Loneliness, social interaction, and sex roles

Forty-three male and 53 female college seniors maintained the Rochester Interaction Record for 2 weeks, providing information about every social interaction of 10 minutes or more. Subjects then completed the revised UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Loneliness Scale and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, measuring sex-role orientation. For both sexes, loneliness was negatively related to the amount of time spent with females and to the meaningfulness of interaction with males and females. However, meaningfulness with males was more important than meaningfulness with females. Femininity was negatively related to loneliness for both sexes and partially mediated the above relationships. There were sex differences, however, in the extent to which variables overlapped in predicting loneliness. For example, a large group of nonlonely males was characterized both by having meaningful relationships with males and by spending time with females, whereas a second group of nonlonely males was characterized simply by having meaningful relationships with males. The largest group of nonlonely females was characterized simply by having meaningful relationships with males, but another sizable group was characterized simply by spending time with females. Females doing both accounted for very little of the variance.     

"Company motivates the miserable": the impact of consensus information on help seeking for psychological problems

Based on an attribution theory analysis, it was predicted that normal individuals (people who do not evidence a particular target problem) would be least motivated to seek help for a psychological problem when they believe that the problem is actuarially common (i.e., high consensus). Based on an analysis of how target problem people evaluate their psychological problem, however, it was predicted that such individuals (unlike normal individuals) should be maximally motivated to seek help when they believe that the problem is common. To test these predictions, target problem and normal individuals (high vs. average test anxious females) were given feedback that they possessed a problem (test anxiety). Individuals were then told that their problem was either common, uncommon, or given no consensus information. As predicted, the higher consensus information led to the least help-seeking behavior for the normal individuals and to the most help-seeking behavior for the target problem individuals.     

The self-serving function of hypochondriacal complaints: physical symptoms as self-handicapping strategies

The present experiment tested the hypothesis that hypochondriacal individuals commonly use reports of physical illness and symptoms as a strategy to control attributions made about their performances in evaluative settings (i.e., self-handicapping strategies). Specifically, it was predicted that hypochondriacal individuals would report more recent physical illness and complaints and more current physical symptoms in an evaluative setting in which poor health could serve as an alternative explanation for poor performance than would either individuals in an evaluative setting in which poor health was precluded as an excuse or individuals in a nonevaluative setting. As predicted, results supported this self-protective pattern of complaints in a hypochondriacal sample but not in a nonhypochondriacal group. The self-protective role of hypochondriacal behavior is discussed in relation to other theory and research on the nature and treatment of hypochondriasis.     

Does reward depletion influence spatial memory performance?

If spatial memory tasks are considered as foraging problems, it can be predicted that rats' difficulty in learning a win-stay task—revisiting part of a maze where food has recently been found—should be partly overcome if the food is not fully consumed at the first visit (nondepleted reward) rather than being all eaten (depleted reward). Three experiments confirmed and further analysed this result. Experiments 1 and 2 showed that it does not depend on the amount of food initially found; nor is win-stay performance affected by the amount of food actually eaten. Experiment 3 suggested that the effects of nondepleted reward are mainly due to the animals' being interrupted while eating, and very little to the fact that uneaten food is left behind. The results are discussed with regard to their implications for learning theory, and for the application of foraging theory to learning and memory experiments.