Prejudice and stereotype maintenance processes: attention, attribution, and individuation

Three experiments examined the relationship between prejudice and processing of stereotypic information. Higher levels of prejudice were associated with greater attention to and more thorough encoding of stereotype-inconsistent than stereotype-consistent behaviors but only when processing capacity was plentiful (Experiments 1 and 3). High-prejudice participants attributed consistent behaviors to internal factors and inconsistent behaviors to external forces (Experiment 2). Together, these results suggest that high-prejudice people attend carefully to inconsistent behaviors to explain them away but only if they have sufficient resources to do so. Results also showed that low-prejudice but not high-prejudice participants formed individuated impressions by integrating the implications of the target's behaviors (i.e., individuating). High levels of prejudice appear to be associated with biased encoding and judgment processes that may serve to maintain stereotypes.     

In search of dominance: the case of the missing dimension

Some previous researchers have found that affect can be described in terms of two dimensions (pleasure and arousal), while others have noted three dimensions are needed (pleasure, arousal, and dominance). The competing claims were tested by creating stimuli with factors previously demonstrated to elicit responses of arousal or dominance, asking respondents to rate the stimuli, and contrasting correlations between ratings and the stimulus factors. Under the two-dimensional theory, the planned contrasts should be zero, while under the three-dimensional theory, the planned contrasts should be nonzero. Results supported the three-dimensional model.     

Comparing performance by parents and offspring on a rapid tapping task

The purpose of this study was to identify the relationships between 42 parents' and their offsprings' performance on a rapid tapping task. It was expected that genetic predispositions would gradually limit children's performance on a tapping task as they matured chronologically. Four different age groups of children and their parents performed the tapping task on different sizes of boards. Repeated-measures analysis of variance indicated that, while parents' mean performance was generally higher than that of their children (F = 32.89, p < .001), the difference was affected by the children's age, which hand was used, and the board size. Spearman rank correlation scores between parents' and children's overall performances gradually increased across age groups (p = -.29, -.10, .47, and .40, respectively, from younger to older age groups). This finding suggests that the potential of youngsters' future performance may be predicted with greater certainty by observing their parents' present performance. This may improve the predictive power of planned programs.     

Syllable structure and sonority in language inventory and aphasic neologisms

Phonological theories have raised the notion of a universally preferred syllable type which is defined in terms of its sonority structure (e.g., ). Empirical evidence for this notion has been provided by distributional analyses of natural languages and of language acquisition data, and by aphasic speech error analyses. The present study investigates frequency distributions of syllable types in German, which allows for a rather complex syllable structure, and in neologistic utterances of a German speaking jargon aphasic. The findings suggest that the sonority structure of the patient's neologisms is generally in accordance with the notion of theoretically preferred syllables. Moreover, comparative analyses suggest that the predominance of the preferred syllable type is especially pronounced in the aphasic data. On the basis of these findings, the influence of sonority in impaired phonological lexical processing is discussed.     

Affirmation of personal values buffers neuroendocrine and psychological stress responses

Stress is implicated in the development and progression of a broad array of mental and physical health disorders. Theory and research on the self suggest that self-affirming activities may buffer these adverse effects. This study experimentally investigated whether affirmations of personal values attenuate physiological and psychological stress responses. Eighty-five participants completed either a value-affirmation task or a control task prior to participating in a laboratory stress challenge. Participants who affirmed their values had significantly lower cortisol responses to stress, compared with control participants. Dispositional self-resources (e.g., trait self-esteem and optimism) moderated the relation between value affirmation and psychological stress responses, such that participants who had high self-resources and had affirmed personal values reported the least stress. These findings suggest that reflecting on personal values can keep neuroendocrine and psychological responses to stress at low levels. Implications for research on the self, stress processes, health, and interventions are discussed.     

The interaction of payoff structure and regulatory focus in classification

This report brings together research on motivation and learning by exploring how fit of regulatory focus affects people's ability to acquire new categories. Perceptual categories were learned by people with a promotion focus (a situationally determined sensitivity to gains) or a prevention focus (a sensitivity to losses). Classification performance was closest to optimal (as determined by models fit to individual subjects' data) when the regulatory focus matched the structure of the payoffs for the categories. Promotion-focus subjects performed best when the payoffs consisted of all gains. Prevention-focus subjects performed best when the payoffs consisted of all losses.     

Sexual victimization in relation to perceptions of risk: mediation, generalization, and temporal stability

There is evidence that personal experience with trauma is associated with increases in both personal and comparative risk perception. This study investigates this relation in terms of sexual victimization among women, focusing on three potential mediators: perceived control over sexual assault, perceived similarity to a typical sexual assault victim, and psychological distress. Mediational analyses were investigated using structural equation modeling. Although victimization experience was not related to comparative risk perception, it was associated with greater personal risk perception. This relation was mediated by perceived similarity to a typical sexual assault victim. Prospective analyses indicated that personal risk perception does change in response to sexual victimization but also indicated that heightened risk perception may be an accurate assessment of risk that actually precedes victimization experience. Implications for the meaning of perceived similarity and perceptions of risk for sexual assault victims are discussed.     

Processes of similarity judgment

Similarity underlies fundamental cognitive capabilities such as memory, categorization, decision making, problem solving, and reasoning. Although recent approaches to similarity appreciate the structure of mental representations, they differ in the processes posited to operate over these representations. We present an experiment that differentiates among extant structural accounts of similarity in their ability to account for patterns of similarity ratings. These data pose a challenge for transformation-based models and all but one mapping-based model, the Similarity as Interactive Activation and Mapping (SIAM) model of similarity.