"Saying one thing and doing another": examining the impact of event order on hypocrisy judgments of others

This study investigated whether the temporal order of people's expressed statements and their behaviors affected others' judgments of hypocrisy, and why. It was proposed that hypocrisy would be greater when a statement establishing a personal standard preceded a behavior violating that standard as opposed to the reverse order. This order effect occurred in three studies, generalizing across two topic areas (healthy living and safe sex) and for both normative and non-normative statements (pro/anti-safe sex). Mediation analyses indicated that the reverse order mitigated against hypocrisy because the target's inconsistency was attributed to dispositional change. The discussion addresses additional variables likely to affect hypocrisy and the relationship of this research to hypocrisy paradigms in dissonance.     

Dying to be thin: the effects of mortality salience and body mass index on restricted eating among women

Following terror management theory, the authors suggest women's striving to attain a thin physique is fueled in part by existential concerns. In three studies, women restricted consumption of a nutritious but fattening food in response to reminders of mortality (mortality salience; MS). When conducted in private (Study 1), this effect was found among women but not men; when replicated in a group setting in which social comparison was likely (Studies 2 and 3), only women who were relatively less successful attaining the thin ideal (i.e., high body mass index; BMI) restricted eating after MS. In Study 3, MS caused high BMI women to perceive themselves as more discrepant from their ideal thinness; this perceived failure mediated the effects of MS and BMI on eating behavior. Findings are discussed from a self-regulatory framework, which considered in the context of pressures for women to be thin, can shed light on health risk behavior.     

Chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes) intentional communication is not contingent upon food

Studies of great apes have revealed that they use manual gestures and other signals to communicate about distal objects. There is also evidence that chimpanzees modify the types of communicative signals they use depending on the attentional state of a human communicative partner. The majority of previous studies have involved chimpanzees requesting food items from a human experimenter. Here, these same communicative behaviors are reported in chimpanzees requesting a tool from a human observer. In this study, captive chimpanzees were found to gesture, vocalize, and display more often when the experimenter had a tool than when she did not. It was also found that chimpanzees responded differentially based on the attentional state of a human experimenter, and when given the wrong tool persisted in their communicative efforts. Implications for the referential and intentional nature of chimpanzee communicative signaling are discussed.     

Eating disorder prevention programs: a meta-analytic review

This meta-analysis of eating disorder prevention programs found that intervention effects ranged from an absence of any effects to reductions in current and future eating pathology. Certain effects persisted as long as 2 years and were superior to minimal-intervention control conditions. Larger effects occurred for selected (vs. universal), interactive (vs. didactic), and multisession (vs. single session) programs; for programs offered solely to females and to participants over age 15; for programs without psychoeducational content; and for trials that used validated measures. The results identify promising prevention programs and delineate sample, format, and design features that are associated with larger effects, but they suggest the need for improved methodological rigor and statistical modeling of trials and enhanced theoretical rationale for interventions.     

A time to tan: proximal and distal effects of mortality salience on sun exposure intentions

According to the dual defense model of terror management, proximal defenses are engaged to reduce the conscious impact of mortality salience, whereas thoughts of death outside of conscious awareness motivate distal defenses aimed at maintaining self-esteem. Two experiments examined these ideas by assessing women's intentions to engage in tanning-related behavior. In Study 1, when concerns about death (relative to dental pain) were in focal attention, participants increased intentions to protect themselves from dangerous sun exposure. In contrast, when thoughts about death were outside of focal attention, participants decreased interest in sun protection. In Study 2, participants primed to associate tanned skin with an attractive appearance responded to mortality concerns outside of focal attention with increased interest in tanning products and services. These findings are discussed in relation to the dual-defense model of terror management, societal determinants of self-esteem, and implications for health risk and promotion.     

Greed, death, and values: from terror management to transcendence management theory

Research supporting terror management theory has shown that participants facing their death (via mortality salience) exhibit more greed than do control participants. The present research attempts to distinguish mortality salience from other forms of mortality awareness. Specifically, the authors look to reports of near-death experiences and posttraumatic growth which reveal that many people who nearly die come to view seeking wealth and possession as empty and meaningless. Guided by these reports, a manipulation called death reflection was generated. In Study 1, highly extrinsic participants who experienced death reflection exhibited intrinsic behavior. In Study 2, the manipulation was validated, and in Study 3, death reflection and mortality salience manipulations were compared. Results showed that mortality salience led highly extrinsic participants to manifest greed, whereas death reflection again generated intrinsic, unselfish behavior. The construct of value orientation is discussed along with the contrast between death reflection manipulation and mortality salience.     

Shape-from-shading depends on visual, gravitational, and body-orientation cues

The perception of shading-defined form results from an interaction between shading cues and the frames of reference within which those cues are interpreted. In the absence of a clear source of illumination, the definition of 'up' becomes critical to deducing the perceived shape from a particular pattern of shading. In our experiments, twelve subjects adjusted the orientation of a planar disc painted with a linear luminance gradient from one side to the other, until the disc appeared maximally convex-that is, until the luminance gradient induced the maximum perception of a three-dimensional shape. The vision, gravity, and body-orientation cues were altered relative to each other. Visual cues were manipulated by the York Tilted Room facility, and body cues were altered by simply lying on one side. The orientation of the disc that appeared maximally convex varied in a systematic fashion with these manipulations. We present a model in which the direction of perceptual 'up' is determined from the sum of three weighted vectors corresponding to the vision, gravity, and body-orientation cues. The model predicts the perceived direction of 'up', contributes to our understanding of how shape-from-shading is deduced, and also predicts the confidence with which the 'up' direction is perceived.     

Contextual moderation of racial bias: the impact of social roles on controlled and automatically activated attitudes

Three experiments tested the hypothesis that the social roles implied by specific contexts can attenuate or reverse the typical pattern of racial bias obtained on both controlled and automatic evaluation measures. Study 1 assessed evaluations of Black and Asian faces in contexts related to athlete or student roles. Study 2 compared evaluations of Black and White faces in 3 role-related contexts (prisoner, churchgoer, and factory worker). Study 3 manipulated role cues (lawyer or prisoner) within the same prison context. All 3 studies produced significant reversals of racial bias as a function of implied role on measures of both controlled and automatic evaluation. These results support the interpretation that differential evaluations based on Race x Role interactions provide one way that context can moderate both controlled and automatic racial bias.     

A function of form: terror management and structuring the social world

Drawing on lay epistemology theory, the authors assessed a terror management analysis of the psychological function of structuring social information. Seven studies tested variations of the hypothesis that simple, benign interpretations of social information function, in part, to manage death-related anxiety. In Studies 1-4, mortality salience (MS) exaggerated primacy effects and reliance on representative information, decreased preference for a behaviorally inconsistent target among those high in personal need for structure (PNS), and increased high-PNS participants' preference for interpersonal balance. In Studies 5-7, MS increased high-PNS participants' preference for interpretations that suggest a just world and a benevolent causal order of events in the social world.