Prejudiced People Perceive More Community Support for Their Views: The Role of Own,Media, and Peer Attitudes in Perceived Consensus

People often overestimate others' support for their views (false consensus effect). Recent research has shown that this is particularly marked in the relation between perceived consensus and prejudice. The current research asked whether this partly arises in an in‐group stereotype of the community as prejudiced. We investigated relations between different sources of normative information (self, media, peers), estimates of community attitudes, and perceived consensus in a sample of 135 community members. Media prejudice predicted community attitudes, and this further predicted consensus. However, strongest was a direct relation between own prejudice and perceived consensus. The results indicate a desire to appear nonprejudiced, relative to others. Confronting prejudiced people with information about community norms is a promising intervention under these circumstances.     

Are problems prevalent and stable in non-clinical populations? Problems and test-retest stability of a patient-generated measure,PSYCHLOPS (Psychological Outcome Profiles), in a non-clinical student sample

In straightened times counselling must evidence the changes it promotes on reputable measures. Patient-generated measures complement nomothetic measures and may be nearer the ethos of counselling in eliciting individuals' problems. Scores from such measures from non-clinical samples are rarely reported, making their test-retest stability uncertain. We report the prevalence and stability of self-reported problems using PSYCHLOPS (Psychological Outcome Profiles) in a non-clinical student population. PSYCHLOPS is a four-item, self-administered, patient-generated instrument. PSYCHLOPS was completed twice, 7–10 days apart. A wide range of problems was reported and showed satisfactory test-retest stability: Pearson, 0.66; Spearman, 0.68; intra-class correlation coefficient, 0.70. This is reassuring as instability would undermine PSYCHLOPS as a sensitive change measure.     

An Opposing Process Model of Benevolent Sexism

An Opposing Process Model outlining the pathways through which individual differences in Benevolent Sexism (BS) simultaneously enhance and attenuate support for gender equality of income and employment opportunity is presented. Results from a New Zealand electoral sample (N?=?336) indicated that BS predicted Hostile Sexism (HS), and thus indirectly opposition toward gender-related policies (a hierarchy-enhancing effect). For women, BS also directly predicted attitudes toward gender equality in the opposing, supportive direction (a hierarchy-attenuating effect). Analyses of a 9-month longitudinal sample of undergraduate women substantiated these results (Study II; N?=?170). In stable societies, the dual opposing effects of BS seem to form a system where hierarchy-enhancing and hierarchy-attenuating processes tend toward homeostasis or equilibrium within the population.     

Preschoolers' Understanding of Simple and Complex Emotions: Links with Gender and Language

In this study we assessed individual differences among preschoolers' emotion understanding, verbal ability, and gender role behavior. Fifty-three children (M = 3 years, 5 months; 26 girls, 27 boys) participated in task that used puppets to assess their understanding of simple (happy, sad) and complex emotions (proud, embarrassed) and a standard vocabulary task. Parents completed a questionnaire on the frequency of their children's gender-typed behavior. Results indicated positive associations between children's total emotion understanding and both general verbal ability (particularly for boys) and parents' perceptions of stereotypic feminine behaviors. Gender analysis revealed that, independent of vocabulary ability, girls scored higher than boys on emotion labeling and understanding of complex emotions, especially the concept of pride. Results are discussed in relation to individual differences and effects of sociocultural context.     

Attention, researchers! it is time to take a look at the real world

Theories of attention, too often generated from artificial laboratory experiments, may have limited validity when attention in the natural world is considered. For instance, for more than two decades, conceptualizations of "reflexive" and "volitional" shifts of spatial attention have been grounded in methodologies that do not recognize or utilize the basic fact that people routinely use the eyes of other people as rich and complex attentional cues. This fact was confirmed by our novel discovery that eyes will trigger a reflexive shift of attention even when they are presented centrally and are known to be spatially nonpredictive. This exploration of real-world attention also led to our finding that, contrary to popular wisdom, arrows, like eyes, are capable of producing reflexive shifts of attention—a discovery that brings into question much of the existing attention research. We argue that research needs to be grounded in the real world and not in experimental paradigms. It is time for cognitive psychology to reaffirm the difficult task of studying attention in a manner that has relevance to real-life situations.     

Parental Psychopathology and Paternal Child Neglect in Late Childhood

We aimed at determining the association of both severity of paternal and maternal substance use disorder (SUD) and psychiatric disorders with paternal child neglect severity during late childhood. The sample comprised 146 intact SUD (n=71) and non SUD (n=75) families with a 10–12 year old female or male biological offspring. The average age of fathers, mothers, and children was 44 (SD=5.9), 42 (SD=4.78), and 11 (SD=.79) years, respectively. The ethnic composition was 85% Caucasian and 15% African American. The results showed that paternal and maternal SUD and psychiatric disorders severity was correlated with paternal child neglect severity. However, paternal psychopathology failed to achieve significance in the regression analyses. Severity of maternal, especially severity of antisocial personality disorder symptoms was associated with paternal child neglect. These results are discussed within the framework of evolutionary psychology research examining paternal investment in the offspring. Implications for the necessity of identifying parental psychopathology and an integrated treatment approach are discussed.     

Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Additive and Interactive Effects

The additive and interactive effects of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) were examined using 16 independent samples of New Zealand European participants ( N =  2,164). Consistent with Duckitt's (2001) Dual Process Model, SDO and RWA displayed strong additive effects across various domains of intergroup-related attitude, including measures of racism, sexism, homosexual prejudice, and ethnic and religious ingroup identification. In each of these five domains, meta-analysis indicated that the statistical interaction of SDO and RWA accounted for an average of less than .001% variance in addition to their linear combination. It is concluded that the association between SDO and various discriminatory attitudes and beliefs is only extremely weakly dependent on RWA, and vice-versa, suggesting that these two ideological attitudes are primarily additive, rather than interactive, in nature.