Familial influences on television viewing and aggression: A sibling study

Familial influences on aggressive behavior and TV viewing were investigated in a survey of adolescent siblings. Same-sex siblings resembled one another in aggression (brothers, r = 0.59; sisters, r = 0.52) and in their exposure to violent TV programs; opposite-sex siblings were dissimilar. Within individuals, the frequency of watching crime and action programs correlated nonsignificantly with aggression. Two other variables, however, were associated with aggression: identification with aggression and aggression consequences. These relationships also held up between families (BF, covariance of sibling' averages) and within families (WF, covariance of sibling' differences). The latter WF relationship indicated that one sibling was typically the more extreme on both aggression and its correlate than a brother or sister. These results were interpreted in light of behavioral genetic data that suggest substantial genetic influences, few common environmental influences, and large within-family environmental influences on personality development.     

Effects of an adult's presence on the social behavior of preschool children

The social behavior of same-sex pairs of nursery school children was observed during two ten-minute play sessions. One half of the pairs played alone during both sessions, and the remaining pairs played in the presence of a passive adult supervisor. Child pairs who played alone were significantly less aggressive and exhibited a moderate but nonsignificant increase in the expression of positive or prosocial behaviors. Unsupervised pairs also tended to verbalize more and engaged in significantly more cooperative play. The absence of adults may encourage children to employ more mature social strategies to achieve a successful relationship with their playmates.     

Applications of social cognitive theory to the career development of women of color

This article provides a review of the literature on the educational and career development of women of color within the context of social cognitive career theory (Lent, et al, 1994 and Lent, et al, 1996). Specifically, possible gender, ethnic, racial, and cultural influences on career self-efficacy and outcome expectations are explored to delinate the potential mechanisms whereby ethnicity, culture, and ethnic and racial identity development, in interaction with gender, affect career choice and adjustment. Suggestions for future research on social cognitive career theory and the career development of women of color are presented.     

How eudaimonic and hedonic motives relate to the well-being of close others

Past research has examined the link of eudaimonic and hedonic motives with personal well-being, but less is known about their link with the well-being of close others. Also, empirical data on the link with the well-being of close others would address an ongoing debate regarding whether eudaimonia is egoistic and possibly detrimental to others. Participants completed self-report measures of their typical degrees of eudaimonic and hedonic motivation. We then asked their friends and relatives to tell us how the participant affected their well-being. When entering eudaimonia and hedonia simultaneously as predictors of close other well-being in multiple regressions, only eudaimonia related positively to the well-being of close others. Thus, eudaimonia had a positive, not negative, impact on other people. Furthermore, while past research shows that both eudaimonic and hedonic motives benefit personal well-being, this study suggests that eudaimonic motivation has more positive influences on close others.     

When being narrow minded is a good thing: Locally biased people show stronger contextual cueing

Repeated contexts allow us to find relevant information more easily. Learning such contexts has been proposed to depend upon either global processing of the repeated contexts, or alternatively processing of the local region surrounding the target information. In this study, we measured the extent to which observers were by default biased to process towards a more global or local level. The findings showed that the ability to use context to help guide their search was strongly related to an observer's local/global processing bias. Locally biased people could use context to help improve their search better than globally biased people. The results suggest that the extent to which context can be used depends crucially on the observer's attentional bias and thus also to factors and influences that can change this bias.     

Contextual interference processing during fast categorisations of facial expressions

We examined interference effects of emotionally associated background colours during fast valence categorisations of negative, neutral and positive expressions. According to implicitly learned colour–emotion associations, facial expressions were presented with colours that either matched the valence of these expressions or not. Experiment 1 included infrequent non-matching trials and Experiment 2 a balanced ratio of matching and non-matching trials. Besides general modulatory effects of contextual features on the processing of facial expressions, we found differential effects depending on the valance of target facial expressions. Whereas performance accuracy was mainly affected for neutral expressions, performance speed was specifically modulated by emotional expressions indicating some susceptibility of emotional expressions to contextual features. Experiment 3 used two further colour–emotion combinations, but revealed only marginal interference effects most likely due to missing colour–emotion associations. The results are discussed with respect to inherent processing demands of emotional and neutral expressions and their susceptibility to contextual interference.     

Matching choices to avoid offending stigmatized group members

People (selectors) sometimes make choices both for themselves and for others (recipients). We propose that selectors worry about offending recipients with their choices when recipients are stigmatized group members and options in a choice set differ along a stigma-relevant dimension. Accordingly, selectors are more likely to make the same choices for themselves and stigmatized group member recipients than non-stigmatized group member recipients. We conducted eight studies to study this hypothesis in different choice contexts (food, music, games, books) and with recipients from different stigmatized groups (the obese, Black-Americans, the elderly, students at lower-status schools). We use three different approaches to show that this effect is driven by people’s desire to avoid offending stigmatized group members with their choices. Thus, although prior research shows that people often want to avoid being associated with dissociative groups, such as stigmatized groups, we demonstrate that people make the same choices for self and stigmatized other to minimize offense.     

Emotional impact feedback affects how people remember an analogue trauma event

Do external motivational processes—in the form of social influences—shape people's memories for trauma? In this experiment, we examined the effects of social influence on memory and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomology for an analogue traumatic event. Seventy-two participants watched a distressing film; some received feedback about others' reactions to the film that either emphasised or downplayed the distressing nature of the film; control participants received no feedback. A week later, participants reported their symptoms, rated their memory on a number of characteristics and we tested their memory for the film's content. Participants who received feedback downplaying the film reported fewer PTSD-related analogue symptoms and weaker memory characteristics than their counterparts. The results suggest that people's memory phenomenology and analogue symptoms are influenced by others' feedback, but only when others' reactions downplayed the distressing nature of the film.