The world looks better together: How close others enhance our visual experiences

People derive a number of benefits from sharing experiences with close others. However, most research on this topic has been restricted to forms of sharing involving explicit socializing, including verbal communication, emotion expression, and behavioral interaction. In two studies, these complexities were eliminated to find out whether merely experiencing visual stimuli (photographs) simultaneously with a close other—without communicating—enhances people's evaluations of those stimuli relative to coexperiencing the same stimuli with a stranger or alone. Compared to when viewers were alone, visual scenes were enhanced (better liked and seen as more real) when coexperienced with a close other and were liked less when coexperienced with a stranger. Implications for close relationships are discussed.     

Explaining Support for Violating Out‐Group Human Rights in Conflict: Attitudes Toward Principles of Human Rights,Trust in the Out‐Group,and Intergroup Contact1

A public atmosphere that supports violating the human rights of out‐group members can enable or even encourage enacting such violations. We present a model that explains such support in terms of 2 underlying components: (a) support for violating general principles of human rights (SVHRG); and (b) lack of trust toward the specific out‐group. This model was successful (R² = .47) in predicting Jewish‐Israeli support for violating human rights of Palestinians (SVHRP). Structural equation modeling indicated that, consistent with our hypotheses, SVHRG and distrust of Palestinians each significantly contributed to predicting SVHRP; and contact with Palestinians and religiosity each significantly contributed to predicting trust in Palestinians, with more contact predicting higher trust and more religiosity predicting lower trust.     

Stroke patients' well-being as a function of caregiving spouses' helpful and unhelpful actions

This study examined the perceptions that 55 older married stroke patients had about themselves and about the motivations of their caregiving spouses when they judged their spouses' actions to be helpful and when they judged them to be unhelpful. It also examined how these perceptions were related to patients' well-being (depression, positive affect, marital satisfaction). Patients had more negative perceptions of themselves and of their spouses when they judged the actions to be unhelpful than when they judged them to be helpful. The hypothesis that perceptions about unhelpful actions would be more strongly related to patients' well-being than would perceptions about helpful actions was only partially supported. Perceptions about unhelpful actions were related to patients' depression, but perceptions about helpful actions were related to positive affect. Both kinds of perceptions were related to marital satisfaction. Findings begin to explicate the complex relationship between perceived helpfulness of actions and well-being.