Optimism in close relationships: How seeing things in a positive light makes them so

Does expecting positive outcomes--especially in important life domains such as relationships--make these positive outcomes more likely? In a longitudinal study of dating couples, the authors tested whether optimists (who have a cognitive disposition to expect positive outcomes) and their romantic partners are more satisfied in their relationships, and if so, whether this is due to optimists perceiving greater support from their partners. In cross-sectional analyses, both optimists and their partners indicated greater relationship satisfaction, an effect that was mediated by optimists' greater perceived support. When the couples engaged in a conflict conversation, optimists and their partners saw each other as engaging more constructively during the conflict, which in turn led both partners to feel that the conflict was better resolved 1 week later. In a 1-year follow-up, men's optimism predicted relationship status. Effects of optimism were mediated by the optimists' perceived support, which appears to promote a variety of beneficial processes in romantic relationships.     

Strategies of text retrieval: a criterion shift account.

This study scrutinized people's ability to apply different strategies to randomly intermixed immediate and delayed test items. In three experiments, participants first read one set of stories. Later, they read more stories, and after each one, answered intermixed questions about that story and one of the earlier ones. The experiments cumulatively manipulated amount of delay, test probe plausibility, probe relation (explicit, paraphrase, inference), and testing procedure (mixed versus uniform delay). Using signal detection response criterion as the index of strategy, we contrasted the single criterion hypothesis, according to which one text retrieval criterion is applied to all test items, and a multiple-criterion hypothesis. The results consistently favoured the multiple-criterion hypothesis. The results also indicated that the presence of immediate and delayed probes mutually influence one another: Less extreme signal detection criteria were adopted under mixed than uniform testing. It was concluded that text retrieval strategy is continually calibrated with reference to the quality of the test probes.     

Evaluation of a behavioral measure of risk taking: the Balloon Analogue Risk Task (BART)

The present study (N = 86) sought to evaluate a laboratory-based behavioral measure of risk taking (the Balloon Analogue Risk Task; BART) and to test associations between this measure and self-report measures of risk-related constructs as well as self-reported real-world risk behaviors. The BART evidenced sound experimental properties, and riskiness on the BART was correlated with scores on measures of sensation seeking, impulsivity, and deficiencies in behavioral constraint. Also, riskiness on the BART was correlated with the self-reported occurrence of addictive, health, and safety risk behaviors, with the task accounting for variance in these behaviors beyond that accounted for by demographics and self-report measures of risk-related constructs. These results indicate that the BART may be a useful tool in the assessment of risk taking.     

The Probability of Collective Choice with Shared Knowledge Structures

Complex decision making typically involves many agents attempting to aggregate many alternatives. If agents' preferences are unconstrained, cyclic outcomes are highly probable. In contrast, we show that if agents share similar models of the choice domain, then a stable collective outcome occurs with about 90% probability. These results have implications for systems of interacting agents, such as group decisions by individuals in social settings or interpretations of sense data by competing perceptual modules of a brain.     

Maternal personality and injury in children: is stability a protective factor?

Measures of injury were obtained in a birth cohort of 953 children in Wales along with maternal Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI) and children's Behaviour Screening Questionnaire (BSQ) data. While there was no relationship between maternal E and child injury, children of low-N mothers had significantly fewer injuries than those of medium of high-N mothers. The magnitude of this trend remained after controlling for the BSQ variables also relating to injury, but was no longer significant in the case of management disorder or of sex. Moreover, while the association was observed for families with only one or two children, this was not the case for families with three or more children.