How Co-Viewing Affects Attitudes: The Mediating Roles of Transportation and Identification

Communication scholars have long acknowledged that watching television is often done in the company of others. While previous research focused mainly on the impact of co-viewing on children’s behavior and their enjoyment of watching, the current research extends this work to determine the effect of co-viewing on the actual viewing experience of adults, specifically, on transportation and identification. Furthermore, the study examines the role of these processes as mediators leading to changes in attitude. Study 1 demonstrates the impact of the co-viewer’s enthusiasm on transportation and identification. Study 2 demonstrates the impact of the co-viewer’s gender on transportation and identification. These processes, in turn, mediate the effect of co-viewing on attitude changes. The findings are discussed in terms of their theoretical and practical contributions.     

Misrecollection prevents older adults from benefitting from semantic relatedness of the memoranda in associative memory

Memory for episodic associations declines in aging, ostensibly due to decreased recollection abilities. Accordingly, associative unitization - the encoding of associated items as one integrated entity - may potentially attenuate age-related associative deficits by enabling familiarity-based retrieval, which is relatively preserved in aging. To test this hypothesis, we induced bottom-up unitization by manipulating semantic relatedness between memoranda. Twenty-four young and 24 older adults studied pairs of object pictures that were either semantically related or unrelated. Participants subsequently discriminated between intact, recombined and new pairs. We found that semantic relatedness increased the contributions of both familiarity and recollection in young adults, but did not improve older adults' performance. Instead, they showed associative deficits, driven by increased recollection-based false recognition. This may reflect a “misrecollection” phenomenon, in which older adults make more false alarms to recombined pairs with particularly high confidence, due to poorer retrieval monitoring regarding semantically-related associative probes.     

Evidence for an Association between Men’s Spontaneous Objectifying Gazing Behavior and their Endorsement of Objectifying Attitudes toward Women

Sex Roles - Despite growing scientific interest in the sexually objectifying male gaze, the relation between men’s gazing behavior and their sexually objectifying attitudes has not yet been...     

Communicative Behaviors of Outperformers and Their Perception by the Outperformed People

Four studies explored the communicative behaviors of people who outperform others in a relevant or irrelevant field and the impression formed of these outperformers by the outperformed people. In line with the premises of the self‐evaluation maintenance model ( A. Tesser, 1988 ) and the STTUC framework ( J. J. Exline & M. Lobel, 1999 ), Studies 1 and 2 predicted and found that people tend to conceal their achievements in conversation with a person whom they have outperformed, especially when the field of performance is relevant to this individual and irrelevant to them. Studies 3 and 4 found that the perception of outperformers is dependent not only on their communicative behaviors following the success but also on the relevance of the field for them and for the perceivers.     

When the physical coldness in the viewer's environment leads to identification with a suffering protagonist

Based on theories of narrative engagement and embodied cognition, we hypothesised that a fit between the psychological state of a protagonist and the physical sensation of the viewer would enhance the subsequent identification with the protagonist, but not para-social relationship with him (seeing the protagonist as a friend). We also hypothesised that identification and a para-social relationship would lead to distinct effects on attitudes related to the narrative. Participants (N = 60) were randomly assigned to either a warmed or cooled room where they watched a movie clip alone in which a suffering protagonist wanted to undergo euthanasia while his close others wanted him to stay alive. Then, the participants answered a questionnaire measuring their identification and para-social relationship with the protagonist and their attitudes toward euthanasia. In accordance with the hypotheses, the results demonstrated that feeling cold enhanced identification with the suffering protagonist. However, the environmental temperature did not affect the development of para-social relationships. Moreover, identification with the suffering protagonist contributed to acceptance of his attitudes, reflected in more positive views of euthanasia. In contrast, having a para-social relationship with the protagonist resulted in negative attitudes toward euthanasia.     

Indirect Ingratiation: Pleasing People by Associating Them with Successful Others and by Praising Their Associates

Most of the literature on impression management considers direct tactics such as self‐promoting by mentioning personal achievements and ingratiating by complimenting others. These direct tactics can backfire if the target recognizes the hidden motive behind them. Therefore, people often use indirect impression management tactics. Previous research has shown that people promote themselves indirectly by associating themselves with successful others or by magnifying the characteristics of others to whom they are connected. The current research suggests that when the motive is ingratiation, the impression manager highlights the success of a person who is close to the target of ingratiation. The four experiments of the current research documented this tactic and examined its consequences for the impression manager and for the target.