Gender-Role Congruence and Self-Referencing as Determinants of Advertising Effectiveness

In an initial experiment, men and women with varied gender-role orientations evaluated gender-stereotyped and nonstereotyped advertisements for gendered products that are actually used by both sexes. Consistent with a gender-role congruence model of advertising effectiveness, traditional participants (masculine men; feminine women) responded more favorably to traditional (i.e., gender-stereotyped) than to nontraditional advertisements, whereas nontraditional participants (androgynous individuals; feminine men; masculine women) reacted somewhat more favorably to the nontraditional advertisements. Experiment 2 revealed that when encouraged to self reference, traditional participants became much more responsive to nontraditional advertisements, even more so than were the nontraditional participants. Practical implications of these results are discussed.     

Effects of preexisting moods on observers' reactions to helpful and nonhelpful models

Two experiments investigated the effects of preexisting mood on observers' reactions to helpful and nonhelpful models. The major predictions, derived from a social learning analysis of altruism and Isen's “cognitive loop” hypothesis, where that (1) subjects experiencing positive moods would be prosocially inclined if exposed to a helpful but not a nonhelpful model, and (2) subjects experiencing negative moods would accede to a request for assistance regardless of the type of model they had observed. Introductory psychology students underwent a positive, negative, or (in Experiment 1) a neutral mood induction. They then observed a model respond either positively or negatively to another person's request for assistance, and were subsequently provided an opportunity to assist the help-seeker. The results were highly consistent across the two experiments. The model's behavior had a stronger impact on subjects' help giving than did preexisting moods. However, internal analyses revealed that the intensity of moods that subjects were experiencing affected their reactions to modeling cues. The prosocial behavior of good mood subjects was positively correlated with the positivity of their moods if they had witnessed a helpful but not a nonhelpful model. By contrast, the helpfulness of subjects experiencing negative moods was positively correlated with the negativity of those moods, regardless of the type of model subjects had observed. The implications of these outcomes for the social learning analysis of altruism and the “cognitive loop” hypothesis are discussed.     

The effects of good moods on systematic processing: “Willing but not able,or able but not willing?”

Previous research has indicated that good moods may disrupt systematic processing of persuasive messages (e.g., Worth & Mackie, 1987). Three experiments were conducted to attempt a replication of this disruptive effect and determine whether this effect is attributable either to cognitive capacity deficits (i.e., ability) or to motivational concerns (e.g., mood maintenance, desire to think about something other than the experimental topic). Several similarities were noted across the experiments. First, no interactions between mood and argument strength emerged on measures of message-based persuasion. Similarly, the quantity of message-related thoughts generated by our subjects was not consistently influenced by the manipulation of mood. Most importantly, consistent findings regarding the relationship between polarity of message elaborations and message-based persuasion implied that good moods may have disrupted message processing when (a) the message was low in personal relevance, (b) source information preceded the message itself, or (c) subjects were led to believe that their moods were stabilized by a drug. These results call into question the robustness of the alleged disruptive effect of positive mood on systematic processing, and are incompatible with the view that such effects are attributable to cognitive capacity deficits.Portions of this research were presented at the Annual Meetings of the American Psychological Association, Boston, August 1990, and San Francisco, August 1991. The authors wish to thank Richard E. Petty and several anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments.     

Manufacturing multiple meanings of addiction: Time-limited realities

This article explores how clinicians, patients, and addiction as a youthful science manufacture meaning. Explanations of addictive behavior and addictive disease are viewed as constructs, ideologies, or ways of making meaning. This analysis considers the controversy—over whether addiction qualifies as a disease—to be primarily a matter of epistemology and social perception. Since there is no widespread agreement about what isease means in general, it is not possible to determine whether or not addiction is a disease in particular. The discussion also envisions how treatment for addicted clients might be reformulated as a transactional process utilizing the range of relevant theoretical models as time-limited reframes of addictive reality instead of dichotomizing addiction as either a disease or not.The authors extend thanks to Michelle Bowdler, Nancy Costikyan, Blase Gambino, Teri Loughead, Janet Mann, Peter Monius, Arthur Robbins, and Mitchell Young for their helpful assistance, suggestions, and comments on earlier drafts of this article.     

Coding factors in transcription

Two experiments looked at aspects of stimulus grouping by trainee typists and tested for the possibility of response grouping. Manipulating text preview indicated that typing speed declined if the next word was not wholly on display but, conversely, there was little gain if it was displayed much in advance of its being typed. Some of the effect of practice was specific to the words actually typed: words not presented during practice were typed slower than practised ones; others given reinforced practice were typed quicker than the rest. An analysis of response latencies provides evidence that response grouping sometimes occurred.     

Seriators' and nonseriators' comprehension of comparative adjective forms

The relationship between comprehension of relational adjective forms and seriation ability was assessed for 60 children aged 4–6. Three groups, operational seriators, intuitive seriators, and nonseriators, were given a test measuring comprehension of affirmative and negative comparative and equative forms. Results indicated that operationals understood more forms than intuitives and that intuitives comprehended more than nonseriators. When age differences between groups were minimized, the latter but not the former difference was preserved. This suggests that significant growth in linguistic com[rehension accompanies the emergence of the ability to order objects by size. Analysis of errors indicated that nonseriators interpreted statements dichotomously and ignored the standard more than seriators. Findings help to clarify the relationship between linguistic and cognitive development for parallel underlying structures.     

External Validity of Conduct and Oppositional Defiant Disorders Determined by the NIMH Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children

We administered the Diagnostic Interview Schedule for Children (DISC) two times to a group of youth (222 boys, 147 girls) entering residential care, once at their time of entry and once 1 year later. We then compared their DISC outcomes on Conduct Disorder (CD) and Oppositional Defiant Disorder (ODD) against changes in independent direct observations of diagnostically relevant behavior obtained over the course of that year. Results from hierarchical linear modeling analyses showed significant discriminative relationships between results from the DISC and the independent observations. Specifically, observations of symptomatic behaviors (CD or ODD) decreased for youth who met diagnostic criteria at the first administration of the DISC but not at the second, increased for youth who did not meet criteria at the first administration but did at the second, and did not change for youth who met criteria at both administrations. These results extend the data on the validity of the DISC and support continued research efforts to determine its clinical utility.     

"IF YOU LET ME PLAY SPORTS"

This study tests a model specifying that girls' precollege participation in sporting activities will foster positive body images, enhanced perceptions of physical competence, and more flexible gender identities, which, in turn, predict higher college self-esteem. A sample of 220 college females (mean age = 19.65 years) provided retrospective reports of their precollege sport involvement and contemporaneous assessments of body image, perceived physical competencies, gender identity, global self-esteem, and other psychosocial variables. Consistent with prior reports on male and mixed-gender samples, greater precollege sport participation predicted higher self-esteem in this exclusively female sample. Follow-up path analyses and tests for mediation revealed that the model's intervening variables totally mediated the sport participation/self-esteem relationship. The patterning of these data implies that participating in sports promotes females' self-worth by fostering physical competencies, favorable body images, and gender flexibility, and, in the absence of any such psychosocial benefits, participation in sports has little salutary effect on and can even undermine self-esteem.