Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Social class schemata appear to affect perceivers' judgments of targets under conditions of stimulus ambiguity. In 1990 E. E. Jones noted that there are insufficient data to determine the effect of clearly disconfirming behavioral information and that the limits on social class schema effects are in need of investigation. This was the focus of the present research. Guided descriptively by a Bayesian model of social perception, the authors predicted and found that unambiguous, relevant stimulus information influenced judgments whereas social class information had no effect. Social class information did, however; affect judgments in a no-information condition. This basic result replicated in two experiments among populations that themselves varied in social class composition, thereby demonstrating the generalizability of the findings. Implications of these data for social perception in a stimulus-rich context are discussed.

In a sample of 168 Dutch individuals falling under the Disablement Insurance Act, it was found that (a) uncertainty and frustration were related to a need for social comparison; (b) the desire for information about similar others was stronger than the desire for affiliation with such others; (c) the evaluation of one's situation was particularly affected by health problems and independently by the perception of being worse off than others;(d) there was a relatively stronger preference for contact with, and information about, others who were better off among those evaluating their own situation negatively; (e) individuals were more interested in obtaining information about comparable others who were coping better than in talking to such others; and (1) there were stronger upward preferences on the coping dimension than on the problem severity dimension. The results are discussed in the context of Taylor and Lobel's model.

A computerized diary method was used to investigate relations between momentary and generalized affect reports. Thirty participants rated current mood at 2-hourly intervals and gave retrospective reports of daily and weekly mood for a 2-week period. Average momentary ratings provided a closer estimate of daily mood than either peak or most recent momentary ratings. Similarly, average daily mood indexes tended to give the best estimates of weekly mood. However, for positive (but not negative) mood, daily reports were consistently higher than average momentary ratings, and weekly reports were consistently higher than average daily ratings. Regression analyses suggested that daily ratings were influenced mainly by average momentary mood but that independent effects of peak and most recent momentary mood were detectable too. Retrospective reports of daily mood were also influenced by current mood. In general, however, memory for affect was rather better than previous research has implied.

A context effect experiment was embedded in a structured telephone survey of renal transplant recipients. Respondents received a specific question, "How satisfied are you with your transplant?," and a global assessment question, "How satisfied are you with life in general?.," under either contrast, assimilation, or control conditions. Importantly, context effects interacted with the treatment adherence status of respondents such that noncompliant recipients were less susceptible to the context manipulations. Results point to the importance of considering respondents' characteristics as potential moderators of item context effects and have implications for intervention strategies.

Do questionnaire items (e.g., masculinity and femininity scale items, occupational preference items) that show large sex differences tend also to be those items that correlate most strongly with independent gender-related criteria within the sexes? Three different criteria of within-sex gender-related individual differences were studied in data from three studies: a composite of eight gender-related behaviors in Study 1, masculinity-femininity as rated by friends and family members in Study 2, and self-ascribed masculinity-femininity in Studies 1, 2, and 3. Data from all studies and for all criteria converged, showing that items displaying large sex differences tended also to correlate most strongly with independent gender-related criteria within the sexes. Implications for the assessment of gender-related and other kinds of group-related individual differences are discussed.

Little is known about citizens' orientations to authority in authoritarian regimes. A 1990 Moscow survey offered an unusual opportunity to examine socialist citizens' views of military crimes of obedience, their attitudes toward political dissent, and predictors of each. In fact, there was no relationship between respondents' attitudes about disobedience (whether they would refuse orders to carry out military war crimes) and their responses about political dissent. However, greater education was associated both with claiming that one would disobey and with engaging in dissent. Exploratory analyses of additional attitude questions revealed two orthogonal factors-socialist conservatism and political powerlessness-which account for some of the effect of education and help explain the role of Communist Party membership. Party members felt more politically efficacious, but nonmembers were more likely to protest.

A new statistical procedure, two-mode clustering analysis, was used to examine consensual beliefs about the features of situations typically occurring within the university milieu. Forty-eight students were asked to keep a written record of the situations they encountered over a 1-week period. The 30 most frequently mentioned situation labels were presented to an independent sample of subjects for rating on bipolar scales. A two-mode hierarchical clustering analysis of the situation-by-feature rating data yielded nine clusters showing how situations relate to each other, how situation-descriptive features relate to each other, and, most important, how situations and features relate to each other Additionally, an overlapping clustering solution was derived illuminating the fuzzy nature of situation categories. Implications of the present methodology for research on situation cognition are discussed.

This study investigated whether actors and observers differ in their beliefs about what features of an individual best reflect his/her "authentic self " Some subjects rated the extent to which both dispositional traits (e.g., the tendency to be adventurous or not adventurous) and the specific content of the activities, thoughts, and feelings that exemplified those traits (e.g., "the things you do for adventure") reflected their "authentic selves. " Others made the same judgments about affined. Self-raters believed that the specific contents of their experiences were better indicators of their "authentic selves" than were their general dispositions, but friend-raters believed that the "authentic selves" of their acquaintances were better reflected by their general dispositions. Female subjects, both self-raters and friend-raters, tended to believe that the contents of covert emotional experiences were better indicators of the "authentic self" than male subjects did.

The task performance of laboratory work groups whose members were trained together or alone was investigated. At an initial training session, subjects were taught to assemble transistor radios. Some were trained in groups, others individually. A week later, subjects were asked to recall the assembly procedure and actually assemble a radio. Everyone performed these tasks in small work groups, each containing three persons of the same gender. Subjects in the group training condition worked in the same groups where they were trained, whereas subjects in the individual training condition worked in newly formed groups. Groups whose members were trained together recalled more about the assembly procedure and produced better-quality radios than groups whose members were trained alone. Through an analysis of videotape data, the mediating effects of various cognitive and social factors on the relationship between group training and performance were explored. The results indicated that group training improved group performance primarily by fostering the development of transactive memory systems among group members.

A small group of hand gestures made during conversation (interactive gestures) seem to function solely to assist the process of dialogue rather than to convey topical information. The rate of interactive gestures was significantly higher when 27 dyads talked in dialogue than in sequential monologues, whereas the rate of other (topical) gestures did not change; this difference supports the theory that interactive gestures are uniquely affected by the requirements of dialogue. A second, microanalytic study tested hypotheses about the specific functions of interactive gestures by examining the responses of the person to whom the gesture was addressed. Predictions were correct for 78 of 88 gestures sampled randomly from a large database. These results support the conclusion that interactive gestures are an important means by which speakers can include their addressees in the conversation. Moreover, these gestures demonstrate the importance of social (dialogic) processes in language use.

The current study assesses the impact of attachment style on the ways young adults react to the stress of 4-month combat training. Ninety-two Israeli recruits completed an attachment scale at the beginning of the training. Their appraisal of the training their ways of coping with it, and peer evaluations of their leadership ability were assessed 4 months later. Compared with secure persons, ambivalent persons reported more emotion-focused coping, appraised the training in more threatening terms, appraised themselves as less capable of coping with the training, and were evaluated by their peers as less fitting for military leadership. Avoidant persons reported more distancing coping and less support seeking and appraised the training in more threatening terms. They did not differ from secure persons in the appraisal of their ability to cope with the training or in the nominations they received for leadership positions. Results are discussed in the framework of attachment theory.