Serious Lies

In a pair of studies, college students and community members told autobiographical narratives about the most serious lie they ever told or the most serious lie that was ever told to them. Most serious lies were told by or to participants' closest relationship partners. Participants reported telling their serious lies to get what they wanted or to do what they felt they were entitled to do, to avoid punishment, to protect themselves from confrontation, to appear to be the type of person they wished they were, to protect others, and to hurt others. The degree to which the liars and targets felt distressed about the lies differed significantly across these 7 different types of lies. Systematic variations in the kinds of serious lies described by different subgroups of participants suggest that serious lies may be indicative of the life tasks that are most significant to those groups.     

Social Status and Aggressiveness as Moderators of the Relationship Between Interactional Justice and Workplace Deviance

Workplace deviance is a prevalent and costly problem for organizations. This study examines the relationship between interactional justice, a specific type of organizational justice perception that reflects how a person is treated by an authority, and 2 categories of deviant behavior. Based on a person-situation model, we expected the relation between interactional justice and deviance to be stronger when the employee is high rather than low in aggressiveness. Drawing from prior research suggesting that people with low status react defensively to self-invalidating events, we hypothesized that the social status variables of hierarchical position, gender, and race would also moderate the relation between interactional justice and deviance. Finally, we propose a 3-way interaction involving aggressiveness, status, and interactional justice. Data were collected from 192 employees of a public sector organization. The results provide support for several of the hypothesized interactions involving aggressiveness, social status variables, and interactional justice.     

Recalled early maternal bonding and mother‐ and self‐related attitudes in young adult daughters: A cross‐cultural study in India and Belgium

The quality of child–parent relationships remains a vital aspect of development through the entire life span. Early childhood attachment develops into a lasting adult attachment bond in which the balance between caregiving and care‐receiving changes over time. Among young adult women a model was examined on the relationship of recalled early maternal bonding with (1) the current relationship with one's mother represented by variables such as adult attachment, filial responsibility and filial concern, and (2) self‐related attitudes represented by orientation to life and satisfaction with life. Participants were female university students from two quite different societies, India and Belgium, including 150 Hindi‐speaking and 150 English‐speaking students in India and 183 Dutch‐speaking students in Belgium. Instruments used were the Parental Bonding Instrument, the Adult Attachment Scale, a self‐constructed Filial Responsibility Scale, the Filial Anxiety Scale, the Orientation to Life Questionnaire, and the Satisfaction With Life Scale. Across the three languages and two cultures we first tested the construct/structural equivalence of the scales by means of exploratory factor analysis and congruence analysis. Results indicated that psychometric conditions of equivalence held for most instruments. In order to examine relationships between the variables, a LISREL path analysis was conducted across the three samples. A model closely similar to the theoretically postulated model was found to show a good fit with invariant parameters in the three samples. As expected, recalled early maternal bonding of young adult women appeared to have an impact on the current relationship with their mother and on aspects of their personal life experiences. Thus, the influence of recalled early maternal bonding on variables reflecting the relationship with one's mother and on self‐related variables were brought together in a single model that showed a good fit in all three samples.     

Hypoxic adaptation during development: relation to pattern of neurological presentation and cognitive disability

Children with acute hypoxic-ischaemic events (e.g. stroke) and chronic neurological conditions associated with hypoxia frequently present to paediatric neurologists. Failure to adapt to hypoxia may be a common pathophysiological pathway linking a number of other conditions of childhood with cognitive deficit. There is evidence that congenital cardiac disease, asthma and sleep disordered breathing, for example, are associated with cognitive deficit, but little is known about the mechanism and whether there is any structural change. This review describes what is known about how the brain reacts and adapts to hypoxia, focusing on epilepsy and sickle cell disease (SCD). We prospectively recorded overnight oxyhaemoglobin saturation (SpO2) in 18 children with intractable epilepsy, six of whom were currently or recently in minor status (MS). Children with MS were more likely to have an abnormal sleep study defined as either mean baseline SpO2 <94% or >4 dips of >4% in SpO2/hour (p = .04). In our series of prospectively followed patients with SCD who subsequently developed acute neurological symptoms and signs, mean overnight SpO2 was lower in those with cerebrovascular disease on magnetic resonance angiography (Mann-Whitney, p = .01). Acute, intermittent and chronic hypoxia may have detrimental effects on the brain, the clinical manifestations perhaps depending on rapidity of presentation and prior exposure.     

Can Deception by Salespersons and Customers Be Detected Through Nonverbal Behavioral Cues?1

Experiments on behavioral lie detection have indicated that observers can detect a communicator's lies with above-chance accuracy, and that detection accuracy may be enhanced when observers pay special attention to certain vocal and body-movement cues. The present experiment asked whether deception in (simulated) sales communications by retail salespersons and automobile customers could likewise be detected nonverbally. Contrary to much of the prior literature, deception-detection in this study was not above chance, apparently because the salespersons' and customers' nonverbal cues simply were not correlated with lying. Though the observers seemed quite suspicious and did not give communicators the “benefit of the doubt”, they could not discriminate the communicators' deceptive communications from their truthful ones. Many—perhaps most—of the lies in sales communications may be told by confident, well-practiced deceivers whose nonverbal behavior is unlikely to reveal their lying.     

Empathetic perception of emotional displays in films as a function of hedonic and excitatory state prior to exposure

A film clip depicting a young couple in a dysphoric encounter was seen following one of four film segments that were selected and pretested to effect a factorial variation in (a) hedonic tone (positive, negative) and (b) excitatory potential (low, high). Reactions to the subsequent film were assessed via ratings to test predictions from excitation-transfer theory and to determine sequential effects in hedonically valued experiences. In a first experiment, in which the subsequent film was viewed immediately after the antecedent film, a nearly significant distraction effect of excitation occurred, that is, affective responses to the subsequent film were less intense following high-excitation films than following low-excitation films. In a second experiment, in which the procedure employed in the interval between films was changed to foster close attention to the subsequent film, an excitation-transfer effect was observed, with the dysphoric encounter being perceived as sadder after high-excitation films than after low-excitation films. In both experiments, hedonic-set effects were also observed. The role of cognitive adjustment in excitation transfer was discussed.     

The effect on language development of the special characteristics of speech addressed to children

Studies of adults' speech to children indicate that adults make a number of modifications in their speech when interacting with a young child and that some of these modifications may facilitate the child's language acquisition. Modified repetitions of the child's utterances, along with certain syntactic, semantic, and cognitive simplifications, appear to be potentially effective language-teaching devices. However, the special lexicon, phonological simplification, and higher pitch that also characterize this baby-talk style are much less likely to play important roles in the child's language learning. The child's role in affecting these modifications in adult speech is briefly discussed, and an optimal pattern of adult-child language interaction is suggested.