Kathy L. Bell

Truth and investment: Lies are told to those who care.

Participants discussed paintings they liked and disliked with artists who were or were not personally invested in them. Participants were urged to be honest or polite or were given no special instructions. There were no conditions under which the artists received totally honest feedback about the paintings they cared about. As predicted by the defensibility postulate, participants stonewalled, amassed misleading evidence, and conveyed positive evaluations by implications. They also told some outright lies. But the participants also communicated clearly their relative degrees of liking for the different special paintings. The results provide new answers to the question of why beliefs about other peoples appraisals do not always correspond well with their actual appraisals.

Family Expressiveness and Attachment

This study examines how family expressiveness relates to individuals’ internal working models of attachment relationships. Seventy-two college students completed the Family Expressiveness Questionnaire (FEQ, Halberstadt, 1986) and participated in the Adult Attachment Interview (AAI, George, Kaplan, & Main, 1985). When the young adults’ attachment interviews were coded using the attachment Q-sort (Kobak, Cole, Ferenz-Gillies, Fleming, & Gamble, 1993), dismissing attachment and preoccupation with attachment were associated with family expressiveness. When total family expressiveness was categorized by type of affect (positive and negative) and power relation (dominance and submission), low levels of family expressiveness were related to dismissing attachment. Negative dominance was the only type of family expressiveness that was related to both security/anxiety and deactivation/hyperactivation of attachment. Results are discussed in terms of primary and secondary attachment strategies and distinctions between dominant and submissive negative affect.