The impact of the social context on resistance to persuasion: Effortful versus effortless responses to counter-attitudinal information

Past research has demonstrated that the presence of attitudinal diversity within a person’s social network increases his or her openness to attitude change. The current research explores whether this increased openness to attitude change is the result of relatively thoughtful or nonthoughtful processes. A nationally representative sample of US adults was exposed to a counter-attitudinal persuasive message that contained either strong or weak arguments. Attitudinal diversity within participants’ social networks was associated with greater argument quality differentiation: people embedded in networks that included a variety of views were more likely than those in attitudinally homogenous networks to carefully scrutinize attitude-relevant information, modifying their attitudes in response to strong but not weak arguments.     

Infant Distress During Immunization: A Multimethod Assessment

The purpose of this study was to comprehensively describe infant procedural distress and pain across assessment modalities, and to compare similarities and differences across measures. A multimethod assessment of distress was conducted to investigate infants (N = 37) undergoing routine immunizations. Measures of infant distress included Parent report, nurse report, infant heart rate, and an observational measure of infant distress. Parents rated their infant's distress and pain significantly higher than did nurses. Observational and physiological ratings of infant distress were found to vary significantly by phase, and there were no correlations between adult ratings of pain and distress and physiological ratings. Findings suggest that infant procedural distress can be assessed in a number of manners. The discordance between these measures emphasizes the need for multimethod assessment of pediatric procedural distress in both research and clinical settings. Given the differences between parent and nurse ratings, clinicians should be aware that different assessment methods might lead to different conclusions about infant procedural distress.     

Choosing to Enter or Avoid Diagnostic Social Situations

ABSTRACT— Three studies suggest that people control the nature of their relationships, in part, by choosing to enter (or avoid) situations providing feedback about other people's social interest. In Study 1 , chronically avoidant individuals (but not others) preferred social options that would provide no information about other people's evaluations of them over social options that would, but did not prefer nondiagnostic situations more generally. In Study 2 , chronically avoidant students (but not others) in a methods class preferred to have their teacher assign them to working groups (a nondiagnostic situation) over forming their own groups (a diagnostic situation). In Study 3 , individuals experimentally primed to feel avoidant were less likely than those primed to feel secure to choose to receive feedback about how another person felt about them. Overall, the research suggests that choices of socially diagnostic versus socially nondiagnostic situations play an important role in guiding people's social relationships.     

Offering more support than we seek

Two studies provide evidence that, in friendships, people offer support to partners more often than they request identical support for themselves. In one study, people reported being more likely to offer different types of support (e.g., a ride to a train station) than to request identical support. This effect was more pronounced for casual than established friendships. In a second study, people assigned randomly to be in a position to give support or to seek identical support from a friend gave more support than they sought. The observed asymmetry is attributed to people balancing desires to establish and strengthen communal relationships against desires to protect the self from rejection, not to people being inherently more unselfish than selfish.     

A Social Disorganization Perspective on Bullying-Related Attitudes and Behaviors: The Influence of School Context

Social disorganization theory suggests that certain school-level indictors of disorder may be important predictors of bullying-related attitudes and behaviors. Multilevel analyses were conducted on bullying-related attitudes and experiences among 22,178 students in 95 elementary and middle schools. The intraclass correlation coefficients indicated that 0.6–2% of the variance in victimization, 5–10% of the variance in retaliatory attitudes, 5–6% of the variance in perceptions of safety, and 0.9% of the variance in perpetration of bullying was associated with the clustering of students within schools. Although the specific associations varied somewhat for elementary schools as compared to middle schools, the hierarchical linear modeling analyses generally suggested that school-level indicators of disorder (e.g., student–teacher ratio, concentration of student poverty, suspension rate, and student mobility) were significant predictors of bullying-related attitudes and experiences. Student-level characteristics (i.e., sex, ethnicity, status in school) were also relevant to students’ retaliatory attitudes, perceptions of safety, and involvement in bullying. Implications for school-based research and violence prevention are provided.     

Patient inquiry into mental hospitalization: a quantitative analysis.

In this section we have assembled a small collection of data concerned with the issue of whether or not adolescents would profit from reflective inquiry into the closed area of mental health care. We have analyzed, arranged and interpreted the data from our study and conclude it demonstrates that adolescent inpatients did profit substantially from a reflective inquiry into mental health care. The number of subjects involved in this experimental program was small. The subjects of the experimental program were not selected randomly. Moreover, the researcher could not control for a number of intervening variables. For this particular group the intervening variables were many: changes in the subjects' individual treatment program, level of tranquilizing medication, attitude of other staff toward the experimental program, relations with parents or relatives, et cetera. This list covers some of the more important weaknesses of the experimental design. In the account of the experiment we reported the influence of other significant intervening variables as they emerged during the course of the study. Even with these important limitations the total push of the results in the direction of our argument compels us to conclude that it is clearly profitable for adolescent inpatients to reflectively inquire into the closed area of mental health care. Although the data reported here are not of predictive value, we believe they indicate the importance of having adolescent inpatients reflectively examine their social situation.     

Perfectionism, depression, and academic performance

In samples of 30 Canadian and 117 American undergraduates, academic performance was more strongly correlated with perfectionism scores (Revised Almost Perfect Scale) (r = .20 and -.17) than with those on self-reported depression (CES-Depression) (r = -.09).     

Distraction for Pediatric Immunization Pain: A Critical Review

The paper provides a critical review of distraction for pediatric immunizations in order to determine clinical practicality and efficacy of this commonly employed intervention. The MEDLINE and PsycINFO databases were searched to identify papers that included an evaluation of a distraction intervention as a method of pediatric immunization pain management. Fifteen papers were included in this review. Effect sizes were calculated to estimate the clinical significance of findings. In order to examine possible differences in effect sizes related to distraction characteristics, chi square analyses were conducted. Results indicate that distraction is clinically effective in the reduction of pain during pediatric immunizations. Support is found for behavioral and cognitive explanations of distraction mechanisms. Further, various distraction stimulus characteristics were found to be associated with the clinical significance of findings. This article is based on the preliminary examination paper of the first author under the direction of the second, at West Virginia University.     

Involuntary commitments to public mental institutions: issues involving the overrepresentation of blacks and assessment of relevant functioning

This article contributes to the debate in the mental health and legal systems concerning involuntary commitments to mental hospitals. The focus is on issues involving the overrepresentation of Black people among adults committed to U.S. public mental institutions and issues involving the assessment of relevant behavioral functioning in particular. Empirical findings, legal principles and procedures, and methodological limitations are reviewed to identify problems in current practice and relevant evidence bearing on those problems. Special emphasis is placed on the possible explanations for the overrepresentation of Blacks and on dependable assessments of relevant functioning that are needed to justify the state's coercive power to involuntarily confine people, regardless of race. The article concludes with a summary and recommendations for research and practice.