Effects of facial attractiveness and gender on causal attributions of managerial performance

The present study examined the effect of facial attractiveness and gender on raters' evaluations of and explanations for managerial performance. Results showed attractiveness to be a potential liability for both males and females. Good performance of attractive females was more likely than that of others to be attributed to luck or bias, while that of attractive males was viewed as occurring with little effort. In addition, the poor performance of attractive individuals was blamed on lack of effort (females) or lack of ability (males). Implications of these findings are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was published in the 1986 Proceedings of the Southern Management Association.     

Contributions of a supportive work environment to parents' well-being and orientation to work

Examined the joint and unique contributions of informal social support in the workplace and formal, family-responsive benefits and policies provided by employers to the job-related attitudes and personal well-being of employed parents with a young child. Eighty married men, 169 married women, and 72 single women with a preschool child completed a survey concerning social support from co-workers and supervisor, utilization of family-responsive benefits and policies, readiness to leave the employer for additional benefits, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, role strain, and health symptoms. Among the findings: (a) Fathers and mothers expressed equal levels of job satisfaction and organizational commitment, but mothers reported more role strain and health symptoms; (b) nearly 48% of married women's organizational commitment was accounted for by measures of support in the workplace; (c) informal social support at work was significantly more important to men's well-being than that of women; and (d) formal, family-responsive policies appeared more consequential for the prediction of women's role strain, perhaps because of women's greater responsibility for adjusting work life to meet the demands of family roles.     

Hypermnesia occurs in recall but not in recognition

Two experiments investigated the effect of encoding conditions and type of test (recall vs. recognition) on the phenomenon of hypermnesia (improved performance across repeated tests). Subjects in Experiment 1 studied a list of words using either imaginal or semantic elaboration strategies and then received three successive tests. Different groups of subjects received either free recall, four-alternative forced-choice recognition, or yes/no recognition tests. Reliable hypermnesia was found only in the recall conditions, with the recognition conditions showing either no change in performance levels across tests (forced-choice tests) or significant forgetting (yes/no tests). In Experiment 2, subjects studied a list of words, and encoding was manipulated using three orienting tasks. Once again, hypermnesia was found with the recall tests but not with the forced choice recognition tests. Finding hypermnesia in recall but not in recognition indicates that retrieval processes in recall play a major role in producing hypermnesia. Also, the finding that the magnitude of the recall hypermnesias increased with an increase in total cumulative recall levels across study conditions suggests that cumulative recall levels are an important factor in determining the presence or absence of recall hypermnesia.     

Automaticity and the capture of attention by a peripheral display change

The proposal that peripheral visual changes (cues) tend to summon attention automatically was tested by studying the effect of peripheral cueing on simple detection latency. Delay between cue onset and target onset, the contingent relationship between cue location and target location, and instructions to subjects were manipulated. Results showed that a peripheral display change could capture attention even when the target was far more likely to appear at an uncued location. When subjects were explicitly informed that targets were likely to appear away from the cued location they were able to suppress this effect, but were unable completely to reverse it by rapidly orienting attention towards the uncued side. Hence the process appears to be automatic in the sense that it occurs unless there are explicit instructions to the contrary. With explicit instructions the processing operation can be suppressed, but not completely reversed. This work was supported by the U.K. Admiralty Research Establishment (Research Agreement No. 53482).     

Pharmacological effects on lateralized behavior

Sixteen student volunteers were administered a placebo and 50 mg. of chlorpromazine in tablet form, on separate occasions, two hours before testing. The three tests measured dichotic listening performance, lateral eye movements while answering questions about spatial location and verbal meaning, and lateralized facial expression while relating pleasant and unpleasant life incidents. Results showed that chlorpromazine increased the number of trials showing an ear advantage in dichotic listening. Chlorpromazine reduced lateral and increased vertical eye movements in response to the questions about spatial location and verbal meaning. Under the placebo both negative and positive emotions were expressed more in the left face. Although chlorpromazine did not affect this lateralization of negative emotions, the expression of positive emotions occurred equally often on the two sides of the face under chlorpromazine. Results may be related to an effect of chlorpromazine on the asymmetrical dopamine pathways of the brain. It is suggested that the findings may be related to a left hemisphere deficit in schizophrenia.