Why do people need self-esteem? Converging evidence that self-esteem serves an anxiety-buffering function.

Three studies were conducted to assess the proposition that self-esteem serves an anxiety-buffering function. In Study 1, it was hypothesized that raising self-esteem would reduce anxiety in response to vivid images of death. In support of this hypothesis, Ss who received positive personality feedback reported less anxiety in response to a video about death than did neutral feedback Ss. In Studies 2 and 3, it was hypothesized that increasing self-esteem would reduce anxiety among individuals anticipating painful shock. Consistent with this hypothesis, both success and positive personality feedback reduced Ss' physiological arousal in response to subsequent threat of shock. Thus, converging evidence of an anxiety-buffering function of self-esteem was obtained.     

Does memory contaminate test-retest reliability?

The Wonderlic Personnel Test (1983) was administered twice over a 3-week period under conditions in which the activity of the second test was experimentally manipulated. Data from 302 undergraduates were analyzed. The standard test-retest reliability coefficient, .872, was not significantly different from the coefficients obtained from three other groups that, on the second test, were each given specific instructions: (a) to reason out the answers (pure reassess condition); (b) to use reasoning, memory of their initial responses, or both (reassess and memory); or (c) to take an alternate form of the test (parallel). However, the standard test-retest reliability coefficient was higher, p less than .10, than the coefficient obtained from a condition (pure memory) in which subjects were instructed to duplicate their previous responses, using only memory. Although the subjects in the test-retest and combined reassess and memory conditions reported recalling previous answers for 20-25% of the items on the second test, it was concluded that conscious repetition of specific responses did not seriously inflate the estimate of test-retest reliability.     

Effects of real gender and labeled gender on adults' perceptions of infants.

Three experiments were conducted to discover factors mediating adults' perceptions of male and female infants. In the first experiment, college students were shown 30-s videotapes of four male and four female babies, each of whom was randomly labeled with a male or a female name. Infants labeled as male were perceived as significantly more masculine and stronger than those labeled as female. Discriminant analyses revealed that both rated masculinity and the combination of ratings on male stereotyped traits differentiated infants labeled as male or female. Analyses of real gender revealed that boys were rated as less sensitive and stronger than girls. Discriminant analyses suggested that the combination of less sensitive, more of a problem, more mature, and more playful best differentiated real males from real females. In Experiment 2, the findings of Experiment 1 were confirmed with a sample of mothers of young infants. In Experiment 3 college students' judgments of the sex of the eight babies were correctly predicted from the sensitivity ratings of these babies in Experiment 1. It appears that there is a complex of cues from which adults make judgments of infants' gender and inferences about their characteristics: Boys may appear stronger, more playful, and more of a problem, and girls seem to look more sensitive. Implications for further studies of gender labeling and for sex typing are discussed.     

Self-report, peer-report, and teacher-report measures of childhood depression: an analysis by item.

We explored the low correlation among different types of childhood depression measures at the item level. The items from the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI), Peer Nomination Inventory of Depression (PNID), and the Child Behavior Checklist-Teacher Report Form (CBCL-T) were combined, and both first- and second-order factor analyses were conducted. Results indicate that self-report, peer-report, and teacher-report assessments of depression measure generally uncorrelated constructs. Second-order analysis suggests that depression as a global construct is being measured to some degree by items from all three instruments. Canonical analysis was employed to identify items that best predicted CDI, PNID, and CBL-T summary scores simultaneously. Also, the relationship between specific items with similar content was investigated. Results from these analyses generally supported a conclusion that the three types of measures yield scores that are primarily independent and that the use of summary scores is not masking stronger relationships within measures. These findings have implications for clinical practice and construct elaboration.     

Effects of Pointing Rate and Availability of Visual Feedback on Visual and Proprioceptive Components of Prism Adaptation

While looking through laterally displacing prisms, subjects pointed 60 times straight ahead of their nose at a rate of one complete movement every 2 or 3 s, with visual feedback available early in the pointing movement or delayed until the end of the movement. Sagittal pointing was paced such that movement speed covaried with pointing rate. Aftereffect measures (obtained after every 10 pointing trials) showed that when the limb became visible early in a pointing movement, proprioceptive adaptation was greater than visual, but when visual feedback was delayed until the end of the movement, the reverse was true. This effect occurred only with the 3-s pointing rate, however. With the 2-s pointing rate, adaptation was predominately proprioceptive in nature, regardless of feedback availability. Independent of the availability of visual feedback, visual adaptation developed more quickly with 3-s pointing, whereas proprioceptive adaptation developed more rapidly with 2-s pointing. These results are discussed in terms of a model of perceptual-motor organization in which the direction of coordinative (guidance) linkage between eye-head (visual) and hand-head (proprioceptive) systems (and consequently the locus of discordance registration and adaptive recalibration) is determined jointly by pointing rate and feedback availability. An additional effect of pointing rate is to determine the rate of discordant inputs. Maximal adaptive recalibration occurs when the input (pointing) rate matches the time constant of the adaptive encoder in the guided system.     

Factors and Taxa, Traits and Types, Differences of Degree and Differences in Kind

ABSTRACT A taxon is a nonarbitrary class whose existence is conjectured as an empirical question, not a mere semantic convenience. Numerous taxa are known to exist in nature and society (chemical elements, biological species, organic diseases, geological strata, kinds of stars, elementary particles, races, cultures, Mendelizing mental deficiencies, major psychoses, vocations, ideologies, religions). What personality types, if any, occur in the nonpathological population remains to be researched by sophisticated methods, and cannot be settled by fiat or "dimensional" preference. The intuitive concept of taxonicity is to be explicated by a combination of formal-numerical and causal criteria. Taxometric methods should include consistency tests that provide Popperian risk of strong discorroboration. In social science, latent class methods are probably more useful than cluster algorithms.     

Classification of adult attachment: an integrative taxonomy from attachment and psychoanalytic theories.

Developmental and psychoanalytic theorists have focused increasingly on empirically determined early childhood antecedents of adult attachments, with several resulting taxonomic models. This article suggests a theoretically based and clinically based model of attachment consistent with both psychoanalytic and attachment theories, resulting in an integrative taxonomy of four adult attachment styles: dependent, avoidant, hostile, and resistant-ambivalent. These styles reflect behavioral manifestations of dependence and anger, as derived from the interaction of primitive relational drives, defenses, and interpersonal experience. In addition to theoretical construction, brief clinical examples are presented to facilitate discussion of the model.     

Marital processes predictive of later dissolution: behavior, physiology, and health.

Seventy-three married couples were studied in 1983 and 1987. To identify marital processes associated with dissolution, a balance theory of marriage was used to generate 1 variable for dividing couples into regulated and nonregulated groups. For studying the precursors of divorce, a "cascade" model of marital dissolution, which forms a Guttman-like scale, received preliminary support. Compared with regulated couples, nonregulated couples had (a) marital problems rated as more severe (Time 1); (b) lower marital satisfaction (Time 1 and Time 2); (c) poorer health (Time 2); (d) smaller finger pulse amplitudes (wives); (e) more negative ratings for interactions; (f) more negative emotional expression; (g) less positive emotional expression; (h) more stubbornness and withdrawal from interaction; (i) greater defensiveness; and (j) greater risk for marital dissolution (lower marital satisfaction and higher incidence of consideration of dissolution and of actual separation).