Implicit Measures in Social and Personality Psychology

Implicit Association Test: Separating Transsituationally Stable and Variable Components of Attitudes toward Gay Men

What Does the Implicit Association Test Measure? A Test of the Convergent and Discriminant Validity of Prejudice-Related IATs

doctoral dissertation, University of Michigan. Norem, J. K. (1989). Cognitive strategies as personality: Effectiveness, specificity, flexibility, and change. In D. M. Buss & N. Cantor (Eds.), Personality psychology: Recent trends and emerging directions (pp. 45-60). New York: Springer-Verlag. Pelham, B. W. (1993). The idiographic nature of human personality: Examples of the idiographic self-concept. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 64, 665-677. Pervin, L. A. (Ed.). (1989). Goal concepts in personality psychology. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Showers, C. (1992). The motivational and emotional consequences of considering positive or negative possibilities for an upcoming event. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 62, 474484. Snyder, M. (1981). On the influence of individuals in situations. In N. Cantor & J. Kihlstrom (Eds.), Personality, cognition, and social interaction (pp. 309-329). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Snyder, M., & Simpson, J. A. (1984). Self-monitoring and dating relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 47, 281-291. Stevenson, H. W., Lee, S. Y., & Stigler, J. W. (1986). Mathematics achievements of Chinese, Japanese, and American children. Science, 236, 693-698. Thorne, A. (1987). The press of personality: A study of introverts and extroverts. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 53, 718-726. Triandis, H. C., Bontempo, R., Villareal, M. J., Asai, M., & Lucca, N. (1988). Individualism and collectivism: Cross-cultural perspectives on self-ingroup relationships. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54, 323-338. Veroff, J. (1983). Contextual determinants of personality. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 9, 331-344. Walsh, W. B., Craik, K. H., & Price, R. H. (1992). (Eds.). Personenvironment psychology: Models and perspectives. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

It is the contention of this paper that personality psychology and social psychology have developed different orientations to theory. Pronouncements of crisis emanating from each area are presumed to reflect these divergent developments. The orientation of social psychology, by means of situationism in social learning theory, is toward data-driven, empirical constructs and theories with a major cognitive content. The data-driven, empirical nature of constructs and theories in situationism emphasizes the primacy of the data in developing the constructs and of asking limited, focussed questions. The orientation of personality psychology, by means of person-situation interactionism, is towards the more traditional concept-driven constructs and theories which emphasize the importance of extensive conceptual systems and broad semantic descriptions. These two orientations are seen as representing Kuhnian paradigms—herein called psychodigms—of different degrees of development. Situationism has developed from and within the Lewinian tradition and has achieved the status of a fully developed psychodigm for social psychology. Interactionism has developed more recently as a result of attacks by situationists on the psychoanalytically relevant constructs of motivation and trait and functions to conserve these constructs as concept-driven and as part of the person in the interaction. The newness of interactionism as the major orientation for personality psychology has produced, at most, a partially developed psychodigm. It is expected that the energizing and conformity-producing effect of a fully developed psychodigm is overwhelming as compared to the undetermined, and incompletely formed, power of a partially developed psychodigm. Judgments about the state of theory in, and future of, personality and social psychology may require consideration of the divergent psychodigms of theory.

Reports an error in "What limitations are reported in short articles in social and personality psychology" by Beth Clarke, Sarah Schiavone and Simine Vazire (Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 2023[Oct], Vol 125[4], 874-901). The following article is being corrected: https://doi.org/10.1037/pspp0000458. The percentages in the seventh sentence in the abstract now appear as 41% and 20%, respectively. The online version of this article has been corrected. (The following abstract of the original article appeared in record 2023-58369-001.) Every research project has limitations. The limitations that authors acknowledge in their articles offer a glimpse into some of the concerns that occupy a field's attention. We examine the types of limitations authors discuss in their published articles by categorizing them according to the four validities framework and investigate whether the field's attention to each of the four validities has shifted from 2010 to 2020. We selected one journal in social and personality psychology (Social Psychological and Personality Science; SPPS), the subfield most in the crosshairs of psychology's replication crisis. We sampled 440 articles (with half of those articles containing a subsection explicitly addressing limitations), and we identified and categorized 831 limitations across the 440 articles. Articles with limitations sections reported more limitations than those without (avg. 2.6 vs. 1.2 limitations per article). Threats to external validity were the most common type of reported limitation (est. 52% of articles), and threats to statistical conclusion validity were the least common (est. 17% of articles). Authors reported slightly more limitations over time. Despite the extensive attention paid to statistical conclusion validity in the scientific discourse throughout psychology's credibility revolution, our results suggest that concerns about statistics-related issues were not reflected in social and personality psychologists' reported limitations. The high prevalence of limitations concerning external validity might suggest it is time that we improve our practices in this area, rather than apologizing for these limitations after the fact. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2024 APA, all rights reserved).

Implicit Measures of Attitudes, by Bernd Wittenbrink & Norbert Schwarz (Eds.). The Guilford Press, 2007, 294 pages (ISBN-10: 1-59385-402-1, ISBN-13: 978-1-59385-402-7, US $38.00 Hardcover) Reviewed by STEVEN M. SMITH DOI : 10.1037/0708-5591.49.2.177 Well before the concept of was first articulated by social psychologists, people expended tremendous energy trying to understand and assess people's opinions of many different topics. Almost immediately after the development of formal attitude measures, there was recognition that at times people may be unwilling or unable to express their true attitudes toward certain topics. For example, if a person is asked about potentially embarrassing topics or topics where social desirability factors may play a role, they may misrepresent their attitude. Alternatively, people may simply be unaware of their true opinion on an issue. Thus, in addition to direct or measures of attitudes (e.g., self-report and surveys or interviewbased measures), we have seen the development of more indirect or measures of attitudes. However, because many early implicit measures were cumbersome (such as the Thematic Apperception Test) and/or had reliability or validity issues, explicit measures of attitudes became dominant. Despite the fact that explicit measures provided a cheap, simple, reliable and valid way to assess attitudes, the limitations of these measures remained an issue. With the advent of computerbased testing and other high-tech methodologies, there has been a dramatic resurgence of the use of implicit attitude measures in the last two decades. Thus it is clear that Bernd Wittenbrink and Norbert Schwarz have produced a very timely volume. The stated goals of Wittenbrink and Schwarz's book are to educate the reader about the value of implicit measures of attitudes, as well as to provide a handbook of sorts for the neophyte wanting to learn how to use the variety of implicit attitude measures available. In addition, the editors want to provide a critical assessment of the state of implicit attitude measurement in terms of the very definition of an implicit measure, as well as the general reliability and validity of these measures. Finally, the editors want to provide directions for future research in the area of implicit attitude measurement. As such, Wittenbrink and Schwarz hope that this text will be a resource book for both new graduate students and established researchers in the field. In general, I believe the editors have accomplished their goals. After the editors' introductory chapter, which gives an overview of the development of implicit attitude measurement as well as an overview of the rest of the volume, the book is broken down into two sections: Procedures and Their Implementation and Critical Perspectives. The procedures and implementation section includes chapters on the most popular implicit measures currently in use. Wittenbrink begins by exploring work that has been done on attitude priming; the procedure that initiated the resurgence of implicit attitude measurement in the 1980s and 1990s. The next chapter, authored by Kristin Lane, Mahzarin Banaji, Brian Nosek, and Anthony Greenwald covers the Implicit Association Test (IAT), which is clearly the most popular implicit attitude measurement procedure currently in use. Patrick Vargas, Denise Sekaquaptewa and William von Hippel follow with a chapter on lowtech paper and pencil implicit measures. For me, this chapter was the most pleasantly surprising in the book. It provides many cheap and accessible methods to measure implicit attitudes, and barkens back to the early days of implicit measures, making the distinction between and deliberative measures. Furthermore, the authors describe a number of implicit measures that do not require spontaneous responses (such as Word Fragment Completion, paper and pencil versions of the IAT, and the information error test) which highlights one of the issues surrounding the definition of measures of attitudes. …

Reviews of articles from social and personality psychology journals have been largely limited to subsets of publications from particular years and to a focus on descriptive qualities of articles. This paper compares the methods and measures employed in all empirical articles published in 1982 to those that appeared in 2016 from Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. There has been an increase in self-report data, a decline in behavioral observations, and an increase in detailed reports of procedures and analyses. A heavy reliance on laboratory experimentation involving college students has been supplanted by online participant pools and data collection procedures. Compared to 1982, articles in 2016 were fewer in number but longer in length, included more studies per article, and had a greater number and diversity of authors. Explanations are offered for these findings along with implications for social and personality psychology.

The responses of 6 representative physiological parameters frequently assumed to be measures of anxiety along with a set of 4 psychological tests for measuring anxiety were obtained under naturalistic conditions from 25 patients hospitalized with a first myocardial infarction. A canonical correlational analysis failed to show any relationship between anxiety as assessed by the Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale, Mood Adjective Check List, State-Trait Anxiety Inventory and Multiple Affect Adjective Check List psychological tests, and anxiety as assessed by the physiological indices of heart rate, systolic and diastolic blood pressures, epinephrine, norepinephrine and VMA. The intercorrelation matrix revealed a significant positive pattern of relationships among all 4 psychological tests, a non-significant, positive pattern of relationships among the physiological indices, and a non-significant, negative pattern of relationships between the psychological and physiological measures. The absence of mood-specific physiological measures for anxiety, as measured by the psychological tests, supports previous theory and investigation and points to the inadvisability of assuming that studies on anxiety that use diverse physiological and psychological measures yield results that may be compared as though they were assessing a common mood.

Social and personality psychology have been criticized for overreliance on potentially biased self-report variables. In well-being science, researchers have called for more “objective” physiological and cognitive measures to evaluate the efficacy of well-being-increasing interventions. This may now be possible with the recent rise of cost-effective, commercially available wireless physiological recording devices and smartphone-based cognitive testing. We sought to determine whether cognitive and physiological measures, coupled with machine learning methods, could quantify the effects of positive interventions. The current 2-part study used a college sample (N = 245) to contrast the cognitive (memory, attention, construal) and physiological (autonomic, electroencephalogram) effects of engaging in one of two randomly assigned writing activities (i.e., prosocial or “antisocial”). In the prosocial condition, participants described an interaction when they acted in a kind way, then described an interaction when they received kindness. In the “antisocial” condition, participants wrote instead about an interaction when they acted in an unkind way and received unkindness, respectively. Our study replicated previous research on the beneficial effects of recalling prosocial experiences as assessed by self-report. However, we did not detect an effect of the positive or negative activity intervention on either cognitive or physiological measures. More research is needed to investigate under what conditions cognitive and physiological measures may be applicable, but our findings lead us to conclude that they should not be unilaterally favored over the traditional self-report approach.

The potential role of brief online studies in changing the types of research and theories likely to evolve is examined in the context of earlier changes in theory and methods in social and personality psychology, changes that favored low-difficulty, high-volume studies. An evolutionary metaphor suggests that the current publication environment of social and personality psychology is a highly competitive one, and that academic survival and reproduction processes (getting a job, tenure/promotion, grants, awards, good graduate students) can result in the extinction of important research domains. Tracking the prevalence of brief online studies, exemplified by studies using Amazon Mechanical Turk, in three top journals ( Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology) reveals a dramatic increase in their frequency and proportion. Implications, suggestions, and questions concerning this trend for the field and questions for its practitioners are discussed.

The past decade has seen resurgence of academic interest in international orga nizations (IOs) following th ir increas d prominence in international pol tics. This new wave of research on IOs has been largely theoretical?drawn from such diverse areas of institutional analysis as transaction cost analysis, bureaucratic theory, and game theory. Although it has improved our understanding of why institu tions matter, the editors of this volume argue that theoretical work has advanced more quickly than empirical work. Their framework chapter thus introduces the goal of the International Organizations Count project as providing a broad research approach that seeks to mold and sharpen theories about IOs by conducting systematic tests and refining analytic techniques (emphasis added; Hafner-Burton, von Stein, and Gartzke 2008 [this issue]). They have brought together an impressive set of researchers whose high-quality contributions will have salutary impact in promot ing this type of research. Systematic research is tall order that is hard to fill. As the editors and authors recognize, being quantitative does not make research systematic. In addition to care ful measurement and statistical work of the sort emphasized here, we need rigorous theory and an exploration of causal mechanisms and contextual effects that some times is best done qualitatively. While research often aspires to maximize all three dimensions?witness the proliferation of three-part projects that proceed from theo retical set-up through large-rc estimation to case study analysis?fully systematic research is difficult to accomplish even in book-length contributions. Broad and systematic work is more property of research traditions and communities. Indivi dual articles can usually contribute only systematic piece to the overall puzzle, and how they best do that depends heavily on the development of the other pieces of the puzzle. To understand the contribution of this new wave of systematic quantitative work on IOs, we must understand how it fits with existing theoretical and qualita tive work. Contrary to the presumption of the volume, we do not have fully articulated theoretical models of IOs to test; as result, quantitative work needs to be more exploratory and inductive in character. This has implications for how systematic empirical work should be conducted, for what we should expect from the individual articles, and for the relationship between different types of research on IOs. April 2008 326-333 ? 2008 Sage Publications 10.1177/0022002707313694 http://jcr.sagepub.com hosted at http://online.sagepub.com

Food experiences can be summarized along two main dimensions: valence and arousal, which can be measured explicitly with subjective ratings or implicitly with physiological and behavioral measures. Food experiences are not only driven by the food's intrinsic properties, such as its taste, texture, and aroma, but also by extrinsic properties such as brand information and the consumers' previous experiences with the foods. In this study, valence and arousal to intrinsic and extrinsic properties of soy sauce were measured in consumers that varied in their previous experience with soy sauce, using a combination of explicit (scores and emojis), implicit (heart rate and skin conductance), and behavioral measures (facial expressions). Forty participants, high- and low-frequency users, were presented with samples of rice and three commercial soy sauces without and with brand information that either matched or non-matched the taste of the soy sauce. In general, skin conductance and facial expressions showed relatively low arousal during exposure to the brand name and again lowest arousal during tasting. Heart rate was lowest during exposure to the brand name and increased during tasting probably resulting from the motor activity during chewing. Furthermore, the results showed that explicit liking and arousal scores were primarily affected by the taste of the specific soy sauce and by the participants' previous experience with soy sauces. These scores were not affected by branding information. In contrast, facial expressions, skin conductance, and heart rate were primarily affected by (1) the participants' level of experience with soy sauce, (2) whether or not branding information was provided, and (3) whether or not the branding information matched with the taste. In conclusion, this study suggests that liking scores may be most sensitive to the food's intrinsic taste properties, whereas implicit measures and facial expressions may be most sensitive to extrinsic properties such as brand information. All measures were affected by the consumers' previous food experiences.

The present study tested the hypothesis that perceived self-efficacy to resist peer pressure for high-risk activities is related to transgressive con- duct, both directly and through the mediation of open familial communi- cation. Adolescents rated their self-regulatory efficacy, openness of com- munication with parents, and their involvement in delinquent conduct and substance abuse. Results of structural equation modeling confirmed that a high sense of efficacy to ward off negative peer influences was accompanied by open communication with parents about activities out-

Human food intake is driven by necessity. We eat to live, but as Brillat-Savarin and others have noted throughout history, in affluent societies eating is a pleasure and becomes more than a means to an end. Eating signifies lifestyle choice and it has considerable meaning in our society beyond the acquisition of essential energy and nutrients. Thus, it is that the study of human food intake, particularly food choice, in contrast to food intake in other animals, tends to be skewed towards measures of behavioural, social and environmental influences rather than on precise physiological processes reflecting metabolism and nutrient partitioning. The dichotomy between physiological and psychological measures is a false one, since all behaviours are necessarily expressed through physiological systems. However, in the field of human food intake research the dichotomy refers to the divergent strands of interest in either psychological or physiological processes underlying intake and appetite. The present review considers both psychological and physiological measures in promoting our understanding of the human appetite system. The overall conclusion is that the burgeoning interest in identifying appetite suppressant drugs to combat obesity and in genotyping alongside behavioural phenotyping will close the gap between psychological and physiological perspectives on human food intake.

Author’s Introduction In our globalized world individuals are frequently confronted with intergroup encounters. Some of them pass by more smoothly than others. Understanding group members’ motivational dynamics provides the key for positive intergroup encounters and the creation of environments fostering such positive events. For a long time, research on motivation in the domain of intergroup behavior mainly focused on needs and motives such as the need for self‐esteem in social identity theory and the need to reduce uncertainty in uncertainty‐identity theory. In contrast, approaches to motivation in many other domains of psychological research have switched from such need‐based approaches to self‐regulation approaches (i.e., theories and models focusing on the processes underlying motivated action). This change of focus from the content of motivation (i.e., need and motives answering the question what motivates behavior) to studying the motivational processes (i.e., self‐regulation approaches answering the question how motivation translates in to action) has led to an enormous progress. To give just one example, this approach allows for much more precise predictions of behavior. Only recently research on intergroup behavior has adopted this change of paradigms in research on motivation. The current article summarized one line of research within this domain, namely the work applying regulatory focus theory (one of the dominant self‐regulation theories) to intergroup behavior. Author Recommends Tajfel, H., & Turner, J. C. (1979). An integrative theory of intergroup conflict. In W. G. Austin & S. Worchel (Eds.), The Social Psychology of Intergroup Relations (pp. 33–47). Monterey, CA: Brooks/Cole. This is a seminal publication on social identity theory and offers important and fundamental information about what intergroup behavior is. At the same time, it presents the first need‐based approach to intergroup behavior. Otten, S., Sassenberg, K., & Kessler, T. (Eds.) (2009). Intergroup relations: The role of motivation and emotion. New York: Psychology Press. This book provides an up‐to‐date overview of research on motivation in the field of intergroup behavior. It provides a good understanding of a variety of intergroup phenomena and explanations for them based on motivational approaches and social cognition approaches to emotions. Carver, C. S. (2004). Self‐regulation of action and affect. In R. F. Baumeister & K. D. Vohs (Eds.), Handbook of Self‐Regulation: Research, Theory, and Applications (pp. 13–39). New York, NY: Guilford. The whole book provides an excellent overview of self‐regulation research in a variety of domains. The particular chapter is an excellent, comprehensive, and concise introduction to the basic ideas of self‐regulation. Higgins, E. T. (1997). Beyond pleasure and pain. American Psychologist , 52, 1280–1300. This is a seminal publication on regulatory focus theory and offers the fundamental information on what regulatory focus is, what its basic principles are, and outcomes it leads to. Higgins, E. T. (2008). Regulatory fit. In J. Y. Shah & W. L. Gardner (Eds.), Handbook of motivation science (pp. 356–372). New York: Guilford. This chapter provides a summary of the more recent developments that followed regulatory focus theory. Its main focus is on regulatory fit (i.e., the fit between an individual’s behavioural strategy and the options provided by the environment). Sassenberg, K., & Woltin, K.‐A. (2008). Group‐based self‐regulation: The effects of regulatory focus. European Review of Social Psychology , 19, 126–164. This article offers a more extensive analysis and overview of the research on regulatory focus and intergroup behavior. It presents a comprehensive narrative review of this research and how regulatory focus and self‐discrepancies operate at the group level. Levine, J. M., Higgins, E. T., & Choi, H.‐S. (2000). Development of strategic norms in groups. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes , 82, 88–101. This article presents the first study applying regulatory focus theory to the group level. It assesses how regulatory focus – manipulated as part of the instructions for a group task – affects small group decision making. Sassenberg, K., Kessler, T., & Mummendey, A. (2003). Less negative = more positive? Social discrimination as avoidance and approach. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology , 39, 48–58. The research presented in this article is the first in applying regulatory focus theory to intergroup behavior. In studies making use of the minimal group paradigm, it demonstrates how regulatory focus can help to make more precise predictions about intergroup behavior – in this case social discrimination. Seibt, B., & Förster, J. (2004). Stereotype threat and performance: How self‐stereotypes influence processing by inducing regulatory foci. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 87, 38–56. This article explains another prominent intergroup phenomenon based on regulatory focus theory, namely stereotype threat. Sassenberg, K., Jonas, K. J., Shah, J. Y., & Brazy, P. C. (2007). Regulatory fit of the ingroup: The impact of group power and regulatory focus on implicit intergroup bias. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology , 92, 249–267. This article connects socio‐structural variables of the intergroup context and regulatory focus by studying how the social power of a group and the regulatory focus of an individual predict whether individuals are interested to become a member of a particular group and how much they like a group they are a member of. Online Materials http://gpi.sagepub.com This is a link to the journal Group Processes and Intergroup relations . Volume 13 will contain a special issue on Self‐regulation within and between groups providing an overview and more examples how self‐regulation approaches allow for a better understanding of (inter)group behavior. In addition, this is a nice place to find some of the current issues being researched in the field of intergroup behavior. It is also a journal to refer students to who are having trouble locating recent articles for class. http://jonathan.mueller.faculty.noctrl.edu/crow/socialidentityassignment.htm This link leads to a small assignment by Michel Schmitt that illustrates the idea of social identity. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YWyI77Yh1Gg This link leads to the video “A girl like me” which illustrates that from early childhood on group members (here African‐Americans) internalize the characteristics of their group in comparison to ot