Exploring the role of emotions in injustice perceptions and retaliation

Although organizational justice scholars often describe unfairness as an emotionally laden experience, the role of emotion is underresearched. In a study of individuals who experienced being laid off (N = 173), the authors found that outcome favorability interacts with both procedural and interactional justice to predict participants' emotions. The pattern of interaction differed for inward-focused (i.e., shame and guilt) and outward-focused (i.e., anger and hostility) negative emotions. Attributions of blame mediated the relationship between fairness perceptions and outward-focused negative emotion. Outward-focused emotion mediated the relationship between fairness perceptions and retaliation.     

Gender differences in the accuracy of self-reported weight

To investigate gender as a possible moderator of the validity of self-reported weight data in studies of body image and eating disorders, the discrepancies between reported weights and actual weights were examined in a sample of 186 college students, 90 males and 96 females. Ninety-four percent of the students were Anglo-American, and 6% were African-American, Asian-American, or Hispanic. In comparison to male students, female students underreported their weight to a significantly greater degree. Generally, use of self-reported weight, rather than actual weight, would result in more subjects classified as normal weight or underweight and fewer classified as overweight, using standard methods of classifying individuals into weight categories. And consistent with previous research, normal-weight females perceived themselves as overweight while normal-weight males were more likely to perceive themselves as underweight. Implications for further research on gender differences in eating problems and body image are discussed.To whom reprint requests should be addressed at Department of Psychology, 210 McAlester Hall, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211.     

Family Therapy with English Caribbean Immigrant Families in the United States: Issues of Emigration, Immigration, Culture, and Race

Many English Caribbean families in the United States are referred for therapy because of difficulties related to their adaptation to a new country/culture. This paper focuses on the intra-familial, and the family-larger system transitional/adjustment difficulties experienced by these families and presents issues specific to therapy with them. Effective therapy with English Caribbean families and their subsystems requires that therapists communicate to these families an understanding of their concerns, be knowledgeable about heterogeneity in cultural values and traditions, and create a therapeutic atmosphere in which families can feel valued and respected. Recommendations for therapists are presented and discussed.     

Sustained attention and the Type A behavior pattern: the effect of daydreaming on performance.

The present study examined the ability of Type A and Type B subjects to sustain attention during a 40-min visual vigilance task. It was predicted that Type A subjects would perform better than Type B subjects and that the performance of both groups would be related to the frequency of daydreams during the vigil. Type A subjects outperformed Type B subjects with regard to perceptual sensitivity (A') and number of signal detections. Although both groups reported an increase in the number of their daydreams as the vigil progressed, Type A subjects reported fewer daydreams during each period of watch than did Type B subjects. In addition, an inverse relationship was found between the number of signal detections and the frequency of daydreams.     

Mishandling the Gift of Life: Noncompliance in Renal Transplant Patients1

Two studies investigating renal transplant patients compliance with their post-transplant medical regimen are presented. Compliance was operationalized as a multidimensional construct incorporating behaviors that represent adherence to the regimen. Study 1 examined the association of noncompliance with clinically significant outcomes and the medical and demographic predictors of noncompliance. Noncompliance was associated with rejection episodes, graft loss, and multiple transplants. The best predictors of noncompliance were medication side effects, age, education, and insurance coverage. Study 2 examined the psychosocial predictors of noncompliance. After age and side-effects complaints, self-efficacy and threat appraisal were the best predictors of compliance. The implications of these results for expectancy-value models of health behaviors (e.g., protection motivation theory; Rogers, 1983) and their ability to predict compliance in patients following long-term regimens are discussed.     

Perceived control,nature of risk information and risk taking. An experimental test of a simple taxonomy of uncertainty

Uncertainty may be categorized along two dimensions: (1) the nature of probabilistic information (i.e. frequency information, about the outcomes of similar situations in the past, versus process information, about the way(s) in which a future loss might occur), and (2) the degree of personal control (i.e. the extent to which an activity's outcomes depend on internal factors (e.g. knowledge, skills) versus external (e.g. chance) factors). The effects of variations in both dimensions on people's risk-taking tendency were experimentally studied. In a computerized task, subjects had to stop a fast-moving symbol before it passed a target line. Success yielded a financial gain, failure led them into a ‘penalty task’ with the possibility of a considerable loss. On each trial subjects chose among 10 risk levels (varying symbol speeds): low levels resulted in small but almost sure gains, high levels yielded larger but less probable gains. Across subgroups of subjects, three penalty task characteristics were varied: (1) the actual loss probability, (2) the external versus internal determination of outcomes, and (3) the available risk information. Major findings were: (a) subjects did not set a lower risk level, but they did appear to be more attentive (i.e. they failed fewer trials) when the actual loss probability was lower; (b) internal outcome determination resulted in more failed trials (lesser caution); (c) subjects ignored frequency information, but were sensitive to process information. Results are discussed in terms of effort allocation for controlling risk during task performance.     

Sex role as a mediator of achievement in task performance

Participants in a test of the influence of sex role on performance in a masculine task were 96 male and female undergraduates. Subject sex, norm (challenging or not challenging), and experimenter (male, female, or no experimenter present) were varied in a 2×2×3 design. When challenged, subjects worked more successfully in the presence of a female than before a male or with no experimenter present. Results support the hypothesis that the arousal of achieving tendencies may depend in part on the importance and conspicuousness of role cues. Implications for industrial performance and for future research are discussed.The authors would like to acknowledge the thoughtful assistance of Barbara Moely and Beverly Jafek, who commented on earlier drafts of this paper.All correspondence should be sent to Dr. Laurie Larwood, Claremont Men's College Claremont, California 91711. Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, Chicago, August 1975.     

The Effectiveness of Audiovisual Self-Instructional Materials in Teaching Child-Care Skills to Parents with Intellectual Disabilities

Children of parents with intellectual disabilities are at risk for neglectful care due to parenting skill deficiencies. Previous studies have shown that parents with intellectual disabilities can improve child-care skills with intensive behavioral training, but self-instruction has not been explored. We evaluated the efficacy of self-instructional pictorial child-care manuals with and without accompanying audiotaped instruction using a multielement design with 13 parents with intellectual disabilities. The self-instructional materials were effective in teaching 22 of 26 skills to levels seen in parents without intellectual disabilities. Eighty-one percent of the skills maintained over a 1-15 month follow-up period and self-learning effects were replicated when the parents received self-instructional materials for the original no-training control skill. Despite the low literacy skills of the parents, for most of them no advantage was found in adding the audiotape to the illustrations. Three parents only reached criterion after an audiotape was added to the manual alone skill. Consumer satisfaction ratings were uniformly high and those parents who stated a preference, preferred the pictorial manuals without, as opposed to with, the audiotape. These findings suggest that a majority of parents with intellectual disabilities may improve their parenting skills with low cost, low tech, self-instructional materials.     

Relationships between anger, symptoms, and cognitive factors in OCD checkers

The purpose of this study was to examine whether individuals diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) with primary checking compulsions report higher levels of trait anger and anger expression compared with a student control group, and whether trait anger and anger expression are correlated with specific beliefs and interpretations that are common among individuals who compulsively check. A group of individuals with OCD reporting significant checking compulsions (n=33) and a group of undergraduate students (n=143) completed a questionnaire package that included measures of trait anger and anger expression, as well as measures of obsessive-compulsive symptoms and beliefs. The compulsive checking group reported greater trait anger, though not greater anger expression, than the student control group. Furthermore, beliefs concerning perfectionism and intolerance of uncertainty were positively correlated with anger expression and trait anger among compulsive checkers but not among the student control group. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of cognitive-behavioural treatments for and models of compulsive checking in OCD.