Interpersonal Cues Research Articles

Heritability of Social Skills in Children

Social cognition involves the processing of interpersonal cues and the planning of appropriate responses underlying smooth social interactions.

Women with schizophrenia and co-occurring substance use disorders: an increased risk for violent victimization and HIV.

Women with serious mental illnesses are at risk for victimization and HIV. Schizophrenia related neurocognitive and social competency deficits exacerbated by the effects of substance abuse may make women with schizophrenia particularly vulnerable. Information processing deficits may impair the ability to identify situations or interpersonal cues signaling danger, and make it difficult to remember and hence avoid, situations, people, or places previously proven dangerous. Social competency deficits interfere with the ability to form lasting relationships, negotiate out of dangerous situations, refuse unreasonable requests, and effectively problem solve. Given the potential increased vulnerability of this population to these negative outcomes, empirically based manualized preventive interventions are greatly needed.

Attachment Anxiety and Reciprocity as Moderators of Interpersonal Attraction

In integrating the interpersonal domains of attraction, perceived reciprocity, and attachment security, the prediction was made that positive interpersonal feedback (reciprocity) would lead to a greater increase in attraction ratings for anxiously versus securely attached individuals and, correspondingly, negative interpersonal feedback would cause a greater diminution in attraction ratings for anxiously versus securely attached individuals, with neutral feedback having no differential effect. For a sample of 154 college students, these predictions as well as an unanticipated gender finding were supported. The findings and clinical implications concerning the susceptibility of anxiously attached individuals to positive interpersonal cues are discussed in terms of a compromised sense of the availability and responsiveness of attachment figures.

Dependency and patienthood.

A review of laboratory and clinical studies of dependency reveals that a dependent personality orientation is associated with several traits that are likely to influence psychotherapy process and outcome (i.e., compliance with rules and authorities, sensitivity to interpersonal cues, and desire for help and support from others). Because empirical studies of dependency have produced highly consistent findings, strong conclusions may be drawn from the converging results of these investigations. After a review of the clinical and experimental literature on dependency, the implications of patient dependency for several areas of patient-related behaviors (i.e., willingness to seek treatment, behavior during psychotherapy, and the dynamics of treatment termination) are discussed.

Schizophrenic patients' sensitivity to social cues: the role of abstraction.

Since individuals with schizophrenia often have difficulty with abstract tasks, they should have more problems recognizing abstract social cues (e.g., inferences regarding actors' affect and goals) than concrete cues (e.g., observations of actors' behavior and dialogue). Moreover, recognition of abstract and concrete cues should interact with the level of emotional arousal engendered by the situation; previous research has shown that schizophrenic patients perform better on cue recognition tasks when the situation produces moderate rather than low levels of arousal. These hypotheses were tested in 24 patients with schizophrenia diagnosed according to the DSM-III-R criteria and 15 normal comparison subjects. All subjects viewed eight short vignettes of interpersonal situations that produce low and moderate levels of arousal. They then answered questions representing perception of abstract and concrete cues that had been matched for difficulty and consistency. The schizophrenic patients were significantly less sensitive to interpersonal cues than the normal subjects. The patients were also less sensitive to abstract than to concrete social cues, and for them there was a significant interaction between cue abstraction level and situational arousal. Specifically, the schizophrenic subjects performed worse on the abstract cue recognition task for the low-arousal situations. Findings regarding the social cue recognition patterns of schizophrenic patients could play an important role in the development of valid measures of social cognition for this population.

The Decision to Attempt Interpersonal Control: The Case of Nonsmoker-Smoker Interactions

Recent theory and research indicate that people are more likely to attempt interpersonal control when that behavior is supported by contextual cues. Related work suggests that individuals feel most comfortable with their behavior when contextual cues are congruent and their behavior is congruent with these clear cues. These hypotheses were tested in the context of smoker-nonsmoker interactions, with degree of support for attempting control manipulated via a 2 x 2 factorial design. Rules of the situation were varied through placement of either a "Smoking Permitted" or "No Smoking" sign in the experimental room. interpersonal cues from the smoker (a research confederate) were manipulated when the smoker either did or did not ask for permission to smoke. As expected, nonsmokers were more likely to ask the smoker not to smoke when both situational rules and interpersonal cues supported them. Task performance, tolerance to frustration, and mood were assessed as indicators of short-term stress. As hypothesized, these indices indicated most stress when the manipulated variables provided conflicting messages as well as when behavior did not match congruent situational and interpersonal cues. It is suggested that administrators can prevent stressful interpersonal encounters by clearly marking smoking and nonsmoking areas. Furthermore, when in a smoking area, smokers who request permission to smoke may inadvertently produce stress in nonsmokers.

The dependent personality: Developmental, social, and clinical perspectives.

Developmental, social, and clinical studies of dependency have produced remarkably consistent results. A review and integration of these findings allow strong conclusions to be drawn regarding the etiology and dynamics of dependency. The etiology of dependency appears to lie in overprotective, authoritarian parenting. In social settings, dependency is associated with suggestibility, conformity, compliance, interpersonal yielding, affiliative behavior, and sensitivity to interpersonal cues. Dependency predicts the onset of certain psychological disorders and follows the onset of others. It seems that the fundamental motivation of the dependent person, from which the behaviors that are exhibited in different situations are derived, is a strong desire to obtain and maintain nurturant, supportive relationships. Implications of these findings for different theoretical models of dependency are discussed.

Construct Validity of Two Heterosocial Perception Skill Measures for Assessing Rape Proclivity

Rape-supportive attitudes and self-reported rape proclivity (using a measure by Malamuth, Haber, & Feshbach, 1980) were negatively correlated with decoding accuracy of women's negative cues (measured by the TRAC-D; McDonel, McFall, Schlundt, & Levenson, 1985) in an unselected sample of male college students. Better decoders of negative female cues on the TRAC-D, as well as subjects expressing fewer rape-supportive beliefs and less rape proclivity, were more conservative in their estimates of a man's justification in continuing to make sexual advances in the face of a woman's negative cues on the Heterosocial Perception Survey (HPS; McDonel, 1986). Ability to decode men's interpersonal cues was not correlated with responses on the HPS or rape attitude and proclivity measures, suggesting that specific rather than global decoding deficits were useful predictors of rape correlates. These results support the construct validity of the two social perception measures, the TRAC-D, and the HPS, as measures of rape proclivity.

Neuropsychological profile of an asperger's syndrome case with exceptional calculating ability

Abstract Some mental retardates and Asperger's syndrome patients demonstrate a single exceptional talent, often musical or calculating ability, in the context of otherwise pervasive intellectual and social/interpersonal disability. Neuropsychological assessment of such individuals can shed light on the cognitive substrates for these unusual patterns of ability. This paper presents a neuropsychological case study of an Asperger's syndrome patient with remarkable mathematical abilities. Within a framework proposed by Rourke (1982), it is hypothesized that the social deficits associated with Asperger's syndrome may arise from longstanding difficulty with processing of information in novel situations, including decoding of visual information such as interpersonal cues and facial expressions. Relatively intact verbal skills may prevent these individuals from leading severely autistic lives and, in some cases, superior auditory verbal memory capacity may support development of extraordinary isolated “savant” sk...

Correlates of social support receipt.

Psychological correlates of social support receipt were examined in an investigation of stress and coping among 150 middle-aged community residents. Subjects were interviewed monthly for 6 months, each time concerning a specific stressful situation in the previous month. Social support received and methods of coping were assessed each time, as well as other variables. Factors hypothesized to be associated with support receipt were person predispositions, appraisal patterns with regard to specific stressful encounters, and coping strategies used. Each was most strongly associated with a particular type of social support. Person predispositions related most strongly to emotional support received, appraisal factors related most strongly to aid, and coping strategies related most to informational support received. Furthermore, of the three sets of variables, the individual's ways of coping appeared to be most strongly associated with all types of social support received. Two implications are explored. First, we suggest that the three types of social support studied represent different constructs with different antecedents and consequences. Second, we argue that coping behavior provides interpersonal cues regarding what is wanted or needed in a stressful situation and that the members of the social environment respond accordingly.

Self-symbolizing and the neglect of others' perspectives.

In the present pair of studies interpersonal cues were set up, prompting selfdescriptions that would be in potential conflict with subjects' self-definitional needs. It was hypothesized that self-definitional needs would hinder subjects' responding to the interpersonal aspects of the situation. In both studies subjects committed to a certain self-definition (e.g., female professional, journalist, mathematician) were given feedback that their personality did or did not predispose them to be successful in their self-definitional realms. Subsequently, in a different context, subjects had to compete in expressing positive self-descriptions that were related or unrelated to their self-definitions (Experiment 1). Subjects given negative personality feedback dominated the competition, provided that the self-descriptions were related to the self-definition to which they felt committed. In Experiment 2, male subjects were asked to report on their standing in their self-definitional realms to an attractive female target person, after she had indicated a preference for either self-deprecating or self-aggrandizing self-descriptions. Subjects given positive personality feedback were more self-deprecating than subjects who received negative personality feedback, given the presence of a cue to be selfdeprecating. In addition, positive feedback subjects complied with the selfpresentational cue set by the target person in proportion to their attraction to her, whereas negative feedback subjects failed to do so. The results are discussed in terms of a recent notion of symbolic self-completion (Wicklund & Gollwitzer, 1982) and in terms of other views on the self.

Choosing friends as activity partners: The role of self-monitoring.

Two investigations examined the involvement of self-monitori ng processes in friendship. The first investigation focused on the differential considerations that are involved when high self-monitoring individuals and low self-monitoring individuals choose friends as partners for leisure-time activities. High self-monitoring individuals, more so than low self-monitoring individuals, chose friends as activity partners on the basis of their friends' particular skills in the activity domain. Low self-monitoring individuals, more so than high self-monitoring individuals, chose friends as activity partners on the basis of general feelings of liking for their friends. The second investigation examined the internal structures of the preferred social worlds of high self-monitoring individuals and low self-monitoring individuals. High self-monitoring individuals preferred relatively partitioned and compartmentalized social worlds in which they would engage in particular activities only with specific partners. Low self-monitoring individuals preferred relatively homogeneous and undifferentiated social worlds in which they would spend time with friends who were globally similar to them. The implications of these findings for understanding the processes by which individuals high and low in self-monitoring facilitate the enactment of their characteristic behavioral orientations, as well as for understanding the nature of friendship itself, are discussed. Investigations of self-monitoring processes have identified two orientations that individuals can and do adopt as they enact their behavioral choices in social contexts. Some individuals typically strive to appear to be the type of person called for by each situation in which they find themselves. These individuals are particularly sensitive and responsive to social and interpersonal cues to situational appropriateness. Their social behavior displays pronounced situation-to-situation specificity. At the same time, correspondence between their behavior and underlying attitudes often is minimal. These individuals are known as

The laryngograph in singing. I. General methods

The Fourcin laryngograph handily provides a voltage output, lx, proportional to the area of the glottal opening. We have investigated the uses of the lx signal in the voice studio as a feedback modality in parallel with the usual kinesthetic, aural, and interpersonal cues by which a singer manages his voice. The lx signal is returned in four ways: (1) The lx waveform, normalized in amplitude and frequency, is displayed on an oscilloscope. The mechanics of phonation are immediately evident in this display. A kinesthetic connection with the visual pattern develops easily as the singer explores the variation of his waveform with pitch or loudness. (2) The power spectrum |Lx′| of the time derivative of lx, is displayed in real time above a keyboard mnemonic. A singer tends to “feel” the waveform lx, including its evident phase relationships, while he “hears” the power spectrum | Lx′|, which is identical to that of the glottal acoustic source. (3) Laryngeal behavior over an extended time is notated as a real time soundscore. Techniques 2 and 3 are applied to the voiced sound as well [see J. Acoust. Soc. Am. Suppl. 1 66, S42 (Fall 1979)]. Feedback modality 4, the laryngeal envelope, surrounds the singer with the amplified sound of his own lx′, which, above a critical loudness level, obliterates normal auditory cues, placing the singer in a new and pedagogically useful relationship with his own voice.

The effects of information processing complexity and interpersonal cue availability on strategic play in a mixed-motive game1

A 60-trial iterated PDG was played by 24 male undergraduates. Half were Abstract Information Processors, and half were Concrete Information Processors. In addition, half of the subject pairs played the game face-to-face, while in the other pairs the game was played in separate cubicles. Rather than allowing for free play, the subjects were given the illusion of playing against one another when in reality they all played against a simulation program. It was found that concrete subjects cooperated most in the presence of another player, and competed most when not facing him. This was apparently due to the tendency for the concrete players to be “caught” by the cooperative pull of the face-to-face condition. The abstract subjects tended to use information-seeking strategies in both conditions. When the information was irrelevant to the game (e.g., presence of a false “partner”) the abstract players did not maximize to the same degree as when the feedback was more meaningful.

Attribution of Pupil Size as a Function of Facial Valence and Age in American and Persian Children

This study tested the hypothesis that pupil size is primarily a cue to sexual interest which becomes salient through incidental learning and/or maturation at age 16 (or the onset of sexual maturity). Because the evidence for this hypothesis is completely confounded by possible culturally determined social learning effects, samples of both Persian children, i.e., children who were reared in a "pupil-intensive" culture and American children were used as subjects. These subjects who ranged in age from 7-10 years were tested using one of the tasks which Hess' group had used to establish 16 years as the age of onset of the salience of pupil-size cues. The results show that pupil size is a salient inter-personal cue for the 8-year-old Persian children which was further articulated in the older Persian groups. Evidence was noted that offered modest support for placing the age of onset of awareness of pupillary cues between 10 and 12 years in American children. Together these data question the validity of age 16 as the age at which pupil-size cues become salient and offer support for a social learning explanation of these behaviors.

Selective Perception and Interpretation of Interpersonal Cues in Dyadic Interactions

Summary Twenty high and 20 low socially anxious male college students interacted with a female confederate (C) for six minutes. The C alternated between providing the S with positive and negative social cues. High and low anxious S s did not selectively attend to positive or negative cues. However, high anxious S s felt the C would prefer to interact less with them in the future than did the low anxious S s. The findings suggest that socially anxious S s may perceive social events similarly to low anxious S s, but interpret these same events differently.

SELF-PERCEPTION OF THERAPEUTIC GAIN AS A FUNCTION OF SITUATIONAL CUES

It was hypothesized that a client's sell-perception of improvement in therapy is in part a function of situational cues. Clients will see themselves as changing in ways implicitly suggested by such cues. In contrast, an “intrapsychic” view sees change as a function of internal mechanisms. Sixtyfive undergraduate Ss self-disclosed on a problem for 10 minutes via intercom to a silent “listener” in another room. Ss were then assigned to one of four “interpersonal cue” conditions, or to a “discharge cue” condition. Discharge Ss rated the amount of emotions expressed by two previous Ss. Inter personal Ss rated responses purportedly written by their listener to two previous Ss, on the dimensions of warmth and empathy. All Ss then rated their therapeutic gains from self-disclosure. It was hypothesized that discharge Ss would see gain in terms of emotional clarity and relief. In contrast. Ss who perceived their listener as high in warmth and empathy would see gain in terms of self-trust and independence, as predicted by client-centered theory. Results supported the hypotheses for emotional relief and self-trust, but not for independence.

Changes in Vocal Intensity as a Function of Interspeaker Influence

The purpose of the present study was to analyze vocal intensity in a prior study as an interpersonal cue in verbal communication. Reanalysis indicates that intensity is both a stable and modifiable characteristic of interpersonal communication and suggests that variations in levels of vocal intensity of conversational partners may convey information about their relationship to each other.