The frame-of-reference (FOR) effect refers to the finding that validities for personality measures can be improved by asking respondents to consider how they behave in a particular context (e.g., "at work"). Recently, Lievens, De Corte, and Schollaert (2008) demonstrated that a FOR serves to reduce within-person inconsistencies in responding, which then improves the reliability and validity of personality measures. Despite this important step forward in FOR research, Lievens et al. note that there is still very little known with regard to how respondents complete non-contextualized personality inventories (i.e., inventories where no FOR is provided). The present studies sought to fill this significant gap in the literature by addressing the question: Do people think of themselves in particular situations or contexts when responding to non-contextualized personality inventories and, if so, what are these contexts? In addition, does the use of context vary by the personality dimension being studied? Two studies were conducted in order to fully address these Research Questions. The first of these studies was a qualitative study which examined the number and types of contexts spontaneously generated by test-takers for non-contextualized personality items. Twenty-eight interviews were conducted with college students who held a variety of life roles (e.g., student, employee, parent, spouse). Interview data demonstrated that participants considered themselves in general, at school, at work, with friends, with family, at home, and in other more specific situations (e.g., driving a car) when responding to non-contextualized inventories. Data for Study 2 were collected from 463 college students using a self-report methodology that asked participants to indicate which FORs they were using in responding to the same non-contextualized inventory used in Study 1. Results indicated significant differences in FOR endorsement across factors, such that participants endorsed the highest number of FORs for agreeableness items and the lowest number of FORs for openness to experience items. In addition, there were significant differences in the use of FORs within factors such that, for example, the "With Family" FOR was used most frequently for agreeableness but the "At School" FOR was used most frequently for openness to experience. Finally, results of Study 2 indicated that while the using more FORs in responding may increase error variances, it does not have a substantial impact on the factor structure of the Big 5. The present studies contribute to the literature by being the first to examine the role that situations play in responding to a non-contextualized inventory, and they do so using both qualitative and quantitative methods. In addition, the present studies represent a person-centric approach to the study of I/O psychology in that they focus on the individual experience as the basis for research.

The present study focused upon both behavioral and cognitive aspects of sympathetic responses in preschool children. Subjects, 36 boys and girls aged 33-75 months, were seen at their regular day care center. An attempt was made to promote comforting behavior through the use of a peer model both alone and accompanied by an adult's inductive statement regarding the consequences of a sympathetic response; a six year-old girl served as the sympathetic model and as an apparently injured victim in need of comforting. In addition, age- and sex-related relationships for the measures of social cognition, affective perspective-taking and knowledge of strategies for intervening when another person's plight invites sympathetic concern, were examined. The former measure employed a commonly used task presenting children with picture stories in which a target character's facial expression is not congruent with information provided by the story situation. Such stimuli have been thought to assess the ability to assume the emotional point of view of a particular person (empathic judgment), as opposed to the egocentric projection of one's own perspective onto another (projective judgment). Capacities for recognizing and explaining situationally consistent emotions (social comprehension and explanation of affect) and explaining the incongruent facial and situational cues (awareness of discrepancy) were also evaluated. The psychometric properties of these measures were a major concern; consequently, internal consistency reliability as well as age- and sex-related differences among item means, which were presumed to reflect differences in item difficulty, were examined for each component of both measures. Finally, relationships among all measures were examined.

The purpose of the present study was to determine what, if any, relationship existed between the correspondence of perceptions between superior-subordinate work dyads and the superior's rating of the subordinate's work performance.

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Schizophrenia (SCZ) is associated with robust social deficits, which have been shown to precede illness onset and predict functional outcome. As a result, social functioning is an important developmental domain affected by SCZ, which likely has a downstream negative impact on other functional abilities, such as interpersonal relationships and vocational capacity. Patients with SCZ also demonstrate significant visual perceptual deficits; however, a remaining question is whether basic impairment in visual processing gives rise to the deficits observed in social perception. In this context, previous research has shown that biological motion contains relevant social information, such as emotional states and intention, which is easily interpreted by healthy observers. Given that biological motion perception is an important source of social information, and that patients with SCZ have known visual perceptual impairment including motion processing deficits, it is possible that poor biological motion perception meaningfully impacts social perception among individuals with SCZ. While previous studies have documented preliminary evidence of biological motion processing deficits in this population, there is a current lack of understanding regarding the basic visual perceptual mechanisms that may underpin this impairment, including the importance of basic visual motion processing with respect to biological motion. Moreover, the ability of individuals with SCZ to extract relevant social information from biological motion, and its relationship with social perception more generally, have yet to be investigated. Thus, the specific aims guiding the current thesis were to examine whether basic visual motion processes may give rise to biological motion deficits and to examine the ability of individuals with SCZ to extract social information, in the form of emotion, from biological motion. Several experimental tasks were used to examine these aims. Overall, the results from this thesis confirm that individuals with SCZ have difficulty perceiving biological motion; however, this deficit was not specific to biological motion, but instead reflected more widespread visual motion processing deficits, including impairment in global coherent motion perception. Additionally, results from this thesis suggest that individuals with SCZ demonstrated disproportionate difficulty extracting social cues, in the form of emotion, from biological motion, and that this deficit was related to perceiving unambiguous expressions of emotion. In contrast, the discrimination of more subtle or ambiguous emotion was relatively preserved. Moreover, impairment in biological motion processing was found to be unrelated to social perceptual abilities among individuals with SCZ. These experiments provide interesting suggestions regarding clinical approaches to treatment and remediation, although further research is needed to fully understand the brain- behaviour mechanisms underlying SCZ-related deficits in biological motion processing. / Dissertation / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / As people navigate though day-to-day life, they encounter many objects in the world that move, such as other people. Research has shown that humans are adept at discriminating human movement and accurate in discerning the emotional states of other people based on this movement. These observations have lead researchers to speculate that, because biological motion is both easy to discriminate and emotionally informative, it plays an essential role in social processing among humans. Research has shown that individuals with Schizophrenia have difficulty understanding social environmental cues, such as the emotions of others. As such, this thesis aims to determine first, whether people with Schizophrenia have difficulty identifying human motion, and second, if they are able to identify emotions embedded within human motion. This thesis will help researchers understand and explain deficits in social perception among people with Schizophrenia.

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