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Discrimination and recognition are often poorer for other-race than own-race faces. These other-race effects (OREs) have traditionally been attributed to reduced perceptual expertise, resulting from more limited experience, with other-race faces. However, recent findings suggest that sociocognitive factors, such as reduced motivation to individuate other-race faces, may also contribute. If the sociocognitive hypothesis is correct, then it should be possible to alter discrimination and memory performance for identical faces by altering their perceived race. We made identical ambiguous-race morphed faces look either Asian or Caucasian by presenting them in Caucasian or Asian face contexts, respectively. However, this perceived-race manipulation had no effect on either discrimination (Experiment 1) or memory (Experiment 2) for the ambiguous-race faces, despite the presence of the usual OREs in discrimination and recognition of unambiguous Asian and Caucasian faces in our participant population. These results provide no support for the sociocognitive hypothesis. Keywords: face recognition, other-race effect, race categorization Supplemental materials: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/a0017680.supp DOI: 10.1037/a0017680

The actor-observer hypothesis (E. E. Jones & R. E. Nisbett, 1971) states that people tend to explain their own behavior with situation causes and other people's behavior with person causes. Widely known in psychology, this asymmetry has been described as robust, firmly established, and pervasive. However, a meta-analysis on 173 published studies revealed average effect sizes from d = -0.016 to d = 0.095. A moderator analysis showed that the asymmetry held only when the actor was portrayed as highly idiosyncratic, when hypothetical events were explained, when actor and observer were intimates, or when free-response explanations were coded. In addition, the asymmetry held for negative events, but a reverse asymmetry held for positive events. This valence effect may indicate a self-serving pattern in attribution, but across valence, no actor-observer asymmetry exists. Keywords: self-other, behavior explanations, social psychology, social perception, social cognition Supplemental data: http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.132.6.895.supp

To date, little is known about how social context cues influence the processing of information about relations between people, as opposed to information about indidvidual persons. This research addresses the [...]

The present study examined the assumption that non-anonymous choices in social dilemmas (i.e., choices for which one is accountable) may influence cooperation, but only to the extent that decision-makers believe that the others will evaluate non-cooperation negatively. Based on a recent review by Kerr (1999), it was expected that under conditions of accountability, decision-makers would cooperate more when they believed that the others within the group were also concerned about their social reputation and therefore were aware of the social norm of cooperation within social dilemmas. As a consequence, it could be expected that non-cooperation by oneself would be evaluated negatively by those others since they seemed to be aware of what ought to be done in a social dilemma (i.e., the norm of cooperation). Results confirmed these predictions and, in addition, also showed that greater willingness to cooperate was associated with stronger feelings of collective concern. The findings are discussed in terms of recent literature on anonymity effects in social dilemmas.

A daily diary study examined how chronic perceptions of a partner's regard affect how intimates interpret and respond to daily relationship stresses. Spouses each completed a diary for 21 days. Multilevel analyses revealed that people who felt less positively regarded read more into stressful events than did people who felt highly regarded, feeling more hurt on days after acute threats, such as those posed by a moody or ill-behaved partner. Intimates who felt less valued responded to feeling hurt by behaving badly toward their partner on subsequent days. In contrast, intimates who felt more valued responded to feeling hurt by drawing closer to their partner. Ironically, chronically activated needs for belongingness might lead people who are trying to find acceptance to undermine their marriage.

A study of the effect that belonging to a socially stigmatized group brings to attitudes about social interactions is examined. The study of women role playing a lesbian identity showed that they were much more self-conscious and paranoid about the motivations behind people's actions now that they were considered part of a stigmatized group.

Persons who are flattered are more likely to assign credibility to and like the flatterer than observers, presumably because they are motivated by vanity. In existing studies, however, the difference between targets and observers has been confounded with other variables. The present experiments demonstrate that the target--observer difference in judgments of an ingratiator is not affected by these confounding variables, such as cognitive resources, the motive to like one's interaction partner, or to form an accurate impression, or mood. Results further suggest that, whereas cognitive responses to ingratiation are different among participants with high versus low self-esteem, affective responses and judgments of the ingratiator are not qualified by any personality variables.

Adult attachment orientation has been associated with specific patterns of emotion regulation. The present research examined the effects of attachment orientation on the perceptual processing of emotional stimuli. Experimental participants played computerized movies of faces that expressed happiness, sadness, and anger. Over the course of the movies, the facial expressions became neutral. Participants reported the frame at which the initial expression no longer appeared on the face. Under conditions of no distress (Study 1), fearfully attached individuals saw the offset of both happiness and anger earlier, and preoccupied and dismissive individuals later, than the securely attached individuals. Under conditions of distress (Study 2), insecurely attached individuals perceived the offset of negative facial expressions as occurring later than did the secure individuals, and fearfully attached individuals saw the offset later than either of the other insecure groups. The mechanisms underlying the effects are considered.

A study is present that examines whether people will comprehend a new event more quickly if they can relate it to something that has happened before.

This article examines the impact of social reactions on healing and recovery in rape victims. Findings indicate that victims who have a supporter who believes their account and allows them to discuss the experience have fewer post-rape physical and emotional health problems than victims who experience negative reactions or no support.

This article examines the influence of situational appraisals and perceptions of social competence on depression and social anxiety symptoms in adolescents. Findings indicate that depression is associated with general self-perceptions of social competence while social anxiety is mediated by social competence perceptions and negative appraisals of the social situation.

This article examines the perceptions of high school students and counselors regarding factors that influence adolescents to independently seek help from a counselor. Findings indicate that counselors emphasize the importance of gender, age, adolescent social and academic status, and the presenting problem while adolescents focus on counselor expertise and trustworthiness.

This article examines the influence of prejudice on knowledge of cultural stereotypes of minority groups. Findings indicate that prejudice significantly influences stereotype knowledge and that highly prejudiced people in the Netherlands believe that stereotypes of Surinamese and Moroccan people are more negative in content than less biased people.

This article examines long-term changes in the accuracy of social stereotypes in first-year sorority sisters by comparing subjects' perceptions with individuals' self-ratings. Findings indicate that participants were consistently more accurate with in-group than out-group judgements and that accuracy significantly increased over the first year.

This article examines sex differences in self-pay, or the amount of money an individual would pay themselves for completed work. Findings indicate that men base self-pay decisions on feelings of self-worth and have elevated levels of entitlement when compared to women who base their decisions on perceived performance.

This article examines the relationship between attitudes and outcome-based trait inferences. Findings indicate that subjects who strongly support mandatory competency testing for teachers made inferences about a fictional teacher's intelligence and skills based on competency test results but the inferences of subjects opposing testing were not mediated by test outcomes.

This article examines the effect of repeated exposure to pictures of human faces on the subsequent ratings of composites of the previously seen faces. Findings indicate that exposure significantly increases likability ratings of both composite faces and the original component faces.

This article examines the influence of attentional resource availability on person-based processing, or the categorization of social information about unfamiliar people on an individual basis. Findings indicate that changes in attentional resources related to age or secondary task loading reduce recall but do not affect person-based information categorization.

This study uses vignettes of African American children with internalizing and externalizing problems to assess the attitudes of teachers, parents, and clinicians towards the seriousness of the problems and intervention needs. Black adults rated the problems as more serious than whites in both conditions, but were more optimistic about the children's prognoses.

This article examines African American college students' perceptions of an audiotaped man who switches between Black and standard English in formal and informal settings. Results indicate that the speaker was rated most favorably when he appropriately switched from Black English in an informal setting to standard English in formal company.

This article investigates the effects of the collectivist black self-construct on political and social orientations in African American adults. Findings indicate that the self-construct, which includes African self-consciousness and ethnic identity, influences perceptions of social issues like race relations and affects levels of identification with political figures and celebrities.

This article examines self-assessments of college students regarding their future test performance in comparison to the performances of their classmates. Findings indicate that students use unrealistic optimism when predicting their test preparation and performance in comparison to similar others and generally rate themselves as above average.

This study investigates the effects of social status on intergroup perception. Results indicate that both high and low status groups demonstrated an out-group homogeneity bias, or the perception that the out-group is less diverse, while low-status groups demonstrated a more pronounced ethnocentrism bias, or a perception of in-group superiority.

This study uses taped interviews to examine women's perceptions of personal safety and abuse during conjugal visits. Common themes in the interviews include fears related to controlling and abusive behavior from incarcerated partners and negative experiences with the correctional system or prison personnel.

This article examines the dynamics of emotional memories that contribute to the escalation process in domestic violence. Abusive men accumulate and archive memories of interpersonal conflicts that are later used to rationalize violent thoughts and play a role in balancing aggression and restraint.

This article examines the relationship between exercise habits and social perception. Findings indicate that men and women who were described as exercisers in brief vignettes were rated more favorably on several personality and physical dimensions when compared to non-exercisers and control subjects.

Although routinely observed among North Americans, self-enhancing biases have been elusive in studies conducted with Japanese. The authors conducted two studies of relationship-serving biases (RSBs) with Japanese, Asian Canadian, and European Canadian participants. In both studies, members of all three cultural groups viewed their own relationships (with their best friend, their closest family member, and their romantic partner) as more positive than those of their peers, and to roughly the same extent. Of importance, however, (a) RSBs were largely uncorrelated with both self-esteem and self-serving biases and (b) Japanese (but not the other two cultural groups') RSBs were paralleled by tendencies to view their relationship partners more positively than themselves. The authors suggest that relationship enhancement serves a different function than self-enhancement, aiding the individual's quest for connection and belongingness with others.

The present research examined gender differences in the perceived prevalence of extradyadic sex (Study 1, n = 184) and of unsafe sex (Study 2, n = 170). Two opposing hypotheses were examined: the justification hypothesis, predicting that the higher the involvement in extradyadic and unsafe sex, the higher the perceived prevalence of such behaviors would be, and the stigmatization hypothesis, predicting that the higher the level of involvement, the lower the perceived prevalence of such behaviors would be. Among men, evidence was found for the justification hypothesis, whereas among women, more evidence was found for the stigmatization hypothesis. In Study 3 (n = 574) and Study 4 (n = 637), conducted in samples representative of the general population, evidence was found that when making prevalence estimates, women thought primarily of other women and men of other men.

The research reported here examined whether misanthropic memory occurs for groups, that is, whether people best remember negative behaviors of group members that have been dispositionally attributed and positive behaviors that have been situationally attributed. Experiment 1 established a baseline, showing that behaviors that were not associated with attributions displayed an incongruity effect in which behaviors incongruent with prior expectancies were better recalled than were behaviors congruent with prior expectancies. In Experiment 2, attributions were associated with the behaviors used in Experiment 1, resulting in an attenuation of the incongruity effect and the emergence of a strong misanthropy effect. Experiment 3 indicated that misanthropic memory is only found for outgroups and not for ingroups. The implications of the findings for intergroup perception were discussed.

Critical illness and subsequent hospitalization are stressful for patients and their family members. The purpose of this descriptive study was to identify the family members' perceptions of their immediate needs within 48 to 96 hours following admission of a relative to a critical care unit in Hong Kong and to compare their perceptions with the critical care nurses' perceptions of the family needs. A convenience sample of 37 Chinese family members and 45 registered nurses completed a self-report Chinese version of the Critical Care Family Need Inventory. The 10 most important and 10 least important family needs were identified by family members and by nurses and the results were compared. Conclusions were drawn about the implications for nurses in planning and implementing quality family-centered care for critically ill patients.

This article examines the relationship between spirituality and mental health in African American women who are recovering from drug and alcohol abuse. Results indicate that women with high levels of spirituality had more positive perceptions of family life, self-concept, and social supports and demonstrated a more active coping style.

This article describes a qualitative study that investigated client perceptions of helpful and unhelpful aspects of couples therapy. A thematic analysis of interviews revealed among other themes, that couple participants associated helpful therapy experiences with (a) being given choices regarding ideas and ways of working that fit for them, (b) working with a therapist they trusted, and (c) developing new ideas about the couple relationship. Implications of this study for future research, practice, and training are described.

Secondary analysis of interviews with 163 birthmothers revealed that the adopted child remains psychologically present. Ten indicators of psychological presence were identified. Indicators related to roles were more salient the more open the adoption, and supernatural referents were more salient when a birthmother once had mediated communication but now has none. Degree of psychological presence was highest in fully-disclosed adoptions and lower in ongoing-mediated, confidential, and time-limited-mediated adoptions, respectively. Valence was generally positive, but more so in fully-disclosed adoptions.

The maternal self-reflective function was assumed to affect maternal perceptions of adopted children's adjustment. In a sample of Israeli mothers of school-aged, non-referred children, self-reflectiveness scores were found to discriminate between adoptive (N = 50) and non-adoptive (N = 80) participants, and affect the rate of perceived externalizing behaviors. Specific protective and risk factors that characterize adoptive motherhood are discussed, indicating their implications for therapeutic intervention.

This study compared actors', partners', and observers' perceptions of the amount of sarcasm used by participants (n=80) in videotaped conversations. Significant differences were found among perceptions of actors, partners, and observers. Of the three perspectives, actors perceived themselves as using the greatest amount of sarcasm, followed by partners' perceptions of actors. Observers perceived actors as using the least amount of sarcasm. Correlations conducted to assess whether partners and observers recognized actors' individual attempts at sarcasm during the conversations were generally low.

The influences of sex and lateralized visual hemispace bias in the judgment of the emotional valence of faces during a free-viewing condition are evaluated. 73 subjects (aged 18 to 52 yr.) viewed videotaped facial expressions of emotion in normal and mirror-reversed orientation and classified each face as a positive, negative, or neutral expression. There was a significant interaction between the sex of the rater and the orientation of the face that influenced the proportion of correct classifications. Male and female perceivers did not differ in the accuracy of their affect judgments for faces viewed in normal orientation, whereas reversal of the orientation of the faces resulted in a significant enhancement of accuracy judgments for the males but not the females. The results suggest greater cerebral lateralization of perceptual processes in males.

The present study examined the influences on empathy and altruism of sex of participant, the affective demeanor (positive or negative) and cognitive processes (positive or negative) displayed by a female target in a video, and the perspective-taking focus of participants. The latter variable is related to the affective or cognitive response to the target's portrayal, or the response to technical aspects of the video (nonperspective-taking). Empathy was measured using Batson's Empathy Adjectives (1987) and altruism was measured by participants' written responses, which indicated how many hours they were willing to volunteer to help persons similar to the target. An ethnically diverse sample of working adults (M age=31.6 yr., SD=8.2) participated. Analysis yielded a subtle difference between groups. Men reported feeling more empathy for a confused, unfocused, illogical woman target, whereas women felt more empathy for a focused, clear, logical woman target. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between sex and helping - men offered more help than women.

Factors determining why acts are regarded as aggressive were investigated in a sample of 303 subjects (140 males, 163 females, M age=17.7 yr., SD= 1.4). A model was tested, according to which people base their attribution of aggression to acts on four factors: (1) intention (yes/no), (2) reason (attack/defense), (3) injury (death/injury/no injury), and (4) mode (weapon/bare hands/nonphysical means). All four factors contributed to the explanation of attribution of aggression, and the order of importance was the one mentioned above, intention being most important. The interaction between intention and reason was the second most important, contributing more than reason alone. The findings are consistent with the severity of punishment in sentences for different crimes of violence

In the paradigm of social cognition, the measurement of response latencies is important not only for priming procedures directed at the cognitive representation, but also for the assessment of strength-related properties of attitudes. The present paper explored the possibility of using response times as indicators of the continuous accessibility of attitude-relevant knowledge. For two different sets of attitudinal items concerning social welfare (idiographic and nomothetic selection) response times were obtained from a sample of 20 university students. In addition to different reliability coefficients for aggregated response times, information about individual subjects' consistencies and stabilities was obtained. Further, evidence for the validity of response times as indicators of the continuous accessibility of attitude-related knowledge is reported. The aggregated response times had significant correlations with self-report data and interview-related variables (such as number of propositions mentioned) which were obtained by a content analysis of semistructured interviews.

The cognitive and behavioral effects of perceived power and expected partner competence were examined in a task-oriented dyadic interaction. Specifically, the authors manipulated the effects of power and expectancy on social information processing during and subsequent to a dyadic problem-solving interaction. In addition, dispositional power orientation was measured. Results indicated that perceiver power led to self-enhancement and derogation of the target and both perceiver and target awareness of perceiver power moderated the effects of interpersonal expectancies. Furthermore, there are important differences between situational power and dispositional dominance orientation. These results advance current models of power and suggest the pervasiveness of power effects in our interactions with others.

This study compares the relative accuracy of targets' self-reports and other-reports of personality in predicting two criteria: (a) emotional experience in daily life and (b) behavior in the laboratory. Ratings of the targets' extraversion and neuroticism were obtained from two knowledgeable informants and the targets themselves. Target participants wore an electronic signaling device ('beeper') for eight days and rated positive and negative emotions at four randomly selected times each day. The participants also interacted with an opposite-sex stranger in a laboratory context and their behavior was coded from videotapes. Targets' self-reports of personality were consistently more accurate than other-reports in predicting daily emotional experience. Self-reports also outperformed other-reports in predicting extraversion-related laboratory behaviors, but not neuroticism-related behaviors. The relative accuracy of self- and other-reports of personality would seem to depend on the criterion employed; self-reports are clearly better for the prediction of emotional experience, while for behavior the picture is mixed.

Communication not only elicits fleeting emotional reactions; it also influences how people learn to approach life emotionally. It does so by shaping perceptions and beliefs implicit in emotions, as well as ideas about the value and appropriateness of emotions. Furthermore, communicative experiences help develop people's capacity and inclination for particular feelings. This essay advances a concept of communication as education for the feelings, then examines the role of storytelling in this process. Four elements of storytelling have important consequences for listeners' emotional lives: (a) narrative depiction of feelings, attitudes, and behavior; (b) the narrator's emotional stance; (c) listeners' expectations; and (d) listeners' emotional responses. The essay uses this analysis to examine how telling and hearing stories can help people learn to approach life with greater peace of mind.

We contend that perceived discrimination has an independent effect on depression outcomes among adults of Mexican origin. Using a sample of 3,012 Mexican-origin respondents in Fresno, California in 1995/96 (ages 18-59) we investigate the direct and moderating connections between perceived discrimination, acculturative stress, and mental health (CES-D). We also investigate the social patterning of perceived discrimination. While more highly acculturated immigrant respondents were more likely to experience discrimination than their less acculturated counterparts, more highly acculturated U.S. born respondents were less likely to experience discrimination. Discrimination was directly related to depression, but this effect was moderated through nativity/country of residence, English-language acculturation, sex, and country of education variables. Moderate levels of legal status acculturative stress were especially depressive for native-born U.S. residents.

This study examines the effects of social comparison on self-esteem. Results indicate that African American students who were outperformed on an intelligence test by an African American confederate experienced enhanced self-esteem due to shared feelings of pride but experienced decreased self esteem when outperformed by White confederates.

This article compares the effects of priming using trait inferences and their antonyms on person judgement. Results indicate that priming affects person judgments in both conditions, but the effect is mediated by the relevance and extremity of the trait inferences and whether they describe personal or behavioral characteristics.

This study examines the social construction of knowledge in the context of the O.J. Simpson criminal trial. The emotional reactions to the divisive verdict are analyzed to demonstrate the direct relationship between theoretical and practical knowledge, social beliefs, and understanding.

This study investigates the relationship between African American mothers' perceptions of their neighborhoods and the psychological adjustment of their adolescent children. Results indicate that mothers' perceptions of crime, resource availability, and physical deterioration directly influences the self-reliance, self-esteem, and behavior of their adolescents.

Three experiments were used to study the interaction between head orientation, gaze direction, and the perception of another person's direction of social attention. Results indicate that head and gaze cues are mutually influential in determining the focus of social attention.