TO NOD OR NOT TO NOD: AN OBSERVATIONAL STUDY OF NONVERBAL COMMUNICATION AND STATUS IN FEMALE AND MALE COLLEGE STUDENTS

Gender studies show that women and men communicate using different styles, but may use either gender style if there are situational status differences. Considering the universal gesture of head nodding as a submissive form of expression, this study investigated head nodding by observing female and male college students in positions of subordinate and equal status. We observed head nodding ( N = 452) in classroom interactions between professor–student and student–student dyads. Overall, women nodded more than men and students nodded more to professors speaking than peers speaking. In addition, female and male students nodded equally to professors speaking, but men nodded less to peers speaking than did women. Thus, both men and women attended to the status and not the gender of the speaker. Future research using varying contexts should further examine the effects of dominance, context, and gender.     

Individual Participation in Organizational Information Commons

This research extended earlier public goods research on individual incentives to use an organizational information commons that was based in Marwell and Oliver's (1993) collective action model. A revised theoretical model that incorporated team‐level social influence and technology‐specific competence was proposed. The model was tested using online survey data from 150 individuals in 13 work groups across 5 organizations. The research demonstrated that perceived team member behavior and technology‐specific competence were positively related to individual use of intranets, over and above the collective level influences modeled in earlier research. These findings supported a more “socialized” model of individuals' motivations to participate in organizational information sharing via collective repositories and suggested that management could boost levels of intranet usage through group level social influence and technology‐specific training.     

The Effect of Anxiety Sensitivity and Gender on the Experience of Pain

The association between negative affectivity (NA) and health complaints is thought to reflect a stronger attentional focus on bodily sensations in high NA persons. Perceiving these sensations as rather threatening, high NA persons may scan their internal environment for impending signs of pain and trouble. Using an on-line registration of attentional deployment, we tested whether high NA persons were allocating more attentional resources to internal sensations and less to external stimuli compared to low NA persons. High and low NA participants (N = 68) performed a Stroop-like primary task during a number of trials in which: (1) only an internal; (2) only an external; or (3) both an internal and an external stimulus could occur. Internal stimuli consisted of 7.5% carbon dioxide administrations, causing slight increases in ventilation. An increase in time interval between successive tones served as the external stimulus. Participants were asked to press a button when they noticed one of both events. Results showed that high NA participants: (1) detected the effects of a first respiratory stimulus faster; (2) performed poorer on the tone task when anticipating a respiratory challenge; (3) performed slower on the Stroop task during respiratory stimuli. These findings may indicate that high NA participants show a stronger attentional bias to internal sensations.