Loneliness, social interaction, and sex roles

Forty-three male and 53 female college seniors maintained the Rochester Interaction Record for 2 weeks, providing information about every social interaction of 10 minutes or more. Subjects then completed the revised UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Loneliness Scale and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, measuring sex-role orientation. For both sexes, loneliness was negatively related to the amount of time spent with females and to the meaningfulness of interaction with males and females. However, meaningfulness with males was more important than meaningfulness with females. Femininity was negatively related to loneliness for both sexes and partially mediated the above relationships. There were sex differences, however, in the extent to which variables overlapped in predicting loneliness. For example, a large group of nonlonely males was characterized both by having meaningful relationships with males and by spending time with females, whereas a second group of nonlonely males was characterized simply by having meaningful relationships with males. The largest group of nonlonely females was characterized simply by having meaningful relationships with males, but another sizable group was characterized simply by spending time with females. Females doing both accounted for very little of the variance.     

Clinical depression and day-to-day social interaction in a community sample

Adult participants recruited from the community, one half of whom met criteria for clinical depression, described their day-to-day social interactions using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record. Compared with the nondepressed participants, depressed participants found their interactions to be less enjoyable and less intimate, and they felt less influence over their interactions. Differences between the two groups in intimacy occurred only in interactions with close relations and not in interactions with nonintimates, and differences in influence were more pronounced for those who were cohabiting than for those who were not. There were no differences in how socially active depressed and nondepressed people were or in the amount of contact they had with different relational partners.     

Emotional intelligence and social interaction

Two studies found positive relationships between the ability to manage emotions and the quality of social interactions, supporting the predictive and incremental validity of an ability measure of emotional intelligence, the Mayer-Salovey-Caruso Emotional Intelligence Test (MSCEIT). In a sample of 118 American college students (Study 1), higher scores on the managing emotions subscale of the MSCEIT were positively related to the quality of interactions with friends, evaluated separately by participants and two friends. In a diary study of social interaction with 103 German college students (Study 2), managing emotions scores were positively related to the perceived quality of interactions with opposite sex individuals. Scores on this subscale were also positively related to perceived success in impression management in social interactions with individuals of the opposite sex. In both studies, the main findings remained statistically significant after controlling for Big Five personality traits.     

Affect- and self-based models of relationships between daily events and daily well-being

The present study examined affect- self-based explanatory models of relationships between daily events and daily well-being. Twice a week for up to 10 weeks, participants described the events that occurred each day and provided measures of their daily affect, self-esteem, and depressogenic thinking. Participants also provided trait-level measures of affect, depression, and self-esteem. Measures of daily well-being representing each model covaried jointly and independently with daily negative and positive events. Positive events buffered the effects of negative events on daily self-esteem and daily depressogenic thinking, whereas there was no buffering effect for daily affect. More depressed people were more reactive to positive events, and those higher in trait PA were less reactive to negative events. Buffering effects for self-esteem were pronounced for those with lower trait self-esteem, and buffering effects for daily depressogenic adjustment were now more pronounced for those with higher trait negative affect. The results suggest that affect- and self-based models provide complementary perspectives on relationships between psychological well-being and daily events.     

Relationships between leaders' and subordinates' emotion regulation and satisfaction and affect at work

The study examined relationships between leaders' emotion regulation and leaders' and subordinates' work-related outcomes. Fifty-one school directors and 281 teachers reported on their strategies of emotion regulation (reappraisal, suppression), job satisfaction, and affect at work. For subordinates, suppression was negatively related to job satisfaction and was positively related to negative affect and emotional exhaustion, and reappraisal was positively related to job satisfaction and negatively to negativ affect. In contrast, multilevel analyses found that directors' use of reappraisal was neg atively related to subordinates' job satisfaction, and directors' use of suppression wa positively related to subordinates' positive affect. Leaders' suppression interacted wit group cohesion to predict subordinates' negative affect. This is one of the first studies to find evidence for the possible tension between leaders' emotion regulation competencie and organizational-role interests.     

Self-construal,affective valence of the encounter,and quality of social interactions: Within and cross-culture examination

In two samples, one from Greece and another from Germany, we examined relationships between self-construal, emotional experience, and the quality of social interactions. In Greece, a more collectivistic culture, the negative affect people experienced in social interactions was more weakly related to the quality of social interactions for those higher in interdependent self-construal than it was for those lower in interdependent self-construal. In Germany, a more independent culture, a contrasting pattern was observed such that the positive affect people experienced in social interaction was more strongly related to the quality of social interactions for those higher in independent self-construal than it was for those lower in independent self-construal. These findings suggest that positive and negative affect in social encounters can have different effects for persons with independent and interdependent cultural orientations within different cultural settings.     

A multilevel framework for understanding relationships among traits,states, situations and behaviours

A conceptual and analytic framework for understanding relationships among traits, states, situations, and behaviours is presented. The framework assumes that such relationships can be understood in terms of four questions. (1) What are the relationships between trait and state level constructs, which include psychological states, the situations people experience and behaviour? (2) What are the relationships between psychological states, between states and situations and between states and behaviours? (3) How do such state level relationships vary as a function of trait level individual differences? (4) How do the relationships that are the focus of questions 1, 2, and 3 change across time? This article describes how to use multilevel random coefficient modelling (MRCM) to examine such relationships. The framework can accommodate different definitions of traits and dispositions (Allportian, processing styles, profiles, etc.) and different ways of conceptualising relationships between states and traits (aggregationist, interactionist, etc.). Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Distinguishing affective and non-affective reactions to daily events

The study of daily events has been dominated by a focus on affective reactions to daily events. Although informative, this research needs to be complemented by research on non-affective and cognitive reactions to events. Although daily events are certainly related to how people feel, they are also related to how people think, particularly about themselves. The present article presents the results of a series of studies examining relationships between daily events and both affective and non-affective states. These results suggest that although affective and non-affective reactions to daily events may covary (e.g., when people feel badly, they may think more poorly about themselves and vice versa), this covariation is not perfect. Non-affective states covary with daily events above and beyond the covariation between events and affect, and affective states covary with events above and beyond the covariation between events and non-affective states.