Stress Strengthens Memory of First Impressions of Others' Positive Personality Traits

Encounters with strangers bear potential for social conflict and stress, but also allow the formation of alliances. First impressions of other people play a critical role in the formation of alliances, since they provide a learned base to infer the other's future social attitude. Stress can facilitate emotional memories but it is unknown whether stress strengthens our memory for newly acquired impressions of other people's personality traits. To answer this question, we subjected 60 students (37 females, 23 males) to an impression-formation task, viewing portraits together with brief positive vs. negative behavior descriptions, followed by a 3-min cold pressor stress test or a non-stressful control procedure. The next day, novel and old portraits were paired with single trait adjectives, the old portraits with a trait adjective matching the previous day's behavior description. After a filler task, portraits were presented again and subjects were asked to recall the trait adjective. Cued recall was higher for old (previously implied) than the novel portraits' trait adjectives, indicating validity of the applied test procedures. Overall, recall rate of implied trait adjectives did not differ between the stress and the control group. However, while the control group showed a better memory performance for others' implied negative personality traits, the stress group showed enhanced recall for others' implied positive personality traits. This result indicates that post-learning stress affects consolidation of first impressions in a valence-specific manner. We propose that the stress-induced strengthening of memory of others' positive traits forms an important cue for the formation of alliances in stressful conditions

Revising working models across time: Relationship situations that enhance attachment security

We propose the Attachment Security Enhancement Model (ASEM) to suggest how romantic relationships can promote chronic attachment security. One part of the ASEM examines partner responses that protect relationships from the erosive effects of immediate insecurity, but such responses may not necessarily address underlying insecurities in a person’s mental models. Therefore, a second part of the ASEM examines relationship situations that foster more secure mental models. Both parts may work in tandem. We posit that attachment anxiety should decline most in situations that foster greater personal confidence and more secure mental models of the self. In contrast, attachment avoidance should decline most in situations that involve positive dependence and foster more secure models of close others. The ASEM integrates research and theory, suggests novel directions for future research, and has practical implications, all of which center on the idea that adult attachment orientations are an emergent property of close relationships

Preliminary studies of charge carrier transport in mercuric iodide radiation detectors

Mercuric iodide single crystals have been grown by static and dynamic sublimation methods. Characteristics of contacts and detector capacitance have been studied by photon excitation methods. Gamma and x-ray spectrometry has been carried out with completed detectors showing resolutions comparable to the best results published to date. A measurement of hole trapping length has been made from the spectral shapes observed and has been found to be approximately 0.3 mm. Transient waveform analysis with alpha-particle excitation shows hole mobilities of approximately 3 cm/sup 2//V-sec for a highly purified crystal and 0.05 for an expected less pure crystal. Electron mobilities of 120 cm/sup 2// Vsec are observed. An attempt is made to explain the observed tansient waveforms in terms of a single dominant trap model, With only partial success. Due to the strongly excitonic character of the material, it is proposed that the unfamiliar observations made regarding transport properties with the HgI/sub 2/ detectors studied may be due to exciton dissociation under high electric fields, to long exciton lifetimes and to interactions between excitons and trapping centers in the material. (auth

Essentialist beliefs predict autormatic motor-responses to social categories

Essentialist thinking has been implicated in producing segregation between social groups even in the absence of negative attitudes. This mode of category representation brings social group information to the fore in social information processing, suggesting that the social consequences of essentialism are associated with basic categorization processes. Drawing on recent work demonstrating that automatic approach and avoidance behaviors are directly embedded in intergroup categorization, we show that people who hold essentialist beliefs about human attributes are faster to approach their ingroup. Moreover this relationship is not accounted for by explicit prejudice towards the outgroup and essentialist beliefs were unrelated to implicit evaluation of either group. The findings demonstrate that essentialist beliefs are associated with immediate behavioral responses attached to social category exemplars, highlighting the links between these beliefs and basic categorization processes