1:30 Preliminary Evidence for a Prototype Structure of Social Allergen Constructs
Year: 2006

Examining the interpersonal content of the MMPI 2 Lindsay E. Ayearst Krista K. Trobst (York University) The Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) has been touted as the most commonly used and most heavily researched clinical inventory (Hicklin Widiger, 2000, p. 502) in use today. Included in the interpretation of any MMPI profile is an assessment of the individuals interpersonal style. It is common practice for a MMPI interpretation to include characterizations of the respondents most maladaptive interpersonal behavior. The manner in which these interpretations are derived, however, is problematic because few of the MMPI scales are direct measures of interpersonal behavior. The purpose of the present study was to determine the kind of interpersonal content that was being assessed in a number of scales that had been developed for the MMPI 2 that, at face value and given their scale names and descriptions, seemed interpersonal in nature. Results indicated that these scales are not always measuring what one assumes, or do so more poorly than expected. In particular, the MMPI 2 interpersonal scales were unable to effectively assess Nurturance, one of the two primary dimensions of interpersonal behaviour. The spread of variables (scales) along the dominance submission axis was more even, with some scales being associated with Dominance and others with Submission, indicating that the selected scales from the MMPI 2 were able to assess this dimension. Overall, only five of the 13 scales examined achieved at least moderate associations with the interpersonal dimensions of Dominance and Nurturance as measured by the IASR B5. No employee is an island" The Social Aspects of Affect in Organizations Sigal Barsade (The Wharton School) In this talk I will discuss the interpersonal aspects of affect in organizational settings. This will include the topics of emotional contagion in groups; the influence of homogeneous and heterogeneous group affect in several organizational settings, including senior management teams; the social sharing of affect; affective organizational culture; and a general model of group emotions within organizations. Cognitive Interpersonal Internalization as a Mediator of Relations between Perceived Criticism and Fear of Failure Trajectories in Youth David E. Conroy J. Douglas Coatsworth, (Pennsylvania State University) Interpersonal behaviors and cognitive affective representations thereof have been implicated in the socialization of individual differences in competence motivation. Fear of failure (FF) is an avoidance valenced motive that refers to a tendency to anticipate shame and humiliation as consequences of failing (Atkinson, 1957) With respect to FF, criticism and love withdrawal characterize representational models of key developmental figures responses to failure (Conroy, 2003; Elliot Thrash, 2004) This study tested a cognitive interpersonal model of FF socialization by investigating the extent to which changes in self criticism accounted for links between perceptions of criticism and FF trajectories in a 6 week period. Youth (N 165) registered for a summer swim league rated their FF at the beginning, middle, and end of the season. At the beginning and end of the season, they completed four single items representing salient aspects of their introject (i.e. self affirmation, self protection, self control, self blame) At the end of the season, youth rated their perceptions of their coaches behavior on a series of single items drawn from the Coaching Behavior Assessment System and the 12 item Perceived Coach Behavior Questionnaire (PCBQ) a measure developed for this investigation. Extensive model comparisons indicated that PCBQ responses could be reduced to three factors (affiliation, control, blame) 2 (50) 90.46, NNFI .94, CFI .96. Youth FF responses exhibited strong longitudinal factorial invariance across assessments. A second order latent growth curve analysis revealed significant variability in youth FF levels and that FF scores decreased slightly over the course of the season. Perceived blame predicted youth FF slopes; however, this coefficient decreased substantially (b 0.43, p .05) when changes in self talk were added to the model. Both perceived control (b 0.27, p .01) and blame (b 0.23, p .05) predicted residualized change in corresponding aspects of youths self talk; however, only changes in self blame positively predicted changes in FF levels during the season (b 0.74, p .01) These findings indicated that youth perceptions of coaches were directly and indirectly involved in FF socialization. Further research is needed to test for other socialization pathways and developmental differences in these mechanisms, to determine whether findings generalize to more heterogeneous and at risk populations, and to investigate other potential social ecological influences on socialization. Dominance and friendliness as implicit constructs: An SEM analysis of IAT measures Nicole Ethier (University of Waterloo) Pamela Sadler (Wilfrid Laurier University) and Erik Woody (University of Waterloo) Recent work has indicated that traits, such as attitudes and self perceptions, exist at two mainly uncorrelated levels explicit and implicit. Explicit traits have been found to predict more voluntary behaviors, whereas implicit traits predict relatively automatic or unconscious behaviors (Asendorpf et al. 2002) Because much of interpersonal behavior takes place outside of conscious awareness, implicit dominance and implicit affiliation are promising explanatory constructs. In the current study, we examined the measurement of implicit dominance and implicit affiliation using the Implicit Association Test (IAT; Greenwald et al. 1998) To illustrate, people with a high degree of implicit affiliation should associate concepts related to self and friendly consistently faster than concepts related to self and unfriendly. IAT scores are typically computed by subtracting average response times of these two types of trials, reflecting the crucial assumption that there is one underlying substantive dimension tapped by adjectives located at bipolar ends of the dimension. We show that this assumption may be false. We developed an SEM based measurement model to test the number of dimensions underlying the IAT measures, as well as the role of general reaction time. Results indicate that each of our IATs tap two unrelated underlying constructs. We argue that constructs measured by the IAT may not be unidimensional, depending on the particular content being measured. These findings are consistent with recent work by Blanton, Jaccard, Gonzales Christie (2006) who also evaluated models of the IAT using Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) One important implication of the current study is that it suggests that the current method of scoring the IAT may not be appropriate for some constructs. Implications for interpersonal theory will be discussed. Agentic and Communal Facets of Self Esteem in Naturalistic Social Settings Marc A. Fournier (University of Toronto) Alana L. Greco (Wilfred Laurier University) Sonya Basarke (University of Toronto) Since the writings of Baldwin (1897) Cooley (1902) and Mead (1934) it has been suggested that how we see ourselves is in part predicated on how we are seen through the eyes of others. From a communal perspective, it has been suggested that self esteem serves as an index of ones inclusion or exclusion from the group (the sociometer hypothesis) From an agentic perspective, it has been suggested that self esteem serves as an index of ones standing in the social hierarchy (the social competition hypothesis) These hypotheses were tested in samples of undergraduates obtained from naturally occurring, on campus social settings (i.e. fraternities and dormitories) Participants first completed a battery of questionnaires, including indices of self esteem, and then completed a series of sociometric peer rating tasks during which each group member rated each other group member in terms of their social status and popularity. Findings suggest that both dominance and acceptance are significant predictors of self esteem both for women and for men. Moving the interpersonal circumplex (IPC) into the third dimension: A closer look at the overlap of the Five Factor and IPC models of personality. Gary W. Giumetti, John E. Kurtz, Patrick M. Markey (Villanova University) Research investigating the convergence of the Interpersonal Circumplex (IPC) and FiveFactor (FFM) models of personality has consistently located extraversion and agreeableness within the IPC. The current study examined these two models of personality to determine if any other traits of the FFM can be mapped onto the IPC. A sample of 327 undergraduate participants completed self ratings on a FFM personality inventory (NEO PI R; Costa McCrae, 1992) and the Revised Interpersonal Adjective Scales (IAS R; Wiggins, 1995) A separate sample of 281 undergraduate participants filled out informant ratings of these two measures for a relative or a friend that they had been acquainted with for at least 5 years. The results from both samples supported previous studies in finding that the two dimensions of extraversion and agreeableness were located in the NO and JK octants of the IPC. Both samples also showed that neuroticism was consistently related to the IPC and was located in the FG octant. In order to understand how the three orthogonal dimensions of extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism can be related to the two orthogonal dimensions of the IPC all relations were presented in a three dimensional graph. These results partially support previous assertions (e.g. Ansell Pincus, 2004) that all of the FFM traits contain agentic and communal qualities of the IPC. Exploring Gender Differences in Interpersonal Problems Michael B. Gurtman, Sara A. Siefert, Katie P. Daly (University