Suchergebnisse

This investigation of face-to-face conversational behavior examined the strategies people employ to deal with the face- and interaction-threatening implications of argumentative behavior and explored the joint influence of individual differences in perceivers' interpersonal construct systems and message producers' communication strategies on the content and structure of impressions of message producers. In general, we found that the complexity of the perceiver's interpretive frame interacted with features of target behavior to affect both the meaning given to behavior and the organization of inferences about behavior in an impression.

Subjects differing in cognitive complexity formed impressions from either (1) three positive and three negative experimenter-selected traits, (2) three traits of each evaluation generated by the subject in a preliminary session, or (3) three experimenter-selected traits of one valence
and three subject-generated traits of the opposite valence. Additionally, subjects reconstructed their impressions from memory after eight weeks. Impressions were dominated in content and evaluation by information tied to subjects' own constructs. The strength with which subjects attributed
the stimulus qualities to the other was greater for self-generated traits. While all subjects organized inconsistency in their impressions at similar levels when receiving self-generated positive information, high and low complexity subjects differed in the organization of their impressions
in the other conditions largely owing to the greater utility of negative information to high-complexity subjects.

Much television programming depicts people engaged in social interaction. Children's understandings of television, therefore, may be guided by their abilities to make sense of character depictions. By examining the developmental characteristics of impressions, this study suggests that the same construal process shapes children's understandings of both television and real peers. The study also indicates that impressions of both television and real peers are based on a common set of perceptual dimensions. Moreover, children's impressions are shown to be a function both of characteristics of the target and of the common underlying construal system.