Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Fazio, Russell H.

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161001pmid: N/A

Basic theory and research in personality and social psychology has provided an essential foundation of knowledge that has furthered progress concerning a number of important societal issues. The specific illustrations that form the contents of this special issue and support this assertion regarding the value of basic research are reviewed.

Dodge, Kenneth A.; Crick, Nicki R.

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161002pmid: N/A

The ways that basic theories and findings in cognitive and social psychology (including attribution, decision-making, and information-processing theories) have been applied to the study of aggressive behavior problems in children are described. Following an overview of each of these theories, a social information-processing model of children's aggressive behavior is outlined. According to this model, a child's behavioral response to a problematic social stimulus is a function of five: steps of processing: encoding of social cues, interpretation of social cues, response search, response evaluation, and enactment. Skillful processing at each step is hypothesized to lead to competent performance within a situation, whereas biased or deficient processing is hypothesized to lead to deviant social behavior Empirical studies are described in which children's patterns of processing have been found to predict individual differences in their aggressive behavior The implications of this body of work for empirically based interventions aimed at reducing children's aggressive behavior are discussed.

Holmes, John G.; Boon, Susan D.

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161003pmid: N/A

Research on interactional processes in marriage is reviewed to illustrate how advances in the field of close relationships have created a foundation for progress in the domains of public education, newlywed counseling, and marital therapy. First, the transition from serious dating to marriage is characterized using the concepts of mutual responsiveness and compatibility. Major themes and assumptions underlying approaches to marital therapy are then examined in the light of research on patterns of social exchange, communication and problem solving, interpersonal perception, and interdependence in marriage. It is suggested that findings in these four areas provide a basis for articulating and modifying interventions for marital distress.

Dykman, Benjamin M.; Abramson, Lyn Y.

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161004pmid: N/A

This article shows how the development of two major cognitive theories of depression - hopelessness theory and Beck's schema theory-were inspired by basic research in psychology. Whereas attribution theory helped resolve ambiguities in the original helplessness theory, additional social psychological concepts helped transform the reformulated helplessness theory into a hopelessness theory. For example, the current theory features situational determinants of causal attributions, a diathesis-stress component, and a specific-vulnerability component, each influenced by basic work in social psychology. The authors also draw on basic research to suggest revisions in Beck's theory. They suggest that (a) both depressives and nondepressives are capable of a full range of processing biases, (b) depressives are responsive to situational information, (c) factors other than "feature match " influence negative schema activation, (d) the "self" in depression is multifaceted, and (e) associative network models can be used to operationalize the depressive schema.

Hollon, Steven D.; Garber, Judy

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161005pmid: N/A

The development of cognitive therapy, one of the most promising interventions for the treatment of depression and other nonpsychotic disorders, has been strongly influenced by basic research in social and cognitive psychology. The approach is predicated on a two-factor cognitive theory of emotion and accords a central role to the operation of schematic knowledge structures and information-processing heuristics. Procedures designed to produce change in existing depresotypic beliefs are grounded in principles emerging from that basic literature, and strategies derived from attribution theory appear to contribute to the apparent capacity of cognitive therapy to prevent the emergence of future depressive episodes. Clearly, the development and articulation of cognitive therapy have benefited greatly from basic research in experimental social and cognitive psychology.

Taylor, Shelley E.; Buunk, Bram P.; Aspinwall, Lisa G.

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161006pmid: N/A

In recent years, basic research and theory on social comparison activities has been applied to understanding the coping processes of people undergoing stressful events. These investigations have both elucidated coping and highlighted issues that need reconsideration in traditional social comparison frameworks. These issues include the predominant motives that guide social comparison activity; the role of cognitive processes in the creation of targets and the selection of dimensions for evaluation; the limits imposed on available social comparison information by stressful or victimizing circumstances; the role of similarity in social comparisons under threat; the inherent meaning of upward and downward comparisons; and the divergence of evaluative versus information-seeking comparative activities. Implications for theoretical integration and for understanding coping and social support are discussed.

Pennington, Nancy; Hastie, Reid

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161007pmid: N/A

The results of basic social science research have been applied to legal practice at a number of levels within the criminal and civil justice systems, although its application is controversial at all levels of practice. A selective review of behavioral science research on juror and jury decision making reveals that there has been cumulative and substantial progress in our understanding of these processes over the past three decades. Many of these findings are relevant to the efforts to improve the institution of the petit jury trial.

Wells, Gary L.; Elizabeth Luus, C. A.

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161008pmid: N/A

Research findings over the last decade have given rise to guidelines about how to minimize the likelihood of false identifications in police lineups and photo spreads. It is argued here that experimental social psychology's common understanding of factors that contaminate research experiments, such as demand characteristics, experimenter bias, and lack of control groups, has been the principal framework leading to hypotheses about how to improve police-conducted lineups. The analogy between a methodologically sound social psychology experiment and a properly conducted lineup has guided eyewitness identification research implicitly; in this article the analogy is expanded and made explicit. Lineup research examples deriving from the lineup-as-experiment analogy, such as the mock-witness control group and the blank-lineup control, are described. Finally, it is argued that research findings that are modeled on the lineup-as-experiment analogy are natural system variables that might be especially immune to some of the criticisms that have been launched against expert testimony on eyewitness matters.

Aronson, Elliot

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161009pmid: N/A

The applied work described here work fits Kurt Lewin's definition of "action research." Specifically, the experiments involved intervening into a system in crisis with an independent variable aimed at reducing or resolving the crisis. Moreover, the intervention was a teachable procedure that the system could continue to use long after the experimenters had packed up their scientific gear and gone back to the university. In addition, the intervention was based on theory and data from prior laboratory experiments. But the extent to which prior theory and laboratory research was considered

Chassin, Laurie; Presson, Clark C.; Sherman, Steven J.

doi: 10.1177/0146167290161010pmid: N/A

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the contributions of basic theory and research in social psychology to our understanding of an important public health problem - adolescent cigarette smoking -and to smoking prevention. The authors describe how social psychological theory and research have enabled us to better understand the processes underlying adolescent smoking adoption and to devise more effective intervention programs to deter adolescent smoking.