A central goal of group-based psychotherapy is for participants to gain insight into how they perceive others and how others perceive them. However, such interpersonal perceptions are challenging to study because any given perception could be a function of the perceiver (some people see everyone as friendly), the target (some people are seen as friendly by everyone), or both. The present article provides an introduction and brief tutorial for how the social relations model (SRM) can be applied to studying such interpersonal perceptions within psychotherapy groups. The SRM is a theoretical and statistical model for understanding the possible sources of dyadic perceptions and behaviors. Specifically, any interpersonal perception within a group can be partitioned into variance due to the person making the rating (perceiver effect), the target of the rating (target effect), the relationship between perceiver and target (relationship effect), and the group as a whole. Research on group psychotherapy is especially amenable to a SRM analysis because the interpersonal context allows multiple perceivers to rate multiple targets, which is a requirement of any SRM analysis. A fictitious study of wilderness therapy is used to highlight the conceptual, methodological, and statistical issues that are addressed with the SRM. Supplementary data and output files are provided to elucidate the analytic process using the WinSoReMo software. Although there are multiple ways that SRM studies and analyses can be conducted, the Win- SoReMo program is specifically designed for round-robin data in which group members rate, and are rated by, other group members.

The first goal for the study was to estimate trait effects and social influences for racial centrality, racial private regard, and racial public regard. The second was to estimate correlational relationships between racial identity, depression, and anxiety symptoms. The study used 110 Black university students (Mage=19.5,SD=4.13) from a southeastern American university. Restricted maximum likelihood estimation was conducted to estimate variance components for all constructs. Racial centrality, racial private regard, and racial public regard consisted of mostly trait effects, although reflecting substantial social influences. Correlational findings indicated that providers who evoked high racial centrality also evoked low depression, low anxiety, and were seen as supportive. Providers who evoked racial private regard also evoked low depression, low anxiety, and were seen as supportive. Socially influenced racial public regard had no statistically significant links to other constructs. Findings suggest socially influenced racial identity holds links to mental health outcomes and social support.

How are people who generally see others positively evaluated themselves? We propose that the answer to this question crucially hinges on the content domain: We hypothesize that Agency follows a “zero-sum principle” and therefore people who see others as high in Agency are perceived as low in Agency themselves. In contrast, we hypothesize that Communion follows a “non-zero-sum principle” and therefore people who see others as high in Communion are perceived as high in Communion themselves. We tested these hypotheses in a round-robin and a half-block study. Perceiving others as agentic was indeed linked to being perceived as low in Agency. To the contrary, perceiving others as communal was linked to being perceived as high in Communion, but only when people directly interacted with each other. These results help to clarify the nature of Agency and Communion and offer explanations for divergent findings in the literature.

Kwan, John, Kenny, Bond, and Robins conceptualize self-enhancement as a favorable comparison of self-judgments with judgments of and by others. Applying a modified version of Kwan et al.’s approach to behavior observation data, we show that the resulting measure of self-enhancement bias is highly reliable, predicts self-ratings of intelligence as well as does actual intelligence, interacts with item desirability in predicting responses to questionnaire items, and also predicts general life satisfaction. Consistent with previous research, however, self-ratings of intelligence did not become more valid when controlling for self-enhancement bias. We also show that common personality scales like the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale reflect self-enhancement at least as strongly as do scales that were designed particularly for that purpose (i.e., “social desirability scales”). The relevance of these findings in regard to the validity and utility of social desirability scales is discussed.