Vallacher, Robin R.

Conflicts between groups are affected by myriad historical and situational factors. Yet
people are rarely overwhelmed by this complexity and are able to adopt a coherent
depiction of the conflict, often with an unequivocal allocation of blame to one group. A
person's final judgment tells only a fraction of the story. To uncover the whole story,
numerous factors must be considered. Two such factors are whether the person harbors
implicit prejudice toward an involved group and whether the way in which relevant
information is presented will allow for the emergence of perspective-taking and provide
insight into the conflict that will aid third-party observes in making a coherent end
judgment. This research explored the role of anti-Muslim prejudice and perspectivetaking
in allocating blame for an ambiguous conflict between two groups that differed
only on the dimension of religion (Muslim vs. Christian). Participants completed two
measures of prejudice-an anti-Muslim Implicit Association Test and an explicit antiMuslim
prejudice questionnaire. Participants then viewed one of two versions of a filmed conflict scene. While both films were identical in content, the order of their
contents was reversed (conflict first vs. history first). Participants were then asked to
allocate blame for the conflict to one group over the other. Following this judgment of
blame, participants recorded their thoughts and feelings regarding this judgment into an
audio recorder. These recordings were then played back while they used the Mouse
Paradigm to express the feelings portrayed in their recordings. Results indicated no
relationship between explicit prejudice and allocation of blame. Implicit prejudice scores
were strongly related to allocation of blame, with increases in IAT scores positively
correlating with blame of the Muslim group. Results also suggested a link between
performance on the lA T and the Mouse Paradigm. More specifically, the results suggest
that IAT performance may predict performance on the Mouse Paradigm. Additional
results provided by the Mouse Paradigm provided insight into the deliberative processes
taking place during the allocation of blame. Future research should explore the link
between lA T scores and Mouse Paradigm performance and should be extended to include
other forms of the lAT.

Coherence of self-concept refers to the ability to stabilize on a clear set of views
about oneself. This aspect of self-structure is closely linked self-esteem, and similar
evidence in emotion research suggests an intricate connection between the self-system
and emotion. Evidence suggests that emotions of seemingly opposing valence such as
happy and sad can co-occur (i.e., mixed emotion). This study validated a new set of
emotional stimuli particularly to elicit mixed emotion and used these stimuli with a
mouse task that allowed participants to report positive and negative emotions
simultaneously. The study examined possible individual differences in discrete emotional
response associated with self-esteem as well as a possible connection between selfconcept
coherence and a differential ability to harbor mixed emotions; specifically that
individuals with high coherence in self-concept would tend to disambiguate their emotional response, but those with low coherence would be more susceptible to cooccurring
positive and negative emotion.

Loneliness – the feeling that manifests when one perceives one’s social needs are
not being met by the quantity or especially the quality of one’s social relationships – is a
common but typically short-lived and fairly harmless experience. However, recent
research continues to uncover a variety of alarming health effects associated with longterm
loneliness. The present study examines the psychological mechanisms underlying
how persons scoring high in trait loneliness perceive their social environments.
Evaluations of transient facial expression morphs are analyzed in R using dynamical
systems methods. We hypothesize that, consistent with Cacioppo and Hawkley’s sociocognitive
model, subjects scoring high in loneliness will exhibit hypervigilance in their
evaluations of cold and neutral emotions and hypovigilance in their evaluations of warm
emotions. Results partially support the socio-cognitive model but point to a relationship
between loneliness and a global dampening in evaluations of emotions.
Keywords: loneliness, perceived social isolation, social dynamics, emotion recognition.

I present the development and initial validation a new measure designed to assess
specific personal prayer content I used feedback from men and women, along with a
review of the relevant literature, to identify specific prayer content for inclusion in the
Personal Prayer Content Scale (PPCS) (Study 1) I administered the PPCS to a sample of
participants from southeast Florida and southeast Michigan allowing for a cross-national
investigation of the specific content of the thoughts that individuals privately direct
towards a god, gods, or god-like entity (Study 2) I compared men’s and women’s
responses (Study 3) and responses between Christians and non-Christians (Study 4) on
the PPCS The results provide evidence for the reliability and discriminant validity of the
PPCS by demonstrating that personal prayer content predicts aspects of religiosity and is
equally valid for men and women and Christians and non-Christians A validated PPCS
may be of theoretical, empirical, and practical value

Self-concept clarity and grit are important constructs in the self-concept and selfregulation
domains. Though distinct in their focus on identity and goal processes, self-concept
clarity and grit similarly emphasize the extent to which self-views and goal-perseverance are
strong, clear, consistent, and unshakeable. We hypothesized self-knowledge and goalperseverance
may be mutually reinforcing given the role of self-knowledge in directing goal
pursuit, and of goal pursuit in structuring the self-concept. The present study tested this
hypothesis in the form of whether self-concept clarity and grit reciprocally influence one other
across time, and was conducted using a daily diary design with 97 college-aged participants
across several weeks. Data were analyzed using multilevel cross-lagged panel modeling. Results
indicated daily self-concept clarity and grit both had positive influences on each other across
time, while controlling for their previous values. The reciprocal influences were also symmetric:
self-concept clarity and grit had equally strong influences on each other. The results of the present
study are the first to indicate the existence of reinforcing feedback loops between self-concept
clarity and grit, and to demonstrate that fluctuations in self-knowledge trigger fluctuations in goal
resolve, and vice versa. The results suggest the two are, in part, both causes and consequences of
one another.

Diminished belief in free will has been shown to influence morally relevant behavior (e.g., cheating, helping) and conformity. What happens when opportunities for immoral action and conformity are both available? To investigate the relative salience of these action tendencies, we manipulated participants’ belief in free will, provided them an opportunity to cheat on a perceptual-reasoning task to obtain a reward, and exposed them to a confederate who did or did not cheat on this task. Participants primed with deterministic (vs. free will) beliefs demonstrated diminished belief in free will, and an increased tendency to cheat regardless of whether the confederate modeled cheating or not cheating. Cheating tendencies were enhanced, however, when the confederate cheated on the task. Discussion centers on the psychological effects of belief versus disbelief in free will and on the methodological challenges associated with research on free will.

Agency and communion are fundamental dimensions underlying psychological
processes. Although agency and communion are coherent dimensions, their origins,
nature, stability differ across theoretical framework. Common to these frameworks are
gender differences in agency and communion. The present study hypothesized that
because agency and communion relate to gender, they may also relate to digit ratio. The
present study is important because digit ratio may offer clues on the origins and nature of
agency and communion, and their gender differences. Agency and Communion factors
were extracted from implicit linguistic measures obtained by LIWC analysis of selfnarratives.
Exploratory structural equation modeling indicated communion related to digit
ratio in men, and gender differences in communion. Although the results supported the
distal, biological influences of communion argued by evolutionary accounts, the null
finding agency was not related to digit ratio, while not directly interpretable, did not
contradict socialization accounts of agency.

The way we think about ourselves is reflected in, and shaped by, the way we think about our actions. The identification of action can vary from mechanistic, low level depictions to far more comprehensive, high level depictions. This study tests the supposition that comprehensive understanding of action is a precondition for coherence in self-concept and that failure to generate stable, high level action identifications interferes with the formation of a stable and personally certain self-concept. It was predicted (and the results confirmed) that persons who experience fragmented action understanding (i.e., relatively low level action identification) demonstrate less coherence in their overall self-evaluative stance and greater self-uncertainty and self-instability. The relationships between self-concept and coherence (i.e., self-stability and self-certainty) and action identification level was studied in both a context-free manner and with respect to specific social roles. The results expand our understanding of the nature and impact of the organizational processes at work within the self system.

This work argues that the self can be viewed as a dynamical system, with lower-level cognitive and affective elements that interact over time giving rise to global patterns of thought and behavior. The underlying structural features of the self-system promote temporal variation in self-evaluation in the stream of thought. To capture the dynamics of self-evaluation, a refinement of the "mouse paradigm" is employed. This procedure assesses the stream of self-evaluative thought and thus provides insight into the global structural features of the self. The goals of this research were to establish the validity of the "mouse paradigm" and to explore the relationship between the structure and dynamics of the self as expressed in self-reflection. The "mouse paradigm" is a procedure where individuals talk about themselves and subsequently indicate the valence of their self-description using a computer mouse. Participants move the mouse pointer (towards a target in the center of the screen to indicate a positive self-evaluation and away from the target to indicate a negative self-evaluation) while listening to the previously recorded version of their self-description. This technique makes it possible to examine self-evaluation as it changes over time. In study 1, participants described themselves after exposure to various self-relevant memory primes (positive, negative, mixed, and no prime). Traditional measures of the structural features of the self were found to be systematically related to the dynamic properties of participants' mouse movements (distance from target, variance, rate of change, and time at rest). Also, the priming manipulations were found to significantly alter the valence and dynamic properties of participants' self-evaluation. Study 2 explored the relationship between individual differences in self-structure and susceptibility to external influence. Participants were asked to describe themselves from three different perspectives (ideal self, actual self, and feared self). Perspective taking was found to systematically alter the nature of participants' self-evaluations. Furthermore, participants with relatively "weak" self-structures were found to be more influenced by the perspective manipulation. In general, results suggest that global properties of self-structure are related to the temporal flow of self-evaluation. Furthermore, individual differences in self-structure result in different levels of susceptibility to extrinsic influence.

This study explored the relationship between memory and social judgment. Subjects evaluated someone who was described in both desirable and undesirable terms in a taped conversation. They used a computer mouse to express their judgments on a moment-to-moment basis for 90 sec. under one of three instructional sets: memory-based (mouse judgment upon completion of the conversation, based on their recall of information), on-line (mouse judgment while listening to the conversation), and off-line (mouse judgment upon completion of the conversation, based on their judgments formed while listening to the conversation). Half the subjects believed their judgments were relevant to the person's fate (high importance), half believed their judgments were not relevant to his fate (low importance). Subjects in the off-line/important condition demonstrated sustained oscillation in their mouse judgments throughout the judgment period in accord with dynamic integration. In all other conditions, subjects converged on a stable judgment relatively quickly, in accord with static integration.