No abstract

The authors suggest that the traditional conception of prejudice-as a general attitude or evaluation-can problematically obscure the rich texturing of emotions that people feel toward different groups. Derived from a sociofunctional approach, the authors predicted that groups believed to pose qualitatively distinct threats to in-group resources or processes would evoke qualitatively distinct and functionally relevant emotional reactions. Participants' reactions to a range of social groups provided a data set unique in the scope of emotional reactions and threat beliefs explored. As predicted, different groups elicited different profiles of emotion and threat reactions, and this diversity was often masked by general measures of prejudice and threat. Moreover, threat and emotion profiles were associated with one another in the manner predicted: Specific classes of threat were linked to specific, functionally relevant emotions, and groups similar in the threat profiles they elicited were also similar in the emotion profiles they elicited.

Important features of the self-concept can be located outside of the individual and inside close or related others. The authors use this insight to reinterpret data previously said to support the empathyaltruism model of helping, which asserts that empathic concern for another results in selflessness and true altruism. That is, they argue that the conditions that lead to empathic concern also lead to a greater sense of self-other overlap, raising the possibility that helping under these conditions is not selfless but is also directed toward the self. In 3 studies, the impact of empathic concern on willingness to help was eliminated when oneness-a measure of perceived self-other overlapwas considered. Path analyses revealed further that empathic concern increased helping only through its relation to perceived oneness, thereby throwing the empathy-altruism model into question. The authors suggest that empathic concern affects helping primarily as an emotional signal of oneness.

Individual differences in the desire for simple structure may influence how people understand, experience, and interact with their worlds. Studies 1 and 2 revealed that the Personal Need for Structure (PNS) scale (M. Thompson, M. Naccarato, & K. Parker, 1989 possesses sufficient reliability and convergent and discriminant validity. In Studies 3-5, Ss high in PNS were especially likely to organize social and nonsocial information in less complex ways, stereotype others, and complete their research requirements on time. These data suggest that people differ in their chronic desire for simple structure and that this difference can have important social-cognitive and behavioral implications. A consideration of chronic information-processing motives may facilitate the theoretical integration of social cognition, affect, motivation, and personality.'' Differences in degrees of freedom are the result of missing data.

Findings of 7 studies suggested that decisions about the sex of a face and the emotional expressions of anger or happiness are not independent: Participants were faster and more accurate at detecting angry expressions on male faces and at detecting happy expressions on female faces. These findings were robust across different stimulus sets and judgment tasks and indicated bottom-up perceptual processes rather than just top-down conceptually driven ones. Results from additional studies in which neutrally expressive faces were used suggested that the connections between masculine features and angry expressions and between feminine features and happy expressions might be a property of the sexual dimorphism of the face itself and not merely a result of gender stereotypes biasing the perception.