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Romantic and sexual relationships are increasingly initiated using mobile dating applications rather than in face-to-face contexts. There is subsequently a need to understand socially competent and incompetent behaviors during this pre-interaction relationship development stage. One-on-one in-depth interviews were conducted with 22 emerging adults from Australia and Belgium. Data were analyzed inductively based on thematic analysis. Participants reported 11 superordinate social competencies represented by 85 competent and 67 incompetent behavioral norms that varied across four stages of online relationship formation (profile, matching, discovery, and evaluation stages). Findings provide a unique contribution to the literature as online social competence has yet to be conceptualized. Comparisons between online and face-to-face relational processes are also discussed.

Implicit and explicit attitudes correlate under certain conditions and researchers are interested in the moderating factors of this relationship. This paper explored the role of socially desirable responding in this relationship by testing the hypothesis that impression management (IM; i.e., deliberate response modification) and self-deceptive enhancement (SDE; i.e., positive self-bias) play moderating roles in the relationship of implicit-explicit attitudes toward asylum seekers in Australia. Seventy-four students responded to a battery of measures and the results revealed that IM (but not SDE) moderated this relationship to the extent that higher IM scores weakened the correspondence between implicit and explicit attitude scores. This suggests that attitudes toward asylum seekers might be susceptible to socially desirable response tendencies and in combination with the finding that IM was negatively related to explicit attitudes, it is argued that self-presentation concerns result in the deliberate attenuation of reported negative explicit attitudes.

Research into the relationship between religion and anti-gay attitudes frequently focuses on Christianity. We explored the role of religiosity dimensions, previous contact, and factors in the dual-process motivation model as predictors of explicit and implicit anti-gay attitudes in samples of Muslims and Atheists. The explicit and implicit attitudes of Muslims were more negative than the attitudes of Atheists. Explicit attitudes were more negative towards gay men than lesbians; implicit attitudes were negative towards gay men but were unexpectedly positive towards lesbians. In regression analyses, religious fundamentalism and extrinsic religious orientations (Study 1), and contact and right-wing authoritarianism (Study 2) were strong significant predictors of explicit anti-gay attitudes. Interestingly, none of the factors of interest predicted implicit anti-gay attitudes. These findings reveal a strong link between Islam and explicit anti-gay attitudes, but suggest that the relationship between religion and implicit anti-gay attitudes may be more complex than previously thought.