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Using a vignette approach, two studies examined the impact of three factors on judgments of parental competence: target parents' sexual orientation, gender, and parenting behavior. According to the aversive prejudice framework, people should express their subtle prejudice against lesbian and gay parents when the latter show detrimental parenting behavior - that is, when devaluation is easy to rationalize. Samples of 170 and 290 German heterosexual participants each were presented with a parent-child conflict situation. In Study 1, the child threw a public tantrum during a restaurant visit; in Study 2, the children wanted to play outside instead of doing their homework. Irrespective of target gender, lesbian and gay parents were judged as equally or even somewhat more competent than heterosexual parents. In both studies, parents who responded in an authoritative way received the most positive evaluation of parental competence, whereas parents who responded in an authoritarian way received the most negative evaluation. In neither study, however, there was a significant interaction between parents' sexual orientation and parenting behavior. That is, contrary to hypothesis, lesbian and gay parents did not receive more negative evaluation than heterosexual parents when responding in a comparatively negative, authoritarian or permissive way. Such interaction could also not be found when additionally considering participants' levels of homonegativity or social desirability. The discussion centers on the increasing acceptance of same-sex parenthood as well as the high appreciation of authoritative parenting in contemporary Germany.

We submit that with advancing age and the age-inherent shrinking of life-time reserves, intrinsic-valuerational, that is, ego-transcending goals tend to gain priority over extrinsic-instrumental goals that aim at future personal benefits. This proposition is investigated in four studies that combine questionnaire assessments and experimental analyses. In Study 1, age differences in extrinsic-instrumental and intrinsic-valuerational orientations are analyzed in a cross-sectional study involving 359 participants in the age range from 35 to 84 years. In Study 2, we ask whether the postulated shift in goal orientations could be simulated by inducing a cognitive focus on themes of death and dying (N = 371). Studies 3 and 4 (Ns = 50 and 86) serve to replicate and expand the findings with an experimental setup, paying particular attention to the moderating role of accommodative flexibility and to implicit preferences. Taken together, the results of this research substantiate the assumption that the experience of narrowing life-time reserves activates accommodative processes that enhance the disengagement from egocentric-individualistic concerns.