Journal of personality and social psychology
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This investigation attempted to replicate and to clarify methodologically an investigation by Pollak and Gilligan (1982). Those investigators reported sex differences in violence imagery to Thematic Apperception Test (TAT) pictures depicting affiliation and achievement situations. ⋯ In addition, their findings could not be replicated when using four different systems for classifying TAT cards into motivational categories. Other potential sources of error in their research, including a restrictive scoring scheme for hostility, unusual instructions, and failure to control for sex role in the TAT pictures, did not influence the pattern of results.
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This article examines the attributional style of lonely and depressed people. Previous studies have suggested that both lonely and depressed individuals ascribe failure to characterological defects in themselves. However, the prototype of a lonely person and the prototype of a depressed person suggest that this characteristic attributional style should mainly hold for interpersonal failures. ⋯ Because the prototype of a lonely person is more singularly interpersonal than is the prototype of a depressed person, we hypothesized that loneliness would show higher correlations with the attributional style. This hypothesis was also confirmed. The findings were replicated using a modified version of the questionnaire.
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The first study in this paper examined the hypothesis that feeling lonely is related to a self-perceived lack of self-disclosure to significant others. Thirty-seven male and 38 female undergraduates rated themselves on the UCLA Loneliness Scale and the Jourard Self-Disclosure Questionnaire. Analyses showed that for males and females, loneliness was significantly and linearly related to a self-perceived lack of intimate disclosure to opposite-sex friends. ⋯ Postexercise ratings by partners indicated that lonely subjects were less effective than nonlonely subjects in making themselves known. Analysis of the intimacy level in the conversations showed that lonely subjects had significantly different patterns of disclosure than nonlonely subjects. We suggest that the self-disclosure style of the lonely person impairs the normal development of social relationships.
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This article compares the effects of distracting oneself from, versus attending to, the sensations produced by cold-pressor stimulation. Experiment 1 revealed that distraction is a better coping strategy than attention to sensations when subjects are asked to report pain threshold and tolerance. Experiments 2 and 3 examined the hypothesis that distraction is effective because persons hold a commonsense belief in the benefits of distraction as a coping device. ⋯ Distraction reduced distress early in the trial, but attention to sensations proved to be a superior strategy for the last 2 minutes of the trial. It is proposed that distraction and attention to sensations may be differentially effective depending on the duration of the painful stimulus. Possible mediating processes underlying the two strategies are discussed.
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The relationship between social skill deficits and the psychological state of loneliness was examined in two studies. Study 1 compared conversational behaviors of high-lonely and low-lonely college students during brief heterosexual interactions. ⋯ For that group, increased use of partner attention during dyadic interactions resulted in significantly greater change in loneliness and related variables relative to interaction only and no-contact control groups. The utility of conceptualizing loneliness as a social skills problem is discussed.