Processing fluency describes the assessment of how easy a stimulus is to cognitively process, an assessment which can be mistakenly applied to judgments of other aspects of the stimulus. This dissertation introduces a novel approach to understanding the development of impressions from online profiles by incorporating the role of processing fluency in interpersonal judgments based on a social networking profile. 195 participants (155 females) were asked to view the "about me" section of a social networking profile, which had been manipulated according to one of three fluency conditions to be harder or easier to process. Participants completed scales assessing liking, similarity, trust, and compatibility, and their disclosure was measured in an open-response item. Confirming expectations based on the processing fluency literature, each of these variables was increased in the high fluency profile condition. No differences in these variables were found between the low fluency conditions and a control condition, and analysis revealed that the manipulations intended to lower fluency may have been too salient to participants. Broadly, this study shows that processing fluency can influence impression formation from online profiles across a number of meaningful relational variables. Enhancing processing ease may allow online interactants a relational "jump-start," increasing liking, perceptions of similarity, trust, compatibility, and disclosure. These findings hold important implications for the role of processing fluency in computer-mediated communication and for models of online relationship development. / text

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The purpose of this study was to test a theoretical model that explains how interpersonal trust develops from interactions in personal relationships. The sample consisted of 311 individuals who were randomly recruited with their dating partners for a longitudinal study on dating relationships. Using interdependence theory as a framework, I tested a model of how trust develops from behaviors and attributions in handling situations of conflicting needs, wants, and desires. This model also examined both the direct and indirect effects of two background characteristics, adult attachment style and parental divorce, on beliefs of trust. The model explored whether attributions partially mediated the direct relationship between the background characteristics and trust. Lastly, multiple group analyses explored whether gender and two developmental factors, stage of relationship involvement and developmental change in relationship involvement, moderated the simultaneous relationships among the predictor variables and trust. The analyses testing my model of the development of trust examined two separate outcomes: trust in partners' benevolence and trust in partners' honesty. The results from the path analyses revealed that the data fit the model for trust in partners' benevolence well enough for the importance of the predictors to be interpreted, but did not fit the model for trust in partners' honesty. The findings showed that in the overall model of trust in partners' benevolence, partners' voice and individuals' attributions were significant predictors of trust. The findings for the multiple group comparisons further revealed that the model was not significantly modified by stage of relationship involvement, developmental change in relationship involvement, or gender. A few marginal findings, however, suggest areas for future research.

In this study I explored the intrapersonal and interpersonal differences among individuals who maintained higher levels of hope for their personal future, with lower hope peers who similarly were experiencing challenging and uncertain circumstances. I administered self-report measures of hope and social connectedness to 76 American young adults aged between 18 and 22 years, in order to sample purposively participants who exemplified higher and lower levels of hope. I used qualitative data from semistructured interviews with 13 individuals recruited from three field sites to develop the current model of hope, then tested the model against an additional three individuals from a separate field site, who had scored highly on hope, in order to establish its generalizability. Total interview time with each of the original 13 participants lasted between two and four hours and I coded the resulting transcription data from audio taped discussions for categories and main themes according to grounded theory guidelines. The emergent model of hope comprised five themes, namely: 1) The Initiating Context: Perceptions of challenge and uncertainty; 2) Temporal Comparisons: Envisioning the future, being realistic about the present, learning from the past; 3) Developing Strategies: Values, goals, planning, and action; 4) Drawing on personal and social resources; 5) Openness and flexibility about outcomes. These data suggested that the higher hope participants differed from their lower hope peers with respect to their relationship with change, difficulty, and uncertainty. The higher hope young adults engaged in a process of hoping that relied on an overall positive orientation toward life. This combination of process and orientation better enabled them to take action, exert control, and regulate the fear experienced when faced with ambiguous outcomes associated with personally important and difficult circumstances. I compared and contrasted this new, inductively-derived model of hope with current conceptualizations from the psychological, philosophical, and nursing literatures on hope, and discussed its theoretical and practical implications. / text

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It is generally accepted that effective leadership is an essential element of positive social change in any institution. It also seems evident that no society can continue to grow and develop without it and that no institution can thrive where it is unavailable. However, these statements raise a number of questions such as: • Whose perceptions of effective leadership is applicable here – the perceptions of those in leadership positions themselves, or the perceptions of others? • What is likely to happen in the case of conflicting perceptions of leadership effectiveness? This study explores this issue by focusing on the relationship between self-ratings and otherratings of managerial leadership within a particular context, namely a South African higher education institution that is in the throes of a radical merging process and on the prevalence of self-perception accuracy amongst the managers of that institution.

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published_or_final_version / abstract / toc / Clinical Psychology / Master / Master of Social Sciences