Impression Formation Task Research Articles

Effects of residential mobility on impression formation across different social contexts

AbstractResearch on residential mobility is burgeoning; however, only a few studies have examined this topic in the context of impression formation. In Study 1, we first examined the hypothesis that high residential mobility increases sensitivity to friendliness, whereas low residential mobility increases sensitivity to hostility. In the word completion task, no effects of residential mobility were observed; however, in the impression formation task, participants with high residential mobility perceived friendly new acquaintances with higher amicability than those with low residential mobility (Studies 1a and 1c). Meanwhile, no effect was observed with the hostile new acquaintances (Study 1b). The results suggest that the effects of residential mobility, with a focus on friendliness and hostility, may be highly context dependent. Study 2 partially confirmed this idea, showing that participants with low residential mobility perceived hostile old acquaintances as less friendly than those with high residential mobility, and there was no effect of residential mobility in the case of friendly old acquaintances (Study 3). The role of residential mobility on impression formation was discussed.

Measuring the neural correlates of the violation of social expectations: A comparison of two experimental tasks

ABSTRACT Evidence exists that people’s brains respond differently to stimuli that violate social expectations. However, there are inconsistencies between studies in the event-related potentials (ERP) on which differential brain responses are found, as well as in the direction of the differences. Therefore, the current paper examined which of the two most frequently used tasks, the Impression Formation Task (IFT) or Implicit Association Test (IAT), provided more robust ERP components in response to the violation of gendered expectations. Both IFT and IAT paradigms were administered in a counter-balanced way among 25 young adults (age 22–31, 56% male), while brain activity was assessed with electroencephalography. The IFT and IAT specifically measured the violation of gendered expectations with regard to toy preferences and behavioral tendencies of young children. The results showed that both tasks were able to elicit relevant ERP components. Yet, the IFT evoked ERP effects of the violation of gendered expectations on all but one of the selected ERP components; the P1, N1, and LPP. The IAT only elicited different P3 amplitudes when expectations were violated. We recommend the use of IFT paradigms when studying neural processes underlying the violation of social expectations.

Minimizing the Pain and Probability of Rejection

Some studies have revealed evidence for proximity seeking following interpersonal rejection, whereas other studies have found evidence of relational distancing (Williams, 2007). This study examined whether both processes could occur simultaneously within face-to-face interactions. Participants were accepted or rejected by one person and then interacted with a new partner for the purposes of an impression-formation task. Conversations were recorded and transcribed. Dyads containing a previously rejected compared to accepted participant exhibited higher levels of linguistic style matching and reciprocated conversational content, suggestive of proximity seeking. However, rejected targets also rated their new partners as less kind and reported lower levels of rapport/liking for their partners, consistent with relational distancing. Partner evaluations were statistically mediated by targets’ expectations of rejection. We suggest that automatic proximity seeking and the appraisal-mediated devaluation of new partners reflect efforts to minimize the potential for and pain of future rejection. Recommendations for future research are discussed.

The effects of gender labels in the impression formation task.

The effects of gender labels in the impression formation task.

Mood, stop-rules and task persistence: No Mood-as-Input effects in the context of pain

Background and objectivesTask persistence despite experiencing pain might be a risk factor for development and maintenance of chronic pain. The Mood-as-Input (MAI) model predicts that the impact of mood on individuals' motivation to persist in a task depends on the interpretation of current mood within a certain motivational context. The aim of the current study was to replicate the original MAI study (Martin, Ward, Achee, & Wyer, 1993), but in a context where the task is painful. MethodsA 2 Mood (negative versus positive) × 2 Stop-Rule (achievement versus hedonic) between-subjects factorial design was used in which 120 healthy participants (97 women, mean age = 21.78 years, SD = 3.07) performed an impression-formation task while being exposed to mechanically induced pressure pain. ResultsThe MAI interaction hypothesis was not confirmed. Instead, participants showed more task persistence when they used hedonic stop-rules as a ground to decide on task (dis)continuation than when they used an achievement-oriented stop-rule. Additionally, participants reporting less pain-related fear also spent more time on the painful impression-formation task. The current findings suggest that the MAI perspective might not apply to task persistence behavior in a pain context. LimitationsThese findings may not generalize to task performance in patients with chronic pain.

Sexual Objectification Increases Rape Victim Blame and Decreases Perceived Suffering

Sexual objectification changes the way people view women by reducing them to sexual objects—denied humanity and an internal mental life, as well as deemed unworthy of moral concern. However, the subsequent consequences of sexually objectifying others remain underresearched. In the current study, we examined the impact of objectification in the domain of sexual assault. Sixty British undergraduate students were recruited to complete an impression formation task. We manipulated objectification by presenting participants with either a sexualized or nonsexualized woman. Participants rated the woman’s mind and the extent to which they felt moral concern for her. They then learned that she was the victim of an acquaintance rape and reported victim blame and both blatant and subtle perceptions of her suffering. Consistent with prior research, sexualized women were objectified through a denial of mental states and moral concern. Further, compared with nonobjectified women, the objectified were perceived to be more responsible for being raped. Interestingly, although no difference emerged for blatant measures of suffering, participants tacitly denied the victims’ suffering by exhibiting changes in moral concern for the victim. We conclude that objectification has important consequences for how people view victims of sexual assault. Our findings reveal that sexual objectification can have serious consequences and we discuss how these might influence how victims cope and recover from sexual assault.

Information-seeking bias in social anxiety disorder.

In the present study, we sought to examine information seeking among individuals with social anxiety disorder (SAD, n = 31) and nonanxious controls (n = 32) during an impression-formation task. Participants were given an initial description of a protagonist that included polarized information on the social rank dimension (i.e., dominant or submissive) or on the affiliation dimension (i.e., friendly or unfriendly). Participants were told that their task was to rate the protagonist on social rank and affiliation traits and were given the opportunity to obtain additional information in order to make their decisions. Results indicated that compared to controls, individuals with SAD sought less information before making social rank ratings. In addition, individuals with SAD rated dominant protagonists as higher in social rank than did controls. These findings suggest that even in nonevaluative conditions, individuals with SAD may have an information-seeking bias. In addition, individuals with SAD may have a bias in forming impressions of dominant others. Implications for cognitive and interpersonal models of SAD are discussed.

The automatic activation of (un)fairness behavior in organizations

We conducted a high impact, laboratory experiment to examine the possibility that the enactment of (un)fairness behavior can be influenced by non-conscious processes. In Phase 1, participants completed an impression formation task in which they read a description of a fair and an unfair leader. The descriptions also included photographs of each leader. Later, we subliminally exposed participants to either the face of the fair leader, the face of the unfair leader, or a neutral face. In Phase 2, under the guise of an unrelated study, participants assumed the role of a manager and wrote a letter communicating a dismissal decision to a subordinate. The results demonstrate that participants were significantly less interactionally fair when communicating the dismissal decision after being subliminally exposed to the face of a leader whom they had mentally associated with unfairness, as compared to either the face of a leader they associated with fairness or the neutral face. The data suggest that people's enactment of fairness toward a third-party can be influenced by their mental representation of the unfairness of a salient other via automatic, non-conscious cognitive processes. We highlight the implications of our conceptual approach and current findings for theorizing on justice and on leadership, as well as for the study of organizational behavior more broadly. We also discuss several possible negative implications for organizations.

The Effects of Thunder, Stereotyping, and Cognitive Load on Impression Formation

The current study examined the effect of stereotypes and stolen thunder on impressions of a person who committed a crime. One hundred twenty undergraduate students from a small private college in rural western Pennsylvania participated in an impression formation task. Participants were given either a 2 digit or a 16 digit number to memorize, followed by a short vignette featuring an African American man whose traits were either consistent or inconsistent with current stereotypes. It was either revealed by the narrator (thunder) or the man (stolen thunder) that he had been convicted of assault. Participants also completed the Need for Cognition scale. A two-way interaction between stereotype consistency and thunder condition emerged. Mainly, when the man was stereotype inconsistent, participants found him to be less guilty than when he was stereotype consistent if he did not reveal the information himself. Future research should focus on the interaction between stolen thunder and stereotype information.

Social knowledge and goal-based influences on social information processing in adulthood.

Effective social functioning is reflected in the ability to accurately characterize other people and then use this information in the service of social goals. To examine this type of social functioning, the authors conducted two studies that investigated potential influences of social experience and chronic socioemotional goals on adults' social judgments in an impression formation task. In line with a social expertise framework, middle-aged and older adults were more sensitive to trait-diagnostic behavioral information than were younger adults. Relative to younger adults, older adults paid more attention to negative than to positive information when it related to morality traits. Increasing the salience of the social context, and presumably activating socioemotional goals, did not alter this pattern of performance. In contrast, when more global social evaluations were examined (e.g., suitability as a social partner), older adults were less likely than younger or middle-aged adults to adjust their evaluations in response to situational goals. Consistent with a heightened focus on socioemotional goals, older adults' judgments were more consistently influenced by their attributions of traits that would likely impact the affective outcomes associated with interpersonal interactions. The results demonstrate the interaction between social knowledge, situational social goals, and chronic socioemotional goals in determining age differences in social information processing.

Can I borrow a feeling? Spillover of negative arousal from inconsistent information during attitude formation diminishes perceptions of well-being

This research examines the extent to which the negative arousal caused by valence inconsistent supraliminal behavioral information and subliminal primes during attitude formation affects people's perceptions of their current well-being. Participants who received inconsistent information about a novel individual during an impression formation task reported more negative arousal, lower self-esteem, greater depression, and greater perceived stress than those in a control condition. Mediational analyses indicated that negative arousal stemming from attitude formation with valence inconsistent information guided participants' responses to well-being measures via misattribution of this arousal. These results cannot be explained by a simple response bias because recall of negative physical symptoms in the past 2weeks were unaffected by receiving valence inconsistent information. This research suggests that the spillover of negative arousal from attitude formation, when unable to be easily attributed to the attitude object, served as a cue that people utilized when determining how they felt.

Sometimes happy people focus on the trees and sad people focus on the forest: context-dependent effects of mood in impression formation.

Research indicates that affect influences whether people focus on categorical or behavioral information during impression formation. One explanation is that affect confers its value on whatever cognitive inclinations are most accessible in a given situation. Three studies tested this malleable mood effects hypothesis, predicting that happy moods should maintain and unhappy moods should inhibit situationally dominant thinking styles. Participants completed an impression formation task that included categorical and behavioral information. Consistent with the proposed hypothesis, no fixed relation between mood and processing emerged. Whether happy moods led to judgments reflecting category-level or behavior-level information depended on whether participants were led to focus on the their immediate psychological state (i.e., current affective experience; Studies 1 and 2) or physical environment (i.e., an unexpected odor; Study 3). Consistent with research on socially situated cognition, these results demonstrate that the same affective state can trigger entirely different thinking styles depending on the context.

Grounding person memory in space: Does spatial anchoring of behaviors improve recall?

In two experiments, we examine and find support for the general hypothesis that memory for behavioral information in the context of an impression formation task depends on where that information is located in vertical space. These findings extend earlier work showing that memory for location and shifts of spatial attention are influenced by the “good is up” metaphor. Specifically, we show that person memory is better for behavioral information in metaphor compatible locations (positive in upper space and negative in lower space) than in metaphor incompatible locations (positive in lower space and negative in upper space). These findings show for the first time that person-specific information, and person memory in general, is structured spatially. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Stress Strengthens Memory of First Impressions of Others' Positive Personality Traits

Encounters with strangers bear potential for social conflict and stress, but also allow the formation of alliances. First impressions of other people play a critical role in the formation of alliances, since they provide a learned base to infer the other's future social attitude. Stress can facilitate emotional memories but it is unknown whether stress strengthens our memory for newly acquired impressions of other people's personality traits. To answer this question, we subjected 60 students (37 females, 23 males) to an impression-formation task, viewing portraits together with brief positive vs. negative behavior descriptions, followed by a 3-min cold pressor stress test or a non-stressful control procedure. The next day, novel and old portraits were paired with single trait adjectives, the old portraits with a trait adjective matching the previous day's behavior description. After a filler task, portraits were presented again and subjects were asked to recall the trait adjective. Cued recall was higher for old (previously implied) than the novel portraits' trait adjectives, indicating validity of the applied test procedures. Overall, recall rate of implied trait adjectives did not differ between the stress and the control group. However, while the control group showed a better memory performance for others' implied negative personality traits, the stress group showed enhanced recall for others' implied positive personality traits. This result indicates that post-learning stress affects consolidation of first impressions in a valence-specific manner. We propose that the stress-induced strengthening of memory of others' positive traits forms an important cue for the formation of alliances in stressful conditions.

A matter of words: Impact of verbal and nonverbal information on impression formation in high-functioning autism

Clinical intuition and resent research (Senju et al., 2009) suggests that adults with high-functioning autism (HFA) are able to use explicit verbal information but fail to react upon subtle nonverbal cues in order to understand others and navigate social encounters. In order to investigate the relative influence of different domains of socially relevant information in HFA as compared to matched controls, we used verbal and nonverbal stimuli as a basis for an interpersonal impression formation task. Results demonstrated a reduced sensitivity to nonverbal cues in individuals with HFA when consideration of conflicting information from the different domains was required, although HFA participants could well evaluate nonverbal stimuli in isolation. Thus, in a more complex experimental setting nonverbal information had a comparably weak impact on the impression formation confirming that social processing is preferentially based on verbal information in HFA.

Modulation of facial reactions to avatar emotional faces by nonconscious competition priming

To investigate whether subliminally priming for competition influences facial reactions to facial emotional displays, 49 participants were either subliminally competition primed or neutrally primed. Thereafter, they viewed computer generated avatar faces with happy, neutral, and sad expressions while Corrugator supercilii and Zygomaticus major reactions were recorded. Results revealed facial mimicry to happy and sad faces in the neutrally primed group but not the competition primed group. Furthermore, subliminal competition priming enhanced Corrugator supercilii activity after an initial relaxation while viewing happy faces. An impression formation task revealed counter empathic effects confirming successful competition priming. Overall, results indicate that nonconscious processes influence a presumably nonconscious behavior.

Stereotypes and prejudice in the blood: Sucrose drinks reduce prejudice and stereotyping

Prejudice and stereotyping cause social problems and intergroup tension. The current work examined whether bolstering self-control by giving participants glucose would reduce stereotype use for an impression formation task. Previous work has demonstrated that self-control depends on biologically expensive brain processes that consume energy derived from glucose in the bloodstream. In the current study, glucose was manipulated via lemonade sweetened with either sugar or Splenda. Compared to the control group, the participants in the glucose condition used fewer stereotypes when writing an essay about a day in the life of a gay man. In addition, high-prejudice participants in the glucose condition used fewer derogatory statements in their essays than high-prejudice participants in the control condition. The findings are discussed in terms of the importance of self-control resources in the effective regulation of prejudice and stereotyping.

You are what you wear: Brand personality influences on consumer impression formation

The present study examines the role of brands in the process of impression formation. The article examines the hypothesis that brand personality traits may carry over and affect perceptions of the personality of the brand's owner. Based on the continuum model of impression formation the findings support the expectation that the impact of brand personality is stronger when the situational context embedding brand and owner is consistent with the key association that the brand evokes. Moreover, the amount of attention the perceiver can devote to the judgment task moderates this process, such that the interaction effect between brand personality and situational consistency is more pronounced when consumers are free to use as much time to the impression formation task as deemed necessary. Conversely, when under time pressure, consumers tend to resort only to brand personality as a basis for forming an impression.

The semantic/episodic distinction: The case for social information processing

The directed-forgetting paradigm was used in order to dissociate episodic from semantic processes in an impression formation task. Results demonstrate that incongruent behaviors are more prone to manipulations that disrupt episodic memory, whereas congruent behaviors are unaffected by such manipulations. The results suggest that the distinction between episodic and semantic memory processes is central for the understanding of social information processing. An explanation is put forward according to which the incongruency effect, a signature effect of impression formation, is due to an episodic encoding advantage for incongruent behaviors because of their semantically isolated nature, and their impoverished semantic encoding.

Controlling your mind without ironic consequences: Self-affirmation eliminates rebound effects after thought suppression

Thought suppression can ironically lead to a rebound of unwanted thoughts [Wegner, D. M. (1994). Ironic processes of mental control. Psychological Review, 101, 34–52.]. The present research explored whether self-affirmation may eliminate rebound effects after thought suppression. Participants either suppressed or used stereotypes in an impression formation task. Subsequently, self-affirmation was manipulated by providing participants with positive or neutral personality feedback, and stereotype accessibility was assessed. The results showed that suppression led to a rebound of stereotypic associations among neutral-feedback participants, but not among positive-feedback participants. The authors conclude that self-affirmation enhances the efficiency of mental control.