Sadness and susceptibility to judgmental bias: the case of anchoring

In a wide range of empirical paradigms, sadness has been associated with more extensive and detail-oriented thinking than happiness, resulting in reductions in judgmental bias that arise from reliance on stereotypes and other simple decision heuristics. It was hypothesized that anchoring would constitute a significant exception to this general pattern. Recent research on anchoring indicates that an active thought process underlies the emergence of this bias. If sad people are likely to think more actively about the judgmental anchor than their neutral-mood counterparts, their subsequent judgments should be more likely to be assimilated toward this reference point. This prediction was confirmed in two experiments demonstrating that sad people are indeed more susceptible to anchoring bias than are people in a neutral mood. Moreover, this effect generalized over judgments in positive, neutral, and negative content domains.     

The effects of a teaching-modeling intervention on early mother-infant reciprocity

This study investigated the effects of a teaching and modeling intervention on the development of early reciprocity and maternal self-confidence between black low-income primiparous mothers and their newborn infants. The sample included 20 mothers who had an uneventful pregnancy, labor, delivery, and postpartum course. Infants were healthy, full-term, singleton, and bottle-fed. Mothers in the experimental group received a teaching session in which the investigator discussed and modeled caregiver behaviors which elicit interactive behaviors and skills of the infant. State control, response to stress, motoric processes, and interaction processes were discussed. On pretest, no significant differences were found between the control and experimental groups on any variable. At posttest, statistically significant differences were found between the two groups on assessment of the mother-infant sensitivity scale. No significant differences were found between the treatment and the control groups on the Mother's Assessment of the Behavior of her Infant (MABI) or the Self-Confidence scores.     

Unspecific postevent information,attribution of responsibility,and eyewitness performance

A large number of experiments have demonstrated that misleading postevent information may result in distortions of eyewitness performance. However, most studies have employed a quite specific piece of misinformation (the colour of a car, a type of a road sign) rather than more general postevent information. In the present experiment subjects viewed a film depicting a traffic accident and were subsequently informed that the car driver had or had not committed hit-and-run behaviour and that the motorcyclist had or had not been drinking. An additional control group received no information. In a subsequent interrogation subjects were asked to rate the amount of cause, responsibility and guilt attributable to the car driver and motorcyclist. Results showed that responsibility and guilt and the statements on the accident-related behaviour were influenced by the postevent information. In general, subjects who had received negative information about one of the persons involved attributed higher amounts of responsibility and guilt to them and provided more negative statements concerning their behaviour. However, details that were not closely related to the accident were not significantly influenced by postevent information. The results are discussed in terms of schematic memory reports.     

Letter visibility and word recognition: The optimal viewing position in printed words

It has repeatedly been shown that the time and accuracy of recognizing a word depend strongly on where in the word the eye is fixating. Word-recognition performance is maximal when the eye fixates a region near the word’s center, and decreases to both sides of this “optimal viewing position.” The reason for this phenomenon is assumed to be the strong drop-off of visual acuity: the visibility of letters decreases with increasing eccentricity from fixation location. Consequently, fewer letters can be identified when the beginning or ending of a word is fixated than when its center is fixated. The present study is a test of this visual acuity hypothesis. If the phenomenon is caused by letter visibility, then it should be sensitive to variations of visual conditions in which the letters are presented. By increasing the interletter distances of the word(e.g.,a_t_t_e_m_ p_ t), letter visibility was decreased. As expected from our hypothesis, the viewing-position effect became more exaggerated. An additional experiment showed that destroying word-shape information (e.g., aTtEmPt) decreased overall word-recognition performance but had no influence on the viewingposition effect. Varying the viewing position in words might thus be used as a paradigm, allowing one to separate out the contribution of letter information and supraletter information to word recognition.     

Selective perception by dynamic touch

Perceiving the length of a rod by dynamic touch is tied to the inertia tensorIij, a quantification of its resistance to rotational acceleration. Perception of the portion extending in front of the grasp has previously been ascribed to decomposing one component ofIij by attention. The tensorial nature of dynamic touch suggests that this ability must be anchored wholly in the tensor. Three experiments show that perceived partial length is a function of two components of the tensor, one tied primarily to magnitude and the other tied primarily to direction, whereas perceived whole length is a function of a magnitude component alone. Dynamic touch is characterized in terms of a haptic perceptual instrument that softly assembles to exploitIij differently depending on the intention, producing 1:1 maps that are appropriately scaled for each intention.     

Prejudice against women: A new perspective

Studies 1 and 2 of this paper were designed to reexamine the assumption that women and men are prejudiced against women. Subjects were 50 college women, 40 college men, 40 high-school women and 40 high-school men who were presented with four employment applications for evaluation. The names referring to the gender of the applicants were manipulated so that half of the subjects were shown the two most qualified applicants as female and the two least qualified as male. The other half of the subjects were shown the reverse of this. The results for this factor, with women subjects, revealed that the sex of the applicants did not interfere with or distort the subject's judgments (p>.25). The men subjects did not show a preference for or a prejudice against applicants of either sex (p>.05). The qualifications of the applicants were selected according to each subject's previous ranking of 10 job-related characteristics. The results for this factor, with women subjects, indicated a significant difference between the subjects' ranking of the characteristics and their final selection of the applicants (p<.05). The men subjects showed no significant difference between the subjects' rankings of the job-related characteristics and their rating of the applicants (p>.05). No significant interaction between factors was found for either population of subjects (p>.05). This research reflects changing attitudes of women towards women and provides new insights regarding men's attitudes toward their own sex.The authors of this paper would like to extend our sincere gratitude to Dr. John Schaeuble for his continuous support of this research endeavor.     

Forms of social awareness and helping

People encounter situations from different forms of awareness; that is, they can attend to different focal topics (e.g., self, other person, or other person's situation) from different perspectives (e.g., the self's viewpoint, the other person's viewpoint). Two studies assessed whether brief interactions would produce different forms of social awareness, whether the form of awareness would persist to a subsequent interaction, and whether it would influence helping in that encounter. Pedestrians on a city sidewalk were induced to become self-focused (experimenter took their picture), become other-focused (they took experimenter's picture), or empathically adopt the perspective of another person (they advised experimenter where to take a picture). In Study 1, subjects were interviewed after leaving the experimenter. First- and third-person pronoun use and self-ratings suggested that subjects had different forms of awareness. In Study 2, pedestrians participated in one of the same three interaction conditions or a control noninteraction condition and subsequently encountered a confederate in need of help. Subjects in the self-focused and empathic condition helped more than subjects in the other-focused or control condition. Results suggest that forms of awareness created in a brief interaction do persist to subsequent interactions and influence helping. Other variables may influence helping by altering forms of social awareness.     

When rigidity does not fail: Individualization and psychologization as resistances to the diffusion of minority innovations

Studied the impact of individualization and psychologization of minorities upon their influence. In Experiment I, 72 Swiss male and female 15-year-old students read a text on pollution prepared in a 2 × 2 ANOVA-design (one/ two sources, rigid/flexible style) and reported their impression of the content. As below, attitude was measured before and after reading. In Experiment II, 24 second-year Swiss psychology students judged the presumed author of an anti-militaristic tract by adjectives with either merely political or political and psychological connotations. Results indicate that the strong difference between flexible and rigid style appears with one source only, but that independent of the number of sources, a rigid style obtains a less positive image. Change of attitude in moderate subjects judging with political adjectives only vanished in those using psychological adjectives in addition. As a rigid minority only tacks influence when individualized and as psychologization constitutes an ideological functioning of resistance to social change, psychological research, by its current strategies, might be participating in such resistance.     

The stability of the factorial pattern of aircrew classification tests in four analyses

This study consists of four factor analyses of the Army Air Forces Aircrew Classification Batteries. The first was an analysis of the 1945 wartime battery, while the other three were analyses of the 1947 postwar battery, consisting of essentially the same variables, but using different samples. Eleven factors were found which had been identified and reported in previous analyses. An additional factor, possibly an artifact, was identified as an age-education doublet. The only factor which differed significantly in the analyses was pilot or flying interest. These factor analyses show that the factorial content of the tests remains quite similar in both wartime and postwar populations.The data reported in this study were collected as part of the United States Air Force Human Resources Research and Development Program and described in Research Bulletin 52-16. The opinions or conclusions contained in this report are those of the authors. They are not to be construed as reflecting the view or indorsement of the Department of the Air Force.