Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

Three studies examined the effects of separation reminders on death-thought accessibility. In Study 1, participants imagined a separation from a relationship partner, the death of such a partner, or a TV program. In Study 2, participants imagined a separation from a relationship partner, a separation from an acquaintance, or an academic failure. In Study 3, participants imagined a short-term, long-term, or final separation from a relationship partner. In the three studies, death-thought accessibility and attachment style were assessed. Thoughts of separation from a relationship partner led to heightened death-thought accessibility mainly when thoughts were focused on long-term or final separations and among persons scoring high on attachment anxiety. The discussion focused on the death-anxiety buffering function of close relationships.

The authors outline a strategy for introducing a Western psychological construct into a different culture. A series of three studies tested how the construct of individuation functions in a collectivist culture. It was hypothesized that the original one-factor model of individuation would not be sufficient to capture the meaning of individuating behaviors in a collectivist culture. Rather, a culture-specific model with two factors, namely, Taking the Lead and Seeking Attention, was expected. In Study 1, the two-factor model showed a better fit than the original one-factor model in a Chinese sample. In Study 2, replicating the original one-factor model in an individualistic culture eliminated an explanation for the obtained two-factor model based on a methodological artifact. In Study 3, the authors examined the nomological network of the two types of individuation and determined whether the imported construct of individuation changes meanings in the new culture.

People have the capacity both to influence their environment and to adjust to it, but the United States and Japan are said to emphasize these processes differently. The authors suggest that Americans and Japanese develop distinct psychological characteristics, which are attuned to social practices that emphasize influence (in the United States) and adjustment (in Japan). American participants could remember more, and more recent, situations that involve influence, and Japanese respondents could remember more, and more recent, situations that involve adjustment. Second, American-made influence situations evoked stronger feelings of efficacy, whereas Japanese-made adjustment situations evoked stronger feelings of relatedness. Third, Americans reported more efficacy than Japanese, especially when responding to influence situations. Japanese felt more interpersonally close than Americans, especially when responding to adjustment situations. Surprisingly, U.S. influence situations also made people feel close to others, perhaps because they involved influencing other people.

This article proposed a motivational model of driving anger and aggression, derived from self-determination theory, suggesting that trait motivation affects motivation in specific driving situations, which in turn predicts driving anger and subsequent aggression. Individuals higher in controlled orientation were predicted to experience more feelings of pressure and ego-defensiveness while driving, leading to more anger and aggression. Participants included 111 individuals who kept structured daily records of all instances in which they experienced driving anger throughout a 10-day period. Participants reported experiencing anger on slightly more than a daily basis, on average, and responding with varying levels of aggression. Results provided strong support for the authors’ motivational framework suggesting that individuals who generally feel controlled tend to experience more pressure and ego-defensiveness, which leads to more anger and aggression while driving.

What are the cognitive strategies that allow people to manage and maintain their daily mood fluctuations within reasonable limits? Despite intense recent interest in affective phenomena, spontaneous changes over time in mood effects have rarely been studied. Three experiments evaluated the temporal sequence of positivity and negativity in social responses by people who received an initial positive and negative mood induction. Following different mood manipulations, participants performed three kinds of serial social tasks: They generated person descriptions (Experiment 1), completed trait words (Experiment 2), or produced a series of self-descriptions (Experiment 3). Results were consistent with the operation of a spontaneous, homeostatic mood management mechanism. The authors found that initially mood-congruent responses were spontaneously reversed and replaced by mood-incongruent reactions over time. The implications of these results for recent affect-cognition theorizing, and for our understanding of people’s everyday mood management strategies, are discussed.

We measured the ways that women with varying degrees of perceived power respond physiologically to children’s elevated vocal pitch (F ₀ : fundamental frequency), a social dependence/immaturity cue. Listeners believed either that they would provide instructions or make judgments about the children they heard. As predicted, women with low perceived power in caregiving relationships (i.e., who attributed greater power to children than to self) were highly reactive to children’s pitch properties—in particular, when they anticipated providing instructions. When expecting to provide instructions to children with higher F ₀ voices, women with low perceived power showed elevations in cortisol levels and heart rate (consistent with defensive mobilization for threat). In all other pairings of women and children, cortisol and heart rate levels held relatively constant or declined. In addition, women with low perceived power showed better recall of messages from children with higher F ₀ voices than lower F ₀ voices. Implications are drawn for interaction patterns that foster caregiving stress and conflict.

The authors hypothesized that both narcissism and high self-esteem are associated with positive self-views but each is associated with positivity in different domains of the self. Narcissists perceive themselves as better than average on traits reflecting an agentic orientation (e.g., intellectual skills, extraversion) but not on those reflecting a communal orientation (e.g., agreeableness, morality). In contrast, high-self-esteem individuals perceive themselves as better than average both on agentic and communal traits. Three studies confirmed the hypothesis. In Study 1, narcissists rated themselves as extraverted and open to experience but not as more agreeable or emotionally stable. High-self-esteem individuals rated themselves highly on all of these traits except openness. In Study 2, narcissists (but not high-self-esteem individuals) rated themselves as better than their romantic partners. In Study 3, narcissists rated themselves as more intelligent, but not more moral, than the average person. In contrast, high-self-esteem individuals viewed themselves as more moral and more intelligent.

Three studies suggest that individuals see the existence and operation of cognitive and motivational biases much more in others than in themselves. Study 1 provides evidence from three surveys that people rate themselves as less subject to various biases than the “average American,” classmates in a seminar, and fellow airport travelers. Data from the third survey further suggest that such claims arise from the interplay among availability biases and self-enhancement motives. Participants in one follow-up study who showed the better-than-average bias insisted that their self-assessments were accurate and objective even after reading a description of how they could have been affected by the relevant bias. Participants in a final study reported their peer’s self-serving attributions regarding test performance to be biased but their own similarly self-serving attributions to be free of bias. The relevance of these phenomena to naïve realism and to conflict, misunderstanding, and dispute resolution is discussed.

Predictions generated by cognitive adaptation theory and conservation of resources theory were tested with regard to positive and negative changes associated with HIV infection in an ethnically diverse, low socioeconomic status sample of 189 HIV-positive women. Women reported a significantly greater number of benefits than losses in their experiences with HIV infection. Changes in the domains of the self and life priorities were significantly positive, whereas changes in romantic/sexual relations and view of body were significantly negative. Women who reported more benefits were less likely to report depressive and anxious symptoms. Although health status and optimism significantly predicted depression, anxiety, and negative HIV-related changes, socioeconomic resources (education and income) were the most significant predictors of HIV-related benefit finding. Implications of these results are discussed.

The impact on self-esteem of activating self-doubt was investigated in three studies. Individuals with enduring high self-doubt were expected to be more threatened by an experimental induction of self-doubt (modeled on the ease of retrieval paradigm) than individuals low in enduring self-doubt, and their self-esteem was predicted to decline. The predictions were supported when self-esteem was measured postexperimentally (Experiment 1) and when it was measured both pre- and postexperimentally (Experiment 2). There was no comparable loss in self-esteem for individuals low in self-doubt. A third experiment explored the phenomenology of low-self-doubt individuals and replicated the finding that their level of self-esteem was unaffected by the induction designed to produce doubt.

It has been found that people unintentionally direct attention to threatening stimuli, but it has been suggested that people with a repressive coping style can inhibit that automatic response. Support for this hypothesis is mixed, however. Consistent with other investigations of this issue, the two studies reported here used a variant of the Stroop procedure. Unlike past studies, though, threatening stimuli were identified idiographically. In line with the assumption that repressive coping is motivated by self-protection, self-concept threats were assessed separately for each participant. Repressors and control participants were presented with these threatening personality traits (i.e., traits they would least want to possess) and also with unfavorable but nonthreatening traits (some other participant’s threatening traits). They named the word colors as quickly as possible. In both studies, only repressors failed to display Stroop interference effects when presented with threatening stimuli. Results indicate that repressors selectively avoid attending to threat-related stimuli.