R. Michael Latta

Relation of Status Incongruence to Personal Space

The relation of status incongruence to personal space was investigated. Status incongruence was defined by age differences between the subject and a variety of targets, and personal space was defined as the magnitude of interpersonal distance a subject maintained between himself/herself and a target of a given age. Status incongruence was found to influence the amount of personal space in two experiments (n = 30 and n = 96). This relation of status incongruence to personal space was not found to vary with subject gender.

There's Method in Our Madness: Interpersonal Attraction as a Multidimensional Construct.

Abstract The convergent validity and number of dimensions common to six measures of interpersonal attraction (three verbal and three nonverbal) were explored in this investigation. Convergent validity was found within verbal and nonverbal modes of measurement, but not between modes. No general factor was found to be common to the six measures of attraction. It was, therefore, concluded that method bias influences experimental results, threatening the comparability of results from research programs using different modes of measuring attraction. The results also question the assumption that social attitudes, such as attraction, are closely related to behavior, and imply that predictions derived from theories based on different modes of measuring attraction will have unequal utility.

Interactive Effects of Initial Achievement Orientation and Prior Success Feedback on the Mastery of Subsequent Difficult and Easy Tasks

This study investigated the effects of initial achievement orientation and prior success feedback on the rate of mastery of subsequent easy and difficult tasks. Eighty male introductory psychology students (40 high in initial achievement orientation and 40 low) were administered six trials of a digit-symbol substitution task on which they received either success feedback or no feedback. All participants then learned an easy or difficult list of paired-associates with no feedback about performance given. Results indicate success facilitates digit-symbol performance in general, but slightly more so for participants initially low in achievement orientation. The transfer effects of prior success feedback indicated a disordinal Trait by Treatment by Task Difficulty interaction. Here, prior success feedback has: 1) no effect on rate of mastery of a subsequent easy task, 2) a positive transfer effect on rate of mastery of a subsequent difficult task for participants initially high in achievement orientation, and 3) a negative transfer effect on rate of mastery of a subsequent difficult task for participants initially low in achievement orientation.

Hope of Success and Fear of Failure Components of Mehrabian's Scales of Resultant Achievement Motivation.

Abstract This report is concerned with the factor structure and psychometric properties of the nonprojective Male and Female scales of Resultant Achievement Motivation (RAM) developed by Mehrabian ( Educational and Psychological Measurement , 1968, 28 , 493–503). The 26-item self-report scales along with Mandler and Sarasons ( Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology , 1952 , 47 , 166–173) Test Anxiety Questionnaire (TAQ) were administered to 237 males and 225 females in Experiment 1. Unrestricted maximum likelihood factor analyses of the RAM scales revealed four primary factors for each version. Since the first two factors from both analyses resembled measures of Hope of Success and Fear of Failure, two strategies for improving the scales were adopted, both of which eliminated the items loading on factors III and IV. One strategy involved adding the indexes of Hope of Success and Fear of Failure, while the other involved finding their difference. Construct validity coefficients were computed for the 26-item full scales, and the RAM measures formed using the above strategies with student grade point average and TAQ scores as the criterion variables. In Experiment 2, the appropriate RAM scale and the TAQ were administered to 30 males and 38 females. Construct validity coefficients were computed in this cross validation sample with the three RAM measures as predictors and with TAQ scores and student achievement in a course in Social/Personality Psychology as the criterion variables. The three RAM measures were used to predict the performance of 16 males who worked at a common laboratory task (anagrams) in Experiment 3. The results of all three experiments indicate the Hope of Success minus Fear of Failure measure to be the best measure of RAM from a theoretical, psychometric, and pragmatic point of view.

Attraction to a Beneficient Victim: Balance Theory or "The Just World"?

When a person suffers and thereby spares another person from having to undergo discomfort, is the victim of suffering liked more when the degree of suffering is mild or intense? Also, is this beneficient victim of suffering liked more when the compensation for suffering is great or small? Balance theory (Heider, 1958) and the notion of a &dquo;just world&dquo; (Lerner, 1965) Make competing predictions about this situation. According to balance theory, we tend to like someone who intentionally benefits. Additionally, the greater the benefit the greater the attraction should be. In general, a beneficient victim should be most liked when he or she suffers greatly in order to spare us discomfort. More specifically, greater attraction should be found for a voluntary victim who receives no compensation compared to one who is compensated since compensation provides external justification for the suffering. The notion of a just world makes completely opposity predictions. According to Lerner, people have a need to believe that the world is just a predictable place where everyone gets what he deserves. In a just worlk, victimization must be accounted for. Lerner has found that an observer accounts for a victim’s suffering by perceiving the victim to be an undeaireable. Lemer (1971) has indicated that when the suffering leads to compensation, the victim should be more attractive than if the victim goes uncompensated. Neither theory offers clear predictions of attractiveness ratings when a person suffers because of chance considerations. According to balanee theory, when fate operates, behavior does not involve personal causation and therefore no inferences about the victim’s attractiveness can be made, regardless of compensation and intensity of suffering. With regard to a need to believe in a just world, the ambiguous conditions of fate would seem to promote a tendency to perceive the victim as being undesireable (and thus, less attractive) in order to account for his or her suggering. However, previous research on the just world (Lerner and Matthews, 1967) found the unwilling victim of fate to be positively evaluated. Lerner labeled this effect &dquo;gratitude&dquo;, even though intentionality was not directly involved. If this effect does result from something like gratitude, it should be attenuated by compensation ; since compensation offers an external incentive to which the suffering may be attributed and thereby removes the opportunity for gratitude to develop. Thus, based on previous findings, a compensated victim of fate is expected to be less attractive than an uncompensated victim of fate.