Is Love Seen as Different for the Obese?1

In order to assess how actual obesity and stereotypes of obesity affect perceptions of love, 222 college students completed an anonymous questionnaire concerning their experiences with love, including the Love Attitudes Scale (LAS) of Hendrick and Hendrick (1986). They then saw a photograph of a male or female who appeared fat or normal weight and responded to an identical questionnaire as they thought the pictured person would. Subjects' obesity was unrelated to dating or marital experience, self-esteem, or LAS subscales. However, fatter stimulus persons were judged to be less attractive, lower in self-esteem, less likely to be dating, less Erotic, less Ludic, and more Manic on the LAS, and to deserve a fatter, uglier love partner. Gender differences were similar to those found in previous studies, with gender stereotypes generally reflecting an exaggeration of actual sex differences. These findings were consistent with the theory that obese people are stereotyped as having fewer resources to contribute to a relationship.     

Simple software for impedance cardiography

Simple software techniques for the digital analysis of impedance cardiography data are described. The software digitizes simultaneous impedance and ECG signals, averages these signals over time on a beat-by-beat basis, processes the averaged signals to locate relevant features, and computes heart rate, stroke volume, and cardiac output for the averaged period. The source and executable code, written in Pascal for a PDP-11 with standard peripheral addressing and a VT125 graphics terminal, is available from the authors.     

Enhancing the prediction of self-handicapping

Levels of test anxiety, Type A and Type B coronary-prone behavior, fear of failure, and covert self-esteem were studied as predictors of self-handicapping performance attributions for college women who were placed in either a high- (N = 49) or low- (N = 49) evaluative test or task situation. We hypothesized that test anxiety. Type A or Type B level, and their interaction would account for reliable variance in the prediction of self-handicapping. However, we also theorized that underlying high fear of failure and low covert self-esteem would explain the self-handicapping claims of test-anxious and Type A subjects. The results indicated that only high levels of test anxiety and high levels of covert self-esteem were related to women's self-handicapping attributions.     

Fathers and fetuses

Harris postulates that in certain instances it would be morally impermissible for a woman to have an abortion because it would be a wrongful harm to the father and a violation of his autonomy. He constructs and analyzes five cases chosen to elucidate the moral issues involved and concludes that, for a man to lay claim to the fetus being his in a sense that the mother is obligated to respect, the fetus must be the result of his having pursued a legitimate interest in procreation in a morally legitimate way. When a man has satisfied the requirements of autonomy both for himself and for his sexual partner in regard to the interest in procreation, the woman has a prima facie obligation to him not to harm the fetus. Therefore, unless there is some contravening moral consideration that overrides this obligation, the abortion of the fetus is morally impermissible.     

World isolation and meaning in segmentation

The effect of meaning and isolation of words on the acquisition of segmentation of words in sentences was examined with an artificial miniature language composed of Mandarin Chinese quasi-elements. Forty undergraduate students participated in one of four groups: Word No Meaning, Word Meaning, Sentence No Meaning, or Sentence Meaning. In each group the subjects listened to the same set of words, either as isolated words or in sentences. Additionally, the meaning groups saw accompanying pictorial representations of isolated words or sentences. Pretest and posttest assessments indicated that isolation of words is a significant factor in word segmentation for an initial word set restricted in size when meaning is not provided. When meaning is provided, the isolation of words apparently does not influence word segmentation performance.     

Personality moderators of interpersonal expectancy effects: Replication of Harris and Rosenthal (1986)

Personality moderators of interpersonal expectancy effects were examined in a replication and extension of the findings of Harris and Rosenthal (1986). Twenty-eight undergraduates, assigned the role of “interviewer,” interacted with 89 undergraduates during several 15-min getting acquainted sessions. Interviewers had been led to believe that the subjects they were interviewing were extremely high, average, or extremely low with respect to shyness. Prior to the sessions, all subjects completed a battery of personality measures. Analyses suggested mixed support for an interviewer expectancy effect, with stronger bias effects being found for interviewers given Shy vs Average expectancies than for those given Not Shy vs Average expectancies. Greater bias effects were found for interviewers who scored higher on PRF Achievement, Order, self-rated expressiveness and lower on self-rated shyness. Interviewees who scored higher on Achievement, Dogmatism, Endurance, and Cognitive Structure showed significantly lower bias effects. These findings are interpreted as indicating the importance of the rigidity of cognitive schemas in determing whether or not an expectancy effect will occur.     

Family system variables and the health status of adolescents with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus

This study investigated the associations between important dimensions of family relations and the metabolic control of adolescents with insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM). Participants were 94 intact families (mother, father, and adolescent) of adolescents with IDDM. Metabolic control was determined by the adolescents' level of HbA(1c), and family relations were assessed with the Marital Adjustment Scale and the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Evaluation Scales-II. Although zero-order correlations showed that good metabolic control was associated with high family cohesion, family flexibility, and high marital satisfaction, hierarchical regression analyses revealed that these associations were considerably attenuated when participant demographic variables, especially the duration of IDDM, were controlled. Follow-up analyses showed that the associations between family relations and metabolic control were mediated by the duration of IDDM. Under conditions of short duration, there were strong associations between family relations and metabolic control. As duration lengthened, however, these associations decreased substantially. These results suggest that the associations between family relations and health are relatively complex in this sample of adolescents with IDDM.     

The weight of expectation: Implicit,rather than explicit,prior expectations drive the size–weight illusion

In the size–weight illusion, small objects feel heavier than identically weighted larger objects. This illusion is thought to be a consequence of how one's prior expectations can influence conscious perception—lifters expect the large object to outweigh the small object and subsequently experience it as feeling lighter than they expected it to be. Here, we directly examined how a familiar object's identity can affect how heavy someone expects it to be, and how these expectations will influence subsequent perceptions of heaviness. We describe two novel weight illusions induced with familiar objects. In one condition, participants judged the weight of a set of similar-size objects with very different natural weights (a polystyrene sphere, a tennis ball, and a cricket ball), which had all been adjusted to weigh the same amount as one another. In this condition, participants experienced a small, but reliable, weight illusion, with the lightest looking ball feeling heavier than the heaviest looking ball. In the other condition, participants judged the weights of a different set of balls, which were different sizes, but similar natural weights, to one another (a golf ball, a foam soccer ball, and an inflated beach ball). Again, participants experienced a perceptual illusion, but in the opposite direction. Surprisingly, participant's perceptions matched, rather than contrasted with, their explicit expectations such that, even though they expected the golf ball to outweigh the beach ball they perceived the golf ball as feeling heavier than the beach ball. The effect of object mass appeared to dominate the effect of conscious expectations, suggesting that contrasting expectations of heaviness are not necessary to experience weight illusions and that current models of this robust perceptual effect must be revised.     

Keep it local (and final): Remnant preferences in “let alone” ellipsis

The let alone construction (John can't run a mile, let alone a marathon) differs from standard coordination structures (with and or but) by requiring ellipsis of the second conjunct—for example, a marathon is the remnant of an elided clause [ John run a marathon]. In support of an ellipsis account, a corpus study of British and American English finds that let alone exhibits a Locality bias, as the second conjunct preferentially contrasts with the nearest lexical item of the same syntactic type. Two self-paced reading studies show that the Locality bias is active during online processing, but must be reconciled with indicators of semantic contrast and discourse information. Further, a sentence-rating study shows that the Locality bias interacts with a Finality bias that favours placing the let alone phrase at the end of a clause, which sometimes necessitates a nonlocal contrast. Together, the results show how a general bias in ellipsis for local contrasts is affected by discourse demands, such as the need for scalar contrast imposed by let alone, thereby offering a window into how possibly divergent syntactic and discourse constraints impact sentence processing.     

Person Perception in Young Children Across Two Cultures

To adult humans, the task of forming an impression of another social being seems effortless and even obligatory. In 2 experiments, we offer the first systematic cross-cultural examination of impression formation in European American and East Asian preschool children. Children across both cultures easily inferred basic personality traits, such as nice and mean, about unfamiliar peers from behavioral information, whether or not they were specifically prompted to do so. Children were able to identify peers they had seen before, to remember the traits associated with these peers, and to anticipate future behaviors consistent with the traits they had attributed. Thus, for basic traits, the ability to make behavior-to-behavior predictions, via an intervening trait inference, is present in young children across diverse cultures.