Two studies explored the associations between media consumption, partner/relationship ideals and beliefs, and relationship satisfaction. Study 1 assessed participants' total television consumption as well as total romance/relationship-oriented and total erotic media consumption. Total television consumption (regardless of content) showed little evidence of cultivating effects on relationship beliefs. However, the more romance/relationship-oriented media participants consumed, the more idealized their partner/relationship ideals, the stronger their belief that mind-reading is expected in a relationship, that disagreement in a relationship is destructive, and that fate brings soul-mates together. For men, a negative relationship between erotic media consumption and relationship satisfaction was mediated by their perception of a discrepancy between their ideal and actual partner/relationship. Study 2 used an experimental design to explore the temporary effects of viewing a popular film that strongly emphasizes the idea that destiny determines relationships. Compared to participants exposed to the control film, those exposed to the manipulation endorsed significantly stronger beliefs in relationship destiny directly after viewing. These findings are an important first step in showing how media messages influence people's relationship attitudes but will need to be replicated and extended.

This dissertation explores the relationship between gays and the family of origin in North America from 1945 to the early 1990s. Using personal correspondences, diaries, published and visual sources, I argue that the family has been a central preoccupation and animating force of gay culture, gay politics, and gay consciousness, and that gays in turn have shaped their parents' sensibilities and ideas of family intimacy. Beginning in the immediate postwar period, as companionate family styles became entrenched, gays and their parents revealed a mutual curiosity and intrigue between family members inherent in postwar family life. As the gay liberation and lesbian feminist movements developed, gays embraced a broad repeal of discretion about the personal and the sexual in their family lives, as well as in their own political and cultural articulations. During the AIDS crisis, however, gays began to esteem a closeness with their families based less on their recognition of sexuality and more on their material acts of care. Throughout, I also trace parents' early activist, advice, and memoir literature of the 1950s and 60s, and the turn to more formal organizations of the 1970s and 80s, most prominently, PFLAG (Parents, Friends, and Families of Lesbians and Gays). The writings of both parents and children chart a unique history of family communication, as it moved from metaphor, code and discretion in the immediate postwar years, to direct revelations and even obligatory "coming outs" by the end of the century. In the process, I show how gay personal lives went from being intensely private, to political, and finally to public. Examining the relationship of family members who considered one another quite consciously over this time period, and who often straddled an uneasy balance between longings and estrangement, I reveal some of the most urgent concerns and tensions within postwar companionate families, including shifting meanings of family care and nurturance, and concepts of intergenerational obligation.

The present project tested a theoretical framework for the deception judgment process. The framework argues that the deception judgment process begins when a perceiver first becomes suspicious of deception. This engages the perceiver to attempt to verify the speaker's claims. If the claims are deemed untrue, in an effort to classify the statement as a lie, the perceiver then examines the speaker's motives. If deemed a lie, the perceiver decides what to do about the deception, often taking into consideration the speaker's motives for lying. Three studies tested this framework. The first study examined the information perceivers used to distinguish lies from non-lies; the second study examined how the various forms of information were utilized and weighed in the deception judgment process; and finally, the third study examined the information processing strategies perceivers used to process deception. Overall, it was found that perceivers used several forms of information (e.g., logical inconsistencies, facts, and motives) when considering and judging deception. However, only facts were used to draw a conclusion regarding a statement's deceptiveness. In terms of processing strategies, support was found for an information-processing ordering effect consistent with the proposed model. Implications and future research are discussed.

As researchers in the social sciences increasingly become interested in gay and lesbian issues and investigate questions pertaining to sexual orientation and nonheterosexual populations, methodological and sociopolitical problems with the conceptualization and measurement of sexual orientation must be addressed. Historical problems with this construct include compelling arguments that an essentialist, categorical conceptualization of sexual orientation is a sociopolitical artifact; that unidimensional and single-domain models are insufficient to capture the complete range of possible sexual expressions; and that the category of bisexuality is often neglected. Current measures of sexual orientation confound sexual orientation with sexual identity or they are impractical to use and difficult to interpret. This dissertation reviews how sexual orientation has been defined as a construct and measured for the purpose of psychological research, while discussing the theoretical and methodological problems that have emerged and proffering solutions to these problems. It proposes a conceptual and operational definition of sexual orientation that incorporates these solutions to past problems, providing a more theoretically sound and methodologically pragmatic approach to the study of sexual orientation issues. The Sexual Orientation Scale, a multidimensional self-report measure of sexual orientation that follows directly from the proposed model for defining that construct, is presented along with data establishing its reliability and validity and recommendations for its future use. The Sexual Orientation Scale comprises separate subscales for thoughts, feelings, and behaviors within sexual and romantic domains. Each subscale comprises two independent dimensions: androphilia (orientation to men) and gynophilia (orientation to women). Subscales may be analyzed separately or combined into grosser measures. The measure was designed to be temporally located in the present and to tap objective frequencies of actual thoughts, feelings, and behaviors; it therefore assesses actual sexual orientation independently of idealized sexual orientation or sexual identity.

This research project has investigated how popular media images of Asian Americans affect Asian Americans' self-concepts, their views on other Asian Americans, and the perceptions of people from other racial groups. The subjects are almost all undergraduate students of from the University of Massachusetts in Amherst and Boston, and they are divided into three racial groups: Asian Americans, blacks and whites. There are 538 students in the survey and 67 students in the focus group interviews (21 groups). Survey findings indicate that the respondents' general perceptions of Asian Americans across different racial groups can best be described as “model minority”: they are quiet, smart and hard-working. There is a major difference between perceptions of Asian American males and females: Asian American females are perceived as sexually appealing, but Asian American males are not. Although the survey has not demonstrated statistically significant and verified media effects, focus groups strongly suggest media influence on the respondents' perceptions of Asian Americans. The notion of media effects is expanded beyond behavior or attitude change. Media effects are evidenced when Asian American respondents reflect on childhood memories in which cartoon images of Asian stereotypes evoked shame, anger and alienation; when Asian American respondents use white beauty standards which are permeating in mass media images to judge themselves and other Asian Americans; and when respondents across racial groups use media images of Asian Americans to validate their impressions of Asian Americans in real-life. The third person effect, that media affect other people but not oneself, is strongly evidenced in the focus groups, arguably one of the first such studies done in a qualitative method. The findings of the study demonstrate strong implications for the need to teach media literacy so that students can learn to critically examine not only what the media messages are about, what they are for, and in whose interests, but also ways of changing the current media to be more open and democratic.

Three experiments integrated insights from achievement goal theory, social identity threat, and stress and coping research, to develop a theory-based strategy individuals can use to navigate social identity threat in high stakes achievement settings. In all experiments women were asked to adopt a mastery goal (focus on learning and building skills) or a performance goal (perform well; avoid errors) before a mock job interview. In Experiment 1, women expected their interviewer to be either sexist (creating identity threatening situation) or not sexist (a non-threatening situation). Women who focused on mastery rather than performance goals felt more challenged and less threatened while anticipating a job interview in an identity threatening situation; goals did not affect their appraisals of a non-threatening interview. Moreover, women who focused on mastery rather than performance intended to be more assertive (Experiment 2) and ultimately performed better in the interview (Experiment 3). Mediational analyses showed that a focus on mastery led women to appraise the identity threatening situation as a challenge they could overcome rather than a threat they were helpless to combat; challenge, in turn, enhanced performance.

Research supports that aggression is one of the best known predictors of future social, psychological, behavioral, and academic problems. Longitudinal studies have demonstrated that aggression through bullying is detrimental for both the aggressor and the victim and is correlated with many negative outcomes including depression and poor school achievement. Recently, scholars have recognized that there are a wide range of bullying behaviors, including physically, overtly, and relationally aggressive behaviors. Relational aggression refers to behaviors that harm others through damage (or threat to damage) to relationships or feelings of acceptance or group inclusion. Most studies of relational aggression have not addressed the social contexts within which children develop, including the context of school. The present study explored the relationship between student reports of the frequency of school-based relational and overt aggression, teacher reports of the frequency of school based relational and overt aggression, and office discipline referral data (used as a measure of school climate). Fifty-eight third, fourth, fifth, and sixth grade students (boys and girls) and nine teachers from a public elementary in Massachusetts school participated in this study. Students completed an anonymous survey about relational and overt victimization and relational and overt witnessing. The teachers of the students also completed an anonymous survey about the frequency with which they witnessed and intervened with relational and overt aggression. Office discipline referral data were collected for one month. Data indicated that students and teachers reported witnessing similar levels of relational aggression. However, teachers reported witnessing more overt aggression than students. In addition, students reported witnessing significantly more relational aggression than overt aggression. Of note, although students reported witnessing significantly more relational aggression, they reported experiencing significantly more overt aggression. Office discipline referrals revealed that students were more often sent to the office for overtly aggressive behaviors than for relationally aggressive behaviors. Survey findings are discussed in light of the school climate data provided by the office discipline referrals. Future research should further investigate the complicated connections between student report, teacher report, and school climate as they relate to bullying and relational aggression, in particular.

In this dissertation, two exemplar-based models of categorization, the General Context Model (GCM) and the Exemplar Based Random Walk model (EBRW), were used to describe between-group categorization differences in artificial and natural language categories. Prior research has shown that political Conservatives in avoidance mode are more exclusive categorizers of natural language category members than Conservatives in approach mode, but this effect was absent for Liberals (Rock & Janoff-Bulman, 2010). In Experiment 1, experimenter-generated stimuli were used to show that the EBRW could account for between-group differences in categorization decisions. In Experiment 2, the data collected by Rock and Janoff-Bulman were used to develop techniques allowing the GCM to account for between-group differences in natural language categorization decisions. Experiment 3 extends these methods to allow the EBRW to account for between-group differences in natural language categorization decisions. Across these experiments, the models identify between-group differences in determining similarity, bias to give an "in-the-category" decision, and the amount of information required to make a categorization decision. Techniques for modeling natural language categorization decisions are discussed.

The purpose of this study was to investigate how attachment style, sexual passion, and love directly and jointly affect the how the HPA-axis responds to relationship conflict. Cortisol measurements were gathered from 198 dating couples while they discussed a relationship issue that has recently been the source of heated debate. Sexual passion was associated with higher levels of cortisol during the conflict for men but not women. In contrast, being in love and being loved more by a partner were linked to lower levels of cortisol during the moment of conflict for both men and women. The hypothesis that cortisol levels during conflict further depend on the interaction between sexual passion, love and a person's attachment style received some support. Females high in sexual passion and attachment anxiety experienced a faster increase in cortisol in anticipation of conflict, and females high in love and avoidance displayed a slower increase in cortisol during conflict. The discussion also focuses on the role that cortisol appears to play in conflict related attachment processes.

Relationship marketing is emerging as a major theme in the marketing literature. Its central focus is the establishment, development, and maintenance of relationships between exchange partners (Morgan and Hunt 1994). The relationship definition of marketing states that the goal of "marketing is to establish, maintain, enhance, and commercialize customer relationships so that the objectives of the parties involved are met" (Gronroos, 1990). It is believed that good quality relationships improve the chance that relationships continue (Crosby, Evans and Cowles, 1990). This study investigates the antecedents of good relationships and the role relationship quality plays in determining whether relationships will continue. It also examines the determinants of relationship importance and its effect on the likelihood of continued interaction. Three major research questions are posed: In what types of buying situations are relationships important to the customer? What determines the quality of buyer seller relationships? and Is the role of relationship quality in determining the likelihood of continued interaction moderated by the importance of the relationship between buyer and seller? Using constructs from existing literature, a model is developed to address these questions. A mail survey instrument measures each of the constructs in the model and is sent to buyers and purchasing agents in industrial firms. This study provides many interesting results. Inherent risk factors, such as financial risk and termination costs, are the most influential determinants of relationship importance, while additional situational measures may be needed. In terms of relationship quality, a number of factors are significant determinants, some attributed to the characteristics of the salesperson and others attributed to the relationship itself. The likelihood of continued interaction is strongly influenced by relationship quality and enhanced by the addition of relationship importance. These results in terms of marketing theory suggest that relationship importance should be included in models that investigate relationship quality and that there are many dimensions of relationships that influence whether relationships continue. For managers, these results suggest the salesperson's ability to develop and maintain strong customer relationships improves the chance that relationships continue. Relationship importance also influences the appropriateness of relationship marketing strategies.