The durability bias, the tendency to overpredict the duration of affective reactions to future events, may be due in part to focalism, whereby people focus too much on the event in question and not enough on the consequences of other future events. If so, asking people to think about other future activities should reduce the durability bias. In Studies 1-3, college football fans were less likely to overpredict how long the outcome of a football game would influence their happiness if they first thought about how much time they would spend on other future activities. Studies 4 and 5 ruled out alternative explanations and found evidence for a distraction interpretation, that people who think about future events moderate their forecasts because they believe that these events will reduce thinking about the focal event. The authors discuss the implications of focalism for other literatures, such as the planning fallacy.

Previous research on the persuasive impact of an overheard audience has yielded conflicting results. In this study, we attempted to understand such audience effects within the framework of the heuristic model of persuasion. Subjects listened to an audiotaped persuasive message that conveyed arguments of either high or low quality and that was responded to by either an enthusiastic or an unenthusiastic overheard audience. In addition, subject involvement (high vs. low) was varied. Consistent with predictions, the audience response cue influenced postmessage opinions only under low involvement; under high involvement, only argument quality affected persuasion. Analyses that took into account subjects' need for cognition supported the additional hypothesis that individuals lower in need for cognition would be more responsive to the audience manipulation under low involvement. Thought-listing data and regression analyses provided further support for the heuristic model.

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Alcohol is the most common "rape drug," with up to two-thirds of victims consuming alcohol prior to the assault. Surprisingly, little research has examined the assault and postassault experiences of victims who were impaired or incapacitated as a result of substance use, including alcohol, during a rape. Thus, the current study evaluated the assault and postassault experiences of a sample of 340 nonimpaired, impaired, and incapacitated college rape victims. Results supported that these three groups differed in several assault characteristics, including threats by the assailant, resistance by the victim, and relationship with the assailant. In addition, impairment and incapacitation were associated with several postassault factors, including self-blame, stigma, and problematic alcohol use. Results also highlighted similarities in victims' experiences, including levels of postassault distress. Implications of the findings for future research investigating impaired and incapacitated sexual assault victims are discussed.