Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin

We explored cultural and historical variations in concepts of happiness. First, we analyzed the definitions of happiness in dictionaries from 30 nations to understand cultural similarities and differences in happiness concepts. Second, we analyzed the definition of happiness in Webster’s dictionaries from 1850 to the present day to understand historical changes in American English. Third, we coded the State of the Union addresses given by U.S. presidents from 1790 to 2010. Finally, we investigated the appearance of the phrases happy nation versus happy person in Google’s Ngram Viewer from 1800 to 2008. Across cultures and time, happiness was most frequently defined as good luck and favorable external conditions. However, in American English, this definition was replaced by definitions focused on favorable internal feeling states. Our findings highlight the value of a historical perspective in the study of psychological concepts.

Self-expansion without regard for others’ well-being may represent the dark side of an otherwise healthy motive. Guided by Amoebic Self-Theory (AST), we developed the Engulfing Self Scale (ESS) to measure acquisitive tendencies across AST’s three domains of the self. Four studies revealed that bodily engulfment appeared generally benign, and that the problematic aspects of social engulfment were generally restricted to interpersonal contexts. Spatial-symbolic engulfment motivation was linked to a breadth of problematic indices such as psychopathy, Machiavellianism, narcissism, psychological entitlement, social dominance orientation, economic system justification, greed, and valuation of power. It also predicted reluctance to expose a cheating group leader when doing so would threaten one’s own positive outcomes, greater justification of a looter’s behavior when prompted take his or her perspective, and greater justification of self-serving reward allocations after defeating an ostensible competitor. Spatial-symbolic engulfment may be a motivational fountainhead for behaviors that negate others’ well-being.

Three studies examined the production of political messages and their persuasive impact on recipients as a function of speaker–audience similarity. The first two studies found support for the hypothesis that political leaders (Study 1) and party activists (Study 2) formulate more abstract messages when the audience is politically similar to them than when the audience is dissimilar or heterogeneous. The third study examined the persuasive impact of message abstractness versus concreteness. We predicted and found that abstract messages are more effective in convincing an audience whose political positions are similar to the speaker’s and concrete messages are more effective in convincing an audience whose political positions differ from the speaker’s or are heterogeneous. Implications of these findings for the relation between language and social cognition are discussed.

The generalization of attitudes toward individual outgroup members into attitudes toward the outgroup as a whole can affect intergroup relations. However, little is known about the relative strengths of the generalization of negative and positive interpersonal attitudes into attitudes about the outgroup. The unique contribution of negative (disliking) interpersonal attitudes to intergroup attitudes was examined and its strength was compared with the effect of positive (liking) interpersonal attitudes, using cross-sectional (Study 1; N = 733, age 10-12) and longitudinal data (Study 2; N = 960, age 12-13). Disliking uniquely contributed to respondents’ outgroup attitudes. The generalization of interpersonal liking and disliking was about equally strong in both studies. This underpins the importance of examining the effects of both positive and negative intergroup contact experiences on the formation of outgroup attitudes.

Anxiety leads to exaggerated perceptions of distance, which may impair performance on a physical task. In two studies, we tested one strategy to reduce anxiety and induce perceived proximity to increase performance. We predicted implementation intentions that reduce anxiety would increase perceived visual proximity to goal-relevant targets, which would indirectly improve performance. In two studies, we induced performance anxiety on a physical task. Participants who formed implementation intentions to reduce anxiety perceived goal-relevant targets (e.g., golf hole, dartboard) as physically closer and performed better than both participants without a strategy (Study 1) and participants with only a goal to regulate anxiety (Study 2). Furthermore, perceived proximity improved performance indirectly by increasing subjective task ease (Study 2). Results suggest that implementation intentions can reduce anxiety and lead to perceived proximity of goal-relevant targets, which helps perceivers make progress on goals.

Are depressive symptoms associated with more biased or more accurate interpersonal perceptions? Both members of committed heterosexual couples (N = 78) reported on their perceptions of their partner’s commitment and behavior daily across a 3-week period. Using the partner’s reports as the benchmark, participants who reported more depressive symptoms not only underestimated their partner’s commitment and overestimated their partner’s negative behavior (greater directional bias) but were also more accurate in tracking changes in their partner’s commitment and behavior across days (greater tracking accuracy). More negative perceptions of the partner’s commitment and behavior was also associated with increases in relationship insecurity and depressed mood, particularly when the partner also reported lower commitment and more negative behavior. These results indicate that depressive symptoms are associated with both more accurate and more biased interpersonal perceptions and suggest that more accurate detection and more biased magnification of interpersonal threat has important implications for the maintenance of depressed mood.

Three studies examined the consequences of subtyping ingroup members for evaluations of the self. The first study examined the impact of subtyping high-performing or low-performing ingroup members on self-evaluations. Study 2 employed an alternative manipulation of subtyping. Given the observed benefits of subtyping low-performing ingroup members for the group and the benefits of subtyping high-performing ingroup members for the self, Study 3 investigated participants’ subtyping target selection (i.e., high-performing vs. low-performing ingroup members) when the focus of the sorting task was on self-evaluations or group evaluations. In sum, these studies suggest that subtyping ingroup members can serve a self-protective function.

Two experiments examined for the first time whether the specific content of participant-generated affirmation essays—in particular, writing about social belonging—facilitated an affirmation intervention’s ability to reduce identity threat among negatively stereotyped students. Study 1, a field experiment, revealed that seventh graders assigned to a values-affirmation condition wrote about social belonging more than those assigned to a control condition. Writing about belonging, in turn, improved the grade point average (GPA) of Black, but not White students. In Study 2, using a modified “belonging-affirmation” intervention, we directly manipulated writing about social belonging before a math test described as diagnostic of math ability. The more female participants wrote about belonging, the better they performed, while there was no effect of writing about belonging for males. Writing about social belonging improved performance only for members of negatively stereotyped groups. Implications for self-affirmation theory and practice are discussed.

How stable are individual differences in self-esteem? We examined the time-dependent decay of rank-order stability of self-esteem and tested whether stability asymptotically approaches zero or a nonzero value across long test–retest intervals. Analyses were based on 6 assessments across a 29-year period of a sample of 3,180 individuals aged 14 to 102 years. The results indicated that, as test–retest intervals increased, stability exponentially decayed and asymptotically approached a nonzero value (estimated as .43). The exponential decay function explained a large proportion of variance in observed stability coefficients, provided a better fit than alternative functions, and held across gender and for all age groups from adolescence to old age. Moreover, structural equation modeling of the individual-level data suggested that a perfectly stable trait component underlies stability of self-esteem. The findings suggest that the stability of self-esteem is relatively large, even across very long periods, and that self-esteem is a trait-like characteristic.

Effects of exposure to a severe weather disaster on perceived future vulnerability were assessed in college students, local residents contacted through random-digit dialing, and community residents of affected versus unaffected neighborhoods. Students and community residents reported being less vulnerable than their peers at 1 month, 6 months, and 1 year after the disaster. In Studies 1 and 2, absolute risk estimates were more optimistic with time, whereas comparative vulnerability was stable. Residents of affected neighborhoods (Study 3), surprisingly, reported less comparative vulnerability and lower “gut-level” numerical likelihood estimates at 6 months, but later their estimates resembled the unaffected residents. Likelihood estimates (10%-12%), however, exceeded the 1% risk calculated by storm experts, and gut-level versus statistical-level estimates were more optimistic. Although people believed they had approximately a 1-in-10 chance of injury from future tornadoes (i.e., an overestimate), they thought their risk was lower than peers.