Who shapes the self of independents and interdependents? Explicit and implicit measures of the self's relatedness to family,friends and partner

We suggest that social relationships shape the self in different ways, depending on whether persons define themselves as independent or interdependent. While the self of independents is most strongly associated with mental representations of others to whom they are related because of their own deliberate action (e.g. friends), the self of interdependents is most strongly connected with representations of others with whom they share allocated group memberships (e.g. family members). We took both explicit (Study 1) and implicit measures (Studies 2, 3 and 4) on how strongly independent and interdependent selves are associated with self‐chosen versus allocated close others. In Studies 3 and 4, we additionally primed the independent or interdependent self. Both explicit and implicit measures indicated that mental representations of family members were more strongly associated with the interdependent self than with the independent self, while romantic partners and friends were connected with both the independent and interdependent self. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Temporal uncertainty degrades perceptual processing

When participants are required to react to a stimulus, reaction times (RTs) are usually reduced when temporal uncertainty about stimulus occurrence is minimized. Contrary to the common assumption attributing this RT benefit solely to the speeding of motor processes, recent evidence suggests that temporal uncertainty might rather influence premotoric processing levels. We employed a backward-masking procedure to further confine the locus of the temporal uncertainty effect. Participants performed a discrimination task and indicated whether a spatial gap within a square was on the right or the left side. In addition to the shorter RTs, visual discrimination accuracy was improved when temporal uncertainty was low. This result demonstrates that temporal uncertainty influences stimulus processing at a perceptual level.     

Social support from work and family domains as an antecedent or moderator of work-family conflicts?

On the basis of Conservation of Resources theory, we investigated how social support from supervisor, co-workers, life partner, and family members is associated with work-family conflicts in N = 107 working mothers. We used data from a cross-sectional questionnaire and a standardized diary to examine two possible forms of interplay: (a) Social support as an antecedent of work-family conflicts, and (b) moderating effects of social support on the relationship between domain-specific strain and work-family conflicts. Overall, results favored social support as an antecedent of work-family conflicts.     

Challenges Faced by Genetics Service Providers’ Practicing in a Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Population: An Australian Experience

This paper explores the perceived challenges facing clinical genetics practitioners in multicultural Australia. Focus groups conducted with 53 practitioners explored: 1) participants’ experiences and definitions of cultural diversity; 2) their use of educational resources with clients; 3) their experiences with culturally diverse groups/individuals in practice; 4) their experiences working with interpreters; and 5) the impact culturally specific educational training and/or experiential learning had on their confidence or practice when dealing with culturally diverse clients. Participants viewed culture as extending beyond traditional definitions such as ethnicity, language and religion. Most respondents had experienced positive results working with health care interpreters, although at times, this was a challenge for the family as they preferred privacy and the use of family members as interpreters. Another commonly reported challenge was the limited availability of reliable, culturally appropriate translated resources. Some participants expressed concern that learning theories about specific cultures may lead to stereotypes and that opportunities for formal cultural competence training were limited. Recommendations for practice include the targeting of educational resources to meet the needs of a diverse community and placing cultural competence on the agenda for ongoing training and maintenance of professional standards for clinical genetics practitioners to avoid the current ad hoc approach.     

Judgement frequency, belief revision, and serial processing of causal information

The main aim of this research was to study the cognitive architecture underlying causal/covariation learning by investigating the frequency of judgement effect. Previous research has shown that decreasing the number of trials between opportunities to make a judgement in a covariation learning task led to a higher score after an a or d type of trial (positive cases) than after b and c trials (negative cases). Experiment 1 replicated this effect using a trial-by-trial procedure and examined the conditions under which it occurs. Experiment 2 demonstrated a similar frequency of judgement effect when the information was presented in the form of contingency tables. Associative or statistical single-mechanism accounts of causal and covariation learning do not provide a satisfactory explanation for these findings. An alternative belief revision model is presented.     

Growing Together—Effects of a school-based intervention promoting positive self-beliefs and social integration in recently immigrated children

We present a school-based intervention geared to foster the social integration of recently immigrated (RI) primary school children by creating repeated positive contact situations with classmates brought up in the receiving society. Coaches encouraged groups of tandems, consisting of one RI and one child brought up in Germany each, to engage in cooperative activities designed to strengthen positive self-beliefs and perception of equal status. In a quasi-experimental control-group design (N = 318), we compared the 30 children (12 RI) who participated in our intervention between pre-test and post-test with a reference group. Self-beliefs were measured via self-reports, social integration via sociometric peer-nominations. The reference group (n = 288 children) included all children who did not participate in the intervention between pre-test and post-test: (a) 12 children (7 RI) of a waiting control group and (b) all classmates of both the students of the intervention and the waiting control group. Post-test self-beliefs were more positive in children having participated in the intervention. The intervention did not affect social integration: Neither the number of classmates nominating a student nor the number of peers the respective student nominated increased. Possibly, the intervention initiated self-reinforcing processes which support social integration over longer time periods.     

Perceived Distributive Fairness of European Transfer Payments and EU‐Taxes in Austria,the Czech Republic,and the United Kingdom

The present research compared a distributive fairness model of EU transfer payments (Hartner, Rechberger, Kirchler, & Wenzel, 2011) between three countries: Austria, the Czech Republic, and the UK. The model postulates an interplay between EU‐tax compliance, distributive fairness, outcome favorability as well as national and European identification. Results across countries showed that EU‐tax compliance was positively related to distributive justice, which was in turn related to outcome favorability and identification. National identifiers perceived EU membership as unfavorable in financial and socio‐political terms, and thus considered the transfer payments as less fair. Dual identifiers perceived the socio‐political outcomes as more favorable, and thus evaluated the transfer payments as fairer. Although the basic structure of the model was valid across all three countries, two country‐specific results were found. First, in the UK individual tax paying behavior was influenced by outcome favorability, whereas in Austria and the Czech Republic this relationship was mediated via distributive fairness. Second, in the Austrian sample, the differentiation between patriots and nationalists proved fruitful since nationalists considered the EU transfer payments as unfair, unlike patriots. In the UK and the Czech Republic the distinction between nationalists and patriots did not add any further information.     

Contingency experiences of 3-month-old children and their relation to later developmental achievements

In this study, the authors investigated the relation between early social contingency experiences and infants' competencies to detect nonsocial contingencies. In this study of 87 three-month-old infants, the authors operationalized early social contingencies as prompt, contingent maternal responses and coded microanalytically on the basis of video-recorded mother-infant interactions. The authors assessed competence to detect nonsocial contingencies by 2 methods: (a) the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm, which focuses on detecting contingencies between the infants' actions (kicking) and nonsocial consequences (mobile moving) and (b) the visual expectation paradigm, which focuses on detecting contingencies between 1 event (a smiley face projected on a screen) that was followed by a 2nd event (a complex picture projected on the other side of the screen). The results showed that early social contingencies are related to the competency to detect nonsocial action-consequence contingencies in the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm.     

Don't stand so close to me: the effects fo self-construal in interpersonal closeness

Abstract— Three studies investigated the effects of self-construal activation on behavior conducive to interpersonal proximity. Study 1 revealed that compared with control participants, participants who were primed with the independent (or personal) self sat further away from where they anticipated another person would sit in a waiting room. Results of Study 2 indicated that participants primed with the interdependent (or social) self sat closer to the anticipated other person than did those primed with the independent self. Finally, Study 3 used the chronic self-construal of participants to predict the seating distance in dyadic settings. Results showed that greater independence of participants' self-construals was associated with greater spatial distance during the interaction. Together, the studies provide clear evidence that self-construal activation automatically influences interpersonal behavior as reflected in the actual distance between the self and others. Results are discussed in terms of the functions and motives connected to self-construals.     

Valence of distractor words increases the effects of irrelevant speech on serial recall

Participants memorized target words in silence or while ignoring neutral or valent (positive or negative) distractor words that could be either possessor-relevant or other-relevant. Distractor words impaired recall performance, but valent distractor words caused more disruption than neutral distractors, and negative distractors caused more disruption than positive distractors. The results are problematic for explanations of the irrelevant speech effect within working memory models that do not specify an explicit role of attention in the maintenance of information for immediate serial recall.