THE EFFECTS OF INDIVIDUAL AND CONTEXTUAL ATTRIBUTES ON THE SIZES OF RECOMMENDED SALARY INCREASES

In a series of experiments, college students, line managers, and compensation managers allocated salary increases to hypothetical job holders who varied in the criticality of their positions for accomplishment of organizational goals, occupational marketability, job performance, personal need for money, and increase in capability since the last performance review. Results indicated that though performance had the largest impact, a number of nonperformance factors also influenced the recommendations. Salary recommendations were lower when constrained by a budget, and performance, growth in capabilities, marketability, and criticality were all significantly related to the magnitudes of suggested increases.     

The effect of cuing after backward conditioning trials

Rats were given backward pairings of a tone (CS) and shock (US) and were then tested for response to the CS in a lick suppression test. Animals given a cuing or reminder treatment prior to the test exhibited enhanced suppression in the presence of the tone relative to a variety of control conditions. The cue-induced suppression enhancement did not appear to result from sensitization or short-term motivational changes nor did it seem to depend on second-order conditioning of the test context. The effect appeared more robust as the number of backward conditioning trials preceding the cue increased. The results were discussed in terms of current explanations of backward conditioning effects.     

On narcissism and post-narcissism: Psychology and theology in context

A contextual approach to narcissism is developed in which theology is seen to articulate simultaneously with psychological needs and cultural values. Some implications of the psychology of the self for theology and culture are discussed in this framework.The author wishes to express his gratitude to Dr. Larry K. Graham for his comments on an earlier version of this paper.Dr. Fallot is a psychologist on the staff of the Student Counseling Service, University of Illinois at Chicago, P.O. Box 4348, Chicago, Il. 60680.     

The effect of the divorce experience on spiritual growth

This essay presents the findings from a study of the effect of divorce on spiritual growth among Protestants. Looking at movement in the areas of love of God, self, and others, it shows that the divorce experience can have varying levels of impact which relate at least partially to the traumatic intensity of the experience itself.Excerpted from The Effect of Divorce on Spiritual Growth: A Study in Protestant Spirituality (unpublished thesis), (c) 1984 Jean M. Blomquist. All rights reserved.     

Representation and retention of three-event sequences in pigeons

The present experiments studied a three-event delayed sequence-discrimination (DSD) task: one arrangement (order) of two stimuli (red and yellow overhead lights) taken three in succession (e.g., red, yellow, red) was the positive sequence and the remaining seven arrangements were the negative sequences for responding and reward during the subsequent test stimulus. In Experiment 1, the final stimulus (recency) and the order of stimuli in the positive sequence controlled acquisition of discrimination. In Experiment 2, increasing the duration of memory intervals between stimuli reduced the discriminability of those negative sequences identical to the positive sequence after the delay. Three-event DSD performance in Experiments 1 and 2 was similar to two-event DSD performance in comparable published experiments. Models developed to explain pigeon performance in two-event DSD were extended to the three-event task. Results from both two- and three-event versions of the DSD task falsified a noncumulative model and several cumulative integration models (i.e., adding, averging, and some multiplying models), but corroborated one cumulative, multiplying model.     

Interpersonal attraction,social identification and psychological group formation

Two perspectives on the nature of the social group and psychological group formation are discussed. The traditional social cohesion approach traces group formation to processes of interpersonal attraction, while the social identity approach defines the group in cognitive terms and considers identification, or self-categorization, to be the mechanism of psychological group formation. On the basis of an experiment by Turner, Sachdev and Hogg (1983) it is hypothesized that interpersonal attraction (positive or negative) is related to group formation only in so far as it enhances intergroup distinctiveness. This hypothesis is experimentally tested in a 2 × 3 (interpersonal liking/disliking per se versus no explicit categorization/random categorization/criterial categorization on the basis of affect) factorial design employing the ‘minimal group’ paradigm. People who like each other and were not explicitly categorized formed a group. This effect was enhanced by criterial categorization but disappeared when categorization was random. Although the results do not support the hypothesis, they are not explicable in social cohesion terms. A social identity explanation is furnished—attraction influences group formation by acting, under certain specifiable conditions, as a cognitive criterion for common category membership. This explanation is located in current theorizing and is proposed as part of a reconceptualization of the relationship between interpersonal attraction and group formation.     

Social categorization,visual cues,and social judgements

Recent research on social cognition suggests that lifelike visual and vocal information about a person may strongly mediate the impact of prior social categorical knowledge on social judgements. Other research, however, on the contribution of visual cues to impression formation, suggests that they have relatively little impact. This study sought to resolve these conflicting findings by examining the effect of visual cues on social judgements when subjects possess prior social categorical knowledge varying in salience to the experimental task. Videotaped target interviews were monitored by observers in either sound and vision or sound only, and measures were taken of the targets' perceived personality, their ‘actual’ and ‘predicted’ social performance, and social acceptance by observers. Whilst salience of categorization strongly influenced the quality of judgements, visual cues had little if any effect. However, visual cues strongly influenced subjects' confidence in all three sets of judgements, sound and vision subjects being consistently more confident than their sound only counterparts. The findings are discussed in relation to previous research in both social cognition and visual cues.     

Preference for decision structures in a social dilemma situation

Additional results from Rutte and Wilke's (1984) study are presented. In the context of a social dilemma situation two variables were manipulated: use and variance. Preference for various decision structures is the issue of the present paper. It appeared that a large majority structure and an unanimity structure were mast preferred. A small majority structure and a structure in which each decides for him/herself were intermediately preferred. Whereas a structure in which one person, a leader, decides for all was least preferred. Further analysis of these data suggested that only the latter two decision structures were influenced by the use and variance manipulations.     

Estimating social and nonsocial utility functions from ordinal data

This paper reports an experiment testing two hypotheses. The first is that the value or utility associated with a payment to one's self and a payment to a co-worker can be represented as an additive function of a utility for own payment (nonsocial utility) and a utility for the difference between own and other's payment (social utility). The second hypothesis is that changes in the amount of work accomplished by one's self and/or the other should influence the social, but not the the nonsocial utilities. Support for both hypotheses is reported.     

Symbolic comparisons with and without perceptual referents: Is interval information used?

In an attempt to investigate the range effect obtained by Moyer and Bayer (1976), two groups of subjects were taught to associate colors with circles that differed in size by larger or smaller intervals and then participated in a symbolic comparison task, in which they determined which of two simultaneously presented symbols (the first letters of two colors) represented the larger magnitude. A third group of subjects, who merely learned an arbitrary ordering of the colors along the dimension of size, also participated in the symbolic comparison task. Despite the fact that no practice trials were given, there was no effect of interval size in either early or late blocks, and the circle-learning groups did not differ in performance from the group who only learned an arbitrary ordering of colors, even when pairs containing end terms were removed from the analysis. It is concluded that subjects do not use analogue codes in symbolic comparison tasks involving small, repeated sets of arbitrarily defined symbols.