Thesis (Ph.D.)--Fairleigh Dickinson University, 2004. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 64-12, Section: B, page: 6339. Chair: Ronald Dumont. Available also in print.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2006. / Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 67-07, Section: B, page: 4154. Adviser: Justin Kruger. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 63-67) Available on microfilm from Pro Quest Information and Learning.

Two studies were conducted to examine the role that information plays on persuading participants to engage in psychotherapy. Study 1 examined the effect of commitment to treatment on the seeking of information about the treatment by psychotherapy clients. This study demonstrated that participants have a preference for seeking positive information about treatment, particularly those who are postdecisional about change. Study 2 presented undergraduate participants with either positive information (one-sided) or combined positive and negative information (two-sided) about treatment. An interaction effect was found such that participants who were contemplating change were more likely to attend treatment after hearing two-sided information than one-sided. Participants who were ready to take action were more likely to attend when they heard one-sided information than when they heard two-sided information. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for the presentation of information in psychotherapy informed consent procedures.

This study examined the best friendships of 40 adolescents with visual impairment. Twenty three best friends of these adolescents also participated in the study. The 63 participants completed a Demographic Form, the Intimate Friendship Scale (Sharabany, 1974), and the Telephone Survey. Ten dyads, who were representative of the study sample, were selected for Personal Interviews. Each of the 40 adolescents with visual impairment and the best friend were similar in gender, ethnicity, grade in school, grades earned in school, and dating experience. Twelve of the best friends also had a disability. On the Intimate Friendship Scale both the adolescents with visual impairment and their best friends rated the dimensions of Frankness/Spontaneity, Giving/Sharing, Trust/Loyalty, and Attachment as being the most salient characteristics in the reported best friendship. Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) tests to examine the effect of gender (male, female), vision status (blind, low vision), and grade group (junior high school, senior high school) yielded significant interaction effects for Frankness/Spontaneity and Trust/Loyalty. The majority of response for where friends spent time together was in the home environment, with the most common activities they reported doing together being hobbies. When talking together both members of the friendship dyad most frequently reported topics around other people and hobbies. Few study participants reported that the visual impairment impacted the activities the friends could do together. The activities that were difficult were ball sports and watching movies. When the 23 best friends reported how their time with another best or close friend was spent, there were few reported differences from how they spent time with the adolescent with visual impairment. Adolescents with visual impairment established reciprocal friendships which had high levels of intimacy and were similar to those of sighted peers. Together the friends engaged in activities typical of nondisabled adolescents. Participants in this study appeared to recognize the limitations of the visual impairment and to adapt interactions appropriately. There were not major differences in the reported friendships of study participants compared to adolescents described in the literature.

<p> This dissertation aims to understand various developmental decision making phenomena associated with turning points in the lives of middle-aged adults. More specifically, the decision processes of persons who lived in pre-war Nazi Germany were studied in relation to their decisions around emigration, based on their memoirs. The source material is from an archive located at Houghton Library, Harvard University, entitled &ldquo;My Life in Germany before and after January 30, 1933,&rdquo; collected in 1939&ndash;40. The study reveals three main reasons given for deciding to emigrate, the loss of employment opportunities, a feeling of moral repugnance for the Nazi regime, and an experience of physical threat. Developmental findings related to the turning point, following Maslow, revealed coping abilities amid an atmosphere of tension, reflecting maintained attainment of adult functioning and a persistent sense of self. Turning point findings supported an extended rather than pinpoint definition of the turning point.</p>

First impressions play a central role in human social interaction. In particular, the face is a rich source of information that perceivers use in making both initial and lasting character judgments. Despite the large and growing body of work demonstrating that these judgments affect outcomes in domains as crucial as elections and criminal sentencing, little remains known about the ontogenetic origins of this consequential aspect of human social cognition. The purpose of this dissertation is to provide a set of early investigations into the development of face-to-trait inferences. Paper 1 demonstrates that, like adults, even children as young as 3-4 years of age provide consistent trait judgments when asked to judge two-dimensional computer-generated face images, suggesting that this general ability is so fundamental as to emerge strongly at the earliest ages tested. Paper 2 shows that this propensity is so deeply ingrained at an early age that similar consensus across the lifespan emerges in response to static faces belonging to adults, children, and even rhesus macaques. Paper 3 investigates the potential consequences of these judgments, showing that face-based character assessments influence attributions of trait-relevant behaviors and even cause children to modulate their own behaviors towards others. The findings of this dissertation clearly illustrate that face-to-trait inference emerges early in development, and is therefore a fundamental element of human social cognition with important consequences throughout the lifespan. / Psychology

Psychologists have documented a panoply of beliefs that are sufficiently skewed towards desirability to arouse our suspicion that people believe things in part because they want them to be true (e.g. “above-average” effects (Alicke & Govorun, 2005; Baker & Emery, 1993; Beer & Hughes, 2010; Dunning, Meyerowitz, & Holzberg, 1989; Svenson, 1981; Williams & Gilovich, 2008), unrealistic optimism (Carver, Scheier, & Segerstrom, 2010; Scheier, Carver, & Bridges, 1994; Sharot, Korn, & Dolan, 2011; Weinstein, 1980), and wishful thinking (Aue, Nusbaum, & Cacioppo, 2011; Babad, 1997; Krizan & Windschitl, 2009; Windschitl, Scherer, Smith, & Rose, 2013)). The ostensible irrationality of these motivated biases poses a deep psychological question: how are such biases generated and maintained by a cognitive system that is presumably designed to accurately track reality? Studies that look at the motivated biases and the biased belief updating that may give rise to them tend to employ rich meaningful stimuli covering different targets of belief that are of every day concern: from your health, intelligence, and attractiveness, to your perfidy, academic performance, marital prognosis and driving ability. The use of such stimuli makes it difficult to account for the prior experience and beliefs relevant to such stimuli that a participant brings to the study as well as inadvertently reinforcing a view that motivated biases emerge through rumination upon specific and relatively sophisticated belief content (Lieberman, Ochsner, Gilbert, & Schacter, 2001). In this dissertation we changed this methodological emphasis. Over the course of the first three experiments, we demonstrate wishful thinking in a semantically sparse, repeated decision-making task about which participants can have no prior expectations, where the components of the task have no personal relevance beyond the experiment, and where they will be required to update their belief about the current state of affairs based upon a repeated and varying diet of desirable and undesirable evidence. We then situated this bias in the dual-process framework of judgment and decision-making by manipulating the time participants take to make their judgment in our task (Experiments 4a and 4b), by manipulating participants' cognitive load (Experiment 5), and by manipulating participants' thinking style—the weight participants put on the contribution from each type of processing—with an essay writing prime (Experiments 6a and 6b). On the whole, the results show that automatic processes alone are sufficient for wishful thinking. Though controlled, Type 2 processing inhibits the bias when induced to play a role, it does not typically contribute to the bias, either antagonistically or complementarily, absent such an inducement. Far from being an occasional, effortful rationalization that thrives on evidential complexity and uncertain costs, the wishful thinking bias we engendered is a simple, biased, belief updating process that operates automatically and beneath our awareness. / Psychology

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