Is the Positive Illusory Bias Illusory? Examining Discrepant Self-Perceptions of Competence in Girls with ADHD

It has been claimed that excessively positive self-perceptions of competence are a key risk factor for concurrent and subsequent impairments in youth with attention-deficit/ hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). We examined whether girls with ADHD demonstrate positive illusory self-perceptions in scholastic competence, social acceptance, and behavioral conduct domains. We then tested, across a five-year longitudinal span, whether (a) such self-perceptions versus (b) the constituent informant ratings or test scores were more strongly predictive of adolescent impairment and positive adjustment. Participants included an ethnically diverse sample of 140 girls with ADHD and 88 comparison girls, aged 6-12 at baseline (M?=?9.0, SD?=?1.7). Girls with ADHD rated themselves as more positive than indicated by external ratings, but these self-reports were still in a negative direction (comparison girls rated themselves as less positive than these indicators). ADHD subtypes were not related to discrepancy scores. Higher rates of depression symptoms were associated with attenuated discrepancy scores. Crucially, measures of actual competence were more strongly associated with adolescent impairment and positive adjustment than were "illusory" self-perceptions for girls with ADHD. Our findings challenge the view that, at least in girls with ADHD, overly positive and "illusory" appraisals of competence are strongly associated with future impairment and adjustment. The key psychometric point is that, in difference or discrepancy scores, the individual components of such scores should be separately examined.     

Bitter reproach or sweet revenge: cultural differences in response to racism

Culture has been shown to influence response styles. The authors conducted two studies to test the notion that African Americans would be more likely to respond to racism directly, whereas Asian Americans would be more likely to respond indirectly and therefore more subtly. Study 1 showed that Black women subjected to a racist comment from a confederate during an online interaction were more likely than Asian women to verbally reproach the perpetrator. These group differences were not present when the outcome measure was indirect responding--administration of good/bad jellybeans. Study 2 used an online format to demonstrate that Asian women were more likely than Black women to say they would not respond directly to a racist comment. This group difference in unwillingness to confront was significantly mediated by a goal of maintaining peace with their interaction partner. Implications of these findings for the study of discrimination, coping, and well-being are discussed.     

Second-class citizen? Contract workers' perceived status,dual commitment and intent to quit

Outsourcing of jobs to contract workers who work alongside a client's employees has changed the human resource landscape of many organizations. In this study we examine how a contract worker's perceived employment status similarity to the client's own standard employees influences his/her affective commitment to both the client and the employer and ultimately intent to quit the employer. Using a sample of 623 contract workers, we found strong support for our hypotheses. In particular, findings indicate an important role for perceived employment status at the client organization in driving contract worker's attitudes and that contract workers consider both the client and the employer when making decisions to leave the employer. Implications for managing contractor relationships are discussed.     

Children's discrimination of fantastic vs. realistic visual displays after watching a film with magical content

Six- and nine-yr.-old children (n=28 of each) were divided into equal experimental and control groups. The experimental groups were shown a film with a magical theme, and the control groups were shown a film with a nonmagical theme. All groups then were presented with a choice task requiring them to discriminate between ordinary and fantastic visual displays on a computer screen. Statistical analyses indicated that mean scores for correctly identifying the ordinary and fantastic displays were significantly different between experimental and control groups. The children in the experimental groups who watched the magical film had significantly higher scores on correct identifications than children in the control groups who watched the nonmagical film for both age groups. The results suggest that watching films with a magical theme might enhance children's sensitivity toward the fantasy/reality distinction.     

The Use of Propensity Scores in Mediation Analysis

Mediation analysis uses measures of hypothesized mediating variables to test theory for how a treatment achieves effects on outcomes and to improve subsequent treatments by identifying the most efficient treatment components. Most current mediation analysis methods rely on untested distributional and functional form assumptions for valid conclusions, especially regarding the relation between the mediator and outcome variables. Propensity score methods offer an alternative whereby the propensity score is used to compare individuals in the treatment and control groups who would have had the same value of the mediator had they been assigned to the same treatment condition. This article describes the use of propensity score weighting for mediation with a focus on explicating the underlying assumptions. Propensity scores have the potential to offer an alternative estimation procedure for mediation analysis with alternative assumptions from those of standard mediation analysis. The methods are illustrated investigating the mediational effects of an intervention to improve sense of mastery to reduce depression using data from the Job Search Intervention Study (JOBS II). We find significant treatment effects for those individuals who would have improved sense of mastery when in the treatment condition but no effects for those who would not have improved sense of mastery under treatment.     

Peer pressure against prejudice: A high school field experiment examining social network change

Individuals often conform to the intergroup attitudes and behaviors modeled by their peers in a given situation. To what extent does peer influence on intergroup prejudice 1) diffuse across a social network of peers and 2) affect attitudes and behavior across time? Student leaders (“Peer Trainers”) were trained to confront expressions of intergroup prejudice in five randomly assigned high schools across a period of five months; students recruited to be Peer Trainers in five control schools waited to be trained. Independent surveys of Peer Trainers' social networks reveal that treatment Peer Trainers were significantly more likely than control Trainers to be nominated by peers as students who confront prejudice. Treatment Peer Trainers' tolerant behavior spread to close friends and to acquaintances in their social network; their attitudes spread inconsistently, and only to close friends. Studying peer influence within social networks can improve understanding of social influence, prejudice reduction, and social change.     

Integrating advice and experience: learning and decision making with social and nonsocial cues

When making decisions, people typically gather information from both social and nonsocial sources, such as advice from others and direct experience. This research adapted a cognitive learning paradigm to examine the process by which people learn what sources of information are credible. When participants relied on advice alone to make decisions, their learning of source reliability proceeded in a manner analogous to traditional cue learning processes and replicated the established learning phenomena. However, when advice and nonsocial cues were encountered together as an established phenomenon, blocking (ignoring redundant information) did not occur. Our results suggest that extant cognitive learning models can accommodate either advice or nonsocial cues in isolation. However, the combination of advice and nonsocial cues (a context more typically encountered in daily life) leads to different patterns of learning, in which mutually supportive information from different types of sources is not regarded as redundant and may be particularly compelling. For these situations, cognitive learning models still constitute a promising explanatory tool but one that must be expanded. As such, these findings have important implications for social psychological theory and for cognitive models of learning.     

The flexible use of inductive and geometric spatial categories

The present study examined the flexibility with which people can adopt different category schemes in the spatial domain. In a location memory task, participants viewed and estimated the locations of four kinds of objects that were spatially grouped by object identity. This identity-based arrangement was either congruent or incongruent with the perceptually based, geometric categories that have been reported in previous research. Four experiments examined the conditions under which these different category schemes are used to inform estimates of locations. The results showed that use of identity information depended on the number of objects to be remembered during a trial: When one or two objects were remembered at a time, only geometric categories affected estimates, but when four objects were to be remembered, both geometric categories and identity groupings affected estimates. As memory load increases, participants rely on additional sources to inform their estimates of location.