Search results

Abstract: Context effects on men's and women's reactions to infidelity were studied in a laboratory experiment. University students (71 male, 54 female) were randomly assigned to either a neutral-priming control condition or a condition where AIDS was primed unobtrusively. Then they reported whether emotional or sexual infidelity of their partner would distress them more, and rated their degree of distress for each type of infidelity. Men (vs. women) reported greater distress in response to sexual (vs. emotional) infidelity in the neutral-priming condition, whereas no sex differences were observed in the AIDS-priming condition. Most participants were unaware of the priming. The results are discussed in relation to evolutionary and socio-cultural explanations of sex differences in jealousy.

Research has shown that women's level of rape myth acceptance (RMA) moderates the impact of rape salience on their self-esteem. Conceptually replicating previous studies where rape salience was operationalized by presenting newspaper articles, the present study featured a realistic expectation of meeting a rape victim. Female students ( N= 82) who were either low or high in RMA expected a conversation with another woman about one of three topics: studying, the other woman's illness (leukemia), or the other woman's experience of having been raped. Then their collective self-esteem, individual self-esteem, and affect were assessed. In line with predictions, low-RMA women reported lower self-esteem in the rape condition than in the studying condition, whereas high-RMA participants showed an opposite effect. Although affect was generally lower in the rape condition than in the neutral condition, this effect was significantly more pronounced for low-RMA than high-RMA women. Results for the leukemia condition differed from those in the rape condition, confirming the content-specificity of the moderating effect of RMA.

This study examined the impact of mood on the production of persuasive arguments. Research demonstrates that a happy (as opposed to neutral or sad) mood often leads to less systematic information processing but to greater creativity in production tasks. It was hypothesized that individuals in a happy (as opposed to sad) mood produce more original and more persuasive arguments, especially when asked to advocate an unfamiliar (i.e., counterattitudinal) position. Eighty-seven college students were put in a happy or sad mood and asked to write a proattitudinal or a counterattitudinal essay on one of two topics. Happy subjects generally rated their own essays as being more persuasive than sad subjects did. External ratings revealed, however, that happy subjects' essays were judged to be more persuasive when they were counter-attitudinal but not when proattitudinal. No mood effects on various measures of originality were found. Thus support for the hypothesis was found with respect to judged persuasiveness but not to originality. Results are discussed within the framework of models of mood and cognition.

"Die Ergebnisse von Diekmann und Preisendörfer (1992) werden in bezug auf die Bedeutung des Aggregationsniveaus der Daten für die Aussagen über den Zusammenhang zwischen Einstellung und Verhalten einerseits sowie die Verhaltenskonistenz in verschiedenen Situationen andererseits diskutiert. Hierbei zeigt sich, daß die behaupteten inhaltlichen Effekte wegen des unterschiedlichen Spezifitäts- und Aggregationsniveaus der Daten, der geringen Reliabilität von Einzelindikatoren und der Konfundierung von zeitlicher Stabilität mit transsituativer Konsistenz nicht sicher belegt werden können. Schlußfolgerungen für die Vermeidung der Probleme werden gezogen. Schließlich wird gezeigt, daß eine alternative Betrachtungsweise zur Abschätzung der Bedeutsamkeit von Effekten (BESD) die berichteten Einstellungs-Verhaltens-Zusammenhänge keineswegs als gering erscheinen lassen." (Autorenreferat)