Donna Eisenstadt

Psychological Defense in Anticipation of Anxiety Eliminating the Potential for Anxiety Eliminates the Effect of Mortality Salience on Worldview Defense

A large body of research has shown that when people are reminded of their mortality, their defense of their cultural worldview intensifies. Although some psychological defenses seem to be instigated by negative affective responses to threat, mortality salience does not appear to arouse such affect. Terror management theory posits that the potential to experience anxiety, rather than the actual experience of anxiety, underlies these effects of mortality salience. If this is correct, then mortality-salience effects should be reduced when participants believe they are not capable of reacting to the reminder of mortality with anxiety. In a test of this hypothesis, participants consumed a placebo purported to either block anxiety or enhance memory. Then we manipulated mortality salience, and participants evaluated pro- and anti-American essays as a measure of worldview defense. Although mortality salience intensified worldview defense in the memory-enhancer condition, this effect was completely eliminated in the anxiety-blocker condition. The results suggest that some psychological defenses serve to avert the experience of anxiety rather than to ameliorate actually experienced anxiety.

Cueing confidence in eyewitness identifications: influence of biased lineup instructions and pre-identification memory feedback under varying lineup conditions.

Students watched a theft video, attempted an identification from a thief-present or thief-absent lineup under unbiased or biased instructions, and rated identification confidence. In Experiment 1, the participants received (bogus) positive, negative, or no pre-identification feedback about a recall test. Biased instructions and positive feedback increased confidence and ratings of eyewitnessing conditions. In Experiment 2, biased instructions increased confidence unless the thief was absent and lineup members were similar, where they decreased confidence. According to the cue-belief model, biased instructions send a positive accuracy cue regarding the most familiar-looking lineup member. If none stands out, instructions conflict with an inclination to reject the lineup. Feedback may create a belief about memory quality that is a cue regarding likely recognition accuracy.

Dissonance and Importance: Attitude Change Effects of Personal Relevance and Race of the Beneficiary of a Counterattitudinal Advocacy

The authors asked or instructed White college students to write an essay advocating a large tuition hike to increase scholarships for either students in general or Black students (yielding low or high racial symbolism, respectively) that would take effect in the near or far future (yielding high or low personal relevance, respectively). Especially when high-choice participants wrote highly compliant (i.e., unqualified) essays, attitude change was greater when the advocacy had either high (vs. low) personal relevance or high (vs. low) racial symbolism. Yet there was no attitude change when both symbolism and relevance were high. They may increase dissonance by making the dissonant elements more important and numerous. The coupling of relevance and symbolism, however, may link the attitude so strongly to personal values and self-concept that attitude change becomes untenable as a mode of dissonance reduction.

Effects of Social-Comparative Memory Feedback on Eyewitnesses' Identification Confidence, Suggestibility, and Retrospective Memory Reports

In 2 experiments, college students watched a videotaped theft and either recounted it orally or completed an objective memory test about it. Later, some eyewitnesses received either positive or negative feedback about these memory reports, suggesting a cowitnesss report agreed or disagreed with theirs or that they had better or worse memory accuracy than most cowitnesses. Feedback influenced a number of subsequent memory-related responses. Witnesses who had received positive (vs. no) memory feedback later evinced heightened suggestibility in terms of accepting misinformation embedded in a memory interview and made identifications more confidently, quickly, and (in one condition) accurately. Witnesses who had received negative memory feedback evinced heightened suggestibility, made identifications less confidently, and recalled the witnessing and identification experience as involving poorer conditions for memory. Feedback appears to influence the overall self-credibility of memory, thereby altering confidence in both the feedback-specific memory and other aspects of memory for the event.

Asymmetry and Defense in Self-Comparison: Differential Reactions to Feedback About the Rejected and Ideal Selves

This research extended Eisenstadt and Leippes (1994) self-comparison model by examining acceptance and rejection of self-discrepant feedback and the consequences for the broader self-concept. According to the model, individuals should be more vulnerable to low-importance feedback. College students received bogus feedback about an important or unimportant, ideal or rejected trait, and rated the self-descriptiveness of that and other traits. Participants evinced greater and faster resistance to high-importance (vs. low-importance) feedback. Participants were especially susceptible to unimportant rejected feedback, but compensated by increasing the positivity of ratings on non-feedback traits. In contrast, participants resisted important rejected feedback, but evinced deflated positivity on other traits. Judgments were asymmetrical: Rejected feedback and nonfeedback traits were judged as less self-descriptive and were rated more quickly than actual or ideal traits, suggestive of defensive avoidance.

Two paths of defense: Specific versus compensatory reactions to self-threat

Eisenstadt and Leippe (1994) and Eisenstadt, Leippe, and Rivers (2002) proposed that people respond to threatening feedback by engaging in a self-comparison process in which they ultimately accept or reject the feedback based on its refutability. The aims of the current study were to test the processes involved in: (a) specific feedback acceptance and refutation; and (b) compensatory adjustments in the self-concept following feedback. Participants received threatening feedback of high or low importance while under high or low cognitive load and then rated the self-descriptiveness of the specific feedback trait, non-feedback traits, affect, state self-esteem, and listed thoughts about the feedback. As hypothesized, counterarguments mediated acceptance of the specific feedback. Affect and state self-esteem, however, mediated compensatory adjustments in the self-concept.

Social Comparison as a Self-regulatory Measuring Stick

How do individuals assess the magnitude of their self-discrepancies? In this research, we suggest that social comparison operates as a self-regulatory measuring stick that helps individuals assess where they stand relative to self-standards (ideal, ought, and feared selves), and contributes to the experience of discrepancy-related emotions. Study 1 revealed that individuals high in social comparison orientation (SCO) report ideal and ought self-discrepancies larger in magnitude than those low in SCO. Study 2, which examined upward and downward comparison tendencies separately, demonstrated that chronic upward comparison predicts ideal and ought self-discrepancy magnitudes, whereas downward comparison predicts feared self-discrepancy magnitude. Both studies indicate that social comparison tendencies are associated with the experience of agitation, dejection, contentment and cheerfulness.