Psychological Comparison Processes and Self-Concept in Relation to Five Distinct Frame-of-Reference Effects: Pan-Human Cross-Cultural Generalizability over 68 Countries

The concept of self is central to personhood, but personality research has largely ignored the relevance of recent advances in self-concept theory: multidimensionality of self-concept (focusing instead on self-esteem, an implicit unidimensional approach), domain specificity (generalizability of trait manifestations over different domains), and multilevel perspectives in which social-cognitive processes and contextual effects drive self-perceptions at different levels (individual, group/institution, and country) aligned to Bronfenbrenner's ecological model. Here, we provide theoretical and empirical support for psychological comparison processes that influence self-perceptions and their relation to distal outcomes. Our meta-theoretical integration of social and dimensional comparison theories synthesizes five seemingly paradoxical frame-of-reference and contextual effects in self-concept formation that occur at different levels. The effects were tested with a sample of 485,490 fifteen-year-old students (68 countries/regions, 18,292 schools). Consistent with the dimensional comparison theory, the effects on math self-concept were positive for math achievement but negative for verbal achievement. Consistent with the social comparison theory, the effects on math self-concept were negative for school-average math achievement (big-fish-little-pond effect), country-average achievement (paradoxical cross-cultural effect), and being young relative to year in school but positive for school-average verbal achievement (big-fish-little-pond effect—compensatory effect). We demonstrate cross-cultural generalizability/universality of support for predictions and discuss implications for personality research. © 2020 European Association of Personality Psychology     

Central load reduces peripheral processing: Evidence from incidental memory of background speech

Is there a trade‐off between central (working memory) load and peripheral (perceptual) processing? To address this question, participants were requested to undertake an n‐back task in one of two levels of central/cognitive load (i.e., 1‐back or 2‐back) in the presence of a to‐be‐ignored story presented via headphones. Participants were told to ignore the background story, but they were given a surprise memory test of what had been said in the background story, immediately after the n‐back task was completed. Memory was poorer in the high central load (2‐back) condition in comparison with the low central load (1‐back) condition. Hence, when people compensate for higher central load, by increasing attentional engagement, peripheral processing is constrained. Moreover, participants with high working memory capacity (WMC) – with a superior ability for attentional engagement – remembered less of the background story, but only in the low central load condition. Taken together, peripheral processing – as indexed by incidental memory of background speech – is constrained when task engagement is high.     

Social Ecological Context of Conversing

The purpose of this article is to provide some groundwork about ecological social psychology as a starting point for researchers tackling neglected issues of language ecologically. I review basic principles of the ecological approach to perceiving and acting and discuss how the ecological approach has been applied beyond solo actors in an ecological niche to multiple actors acting in a niche explicitly conceptualized as social. In the last decade, researchers were inspired by tool-use research and solo action-based research on affordances (e.g., stair climbing) to take an affordance-based approach to understanding cooperation in a more embodied approach than was previously used in social psychology. Beginning at least a decade prior to that, researchers were inspired to wonder whether the dynamics of the coordinative structures of a solo actor's body movements, spontaneously emerging when different limbs engaged in rhythmic movement, might cross the bodily divide to yield similar collective dynamics when multiple actors are incidentally engaged in rhythmic movement (e.g., different people swinging their legs together). One insight from the affordance research emphasizes the role of meaning as emerging in dynamic interaction between multiple actors confronted by demands and resources of an environment: language's potential contribution to this is discussed in the context of the newest advances in theorizing about values and about the sociocultural grounding of affordances. Finally, the potential role of language for facilitating being pulled into “social eddies” of coordinated orbits of motion, as well as its potential role in joint action, is discussed.     

Concreteness and item-to-list context associations in the free recall of items differing in context variability

Context variability can be defined as the number of preexperimental contexts in which a given concept appears. Following M. Steyvers and K. J. Malmberg's (2003) work, the authors have shown that concepts that are experienced in fewer preexperimental contexts generally are better remembered in episodic memory tasks than concepts that are experienced in a greater number of preexperimental contexts. The purpose of this article is to demonstrate that low context variability confers its memorial advantage because of stronger item-to-list context associations as compared with high context variability. Three experiments that use environmental context changes from study to test demonstrate that the low context variability advantage is eliminated when item-to-list context associations are not available because of environmental changes at test. In addition, the low context variability advantage is eliminated when inward processing at study prevents the formation of item-to-list context associations.     

Beliefs about essences and the reality of mental disorders

Do people believe mental disorders are real and possess underlying essences? The current study found that both novices and practicing clinicians held weaker essentialist beliefs about mental disorders than about medical disorders. They were also unwilling to endorse the idea that mental disorders are real and natural. Furthermore, compared with novices, mental health clinicians were less likely to endorse the view that there is a shared cause underlying a mental disorder and that one needs to remove the cause to get rid of the mental disorder. Clinicians were polarized on their views about whether mental disorders are categorical or dimensional. These findings reflect current controversies about mental disorders in the field at large.     

Individual differences in event-based prospective memory: Evidence for multiple processes supporting cue detection

The multiprocess view proposes that different processes can be used to detect event-based prospective memory cues, depending in part on the specificity of the cue. According to this theory, attentional processes are not necessary to detect focal cues, whereas detection of nonfocal cues requires some form of controlled attention. This notion was tested using a design in which we compared performance on a focal and on a nonfocal prospective memory task by participants with high or low working memory capacity. An interaction was found, such that participants with high and low working memory performed equally well on the focal task, whereas the participants with high working memory performed significantly better on the nonfocal task than did their counterparts with low working memory. Thus, controlled attention was only necessary for detecting event-based prospective memory cues in the nonfocal task. These results have implications for theories of prospective memory, the processes necessary for cue detection, and the successful fulfillment of intentions.     

Memorial consequences of multiple-choice testing on immediate and delayed tests

Multiple-choice testing has both positive and negative consequences for performance on later tests. Prior testing increases the number of questions answered correctly on a later test but also increases the likelihood that questions will be answered with lures from the previous multiple-choice test (Roediger & Marsh, 2005). Prior research has shown that the positive effects of testing persist over a delay, but no one has examined the durability of the negative effects of testing. To address this, subjects took multiple-choice and cued recall tests (on subsets of questions) both immediately and a week after studying. Although delay reduced both the positive and negative testing effects, both still occurred after 1 week, especially if the multiple-choice test had also been delayed. These results are consistent with the argument that recollection underlies both the positive and negative testing effects.     

Pre-Entry Expectations,Attitudes, and Intentions to Join Predict Military Tenure

The objective of this study was to examine pre-entry expectations, attitudes, and intentions as predictors of tenure among military members. Data from nationally representative (U.S.) samples of youth on attitudes toward military service, expectations about the effect of joining the military on quality of life, and intentions to join the military were linked to tenure among those who later joined the military as adults. Results from survival analyses indicate that those who initially had no desire to join the military and did not expect military service to have positive effects on their quality of life, but ultimately joined the military nonetheless, tended to have shorter military careers. Explanations for these findings are offered along with implications for military staffing.     

Memory as discrimination: What distraction reveals

Recalling information involves the process of discriminating between relevant and irrelevant information stored in memory. Not infrequently, the relevant information needs to be selected from among a series of related possibilities. This is likely to be particularly problematic when the irrelevant possibilities not only are temporally or contextually appropriate, but also overlap semantically with the target or targets. Here, we investigate the extent to which purely perceptual features that discriminate between irrelevant and target material can be used to overcome the negative impact of contextual and semantic relatedness. Adopting a distraction paradigm, it is demonstrated that when distractors are interleaved with targets presented either visually (Experiment 1) or auditorily (Experiment 2), a within-modality semantic distraction effect occurs; semantically related distractors impact upon recall more than do unrelated distractors. In the semantically related condition, the number of intrusions in recall is reduced, while the number of correctly recalled targets is simultaneously increased by the presence of perceptual cues to relevance (color features in Experiment 1 or speaker’s gender in Experiment 2). However, as is demonstrated in Experiment 3, even presenting semantically related distractors in a language and a sensory modality (spoken Welsh) distinct from that of the targets (visual English) is insufficient to eliminate false recalls completely or to restore correct recall to levels seen with unrelated distractors . Together, the study shows how semantic and nonsemantic discriminability shape patterns of both erroneous and correct recall.