Self-management (Psychology)

Research on social judgment typically emphasizes one of three processes that enable unequivocal understanding of events with ambiguous causality. In the social influence perspective, people are susceptible to the interpretations offered by others. In the explicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with their consciously held attitudes and values. In the implicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with unconscious biases. The model investigated in the present study assumes that these processes vary in salience depending on people's mindset. Participants with low versus high implicit racial bias toward Blacks read a narrative concerning this altercation under either a lowlevel or a high-level mindset and then read a summary that blamed one of the parties or they did not read a summary. As predicted, low-level participants allocated responsibility to the African-American if they had a high implicit racial bias and to the White if they had a low implicit racial bias, regardless of the summary manipulation. Contrary to prediction, however, high-level participants' allocation of responsibility did not reflect their explicit prejudicial attitudes. Instead, they corrected for their implicit biases in their trait inferences and affective reactions, in line with research suggesting that a high-level mindset promotes self-regulatory processes in social judgment.

Despite extensive research in conflict, relatively little is known about how psychological processes evolve over time in response to a dispute. The present research examines how cognitive and affective processes react to cooperative, competitive, or mixed cooperative-competitive interactions. Experimental predictions were derived from a model of two-actor interaction (Liebovitch, Naudot, Vallacher, Nowak, Bu--Wrzosinksa & Coleman, 2008). Specifically, it was expected that attitudes and emotional valence would exhibit stable dynamics when people encountered a neutral, continually cooperative, or continually competitive interaction. However, attitudes and emotional valence were expected to exhibit perturbation in response to transitions from cooperation to competition and vice-versa. These predictions were tested in four experiments. The first study verified most predictions, finding that people have little attitude or valence reaction to interactions that are neutral, continually coo perative or continually competitive. This study also established that people's attitudes are significantly unstable when faced with an interaction shifting from cooperation to competition, and this is experienced with negative emotions. However, interactions shifting from competition to cooperation resulted in stable attitudes and emotional valence. The remaining three experiments sought to explain the lack of psychological reaction to the development of cooperation in a previously competitive interaction. In Study 2, interaction expectancy was ruled out as a factor. Study 3 demonstrated that the reactivity to sudden competition and lack of reactivity to sudden cooperation developed regardless of interaction history. Finally, Study 4 offers evidence indicating that the lack of reaction to sudden cooperation results from factors other than the duration of cooperative feedback. The research has several important implications. First, the results provide evidence that competition is

Establishing and maintaining a clear and stable view of oneself is one of the major goals that human beings are motivated by. Individuals' environment is overflowing with a variety of self-relevant feedback. Yet, humans are able to generalize their experience into idiosyncratic self-concept, that despite being the largest, and most complex of all cognitive structures provides a good frame of reference for regulation of action, emotion, and cognition. This research project examined a dynamic model of self-regulation that explains how humans manage to arrive at and maintain a coherent understanding of who they are and what they are like despite the abundance and constant influx of often contradictory self-relevant information. The dynamic model of self-regulation emphasizes the role of selective attention to specific regions of the self-concept as a prerequisite for self-concept adaptive development and functional expression. From a dynamical systems perspective the self-concept is conceptualized as a dynamic cognitive structure of knowledge that becomes organized into meaningful self-aspects (i.e., identities, self-perceived traits, roles) that differ with respect to evaluative coherence. Some self-aspects are coherent and comprise exclusively positive or exclusively negative elements, while other do not achieve evaluative coherence and are comprised of self-beliefs with mixed evaluations. As the focus of conscious attention changes between coherent and incoherent areas, the experience of Self and implications of self-concept for ongoing processes change accordingly. The total number of 296 participants took part in four studies conducted in Poland and in the United States.