Craig A. Hill

When Our Identities Are Mistaken: Reaffirming Self-Conceptions Through Social Interaction

Although those who have labored to change self-concepts in naturally occurring situations (jave often experienced difficulty, laboratory investigators have reported considerable success in this endeavor. This research sought to reconcile these contradictory findings by examining how people respond behaviorally and psychologically when they receive feedback that disconfirms their self-conceptions. The results showed that self-discrepant feedback produced changes in selfratings only when recipients had no opportunity to reject and refute it. If participants had opportunity to behaviorally discredit discrepant feedback, they did so and subsequently displayed minimal self-rating change. The discussion proposes some important differences between transitory fluctuations and enduring changes in self-ratings and suggests some conditions that must be met before lasting self-concept changes will occur.

Individual Differences in the Experience of Sexual Motivation: Theory and Measurement of Dispositional Sexual Motives

A construct consisting of eight dispositional sexual motives was proposed to expand upon and integrate earlier theory and research. The eight motives are desire for (a) feeling valued by ones partner, (b) showing value for ones partner, (c) obtaining relief from stress, (d) providing nurturance to ones partner, (e) enhancing feelings of personal power, (f) experiencing the power of ones partner, (g) experiencing pleasure, and (h) procreating. Based on this formulation, a self‐report questionnaire was developed to measure stable interest in the eight incentives hypothesized to influence sexual motivation and behavior. Initial factor analyses supported the proposed model in that items clustered predominantly into the theoretically proposed dimensions. The questionnaire was revised, and two subsequent factor analyses supported the earlier factor structure. AMORE scales were moderately correlated with erotophobic versus erotophilic attitudes, attitudes about uncommitted sex, sensation‐seeking tendencies, ...

High-Risk Sexual Behavior at a Midwestern University: A Confirmatory Survey

According to a 1991 study of sexual behavior based on a random sample of heterosexual undergraduates at a Midwestern university, 80% of the males and 73% of the females had experienced vaginal or anal intercourse. The average age at first vaginal intercourse was 17.2 years for both sexes. Seventeen percent of the sexually experienced males and 18% of the sexually experienced females had engaged in heterosexual anal intercourse; among these respondents, the average age at first anal intercourse was 20.3 for males and 19.1 for females. Although less than four years, on average, had elapsed since the respondents had first had vaginal intercourse, males reported an average of 8.0 lifetime vaginal-sex partners and females reported an average of 6.1. Overall, the findings from this random sample of students are similar to those from a 1988 convenience sample of the same college population.

Gender, relationship stage, and sexual behavior: the importance of partner emotional investment within specific situations.

This study examined the relationship of type of sexually instigating situation (partner behavior conveying emotional investment or not), relationship stage, and gender to self‐reported likelihood of engaging in sexual behavior. Participants (200 female and 122 male college students) read scenarios describing partner behavior in eight hypothetical sexual situations. Five of the sexual situations were proposed to explicitly communicate a sense of emotional investment in the relationship, and three other scenarios were conceived as not explicitly conveying emotional investment. Emotional investment situations were hypothesized to influence likelihood ratings as a function of imagined relationship stage (dating or in a serious relationship), manipulated across participants. Situations not conveying investment were hypothesized to influence ratings as afiinction of both relationship stage and gender. In large part, hypotheses were confirmed. The few exceptions were consistent with other gender‐role considerations related to trust and power.

The distinctiveness of sexual motives in relation to sexual desire and desirable partner attributes

The distinctiveness of eight dispositional sexual motives and global sexual desire was examined to extend evidence concerning the construct validity of a multidimensional conceptualization of sexual motivation. Sexual motives were measured by the Affective and Motivational Orientation Related to Erotic Arousal Questionnaire (AMORE; Hill & Preston, 1996). As predicted, self‐reported arousal to scenarios describing eight motive‐relevant situations were correlated most strongly with the theoretically most relevant of the eight sexual motives. Although global sexual desire ratings were moderately correlated with responses to all eight sexual scenarios, the correlations were eliminated or substantially reduced when controlling for the theoretically most relevant sexual motive scores. Similarly, ratings of desirable partner attributes were more highly and consistently correlated with specific sexual motives than with global sexual desire. The results provide further evidence of the validity of the sexual motive...

Social support and health: The role of affiliative need as a moderator

Abstract This study sought to demonstrate that different types of support (e.g., socioemotional vs material) have differential effects upon well-being as a function of affiliative need. Items on a measure of recent social support were categorized into the two types of support. Subsequently, each subscale was included separately in regression models, along with measures of affiliative need and negative life events, to predict physical and psychological impairment. As expected, material support buffered all individuals from the deleterious effects of negative life events, regardless of affiliative need. However, only low affiliative need individuals benefited from socioemotional support, also as predicted. The findings were explained in terms of the degree to which each type of support is perceived as an instrumental coping resource versus a form of intrinsic gratification. High affiliative need individuals presumably are influenced largely by the relationship aspects of socioemotional support, while low affiliative need individuals are influenced by its instrumental potential.

Strategic self-attribution and Type A behavior ☆

Abstract A variety of laboratory and survey studies indicate that Jenkins Activity Survey-defined Type A individuals differ from their Type B counterparts in the self-attributions they make for negative events and outcomes in their lives. However, these differences are inconsistent. Some studies find Type As taking credit for negative outcomes whereas other investigations find Type As externalizing responsibility for negative outcomes. The present experiment was designed to clarify these previous findings by asking Type A and B subjects to make attributions for hypothetical events that varied orthogonally in threat to self-esteem and in threat to control. Based on a control model of Type A behavior, it was predicted that Type As would be more likely than Type Bs to attribute events that threatened their control to internal factors which were potentially modifiable. In contrast, Type As should make more external attributions than Type Bs for those events that threatened their self-esteem. Accordingly, Jenkins Activity Survey-defined Type A and B male college students were administered an attributional style questionnaire developed for this study. Results indicated that relative to Type Bs, Type As made greater internal but unstable attributions for negative events, particularly those which were high in threat to control. Both Type As and Bs made external attributions for negative events that were high in self-esteem threat but low in control threat. The implications of these findings for self-evaluative models of Type A behavior and Type A as a stress engendering behavior are discussed.

Implicit and Explicit Sexual Motives as Related, But Distinct Characteristics

ABSTRACT A measure of implicit sexual motives—the implicit AMORE—was constructed employing the Affect Misattribution Procedure (Payne, Cheng, Govorun, & Stewart, 2005). Subscales paralleled the 8 dimensions identified previously by the self-report measure of sexual motives, the explicit AMORE (Hill & Preston, 1996). Confirmatory factor analyses supported the proposed 8-factor model in slightly revised form, which was confirmed based on a second independent set of participants. Consistent with hypotheses, the implicit scales correlated with nonconscious erotica-viewing behavior for women in a laboratory setting. In contrast to explicit scales, implicit scales were unrelated to self-report ratings of likely sexual behavior. Finally, self-reports of aspects of sexual behavior were generally associated with the measures of implicit motives independently of corresponding explicit motives for both women and men. The results support the conception of implicit sexual motives as related, but distinct from explicit sexual motives.