Social power increases implicit prejudice

The effects of power on implicit and explicit attitudes towards racial groups were examined. In Study 1, participants who had power showed a stronger facilitation of positive words after exposure to White faces, and negative words after exposure to Black faces, compared to participants who did not have power. In Study 2, powerful participants, compared to controls and powerless participants, showed more positive affective responses to Chinese pictographs that followed White compared to Black faces. Power did, however, not affect explicit racial attitudes. In Study 3, powerful participants showed greater racial prejudice toward Arabs in an Implicit Association Test than did powerless participants. This effect was driven by the power of the perceiver rather than the power of the target. Implications of these findings are discussed.     

A smart unconscious? Procedural origins of automatic partner attitudes in marriage

The paper examines potential origins of automatic (i.e., unconscious) attitudes toward one’s marital partner. It tests the hypothesis that early experiences in conflict-of-interest situations predict one’s later automatic inclination to approach (or avoid) the partner. A longitudinal study linked daily experiences in conflict-of-interest situations in the initial months of new marriages to automatic evaluations of the partner assessed four years later using the Implicit Associations Test. The results revealed that partners who were initially (1) treated less responsively and (2) evidenced more self-protective and less connectedness-promoting “if-then” contingencies in their thoughts and behavior later evidenced less positive automatic partner attitudes. However, these factors did not predict changes in love, satisfaction, or explicit beliefs about the partner. The findings hint at the existence of a “smart” relationship unconscious that captures behavioral realities conscious reflection can miss.     

Rearing practices and impulsivity/hyperactivity symptoms in relation to inflated responsibility and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms

Smári, J., Rúrik Martinsson, D., & Einarsson, H. (2010). Rearing practices and impulsivity/hyperactivity symptoms in relation to inflated responsibility and obsessive‐compulsive symptoms. Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, 51, 392–397. The aim of the study was to investigate potential precursors of inflated responsibility (responsibility attitudes) and obsessive‐compulsive (OCD) symptoms. It was argued that both parental overprotection and impulsivity, separately and in interaction with each other, contribute to inflated responsibility and OCD symptoms. In a large sample of young adults (N = 570), self‐report measures of OCD symptoms (OCI‐R), responsibility attitudes (RAS), anxiety/depression (HADS), rearing practices (EMBU), present and past impulsivity/hyperactivity symptoms (IMP/HY) were administered. Overprotection as well as IMP/HY were found to predict OCD symptoms as well as inflated responsibility. Finally, a significant interaction was found between IMP/HY and overprotection with regard to both OCD symptoms and inflated responsibility. This effect reflected that IMP/HY was more strongly related to OCD symptoms and responsibility in people who had not been overprotected than in people who had been. Conversely overprotection was related to OCD symptoms and responsibility in people low but not in people high in IMP/HY. The results seem to indicate that the inadequacy between offer and need for parental control may play a role in the development of OCD symptoms.     

Physical discipline,escalation, and child abuse potential: psychometric evidence for the Analog Parenting Task

Data from three studies provide new evidence to support the validity of the Analog Parenting Task (APT) as an instrument to assess risk for harsh, physically aggressive parenting. In this series of studies, there was a strong association between APT scores of expected use and escalation of discipline strategies and self‐reported disciplinary attitudes. APT scores were also associated with physical abuse potential as assessed by both a well‐established measure of child abuse potential (Child Abuse Potential Inventory) and another instrument designed specifically for use in pre‐parent populations (e.g., Adult–Adolescent Parenting Inventory‐2). This study provides new psychometric evidence to support the use of the APT to assess harsh parenting. Additionally, these data highlight the connection between acceptance and use of physical disciplinary strategies, propensity for disciplinary escalation, and risk for abuse perpetration. The findings are discussed in the context of Milner's Social Information Processing model [Milner, 2003] of abuse, which suggests that parental selection of disciplinary responding and the monitoring of disciplinary responding are key events in the disciplinary process. The APT may prove a useful adjunct to more commonly used self‐report measures to allow for multimethod assessment of risk for punitive parenting. Aggr. Behav. 36:251–260, 2010. © 2010 Wiley‐Liss, Inc.     

Do Guns in the Home Predict Gender and Relationship Attitudes? An Exploratory Study

This study explores the potential relationship of guns in students’ homes with attitudes indicative of tolerance of violence, negative attitudes toward women and their roles, and attitudes suggestive of myths regarding sexual assault. Seniors in Kentucky high schools whose families possessed guns (n = 1,749) produced higher scores on scales measuring these variables as well as on scales of relationship dependency and religious involvement than seniors whose families did not own guns (n = 912). Students whose families owned more than 10 guns tended to score highest on these measures compared with students whose families owned no guns or a few guns. Because of lower effect sizes, these significant associations require further investigation.     

Memory of pain and affect associated with migraine and non-migraine headaches

The main aims of this study were to assess memory of pain and pain-related affect in headache sufferers and to compare the pain memories of individuals who suffer from migraines and those who experience non-migraine headaches. A total of 313 women participated in the study, 86 of whom had a diagnosis of migraine headache. The women rated their state anxiety about having a headache, the intensity and unpleasantness of headache pain, and their emotions while actually experiencing a headache. Either three or six months later, the participants were asked to recall their state anxiety, the intensity and unpleasantness of pain, and the emotions they had felt. Regardless of the length of recall delay or migraine diagnosis, participants accurately remembered both pain intensity and unpleasantness. Together, recalled anxiety, experienced pain and recalled positive affect were the most important predictors of memories for headache, accounting for 41% and 37% of the total variance in recalled pain intensity and unpleasantness, respectively. However, participants overestimated recalled positive and negative affect. The effect of recalled affect on memory of headache, together with the overestimation of recalled affect, suggests that although memory of headache is accurate, it is influenced by distorted memories of affect.     

Study of a Cognitive Dissonance Intervention to Address High School Students' Cheating Attitudes and Behaviors

This study examined academic dishonesty (AD) of 586 Taiwanese graduate students, the relationship between students' AD and their perceptions of AD of their peers, and their judgments regarding the seriousness of AD. Results showed that female students were more critical of AD than their male counterparts were in the areas of fraudulence, plagiarism, and falsification. Male students demonstrated more awareness of peer involvement in AD in the area of falsification than did female students. Master's students confessed to greater involvement in AD compared with the PhD students. Doctoral students were more judgmental with respect to unethical acts of fraudulence, plagiarism, and falsification.     

Imitation Is the Sincerest Form of Cheating: The Influence of Direct Knowledge and Attitudes on Academic Dishonesty

What effect does witnessing other students cheat have on one's own cheating behavior? What roles do moral attitudes and neutralizing attitudes (justifications for behavior) play when deciding to cheat? The present research proposes a model of academic dishonesty which takes into account each of these variables. Findings from experimental (vignette) and survey methods determined that seeing others cheat increases cheating behavior by causing students to judge the behavior less morally reprehensible, not by making rationalization easier. Witnessing cheating also has unique effects, controlling for other variables.     

Attitudes towards credit and finances among college students in China and the United States

Although there is growing concern about the issue of credit card debt among college students in China, little research has examined attitudes to money and debt among that group. The present study compared financial self‐confidence, perceived financial wellbeing, attitudes to debt, and parent education about money and debt in 410 college students from the US and China. Although college students in China reported fewer credit cards and less debt, they also reported lower levels of financial self‐confidence and financial wellbeing. In both cultures, delay of gratification and parental education predicted both self‐confidence and financial wellbeing.     

Presleep Suggestion Related to a Phobic Object: Successful Manipulation of Reported Dream Affect

Twenty-four female subjects with a strong dislike of snakes slept for four nonconsecutive nights in the laboratory. They were divided into four groups of six, each group receiving a different presleep suggestion on Nights 3 and 4. On Nights 2, 3, and 4, before sleep, the subjects saw but did not have to touch a live snake and their dreams were collected for each REM period. The results showed that, when compared with the subjects who received the negative affect suggestions, subjects who received positive affect suggestions had significantly higher levels of positive emotions in their dreams, rated their own dreams as more pleasant, and had significantly lower levels of anxiety, sadness, and aggression. These results support the hypothesis that presleep suggestion can be an effective technique in influencing the affective dimension of the dream.