Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Tucker, Joan S.; Anders, Sherry L.

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004001pmid: N/A

This study investigated associations between attachment style, partner perception accuracy, and relationship satisfaction in a sample of 61 undergraduate dating couples. Each partner completed questionnaires assessing own attachment style, own feelings about the relationship, and perceptions of the partner’s feelings about the relationship. Results indicated that more avoidantly attached men and more anxiously attached individuals of both sexes reported lower relationship satisfaction. However, only anxiously attached men showed consistently lower accuracy in perceiving their partner’s feelings about the relationship. The lower satisfaction among anxiously attached men could be partially explained by their lower accuracy in perceiving their partner’s feelings of love, and this lower accuracy was not due to the partner’s self-reported level of communication. Implications of the results in terms of understanding how attachment style influences interpersonal communication and relationship quality are discussed.

Cejka, Mary Ann; Eagly, Alice H.

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004002pmid: N/A

This study examines the role of gender stereotypes in justifying the social system by maintaining the division of labor between the sexes. The distribution of the sexes in 80 occupations was predicted from participants’ beliefs that six dimensions of gender-stereotypic attributes contribute to occupational success: masculine physical, feminine physical, masculine personality, feminine personality, masculine cognitive, and feminine cognitive. Findings showed that, to the extent that occupations were female dominated, feminine personality or physical attributes were thought more essential for success; to the extent that occupations were male dominated, masculine personality or physical attributes were thought more essential. Demonstrating the role of gender stereotypes in justifying gender hierarchy, occupations had higher prestige in that participants believed that they required masculine personality or cognitive attributes for success, and they had higher earnings to the extent that they were thought to require masculine personality attributes.

Jakobs, Esther; Manstead, Antony S. R.; Fischer, Agneta H.

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004003pmid: N/A

The goal of the present study was to examine the relationship between social motives, emotional feelings, and smiling, with a view to demonstrating that smiling is determined by both factors but in different ways. To vary social motives, the authors manipulated two aspects of social context. Pairs of friends performed either the same or a different task in either the same or a different room, whereas a control group participated in the experiment alone. To vary emotional feelings, participants viewed each of two film clips that differed with respect to the intensity of positive emotional feelings they evoked. Dependent variables included facial activity, as measured by the Facial Action Coding System (FACS), self-reported emotional feelings, and measures of social motives. As predicted, both emotional feelings and social motives affected facial activity. The relevance of the results for theories of facial displays is discussed.

Strange, Jeffrey J.; Leung, Cynthia C.

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004004pmid: N/A

This study examined whether accounts about individuals in concrete situations—read as news or fiction—influenced judgments about society at large. Participants (N = 95) read either no story or one of two anecdotal accounts about a teenager who was planning to drop out of high school. Whereas one account focused on problems stemming from the student’s inner-city high school, the other account emphasized the boy’s emotional and motivational problems. Results showed that both news and fictional stories influenced participants’ judgments about the causes of and solutions to the dropout problem in the United States (causal generalization) and about the urgency with which policy makers should attend to educational and health care reform (agenda setting). Among the mechanisms shown to facilitate causal generalization was the extent to which the accounts cued remindings from the readers’ stores of personal or mediabased experience. The role of stories in the judgment of social issues is discussed.

Van Overwalle, Frank; Drenth, Tinneke; Marsman, Gooitske

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004005pmid: N/A

This article analyzes whether spontaneous trait inferences explicitly refer to a disposition of the actor or whether they only identify the type of behavior in which the actor was engaged. The authors used a novel primed recognition paradigm, in which participants had to indicate whether the implied trait was part of the original sentence after being briefly primed with the name of the actor, verb (i.e., action), or a control word. If traits are spontaneously encoded during reading, participants will tend to erroneously recognize the trait as part of the sentence or will need extra time to inhibit this error. The results from three experiments demonstrate that spontaneous trait inferences are associated with both the actor and action and that information disconfirming a causal attribution to the person eliminates these spontaneous trait inferences.

Betsch, Tilmann; Siebler, Frank; Marz, Peter; Hormuth, Stefan; Dickenberger, Dorothee

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004006pmid: N/A

Recent work on frequency estimation has provided evidence that availability, as measured by recall, determines judgments of set size but not of frequency of occurrence. The latter in turn rather reflect actual presentation frequencies. In contrast, the present series of experiments shows that by controlling category focus during encoding and category salience during recall, a dramatically altered pattern of effects is obtained. Adopting the research methodology of Manis, Shedler, Jonides, and Nelson (1993), the authors demonstrate that recall does influence frequency of occurrence judgments if the superordinate category is brought into focus during encoding. Furthermore, set size judgments reflect actual presentation frequencies and are almost uninfluenced by recall if the superordinate category is not salient during recall.

Anderson, Craig A.

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004007pmid: N/A

Completing measures of attributional style, depression, and loneliness were 198 college students from the East China Normal University in Shanghai, China, and 193 participants from the University of Missouri at Columbia. Students from China accepted more responsibility for interpersonal and noninterpersonal failures than did U.S. students. They also took less credit for interpersonal success than did U.S. students. These relatively maladaptive attributional styles by Chinese students accounted for much of their relatively higher scores on depression and loneliness. The sample differences in attributional style fit well with previous research showing that the United States is a relatively more independent culture and that China is a relatively more interdependent culture. Finally, the observed relations between attributional style and depression and loneliness were very similar across these two samples, perhaps reflecting cross-cultural generality of fundamental human needs for feeling efficacious. Implications for attribution theories and models of cross-cultural differences were discussed.

Swim, Janet K.; Miller, Deborah L.

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004008pmid: N/A

Four studies examine the strength of feelings of White guilt, the relationship between White guilt and possible antecedents to this guilt, and the consequences of White guilt for attitudes toward affirmative action. Even though mean White guilt tended to be low, with the mean being just below the midpoint of the scale, the range and variability confirms the existence of feelings of White guilt for some. White guilt was associated with more negative personal evaluations of Whites and the theoretical antecedents of stronger beliefs in the existence of White privilege, greater estimates of the prevalence of discrimination against Blacks, and low prejudice against Blacks. Finally, results indicate that White guilt mediated the relationship from White privilege and beliefs about the prevalence of discrimination to attitudes toward affirmative action, and both White guilt and prejudice independently predicted attitudes toward affirmative action.

Coats, Susan; Smith, Eliot R.

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004009pmid: N/A

People’s perceptions of gender subtypes were explored by investigating the extent to which these perceptions are context sensitive. Traditional views regard stereotypes as stable structures that are retrieved from memory intact, whereas more recent views contend that stereotypes are constructed at the time that they are evoked and are thus relatively flexible. Context sensitivity was demonstrated by having participants list characteristics of subtypes after being exposed to one of two dissimilar exemplars of the subtypes. As predicted, descriptions of subtypes were found to differ between exemplar conditions. The authors also hypothesized that exemplars would have a stronger effect for participants describing in-group (same-gender) subtypes than for participants describing out-group subtypes, and this hypothesis was confirmed. The role of exemplar information in judgments about in-groups and out-groups is discussed.

Dijksterhuis, Ap; van Knippenberg, Ad

doi: 10.1177/0146167299025004010pmid: N/A

The authors studied the determinants of associative strength of stereotypes. Based on the literature on associative learning and on assumptions derived from a functional view of stereotyping, the authors hypothesized that the strength of stereotypical associations was determined by two parameters: If (a) central tendency of a trait is high and (b) variability of a trait is low, associations are formed, and activating a social category leads to heightened accessibility of this trait. The authors tested their predictions in two experiments in which stereotype accessibility was measured. In Experiment 1, they investigated stereotype development. It was shown that associations between a social category and a trait attribute develop when central tendency is high and when variability is low. In Experiment 2, it was shown that existing stereotypes are also characterized by high central tendency and low variability. The implications of these results are discussed.