Actual and Perceived Group Performance as a Function of Group Composition: The Moderating Role of the Type A and B Behavior Patterns1

This study examined the moderating influence of the Type A and B behavior patterns on group performance and group functioning. Type As and Bs were assigned to different roles in groups given the task of deciding what items to transfer from a sinking ship to a life raft. Results indicated that groups with Type A leaders in conflict with a Type A group member arrived at relatively poor decisions. Type A leaders, however, also were perceived by their groups to be more competent than were Type B leaders. These results suggested that the Type A behavior pattern can have the paradoxical effects of hindering group problem-solving and of leading others to view Type As as more competent than Type Bs because of their active dynamic style.     

The power of affirming group values: Group affirmation buffers the self-esteem of women exposed to blatant sexism

Extending the group affirmation literature to the domain of prejudice, this study investigated whether group affirmation buffers the self-esteem of women exposed to blatant sexism. In accordance with Self-Affirmation Theory and group affirmation research, we hypothesized that when one aspect of the collective self is threatened (gender identity), self-esteem can be maintained via the affirmation of an alternative aspect of the collective self. In a 2 × 2 between-participants design, female students were randomly assigned to read about discrimination directed toward women or a non-self-relevant disadvantaged group (the Inuit). All then participated in a (fictitious) second study, in which half completed a group affirmation manipulation (wrote about the top three values of a self-defining group) and half completed a control writing exercise. The self-esteem of women who were threatened by sexism, but group affirmed, was protected from the negative effects of perceiving sexism.     

Staff and Boarders Perspectives of the Boarding Environment

This research provides support for a direct comparison between the home and boarding environments, the inference being that boarding staff who fulfil an in loco parentis role have an integral part to play in the developmental outcomes of adolescents (boarders). Research in the area of family functioning has found that adolescents tend to view the family environment more negatively than their parents and that these discrepant perceptions have been linked to both internalising and externalising disorders in adolescents. In an attempt to further clarify the influence of the parenting role of boarding staff and of the boarding environment in general, 121 staff and 415 boarders from schools in Queensland, Australia, were asked to rate the boarding environment on levels of conflict, social support and climate. It was found that boarders, like adolescents in the home environment, perceived significantly higher levels of conflict and lower levels of social support and positive climate than did staff. These findings lend further support to the conceptualisation of the boarding environment as a home away from home. The implications of these findings for boarders’ developmental outcomes are discussed.     

Networks of prospective thoughts: The organisational role of emotion and its impact on well-being

Recent research has shown that many prospective thoughts are organised in networks of related events, but the relational dimensions that contribute to the formation of such networks are not fully understood. Here, we investigated the organisational role of emotion by using cues of different valence for eliciting event networks. We found that manipulating the emotional valence of cues influenced the characteristics of events within networks, and that members of a network were more similar to each other on affective components than they were to members of other networks. Furthermore, a substantial proportion of events within networks were part of thematic clusters and cluster membership significantly modulated the impact of represented events on current well-being, in part through an intensification of the emotion felt when thinking about these events. These findings demonstrate that emotion contributes to the organisation of future thoughts in networks that can affect people's well-being.     

Disentangling fast and slow attentional influences of negative and taboo spoken words in the emotional Stroop paradigm

Although the influence of the emotional content of stimuli on attention has been considered as occurring within trial, recent studies revealed that the presentation of such stimuli would also involve a slow component. The aim of the present study was to investigate fast and slow effects of negative (Exp. 1) and taboo (Exp. 2) spoken words. For this purpose, we used an auditory variant of the emotional Stroop paradigm in which each emotional word was followed by a sequence of neutral words. Replicating results from our previous study, we observed slow but no fast effects of negative and taboo words, which we interpreted as reflecting difficulties to disengage attention from their emotional dimension. Interestingly, while the presentation of a negative word only delayed the processing of the immediately subsequent neutral word, slow effects of taboo words were long-lasting. Nevertheless, such attentional effects were only observed when the emotional words were presented in the first block of trials, suggesting that once participants develop strategies to perform the task, attention-grabbing effects of emotional words disappear. Hence, far from being automatic, the occurrence of these effects would depend on participants' attentional set.