Two stud ies dem on strate that self-image main te nance pro cesses affect the accep tance of per son ally rel e vant health mes sages. Participants who com pleted a self-affir ma tion were less defen sive and more accept ing of health infor ma tion. In Study 1, female par tic i pants (high vs. low rel e vance) read an arti cle link ing caffeine con sump tion to breast can cer. High-rel e vance women rejected the infor ma tion more than did low-rel e vance women; how ever, affirmed high-rel e vance women accepted the infor mation and intended to change their behav ior accord ingly. In Study 2, sex u ally active par tic i pants viewed an AIDS edu cational video; affirmed par tic i pants saw them selves at greater risk for HIV and pur chased con doms more often than did nonaffirmed par tic i pants. Results sug gest that health mes sages can threaten an indi vid ual's self-image and that self-affirm ing tech niques can increase the effec tive ness of health infor ma tion and lead to pos i tive health behav iors. Au thors' Note: We would like to thank Heejung S. Kim, Devra Kupor, Geoffrey Co hen, and Kelli Keough for their feed back through out the pro ject and Eric D. Knowles, Em ily Pronin, and Da vid Fetherstonhaugh for com ment ing on ear lier ver sions of this ar ti cle. We would also like to thank Lauren Puryear and Ed ward Carstensen for serv ing as ex per iment ers in this re search, Shelly Chaiken for pro vid ing the ma te ri als for Study 1, and Jeffrey Fisher for pro vid ing the AIDS ed u ca tional video used in Study 2. This re search was funded by a Stan ford Uni ver sity Grad u ate Re search Op por tu nities Grant and a Stan ford Uni ver sity Un der grad u ate Re search Op por tu nities Grant. Da vid A. K. Sherman was sup ported by a Na tional Sci ence Foun da tion Predoctoral Fel lowship while con duct ing this re search. Por tions of this ar ti cle were presented at the 1998 West ern Psy cho log i cal As so ci a tion con fer ence in Al bu quer que, New Mex ico. Leif D. Nel son now at tends Prince ton University. Cor re spon dence con cern ing this ar ti cle should be ad dressed to Da vid A. K. Sherman, who is now at the De part ment of Psy chol ogy, Uni ver sity of Cal i for nia,

People construct idiosyncratic, self-serving models of excellence or success in social domains, in part, to bolster self-esteem. In 3 studies, participants tended to articulate self-serving theories of success under experimental conditions in which pressures to maintain self-esteem were present, but not under conditions in which such pressures were absent. Participants assigned to role-play being a therapist were more self-serving in their assessments of the characteristics needed to be a "successful therapist" than were participants assigned to observe the role play (Study 1). Participants failing at an intellectual task articulated self-serving theories about the attributes crucial to success in marriage (Study 2) and evaluated targets similar to themselves more favorably than they did dissimilar targets (Study 3), tendencies not observed for participants succeeding at the task. Discussion centers on issues for future research suggested by these findings.

These results suggest treatment with fixed buccal orthodontic appliances is associated with decreased periodontal status and increased levels of periodontopathic bacteria when compared to treatment with removable aligners over the 12-month study duration.

Tb judge another person's behavior, one often has to come to an understanding of what that behavior was in its detail. Five studies demonstrated that stereotypes influence the tacit inferences people make about the unspecified details and ambiguities of social behavior (e.g., what the behavior specifically was, what stimulus the individual reacted to, what caused the individual to act) and that these inferences occur when people encode the relevant information. One study found that participants who scored low on a measure of modern sexism were just as likely to make tacit inferences based on gender stereotypes as were those who scored high. Discussion centers on the implications of these findings for identification processes in social judgment, as well as whether stereotypes influence tacit inferences at an implicit level.

Although the single equivalent point dipole model has been used to represent well-localised bio-electrical sources, in realistic situations the source is distributed. Consequently, position estimates of point dipoles determined by inverse algorithms suffer from systematic error due to the non-exact applicability of the inverse model. In realistic situations, this systematic error cannot be avoided, a limitation that is independent of the complexity of the torso model used. This study quantitatively investigates the intrinsic limitations in the assignment of a location to the equivalent dipole due to distributed electrical source. To simulate arrhythmic activity in the heart, a model of a wave of depolarisation spreading from a focal source over the surface of a spherical shell is used. The activity is represented by a sequence of concentric belt sources (obtained by slicing the shell with a sequence of parallel plane pairs), with constant dipole moment per unit length (circumferentially) directed parallel to the propagation direction. The distributed source is represented by N dipoles at equal arc lengths along the belt. The sum of the dipole potentials is calculated at predefined electrode locations. The inverse problem involves finding a single equivalent point dipole that best reproduces the electrode potentials due to the distributed source. The inverse problem is implemented by minimising the chi2 per degree of freedom. It is found that the trajectory traced by the equivalent dipole is sensitive to the location of the spherical shell relative to the fixed electrodes. It is shown that this trajectory does not coincide with the sequence of geometrical centres of the consecutive belt sources. For distributed sources within a bounded spherical medium, displaced from the sphere's centre by 40% of the sphere's radius, it is found that the error in the equivalent dipole location varies from 3 to 20% for sources with size between 5 and 50% of the sphere's radius. Finally, a method is devised to obtain the size of the distributed source during the cardiac cycle.