Cognitive processes in person perception: Retrieval of personality trait and behavioral information

The processes people use to retrieve information about another person's behavior and personality were investigated. Subjects viewed different lengths of segments from videotaped sequences of actors' behaviors. The subjects' reaction times to questions about the actors' behaviors and about personality traits were both an increasing function of the duration of the segment about which the questions were asked. These data were taken as an indication that people do, in general, carefully examine the contents of their memories in order to respond to questions about another person. In particular, an exhaustive serial search model was supported. Additional data and analyses demonstrated that relatively abstract trait terms usually were answered on the basis of the exhaustive search, while relatively specific trait terms were not. A two-stage process model was proposed to explain the differences in the results for the two types of trait terms.     

Reasons Why College-Educated Women Change Employment

This paper examines selected employee turnover issues using data derived from a survey of graduates from a Midwestern women's college over a ten year period. As hypothesized, organizational commitment was positively related to job commitment, and employee commitment, defined as being composed of organizational and job commitment foci, was positively related to job satisfaction, supervisory support, and organizational career support. In general, the results show women were fairly similar to men in terms of why they change employment or in terms of what companies could have done to retain them.     

Ideals,oughts, and self-regulation: Are there qualitatively distinct self-guides?

Self-regulation, the ability to regulate one's emotions and behavior with respect to important goals, is an important function. While a number of different self-regulatory models exist, self-discrepancy theory (SDT: Higgins, 1987, 1989a, 1989b) is the only model which proposes that there are distinct self-guides, the ideal and the ought self. Discrepancies or congruencies between the actual self and each type of self-guide is proposed to result in unique emotional and behavioral consequences. Some recent research findings have failed to demonstrate these unique consequences, causing the proposed distinction between the self-guides to be questioned in the literature. This paper suggests that this conclusion is based on the assumption that these effects must occur in every case. We argue that SDT does not propose that unique relationships between discrepancies and either emotions or behavior always occur; rather, it specifies moderators of these relationships. A review of recent research examining the effects of these moderators highlights not only that, indeed, such moderating effects are found, but also in some cases the moderating effect is different for relationships between emotions and the two types of discrepancies. It is concluded that these two different types of evidence, namely, the existence of moderator variables and their differential effects on ideal and ought self-regulation, provide compelling support for the distinct nature of the ideal and the ought self-guides.     

Dual-Finger Preferred-Speed Tapping: Effects of Coordination Mode and Anatomical Finger and Limb Pairings

Interlimb and interfinger coordination were examined in a dual-finger tapping paradigm in which 16 subjects performed at preferred frequencies. Three bimanual finger combinations, in random order (2 index; 2 middle; and 1 index and 1 middle), were performed in in-phase and antiphase coordination modes, in addition to 1 unimanual combination (antiphase index-middle). Relative phase means were within 3&percent; accuracy for all conditions. A lower tapping frequency was found in all antiphase vs. in-phase conditions, accompanied by lower phasing variability and lower intrafinger consistency in the antiphase. When frequency was changed from the preferred rate, the 2 coordination modes became more alike in variability and, within the same frequency range, demonstrated no significant differences. The bimanual mixed-fingers tapping tended to have significantly lower phasing values (a small fixed point drift) and higher tapping frequencies than the symmetric conditions. The unimanual task was similar to all other antiphase conditions. Changes in preferred frequency with different coordination modes may be related to differing perceptual informational constraints. Current models addressing natural frequencies of coupled oscillators do not account for the present data.     

Food-related stimuli increase desire to eat in hungry and satiated human subjects

In the present study, the effect of food-related cues on the desire to eat chocolate in hungry and satiated subjects was investigated. Subjects (n=46) were randomly assigned to either a hungry or satiated group and then assigned to a group receiving one of the following stimuli: taste (2 M&Ms), sight (a photograph of M&Ms), cognition (a passage describin M&Ms), or control (no stimulus). In each testing session, subjects rated their desire to eat chocolate before and after the 90-s presentation of the particular stimulus. Each subject was then given a half pound of M&Ms so that actual consumption could also be measured. Results indicated that, following the presentation of the sight and taste stimuli, the subjects’ desire to eat chocolate was significantly increased. Furthermore, no differences in chocolate consumption due to state of hunger or type of food-related stimulus presented were found.     

Sources of auditory masking in infants: Distraction effects

Previous work has demonstrated that infants’ thresholds for a pure tone are elevated by a masker more than would be predicted from their critical bandwidths. The present studies explored the nature of this additional masking. In Experiment 1, detection thresholds of 6-month-old infants and of adults for a 1-kHz tone were estimated under three conditions: in quiet, in the presence of a 4- to 10-kHz bandpa] noise at 40 dB SPL, and in the presence of the same noise at 50 dB SPL. The noise was gated on at the beginning of each trial. Adult thresholds were the same in all three conditions, indicating that little or no sensory masking took place in the presence of the noise. Infant thresholds were about 10 dB higher in the presence of the noise. We term this effectdistraction masking. In Experiment 2, the effect of gating the noise on at trial onset was examined. Thresholds for the same tone were estimated in quiet and in the presence of the bandpass noise at 40 dB SPL, but the noise was presented continuously during the session. Under these conditions, distraction masking was still observed for infants. These findings suggest that a masker can have nonsensory effects on infants’ performance in a psychoacoustic task.     

Presence of human friends and pet dogs as moderators of autonomic responses to stress in women

Autonomic responses were measured while 45 adult women performed a standard experimental stress task in the laboratory with only the experimenter present and 2 weeks later at home in the presence of a female friend, pet dog, or neither. Results demonstrated that autonomic reactivity was moderated by the presence of a companion, the nature of whom was critical to the size and direction of the effect. Ss in the friend condition exhibited higher physiological reactivity and poorer performance than subjects in the control and pet conditions. Ss in the pet condition showed less physiological reactivity during stressful tasks than Ss in the other conditions. The results are interpreted in terms of the degree to which friends and pets are perceived as evaluative during stressful task performance. Physiological reactivity was consistent across the laboratory and field settings.     

Narcissism, Self-Esteem, and Defensive Self-Enhancement

This study investigates the relationships among narcissism, self-esteem, and defensive self-enhancement in samples of 60, 84, 300, and 57 subjects. Using various self-report indices of these constructs we found that (a) defensive self-enhancement is composed of two orthogonal components: grandiosity and social desirability; (b) grandiosity and social desirability independently predict self-esteem and may represent distinct confounds in the measurement of self-esteem, (c) narcissism is positively related to grandiose self-enhancement (as opposed to social desirability), (d) narcissism is positively associated with both defensive and nondefensive self-esteem, and (e) authority, self-sufficiency, and vanity are the narcissistic elements most indicative of nondefensive self-esteem. The results are consistent with several theories that postulate a two-component model for self-esteem regulation and personality development.     

Variable-ratio schedules of timeout from avoidance: effects of d-amphetamine and morphine.

Rats were trained on concurrent schedules in which pressing one lever postponed shock and pressing the other lever produced periods of signaled timeout from avoidance on variable-ratio schedules. These procedures generated high rates of timeout-reinforced responding and provided a baseline for studying the effects of drugs on behavior maintained by different types of negative reinforcement (shock postponement vs. timeout). Morphine (2.5 to 10.0 mg/kg) reduced behavior maintained by timeout at doses that increased or had no effect on avoidance responding. In contrast, d-amphetamine (0.125 to 2.0 mg/kg) produced large increases in timeout responding at doses that had minimal effect on avoidance in rats trained on variable-interval and variable-ratio schedules. Thus, the event-dependent effects of morphine, observed in previous studies in which timeout responding was maintained at low rates by interval schedules, were replicated with high timeout rates maintained by variable-ratio schedules. The effects of d-amphetamine could also be described as "event dependent" because timeout responding was stimulated more than avoidance regardless of the maintenance schedule or baseline rate.