolen-Hoeksema, & Schweizer, 2010). In this investigation, we examined the interaction between adaptive and maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in the prediction of psychopathology symptoms (depression, anxiety, and alcohol problems) concurrently and prospectively. We assessed trait emotion regulation and psychopathology symptoms in a sample of community residents at Time 1 (N = 1,317) and then reassessed psychopathology at Time 2 (N = 1,132). Cross-sectionally, we found that the relationship between adaptive strategies and psychopathology symptoms was moderated by levels of maladaptive strategies: adaptive strategies had a negative association with psychopathology symptoms only at high levels of maladaptive strategies. In contrast, adaptive strategies showed no prospective relationship to psychopathology symptoms either alone or in interaction with maladaptive strategies. We discuss the implications of this investigation for future work on the contextual factors surrounding the deployment of emotion regulation strategies.     

When are puppies receptive to emotion-induced human chemosignals? The cases of fear and happiness

Animal Cognition - We report an observational, double-blind, experimental study that examines the effects of human emotional odors on puppies between 3 and 6 months and adult dogs...     

When to Self-Correct?: A Comparison of Two Procedures on Spelling Performance

We compared the effects of two self-correction procedures on the spelling performance of 5 elementary school students with learning disabilities. Previous studies consistently have demonstrated self-correction to be more effective than traditional approaches to spelling instruction. However, we could find no single-subject design experiments analyzing the procedural details of how or when self-correction should be conducted to be most effective. For 4 days each week students practiced a list of 20 spelling words by listening to an audiotape on which the weekly list was dictated and writing the words. For half of each week's words, students checked and self-corrected after attempting each word; for the other half of the list, the students self-corrected after attempting all 10 words. An alternating treatments design showed self-correction after each word to be more effective for acquisition of new spelling words as measured by end-of-the-week tests for all 5 students, and maintenance of previously studied spelling words as measured by 1-week maintenance tests for 4 of the 5 students.     

When are AIDS patients to blame for their disease? Effects of patients' sexual orientation and mode of transmission

This study examined three factors affecting college students' attributions of blame for an AIDS patient's disease: sexual orientation of the patient, mode of HIV transmission, and the sex of the subject. 148 subjects read one of six vignettes describing an hypothetical AIDS patient who was described as either an heterosexual or an homosexual man who contracted HIV through one of three avenues: blood transfusion, sexual contact, or IV drug use. The homosexual AIDS patient was considered more to blame for his illness than the heterosexual AIDS patient, but only when mode of transmission was sexual contact. In addition, mode of HIV transmission was a significant factor in attributions of responsibility, as the patient who contracted HIV through a blood transfusion was rated as less responsible than the patient who contracted HIV through sexual behavior or IV drug use. Women consistently rated the AIDS patient as less responsible than did men.     

The effects of anxiety on intellectual performance: When and why are they found?

An experiment tested the effects on intelligence and creativity test performance of two 16PF primary anxiety traits, and general mood and activation components of state anxiety. Two attentional theories of the deleterious effects of anxiety on performance were also tested. Subjects were 80 male students. Trait and state components of anxiety appeared to affect creativity test performance independently. Intelligence test performance was insensitive to anxiety variables. The O anxiety primary factor was significantly negatively correlated with creativity test performance, but the unique variance of the other anxiety primary (Q4) was associated with higher levels of performance. Neither specific attentional theory was supported, but data were generally compatible with “dual-mechanism” theories of anxiety, which posit separate detrimental and sometimes facilitative effects of anxiety on performance.     

Perceptions of Rational Discrimination: When Do People Attempt to Justify Race-Based Prejudice?

This research investigated the role of situational context and personality factors in moderating perceptions of race-based decisions made by others. White participants were presented with a short story that described a taxi driver who refuses to pick up a Black man. The primary dependent variable concerned the perceived rationality of the taxi driver's decision. Analyses of these perceptions revealed 2 main findings, both of which involved need for cognition (Cacioppo, Petty, & Morris, 1983). First, need for cognition moderated the effects of participants' attitudes toward Blacks, such that anti-Black participants judged the taxi driver's decision as more rational than did pro-Black participants, but this was only true when participants also scored high in need for cognition. Second, participants who were experimentally induced to think about the task in an "analytical" fashion also judged the taxi driver as relatively rational, but this again was only true for participants who scored high in need for cognition. The implications of these results for a controversial set of arguments regarding rational discrimination by the social critic Dinesh D'Souza (1995) are discussed.     

Choice or circumstance: When are women penalized for their success?

Past research shows that successful women in traditionally masculine roles often experience interpersonal penalties not sustained by similarly successful men. In two studies we, addressed the question of how the perceived motivation of women for counter-stereotypical positions affects whether such penalties occur. Specifically, we investigated whether women who are successful in male gender-typed roles are less likely to be penalized when their attainment of the role is due to circumstance than to focused and intentional goal pursuit. In Study 1, we compared reactions to women and men who had been successful in a leadership role on a STEM project and showed that when a woman had been arbitrarily assigned to the leadership role she incurred fewer interpersonal penalties than when she had actively pursued it. In Study 2, we replicated and extended these findings by demonstrating similar effects for a successful woman in a financial position when she had attained her position due to a series of lucky breaks rather than purposeful goal-directed efforts. The results of these studies support the idea that the perception that women have actively chosen to pursue counter-normative goals plays an important role in determining whether they are penalized for their success in traditionally male domains. It was not simply being in the role, but how she got there, that determined whether the derogation and dislike shown to be directed at successful women in past research occurred.     

When are moods most likely to influence consumers' product preferences? The role of mood focus and perceived relevance of moods

This program of research examined the hypothesis that moods are most likely to be used as a source of information in making evaluations and choices when consumers both focus on their moods (i.e., acknowledge and pay attention to their feelings) and perceive that moods are a relevant source of information for forming judgments. Support for this prediction was obtained when the relevance of moods was examined by manipulating relevance instructions, varying advertising cues, and manipulating product type. Further, the boundary conditions under which the combination of mood focus and perceived relevance is most influential on product preferences are identified.     

When are social judgments made? Evidence for the spontaneousness of trait inferences

Do people make trait inferences, even without intentions or instructions, at the encoding stage of processing behavioral information? Tulving's encoding specificity paradigm (Tulving & Thomson, 1973) was adapted for two recall experiments. Under memory instructions only, subjects read sentences describing people performing actions that implied traits. Later, subjects recalled each sentence under one of three cuing conditions: (a) a dispositional cue (e.g., generous), (b) a strong, nondispositional semantic associate to an important sentence word; or (c) no cue. Recall was best when cued by the disposition words. Subjects were unaware of having made trait inferences. Interpreted in terms of encoding specificity, these results indicate that subjects unintentionally made trait inferences at encoding. This suggests that attributions may be made spontaneously, as part of the routine comprehension of social events.     

Why are moderators of self-other agreement difficult to establish?

Agreement between the self and other rated personality profiles was studied in two samples involving 11,096 speakers of two languages, Dutch and Estonian, who completed two different personality questionnaires, the NEO-PI-3 and HEXACO-PI-R. An outstanding agreement was achieved in the most occasions: in only 4–6% of dyadic pairs was the correlation between two randomly paired profiles higher than the actually observed correlation between true pairs. As in previous studies, we found that age and sex of participants and length of acquaintance had no significant effect on the level of self-other agreement. However, intimate knowledge helped married and unmarried couples in both samples be more accurate in their personality judgments; family members, in turn, had knowledge that made them more accurate than two people who were just acquaintances or friends. We believe that these outcomes can be explained by the contention that the judgment of another’s personality is a relatively simple task, which is accomplishable for most people most of the time. In other words, because judging another person’s personality is an easy task, we are not able to determine “good targets,” “good judges,” or “good traits.” Perhaps it is only “good information” which determines the closeness of the target-judge relationship, and which has a small but reliable impact on the level of self-other agreement. This explains why it is so difficult to find individual differences in the ability to judge another person’s personality.     

Gender equality perceptions of preservice teachers: are they ready to teach it?

Social Psychology of Education - Ensuring gender equality in education is among the Sustainable Development Goals specified by the United Nations. Ensuring gender equality in teaching/learning...     

Metacognitive monitoring during criterion learning: When and why are judgments accurate?

Research on metacognitive judgment accuracy during retrieval practice has increased in recent years. However, prior work had not systematically evaluated item-level judgment accuracy and the underlying bases of judgment accuracy in a criterion-learning paradigm (in which items are practiced until correctly recalled during encoding). Understanding these relationships during criterion learning has important theoretical implications for self-regulated learning frameworks, and also has applied implications for student learning: If the factors that influence metacognitive judgments are not predictive of subsequent test performance, students may make poor decisions during self-regulated learning. In the present experiments, participants engaged in test–restudy practice until items were recalled correctly. Once a given item reached criterion, participants made an immediate or delayed judgment of learning (JOL) for the item. A final cued-recall test occurred 30 min later. We examined judgment accuracy (the relationship between JOLs and test performance) and the underlying bases of judgment accuracy by evaluating cue utilization (the relationship between cues and JOLs) and cue diagnosticity (the relationship between cues and test performance). Immediate JOLs were only modestly related to subsequent test performance, and further analyses revealed that the cues related to JOLs were only weakly predictive of test accuracy. However, delaying JOLs improved both the accuracy of the JOLs and the diagnosticity of the cues that influenced judgments.