Journal of personality and social psychology
-
We explored individual differences in health-seeking behavior and health status in a primary care population. Specifically, we compared high monitors (those who typically scan for threat-relevant information) with low monitors (those who typically ignore threat-relevant information), while controlling for depression. Overall, high monitors came to the physician with less severe medical problems than did low monitors. ⋯ Furthermore, during the week following their visit, high monitors expressed less symptom improvement in both physical and psychological problems than did low monitors. Finally, high monitors demanded more tests, information, and counseling during their visit than did their low monitoring counterparts, yet desired a less active role in their own care. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed.
-
The reformulated model of learned helplessness assumes that attributional style has its impact on depression in part through the intermediary effect of pessimistic or negative expectations about the occurrence of future outcomes. A possible logical next step in testing the model is to measure jointly attributions and expectations and to examine their combined (interactive) contributions. We used a short-term longitudinal design to examine whether attributional style works in combination with other factors, such as expectations, to predispose individuals to depression. ⋯ These findings support our confluence hypothesis, which assumes that vulnerability factors can combine interactively and qualify the effects of attributional style. These interaction-effect findings have implications for currently popular cognitive theories of depression and for previous research on vulnerability to depression that has examined only the effects of single cognitive variables (such as attributional style) considered alone. Further study is also necessary to determine the nature of the overlap of the effects of expectation and initial level of depression.
-
How does mood affect the way we learn about, judge, and remember characteristics of other people? This study looked at the effects of mood on impression formation and person memory. Realistic person descriptions containing positive and negative details were presented to subjects experiencing a manipulated happy or sad mood. Next, impression-formation judgments were obtained, and subjects' recall and recognition of details of the characters were assessed. ⋯ Both cued recall and recognition memory were superior for mood-consistent characteristics. Positive mood had a more pronounced effect on judgments and memory than did negative mood. These findings are discussed in terms of recent theories of mood effects on cognition, and the likely implications of the results for everyday person-perception judgments are considered.
-
A substantial literature has shown that lonely people differ from nonlonely people on a variety of measures of social performance. These differences have usually been conceptualized as a social skills deficit, which implies that lonely people lack the ability to perform appropriate and effective social behavior. Rather than a lack of this ability, the authors hypothesize that the adoption of passive interpersonal roles predisposes lonely people to exhibit inadequate performance. ⋯ In contrast, lonely subjects did not differ from nonlonely subjects in their social performance within each particular role. Lonely and nonlonely subjects did differ, however, in their subjective evaluations of themselves and of their performance. These results illustrate the need for research to address both the interpersonal and the intrapersonal bases of social performance.
-
We provided a microanalytic description of facial reactions to a series of painful and nonpainful electric shocks and examined the impact of these as discrete facial cues for observer judgments of acute pain. Thirty female volunteers were videotaped and reported their discomfort in response to electric shocks after earlier exposure to one of three social influence conditions: a tolerant model, an intolerant model, or neutral peer presence. We coded the videotapes for facial activity using the Facial Action Coding System (Ekman & Friesen, 1978b), and peer judges rated them for painful discomfort. ⋯ Analyses of facial activity yielded consistent findings: Tolerant-model subjects, though reporting discomfort equivalent to that reported in other groups, displayed more pain-related facial activity (brow lowering, narrowing of the eye aperture from below, raising the upper lip, and blinking). There was a substantial direct relation between observer judgments of distress and discrete, pain-related facial actions (mean multiple R = .74 for the various shock levels rated). These data indicate that nonverbal expression yields information about the response to noxious stimulation that is non-redundant with self-report.