Kenneth L. Dion

Gender and Cultural Adaptation in Immigrant Families

The study of immigration and immigrants’ experiences benefits from examining the contribution of gender. In this article, we focus on the importance of gender for understanding different aspects of family functioning. Conditions associated with immigration and settlement in the receiving society may challenge expectations about gender-related roles, resulting in the renegotiation of these roles in immigrant families. Also, there is evidence of different socialization demands on daughters compared to sons in immigrant families, a difference that has potential implications not only for parent-child relationships, but also for the development of ethnocultural identity among adolescents and young adults.

Racial Prejudice and Stereotype Activation

The main goal of the present study was to investigate the interrelationships among preudice and the endorsement and activation of cultural stereotypes. The endorsement of stereotypes was examined using an attribution estimate measure. Stereotype activation was examined using a pronunciation task with short and long stimulus onset asynchronies (300 ms and 2000 ms) to induce automatic and controlled processing. As expected, high prejudiced participants endorsed cultural stereotypes to a greater extent than low prejudiced participants. Furthermore, for high prejudiced participants, Black category labels facilitated stereo-type activation under automatic and controlled processing conditions. For low prejudiced participants, no evidence of differential activation was found for stereotypes relative to non-stereotypes as a function of category labels under either processing condition. In addition, stereotype activation was correlated with individual differences in stereotype endorsement.

The Structure of Group Cohesion

Group cohesion is an important construct in understanding the behavior of groups. However, there has been ongoing controversy on how to define and measure this construct. Central to this debate is the structure of cohesion. The authors critically review the literature on unidimensional and multidimensional models of cohesion and describe cohesion as a multidimensional construct with primary and secondary dimensions. Primary dimensions are applicable to describing the cohesiveness of all or most types of groups, whereas secondary dimensions are applicable to describing the cohesiveness of specific types of groups. Viewing group cohesion as consisting of primary and secondary dimensions is discussed.

Women's reactions to discrimination from members of the same or opposite sex

Abstract The effects upon womens self-evaluations of experiencing varying severity of failure in interpersonal competition against male vs. female opponents were explored. The results supported the hypothesis that self-esteem in women is more vulnerable to interpersonal rejection from men as opposed to other women. Specifically, subjects reported lower self-esteem when severe failure was due to the actions of alleged, male opponents rather than female ones. Also, severe failure elicited less favorable self-evaluations than mild failure only when the female subjects confronted male opponents. Finally, contrary to a defensive self-presentation hypothesis, subjects did not respond to discrimination from men by presenting themselves as being discrepant from the stereotype of women. Instead, subjects who interpreted their failure as reflecting prejudice on the part of men evaluated themselves more favorably on positive traits underlying the female stereotype.

Social-psychological correlates of experienced discrimination: Test of the double jeopardy hypothesis

Abstract Social-psychological correlates of the experience of discrimination, such as stress, self-esteem, and ingroup attitudes, were explored in a survey questionnaire study involving 90 Chinese students at the University of Toronto. Reported experience of discrimination was found to be related to heightened stress and more positive attitudes towards the Chinese group. Self-esteem was a function of both the respondents sex and the experience of discrimination: that is, of those who had reportedly confronted discrimination, women exhibited lower self-esteem than did men. These findings generally support prior research concerning the social psychological effects of discrimination. Perhaps most important, the finding that, of those who indicated having experienced discrimination, Chinese women reported lower self-esteem than Chinese men supports the double jeopardy hypothesis. According to the double jeopardy hypothesis, the self-esteem of women from visible minority groups, such as the Chinese, may be especially vulnerable to the experience of discrimination by the majority group. There is some weak evidence to suggest that men from such groups, on the other hand, may show slightly higher self-esteem in response to experiencing discrimination.

Social Identity and Affect as Determinants of Collective Action - toward an Integration of Relative Deprivation and Social Identity Theories

The goal of this paper is to compare and contrast relative deprivation and social identity theories in an attempt to form an integrative model of social comparison. The model posits that, depending on the determinants of salience, people come to categorize themselves as individuals or group members. When personal or group self-identities are salient, individuals engage in intragroup or intergroup comparisons respectively. Negative outcomes from these comparisons result in negative social identities. These personal or group self-identities, in combination with perceptions of the position as illegitimate, are hypothesized to result in feelings of personal and group relative deprivation (RD) respectively. Depending on their feelings of RD, individuals adopt individual or collective actions to change their status. When personal RD is experienced, individuals will first attempt normative individual actions to change their status. If these attempts fail, non-normative individual action strategies will be adopted. When group RD is experienced, individuals will initially attempt non-normative collective actions to change their status. If these type of actions fail, individuals will attempt normative collective actions.

Narcissism and Adult Attachment: A Multivariate Approach

The primary purpose of this study was to examine the relationship between maladaptive narcissism, attachment anxiety, and attachment avoidance. The secondary objective of the present research was to explore further the differences between overt and covert forms of narcissistic vulnerability. Female participants (N = 171) completed measures of adult attachment, overt narcissism, and covert narcissism. Canonical correlation analysis (CCA) explored the multivariate relationship between overt and covert narcissism, on one hand, and adult attachment dimensions of anxiety and avoidance, on the other hand. CCA indicated the two linear combinations of variables overlapped significantly and shared about a quarter of their variance in common. The most important variable within the narcissism set was covert narcissism; and within the adult attachment set, both anxiety and avoidance were important, but the former more than the latter. The implications of the present findings are discussed in the context of past and future research on personality, attachment, and the experience of emotions.

The experience of being a victim of prejudice: An experimental approach

Abstract Most research on prejudice has followed the unidirectional orientation of investigating why majority-group members become prejudiced toward minorities without considering the effects of prejudice and discrimination upon its victims, the members of minority and subordinate groups. Taking a bidirectional perspective, it is argued that comprehending prejudice will also require knowing how minority members respond to prejudice and defend themselves against it. Various methods for exploring the phenomenon of prejudice from the perspective of the minority member are surveyed. In particular, a recently devised technique for experimentally manipulating perceived prejudice and assessing its psychological consequences is presented along with the findings from several studies using members of different minority groups as subjects. After considering the impact of perceived prejudice upon stereotypic self-evaluations, self-esteem, and affect, some directions for further research into the “victimology” of prej...

Stereotyping Physical Attractiveness: A Sociocultural Perspective

Why does stereotyping based on physical attractiveness occur? We proposed a sociocultural hypothesis that physical attractiveness is less likely to be a salient evaluative cue in cultural contexts where collectivism, rather than individualism, is the basis for the dominant system of values. In collectivist cultures, the group rather than the individual is stressed, suggesting that social judgments, such as first impressions of others, are more likely to be based on group-related attributes (e.g., family, position in a social network), rather than personal or individuating elements, such as physical attractiveness. From this perspective, we predicted that individuals of Chinese ethnicity, who were mostly from Asian Pacific Rim countries and cities and were attending university in Canada, would be less prone to physical attractiveness stereotyping if they reported high involvement in Torontos Chinese community, rather than low involvement. We suggested that high Chinese community involvement would reinforce and maintain a more collectivist value orientation, which should reduce the likelihood of stereotyping of own-group members based on physical attractiveness for the reasons discussed above. To test this hypothesis, subjects were asked to complete a measure of participation in various aspects of the Chinese community and to rate the personality traits and expected life outcomes of stimulus persons who varied in physical attractiveness. Our sociocultural hypothesis was supported in the case of personality trait ratings (the principal measure in attractiveness stereotyping research), but not on expected life outcome ratings. Implications of these findings for understanding attractiveness stereotyping are discussed.

Breaking up is Hard to do, Especially for Strongly “Preoccupied” Lovers

Abstract Is a relationship breakup harder on certain people? To address this question, the present study investigated the relationship of individuals’ attachment styles to various reported aspects of a relationships dissolution: initiation of the breakup, emotional reactions to the breakup, reasons for the breakup, and experiences and perceptions following the breakup. One hundred nineteen undergraduates completed an extensive questionnaire concerning a past romantic relationship that had broken up. Feeney, Noller, and Hanrahans (1994) Attachment Style Questionnaire (ASQ) provided continous measures for five attachment styles or “attitudes”: confidence, discomfort with closeness, need for approval, preoccupation with relationships, and relationships as secondary. Principal-components analyses served to derive criterion indexes from the breakup questionnarie measures, which were individually regressed on the five ASQ scales. As predicted form attachment theory, respondents scoring high on preoccupation with relationships (reflcting anxious/ambivalent attachment) showed distinctive responses to the relationship breakup, in contrast to those scoring high on other attachment styles. Specifically, those strongly preoccupied with relationships reported (a) that their partner was unhappy in the relationship and had initiated the breakup, (b) having experienced difficulty adjusting to the breakup and felling it had been a mistake, and (c) more negative emotion and less positive emotion following the breakup. Implications of these findings are discussed