Belief in an Unjust World: When Beliefs in a Just World Fail

Past research has attempted to delineate personality differences between insomniacs and good sleepers but has failed to control for type of insomnia or severity of the disorder. The purpose of this study was to compare MMPI scores of mild and severe sleep onset insomniacs with a control group of noninsomniacs. Results demonstrated that sleep onset insomniacs, regardless of degree of severity, differed significantly from noninsomniacs; and that mild and severe insomniacs differed from each other on only one MMPI scale.     

Distraction from emotional information reduces biased judgements

Biases arising from emotional processes are some of the most robust behavioural effects in the social sciences. The goal of this investigation was to examine the extent to which the emotion regulation strategy of distraction could reduce biases in judgement known to result from emotional information. Study 1 explored lay views regarding whether distraction is an effective strategy to improve decision-making and revealed that participants did not endorse this strategy. Studies 2–5 focused on several established, robust biases that result from emotional information: loss aversion, desirability bias, risk aversion and optimistic bias. Participants were prompted to divert attention away from their feelings while making judgements, and in each study this distraction strategy resulted in reduced bias in judgement relative to control conditions. The findings provide evidence that distraction can improve choice across several situations that typically elicit robustly biased responses, even though participants are not aware of the effectiveness of this strategy.     

Exploring the Toolkit of Emotion: What Do Sadness and Anger Do for Us?

What do negative emotions do for people? We present a framework that defines the function of emotions as the degree to which discrete emotions result in better outcomes in particular types of situations. Focusing on sadness and anger, we review evidence related to the situations that elicit these emotions; the cognitive, physiological, and behavioral changes associated with the emotions; and the extent to which these changes result in demonstrably better outcomes in the type of situation that elicits the emotion. Sadness is elicited by perceived goal loss without possibility of restoration given current abilities and is associated with deliberative reasoning, reduced physiological activity, and behavioral expression. There is preliminary evidence suggesting that sadness can permit coping with loss, and that expression of sadness can recruit others to assist in goal attainment. Anger is elicited by perceived goal loss that can be prevented if an obstacle is overcome and is associated with heuristic reasoning, increased physiological activity, and behavioral expression. There is evidence that expression of anger prompts others to remove themselves as obstacles, and preliminary evidence that anger can promote overcoming obstacles and goal attainment. Like precision tools, specific emotions are best utilized to resolve particular problems.     

Automatic Optimism: Why People Assume Their Futures will be Bright

Why are people optimistic about their futures, continuously assuming that their futures will be full of the positive outcomes they desire and devoid of negative outcomes? This paper concerns the proposal that desire, represented as affective reactions to potential future events, causes optimism for the future. We propose that positive or negative affective reactions to future events innervate motivations to approach or avoid the events. These motivations can be satiated by judging that events that elicit positive affective reactions are likely to occur and events that elicit negative affective reactions are unlikely to occur. The tendency to be optimistic thus results from emotional processes that occur largely outside of conscious awareness. We discuss recent evidence that supports these propositions, the import of understanding optimism as the result of emotional processes for judgment and decision research as well as attempts to improve decision‐making, and remaining unresolved issues.     

Goals and responses to failure: Knowing when to hold them and when to fold them

The ability to disengage from hopeless situations is critical to goal attainment and effective self-regulation. Two experiments investigated the effects of striving to attain success (approach goals) versus striving to avoid failure (avoidance goals) on persistence. Participants completed anagrams designed so that less persistence during an initial set of unsolvable anagrams was beneficial. In Study 1, participants reported how motivated they were by approach and avoidance goals. In Study 2, participants were primed to set approach or avoidance goals. Participants with avoidance goals persisted longer during failure, with more intense and enduring emotional distress, than those with approach goals. Greater anger predicted spending more time on subsequent unsolvable anagrams and accounted for differences in persistence. The results suggest that people with approach goals are better able to identify when they should disengage during failure, and disengage more completely, than people with avoidance goals. An earlier version of this article was presented at the Society for Personality and Social Psychology conference, Palm Springs, CA, January, 2006.     

Belief in an unjust world: when beliefs in a just world fail

Belief in a just world, where people get what they deserve, has been hypothesized to underlie a variety of psychological phenomena (Lerner, 1965). Close inspection of individual difference measures of this belief, however, has indicated repeatedly that just world beliefs are not a unidimensional construct. The purpose of this investigation was to elaborate upon the conceptualization of unjust world beliefs as a related but separate construct from just world beliefs. In two studies, the Unjust World Views scale (UJVS) was developed and its reliability and validity examined. The UJVS demonstrated acceptable reliability and validity and accounted for more variability in related outcomes than just world beliefs. Further, belief in an unjust world was related to defensive coping, anger, and perceived future risk. These findings contribute to theory development and suggest that a belief in an unjust world may serve a self-protective function. Clinical implications are discussed as unjust world views also were found to be potentially maladaptive.     

Suggestibility, social support, and memory for a novel experience in young children

This study examined 5- and 6-year-olds' suggestibility and interviewer demeanor as joint predictors of their memory for a novel experience. Session 1 consisted of children taking part in a novel laboratory event. Session 2 took place after approximately a 1-week delay and consisted of children completing both a memory test concerning what happened during the prior event and the Video Suggestibility Scale for Children (VSSC). During the second session, the interviewer behaved either supportively or nonsupportively. Greater acquiescence on the VSSC was associated with fewer correct responses to misleading questions about the laboratory event in the supportive and nonsupportive conditions and with more errors in response to specific questions in the nonsupportive condition. Results indicate that individual differences in children's suggestibility are related to the accuracy of their memory for separate events, although some of these relations may vary depending on the context in which children are interviewed.     

Incremental validity of new clinical assessment measures

The authors address conceptual and methodological foundations of incremental validity in the evaluation of newly developed clinical assessment measures. Incremental validity is defined as the degree to which a measure explains or predicts a phenomenon of interest, relative to other measures. Incremental validity can be evaluated on several dimensions, such as sensitivity to change, diagnostic efficacy, content validity, treatment design and outcome, and convergent validity. Indices of incremental validity can vary depending on the criterion measures, comparison measures, and individual differences in samples. The authors review the rationale for, principles, and methods of incremental validation, including the selection of comparison and criterion measures, and address data analytic strategies and the conditional nature of incremental validity evaluations in the selection of measures. Incremental validity contributes to, but is different from, cost-benefits, which reflect the cost of acquiring the data and the benefits from the data. The impact of an incremental validity index on whether a measure is selected will be moderated by the cost of acquiring the new data, the importance of the measured phenomenon, and the clinical utility of the new data.     

Economic indicators predict changes in college student optimism for life events

This investigation explored the extent to which an economic recession predicted changes in college students' optimism about the length and quality of their futures. In a cross‐sectional design, college students in the United States rated their likelihood of divorcing, being unhappy in their career, and living past age 60, at time points before, during, and in the aftermath of an economic recession (2007–2010). Economic indicators, particularly gas prices, predicted decreased optimism as the indicators worsened. After the recession, however, optimism rebounded. The findings reveal that people's expectations for their personal futures are generally sensitive to the state of the national economy.     

Negative affective reactions reduce perceived likelihood of risk

This investigation examined the influence of negative affective reactions on the perceived likelihood of experiencing a health risk. Concepts related to formaldehyde exposure were paired with negative stimuli to create affective reactions. In Study 1, perceived risk was reduced when the thought of formaldehyde exposure elicited negative affective reactions compared to a control condition and participants were less interested in information on the risk and recommended spending less money to alleviate the hazard. The potential boundary condition of emotional states was examined in Study 2. Sad or neutral emotion was elicited before learning about the hazard, which was again paired with negative stimuli or no affective stimuli. Sadness increased perceived risk; negative affective reactions reduced perceived risk only when participants were in a neutral incidental state. These findings suggest that negative affective reactions reduce the perceived likelihood of risk, but only in the absence of alternative emotional information.