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Objective: This research investigated the effect of social class on personal control beliefs. Background: Differences in personal control beliefs serve as a central theoretical explanation for social class differences in cognition, emotion, and behavior. However, prior empirical research has not yet conclusively demonstrated that personal control beliefs differ between social classes. Method: Across four studies (total N = 138,417), we investigated the link between social class and personal control beliefs with well‐established measures of social class (e.g., ISEI, McArthur Scale),representative samples, and data that allow for causal conclusions (e.g., experimental, and longitudinal data). Results: We found that (a) higher social class was associated with higher personal control beliefs across 60 countries. Furthermore, we observed that (b) higher social class of parents was associated with higher personal control beliefs in their children, and that (c) experimentally induced higher (vs. lower) social class led to increases (vs. decreases) of personal control beliefs. Conclusions: Individuals from lower social classes consistently have weaker personal control beliefs than individuals from upper social classes. Social class differences in this fundamental personality characteristic are bound to have important consequences in various life domains (e.g., psychological and physical well‐being, and academic success). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notes many survey respondents are asked to report on frequency of behaviors during a specified reference period. Tests if a given piece of contextual information is more influential when it is unique to the question asked rather than shared by several questions. Finds influence of reference period on question interpretation is only observed when the period is unique to the target question. (SG)

The authors propose that the experience of flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2000) as reflected in the deep involvement in an activity perceived as intrinsically rewarding represents a regulatory compatibility experience. The research addresses the notion that the compatibility of critical person (e.g., skills) and environmental factors (e.g., demands) involved in a given activity elicits subjective experiences that render the respective activity rewarding. Two studies are reported that investigate the consequences of compatibility of skills and task demands during task engagement. Departing from correlational research, the present studies employ a newly developed experimental paradigm to document the causal impact of such a skills/demands compatibility on the emergence of flow. Experiment 2 revealed that individuals characterized by a strong habitual action-orientation were most sensitive to the manipulation of the skills-demands compatibility. Keywords: action-orientation; flow experience; intrinsic motivation; regulatory compatibility

The extent to which the impact of accessible content versus accessibility experiences is moderated by processing capacity is discussed.

Four studies investigate the relationship between individuals' mood and their reliance on the ease of retrieval heuristic. Happy participants were consistently more likely to rely on the ease of retrieval heuristic, whereas sad participants were more likely to rely on the activated content. Additional analyses indicate that this pattern is not due to a differential recall (Experiment 2) and that happy participants ceased to rely on the ease of retrieval when the diagnosticity of this information was called into question (Experiment 3). Experiment 4 shows that reliance on the ease of retrieval heuristic resulted in faster judgments than reliance on content, with the former but not the latter being a function of the amount of activated information.

People tend to be overly critical of their own displays of vulnerability, whereas observers evaluate others' showing of vulnerability rather positively (beautiful mess effect). We propose that self-compassion might buffer against such misperceptions of one's own vulnerabilities. When confronted with challenging situations, self-compassionate people are kind to themselves, see adversity as inevitable, and face the difficulty of their circumstances without overexaggeration. Thus, we hypothesized reduced self–other differences in the evaluation of showing vulnerability in self-compassionate individuals. The hypothesis was addressed in four studies. The first two studies measured self-compassion either immediately (Study 1a) or substantially (Study 1b) before participants evaluated showing of vulnerability. Studies 2 and 3 tested the generalizability of the hypothesis across different situations as well as the discriminant validity of self-compassion's role in the reduction of the beautiful mess effect. Implications for research and practice are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research presented concerns how people perceive stereotype-inconsistent subjects and how this categorization can influence the perception of the subject's social group as a whole. Topics addressed include social inclusion and exclusion, the assimilation of subjects into stereotypical groups, and the implication of this research for intergroup relations.

The authors investigated how the perceived typicality of context information for a target category moderates whether that information produces assimilation or contrast in the target evaluation. To manipulate context information, the accessibility of either positive or negative exemplars was increased. These exemplars were pretested to seem moderately typical with respect to the target category if participants were not provided with additional instructions. To manipulate perceived typicality, different instructions were provided so that participants categorized the same activated exemplar as either typical or atypical Information that was perceived as typical resulted in assimilation effects, whereas information that was perceived as atypical resulted in contrast effects. The results showed that the very same context may result in assimilation or contrast as a function of the categorization decisions that operate on the context information.

Experienced ease of thought generation was found to affect the impact of thought valence on attitude judgments. Participants generated either three or seven arguments that were either in favor or opposed to a specific issue. After generating three arguments, which was experienced as easy, participants' reported attitudes reflected the implications of their arguments, but this was not the case after generating seven arguments, which was experienced as difficult. In contrast, yoked participants who had read the arguments generated by the first group and consequently had lacked the subjective experience in thought generation were influenced more strongly by having been exposed to seven arguments rather than three. The results suggest that individuals use their subjective experience that accompany thought generation for the construction of their attitudes.

Experimental studies of the influence of successful atypical exemplars of the black community on the attitudes of white people toward the economic and political status of the blacks reveals an increase in discrimination against blacks with prior activation of the exemplar. The positive effect exerted by these exemplars is eliminated with the knowledge that they are atypical. These results substantiate the generalized appraisal viewpoint, wherein intergroup attitudes are affected by exemplary people of a minority community.