S. Adil Saribay

Relational to Collective: Significant-Other Representations, Ethnic Categories, and Intergroup Perceptions

Social perception is known to be affected by the social-cognitive process of transference—that is, by a new person bearing a minimal resemblance to a significant other, which activates the significant-other representation and indirectly the relational self. We examined relational processes in social identity and intergroup bias in two studies testing the dual hypothesis—that activating a significant-other representation in transference activates the significant others ethnic category, which is then applied to the new person, and that under this circumstance the participants own ethnic identity should also be activated as the relational self is activated, particularly if the participant shares the significant others ethnicity. This should lead to shifts in intergroup bias as moderated by the ethnic diversity of the significant others own social network. The evidence largely supports this, revealing the interplay of relational and collective levels of self.

Are Past Relationships at the Heart of Attachment Dynamics? What Love Has to Do With It

The ways in which a sense of attachment security can be primed and the consequences that follow from this for self-, interpersonal, and intergroup perception are the subject of this insightful target article (Mikulincer & Shaver, 2007). The model and research supporting it move well beyond early trait-like conceptions of attachment styles to conceiving them as malleable and context-dependent. They do so by making extensive use of the models and methods of social cognition to explore the manner in which a sense of security can be evoked consciously or unconsciously through “security priming.” Such representations offer the person an “inner resource” that, when used, results in various positive outcomes ranging from the intrapersonal to the interpersonal and the intergroup. The work is timely given the ever-increasing interest in the field in understanding the links between these levels of analysis and also of special value given the still limited research on these precise linkages. Within each level, the reviewed research points to potential mechanisms through which a wide variety of positive outcomes may arise based on security priming and suggests broader, long-term effects beyond the immediate situation. Intrapersonally, security priming appears to make individuals more open to learning about their weaknesses, as they rely less on defensive mechanisms to establish or maintain their sense of self-worth. This should contribute; the authors argue, to increased competence, to stable, non-defensive high self-esteem, to self-actualization, and to more authenticity. While these predictions remain to be tested in longitudinal or mini-longitudinal work, they are provocative. The authors also assume that security priming evokes positive affect, and may thus contribute to improved mental health over time. Interpersonally, security priming promotes “pro-relational behaviors,” apparently primarily by influencing expectations about relationship partners. This should contribute to forming lasting positive relationships, to increased compassion, prosocial values, and helping behavior (by decreasing personal distress and allowing attention to others’ distress). It should also lead to stronger bonds with fellow human beings. At the intergroup level, security priming reduces intergroup bias via an appraisal of the outgroup as less threatening, realistically and symbolically, and by reducing anxiety. This should contribute to more positive intergroup behavior, the authors argue, and even to more peaceful relations societally and on the international stage. In addition to these claims, the evidence shows that the security priming effects observed cannot simply be reduced to the priming of a positive concept. Security priming does increase positive evaluation of neutral stimuli, but does so in both neutral and stressful contexts, whereas positive concept priming (not attachment-related) increases positive evaluation only in the absence of stress. Moreover, even though positive affect or mood arises in consciousness based on security priming, it does not appear to mediate the observed effects. Instead, security priming seems to work primarily by reducing threat appraisal and by facilitating effective regulation of distress in the face of threat, strengthening people’s sense of efficacy that threats can be overcome, that security will not be compromised. Indeed, even when an individual believes his/her ingroup has been insulted by an outgroup member, security priming still reduces intergroup bias. The process may thus be robust and nonredundant with other effects. Part of the authors’ theoretical argument is that experiences with available, supportive attachment figures lead to a “reservoir of core cognitive representations” relevant to security which can then become accessible via security priming. The authors have conceptualized these core representations mostly as generalized knowledge. In our work, we have emphasized specific dyadic relationships. That is, we argue that any kind of felt security or comfort is necessarily grounded in specific relationships and is thus linked in memory to distinct significant-other representations. We highlight below how our own model is theoretically relevant to the authors’ point of view on attachment-related phenomena and a sense of security, and emphasize our view that it is mainly the love one feels (or once felt) for a significant other – and the love received in return – that matters.

Justify your alpha

In response to recommendations to redefine statistical significance to P ≤ 0.005, we propose that researchers should transparently report and justify all choices they make when designing a study, including the alpha level.

Social psychological processes linking personality to physical health: A multilevel analysis with emphasis on hostility and optimism

F. Rhodewalt, Personality and Social Behavior: An Overview. D. Cervone, T.L. Caldwell, H. Orom, Beyond Person and Situation Effects: Intraindividual Personality Architecture and Its Implications for the Study of Personality and Social Behavior. F. Rhodewalt, B. Peterson, The Self and Social Behavior: The Fragile Self and Interpersonal Self-regulation. S.M. Andersen, S.A. Saribay, C.S. Kooij, Contextual Variability in Personality: The Case of the Relational Self and the Process of Transference. W.S. Rholes, R.L. Paetzold, M. Friedman, Ties That Bind: Linking Personality to Interpersonal Behavior Through the Study of Adult Attachment Style and Relationship Satisfaction. G. Downey, J. Zaki, J. Mitchell, Different Toolkits for Different Mind-readers: A Social-Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective on Personality and Social Relationships. M. Hogg, Personality, Individuality, and Social Identity. M.M. Chemers, Leadership as Dynamic Social Process. P.G. Devine, F. Rhodewalt, M. Siemionko, Personality and Prejudice in Interracial Interactions. B.N. Uchino, A.A. Vaughn, S. Matwin, Social Psychological Processes Linking Personality to Physical Health: A Multilevel Analysis With Emphasis on Hostility and Optimism.

Thinking integratively about social psychology: The example of the relational self and the social-cognitive process of transference

Cultural evolutionary theory, like other evolutionary theories, links individual-level and population or society-level phenomena. It provides numerous bridges between social psychology and other disciplines and sub-disciplines. The theory uses mathematical models to understand the population-level consequences of the individual-level processes of individual and social learning. The theory has been used to explain group-level behavior such as cooperation, altruism, and the cross-cultural variation associated with social institutions. The empirical study of social psychological assumptions of such models and experimental tests of cultural-evolutionary hypotheses are in their infancy.Increasingly in recent years, social psychologists have come to appreciate the role that language plays in social life. For the discipline, the consequences of this developing awareness have been salutary. Language is critically implicated in many of the core phenomena social psychologists study (e.g., causal attribution, social identity, status and intimacy, and interpersonal relations, to list but a few), and taking the role of language into account has greatly enhanced our understanding of them. Moreover, because stimulus and response in social psychology are so often verbal in form, many fundamental questions of methodology turn on issues that are implicitly linguistic. When social psychologists have considered language, they typically have focused on the semantic–pragmatic levels of linguistic analysis. Much less attention has been paid to the system of sound production that allows semantic representations to be transformed into the perceptually accessible form we call speech. This is unfortunate for many reasons, not the least of which is that speech, in addition to its semantic content, contains information that bears directly on phenomena that are the concern of social psychological theory. It is useful to distinguish between two related areas of investigation that involve speech processing: research on speech perception and speaker perception. Speech perception research studies the process by which listeners extract linguistically significant information from highly variable acoustic input. The process is complicated by the fact that spoken language is both highly variable

Political orientations, ideological self-categorizations, party preferences, and moral foundations of young Turkish voters

ABSTRACT Political ideology is often characterized along a liberal–conservative continuum in the United States and the left–right continuum in Europe. However, no study has examined what this characterization means to young Turkish voters or whether it predicts their approach to morality. In Study 1, we investigated in two separate samples the relation between young Turkish participants’ responses to the one-item left-to-right political orientation question and their self-reported political ideologies (conservative, socialist, etc.). In Study 2, we investigated the relation of moral dimensions as defined by Moral Foundations Theory to political party affiliation and political ideology. Results revealed that CHP, MHP, and AKP voters display a typical right-wing profile distinct from HDP voters. Findings regarding political ideology measures were consistent with party affiliations. Taken together, the findings reveal the distinctive nature of young Turkish people’s political orientations while supporting the predictive power of the one-item political orientation question.

Lower Levels of Resistance to Change (but not Opposition to Equality) Is Related to Analytic Cognitive Style

In recent years, there has been increasing research attention to cognitive style differences between liberals and conservatives. While some studies have found a negative relation between conservatism and analytic thinking tendency, others have not observed such a relation. None of these studies has measured the core motives underlying conservative ideology and investigated their relation with analytic cognitive style (ACS). We predicted that ACS is related to only one of the core motives underlying conservatism (resistance to change), but not the other (opposition to equality). This hypothesis was supported in three non-Western samples (total n = 1,552). This finding may clarify why some studies found a relation between cognitive style and conservatism, while others did not.

The Bogazici face database : Standardized photographs of Turkish faces with supporting materials

Many sets of human facial photographs produced in Western cultures are available for scientific research. We report here on the development of a face database of Turkish undergraduate student targets. High-resolution standardized photographs were taken and supported by the following materials: (a) basic demographic and appearance-related information, (b) two types of landmark configurations (for Webmorph and geometric morphometrics (GM)), (c) facial width-to-height ratio (fWHR) measurement, (d) information on photography parameters, (e) perceptual norms provided by raters. We also provide various analyses and visualizations of facial variation based on rating norms using GM. Finally, we found that there is sexual dimorphism in fWHR in our sample but that this is accounted for by body mass index. We present the pattern of associations between rating norms, GM and fWHR measurements. The database and supporting materials are freely available for scientific research purposes.

Stereotype activation and self-regulation by conservatives and liberals in political encounters

ABSTRACT We examined stereotyping and its effect on self-regulation in preparation for inter-ideological interactions. Turkish conservative and liberal students anticipated interacting with a political outgroup (vs. ingroup) member and the accessibility of outgroup and ingroup stereotypes was measured. Conservatives in both outgroup and ingroup interaction conditions showed higher accessibility for outgroup stereotypes. Liberals, however, showed lower accessibility for both outgroup and ingroup stereotypes in both conditions. Liberals’ suppression of stereotypes about the anticipated partner led to worse self-regulation when the anticipated partner was conservative but better self-regulation when the partner was liberal. Conservatives’ stereotype accessibility did not affect their self-regulation. These findings show that liberals may tend to rely on self-regulatory resources to suppress their stereotypes while anticipating inter-ideological interactions, while conservatives rely on stereotypes to navigate such interactions.

Moral foundations explain unique variance in political ideology beyond resistance to change and opposition to equality

Moral foundations theory (MFT), while inspiring much empirical work, has been the target of both methodological and theoretical criticism. One important criticism of MFT is that, in its attempt to explain variability in political ideology, it only repackages the core motives (resistance to change and opposition to equality) and does not actually provide additional explanatory potential. Indeed, some previous studies show that moral foundations do not explain variability in ideology beyond other relevant variables, and that the relation between moral foundations and political orientation is mediated by other ideological variables. In the present research, we examined whether moral foundations can explain variability beyond the core motives in samples from Turkey and the United States. Contrary to some previous findings, we found that moral foundations explain unique variance in general, social, and economic conservatism. These findings suggest that the moral foundations proposed by MFT cannot be reduced to other variables that have been used in the literature to measure ideological proclivities.