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People occasionally choose to cut themselves off from their online social network by taking extended breaks from Facebook. This study investigated whether abstaining from Facebook reduces stress but also reduces subjective well-being because of the resulting social disconnection. Participants (138 active Facebook users) were assigned to either a condition in which they were instructed to give up Facebook for 5 days or continue to use Facebook as normal. Perceived stress and well-being, as well as salivary cortisol, were measured before and after the test period. Relative to those in the Facebook Normal condition, those in the No Facebook condition experienced lower levels of cortisol and life satisfaction. Our results suggest that the typical Facebook user may occasionally find the large amount of social information available to be taxing, and Facebook vacations could ameliorate this stress-at least in the short term.

In 3 studies, we examined the hypothesis that the effects of stereotype usage on target judgments are moderated by causal uncertainty beliefs and related accuracy goal structures. In Study 1, we focused on the role of chronically accessible causal uncertainty beliefs as predictors of a target's level of guilt for an alleged academic misconduct offense. In Study 2, we examined the role of chronic causal uncertainty reduction goals and a manipulated accuracy goal; in Study 3, we investigated the role of primed causal uncertainty beliefs on guilt judgments. In all 3 studies, we found that activation of causal uncertainty beliefs and accuracy concerns was related to a reduced usage of stereotypes. Moreover, this reduction was not associated with participants' levels of perceived control, depression, state affect, need for cognition, or personal need for structure. Results are discussed in terms of their implications for the model of causal uncertainty and, more generally, in terms of the motivational processes underlying stereotype usage.Within the past decade, there has been an explosion of renewed interest in goals and their effects on cognition, affect, and behavior (Gollwitzer & Bargh, 1996;Higgins & Sorrentino, 1990;Sorrentino & Higgins, 1986. Although much of this work focused on specific goal contents and their affective and behavioral sequelae, a major interest of contemporary theorists and researchers has been the various cognitive processes involved in goal-directed action. Individuals (e.g., Carver & Scheier, 1990;Weary & Edwards, 1996) working within this more recent tradition generally have viewed goals as cognitive representations of desired end states, and they have focused their attention on the cognitive processes and strategies used in the pursuit of goal attainment and/or disengagement.In addition to this focus on the cognitive bases of motivation and goal pursuit, several investigators (e.g., Bargh & Gollwitzer, 1994; Gifford Weary, Jill A. Jacobson, and Stephanie J. Tobin, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University; John A. Edwards, Department of Psychology, Oregon State University.Jill A. Jacobson is now at the Department of Psychology and Social Behavior, University of California, Irvine.This research was supported in part by National Science Foundation Research Grant SBR-970954I and by National Institute of Mental Health Training Grant T32-MH19728. Study 2 was conducted in connection with Jill A. Jacobson's dissertation research. Partial reports of the data for Study 2 were presented at the 1999 American Psychological Society meeting in Denver, CO. We thank Galen Bodenhausen for sharing his experimental materials with us.Correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to Gifford Weary, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University, 1885 Neil Avenue, Columbus, Ohio 43210. Electronic mail may be sent to weary.l@osu.edu. Spencer, Fein, Wolfe, Fong, & Dunn, 1998) have begun to focus on the possible implicit, or automatic, activation of goal-relevant cognitive structures. Thes...

Two experiments were conducted to determine the relative impact of direct and indirect (ad hominem) attacks on science claims. Four hundred and thirty-nine college students (Experiment 1) and 199 adults (Experiment 2) read a series of science claims and indicated their attitudes towards those claims. Each claim was paired with one of the following: A) a direct attack upon the empirical basis of the science claim B) an ad hominem attack on the scientist who made the claim or C) both. Results indicate that ad hominem attacks may have the same degree of impact as attacks on the empirical basis of the science claims, and that allegations of conflict of interest may be just as influential as allegations of outright fraud.

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Causal uncertainty about one's own outcomes (CU-Own) is associated with negative affect, depression, and a lack of perceived primary control. We predicted that accommodation, or secondary control, would act as a psychological buffer for high-CU-Own individuals, reducing negative affect and depression.We tested this hypothesis in two studies: one cross-sectional (Study 1) and one longitudinal (Study 2). Participants completed measures of CU-Own, harmony control, and depression in Study 1 and measures of CU-Own, harmony control, flexible goal adjustment, and negative affect in Study 2. Analyses reveal that the CU-Own-depression and CU-Own-negative affect associations were weaker when harmony control or flexible goal adjustment was high. Additional analyses in Studies 1 and 2 examined the roles played by primary control, locus of control, optimism, pessimism, and causal importance. Implications for the CU and accommodation literatures are discussed.

In two studies, we examined how individual differences in causal uncertainty (CU), causal importance (CI), and initial attitudes affected the processing of a persuasive message that contained causal or non-causal arguments. We predicted that high CU individuals' doubts about their causal understanding of events would be activated when they were presented with counterattitudinal arguments. When these individuals also placed a high value on causal understanding (high CI), they should scrutinize any available causal explanations. As a result, they should be more persuaded by strong compared to weak causal arguments. In support of these predictions, we found in two studies that high CU/high CI participants were more persuaded by strong compared to weak counterattitudinal causal arguments. Mediational analyses in Study 2 revealed that high CU/high CI participants were more persuaded by strong causal arguments because they were more confident in them. Implications for the CU model and persuasion processes are discussed.Social psychologists long have been interested in how people understand the causes of events in the social world. Early attribution theorists argued that in order to predict and control their social environments, people attribute behavior and events to stable, underlying causes (Heider, 1958). This early work and subsequent research has provided us with a wealth of information about attribution processes (for a review see Gilbert, 1998) and the critical role they play in many different domains. 44Social Cognition, Vol. 26, No. 1, 2008, pp. 44-65 Stephanie J. Tobin, Department of Psychology, University of Houston; Gifford Weary, Department of Psychology, Ohio State University.This article is based on a doctoral dissertation submitted by Stephanie Tobin to the Ohio State University. We would like to thank committee members Russell Fazio and Richard Petty for their valuable feedback on this research. We also would like to thank members of the 2002-2004 Group for Attitudes and Persuasion and the Weary Lab for their comments on this research and Pablo Briñol and two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier version of this paper. A partial report of the data was presented at the 2004 Society for Personality and Social Psychology meeting.

People occasionally choose to cut themselves off from their online social network by taking extended breaks from Facebook. This study investigated whether abstaining from Facebook reduces stress but also reduces subjective well-being because of the resulting social disconnection. Participants (138 active Facebook users) were assigned to either a condition in which they were instructed to give up Facebook for five days or continue to use Facebook as normal. Perceived stress and well-being, as well as salivary cortisol, were measured before and after the test period. Relative to those in the Facebook Normal condition, those in the No Facebook condition experienced lower levels of cortisol and life satisfaction. Our results suggest that the typical Facebook user may occasionally find the large amount of social information available taxing, and Facebook vacations could ameliorate this stress—at least in the short-term.