Which of the following most accurately states the effects of crowding on behavior?

Activating Events and Cognitive Processing

According to cognitive behavioral perspectives, specific situational cues or contextual events activate schema-driven processing of information about and self-evaluations of one’s physical appearance. Thus, appearance self-schematic persons place more importance on, pay more attention to, and preferentially process information relevant to their appearance. Precipitating events may include, for example, situations that accentuate one’s looks or social scrutiny, interpersonal feedback about one’s appearance, mirror exposure, media exposure to idealized images, wearing certain clothing, exercising, or changes in appearance. As a result of past experiences, certain situations represent classically conditioned stimuli whereby individuals reflectively respond with particular emotions and thought patterns.

Often the activating situations and events are not in the present but are recalled or anticipated contexts. For example, a person may mentally ‘replay’ a past event that represented a body image stressor. For anticipated contexts, individuals process expectancies about what might occur in the future. They envision, imagine, and experience these situations and react in accordance with their anticipatory thoughts and feelings. Thus, activating events should not be regarded as limited to what actually transpires in some external situation.

Provocative contexts, whether external or internal, produce resultant internal dialogues (sometimes termed ‘private body talk’) that involve emotion-laden automatic thoughts, inferences, interpretations, and conclusions about one’s physical appearance (see Figure 1). Among individuals with problematic body image evaluations and self-schemas, these inner dialogues are habitual, faulty, and dysphoric. Thought processes may reflect various errors or distortions, such as dichotomous thinking, arbitrary inferences, emotional reasoning, overgeneralization, biased social comparisons, and magnification of perceived physical shortcomings.

Table 1 provides a summary and definition of eight such cognitive distortions. In 2006, Jakatdar, Cash, and Engle developed, validated, and published the Assessment of Body Image Cognitive Distortions (ABCD) to assess these biased thought processes. Each ABCD item describes a specific situation or event and a thought pattern that reflects the distortion. Respondents are asked to imagine that the event happened to them and to rate the extent to which the thought pattern would match their own thoughts. ABCD scores were clearly predictable by body image attitudes that included the combination of self-schematic investment in one’s appearance (especially self-evaluative salience) and a negative body image evaluation. In a 2007 study by Rudiger and collaborators, ABCD scores were found to predict more negative and more variable body image experiences sampled from actual daily life.

Table 1. Body image cognitive distortions

Social situation

Our social environment as well as our physical environment can contain unpleasant situational cues. Crowding, defined as the perception that there are too many people in the vicinity, can increase aggression.

When we are rejected by others in a social situation, we are also more prone to use aggression. For example, an analysis of school shooters found that 13 out of the 15 shooters had been rejected by a romantic partner prior to the shooting spree. The greater the degree of social rejection, such as in extreme cases like ostracism (being directly isolated or rejected by others), the more prone a person is to using aggression.

Summary

As various societies around the world turn increasingly consumeristic, the prevalence of these situational cues is bound to increase as well, leading individuals to elaborate and refine their consumer selfhood. With consumer selfhood gaining significance as a structuring principle of people’s daily lives and their forms of engagement with their surrounding social environment, more self-functions and needs become channeled into the furrows allotted by consumer culture. This in turn further entrenches consumer selfhood in the lives of individuals, and the framework of consumer culture in the macro social systems in which they live.

Personality motives

Motives are personality dispositions that differentiate individuals with respect to specific classes of goal states that they value and aspire (Schultheiss & Köllner, in press). Whereas goals can be very specific (e.g., passing an exam), motives are broader constructs, subsuming, for instance, all achievement-related goals under the achievement motive. Moreover, because of their very nature of directing behavior, motives are important concepts for understanding behavioral processes (Baumert et al., 2017). Beginning with Murray's (1938) list of more than twenty psychogenic needs, multiple motive taxonomies have been proposed on diverse theoretical and empirical grounds, such as humanistic psychology (Maslow, 1943), evolutionary psychology (Kenrick, Neuberg, Griskevicius, Becker, & Schaller, 2010), or factor-analytic approaches to personality structure (Cattell & Child, 1975). For the purpose of this chapter, we focus on McClelland's (1987) motive disposition theory and the motives of achievement, affiliation-intimacy, and power, which are the most extensively investigated motive domains in this research tradition.

A central tenet of motive disposition theory is that motives have to be aroused by situational cues to become effective (McClelland, Atkinson, Clarke, & Lowell, 1953; McClelland, Koestner, & Weinberger, 1989). Thus, motives are inherently interactionist constructs. Once aroused by situational cues, they are supposed to orient attention and cognition toward the desired goal state, to energize instrumental behavior, and to select situations and behavioral strategies that make successful goal attainment more likely (McClelland, 1980, 1987). Importantly, McClelland, as Murray before him, assumed that motives are not fully accessible to introspection. Thus, motives are viewed as dispositions that are represented at the implicit level of information processing. More specifically, motives are deemed to be grounded in extensive associative networks linking representations of goal states with situational cues, instrumental behaviors, and affective responses. According to McClelland (1987), individual differences in these networks are acquired via reinforcement learning in early childhood before the acquisition of language, which contributes to their implicit nature.a

Coping skills training

Once high-risk situations have been identified, the client can then be taught to respond to these situational cues as discriminative stimuli (highway signs provide a good analogy) for behavior change. Taken collectively, the assessment of high-risk situations and coping skills deficits can be used to target areas that require special training or attention during the coping skills training components of the relapse prevention program. Effective coping skills training focuses on those high-risk situations identified in the client’s assessment as creating the greatest potential for increasing the probability of relapse. As stated earlier, in some cases, it might be best to simply avoid risky situations, if possible. In most cases, however, the high-risk situations or psychological states cannot be avoided easily, and the client must rely on coping skills or alternative strategies to “get through” the situation without engaging in substance use.

Coping skills training methods incorporate components of direct instruction, modeling, behavioral rehearsal, therapist coaching, and feedback from the therapist. Therapists can help clients identify their style of approaching problems either by eliciting examples from them or by giving them a problem and asking them to outline how they would go about solving it. Generating alternatives is perhaps the most important step to effective problem solving. Once a list of alternative solutions has been generated a particular solution can be selected by evaluating the “pros” and “cons” of each solution and selecting what promises to be the best available option.

In addition to teaching clients to respond effectively when confronted with specific high-risk situations, there are a number of additional relaxation training and stress management procedures the therapist can draw upon to increase the client’s overall capacity to deal with stress. Relaxation training may provide the client with a global increased perception of control, thereby reducing the stress that any given situation may pose for the individual. Such procedures as progressive muscle relaxation training, meditation, exercise, and various stress management techniques are extremely useful in aiding the client to cope more effectively with the hassles and demands of daily life.

Anterior Cingulate Cortex

The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) is recognized as an important cortical center of integrations of pain with emotional and situational cues. The ACC has reciprocal connections with the medial and ventrolateral thalamic nuclei, and it receives input from the hippocampus, amygdala, and hypothalamus. The ACC, together with these limbic regions, encodes emotional and autonomic responses to pain. The ACC sends projections to the PAG and the RVM, regions known to participate in the modulation of pain.

Electrophysiological recordings have shown that neurons within the ACC are activated in response to noxious stimulation. Recordings performed in monkeys suggest that the ACC may encode the anticipation of pain because they may be activated by conditioned aversive stimuli. Stimulation of the ACC enhanced the activity of spinal dorsal horn neurons that are responsive to noxious stimuli, and lesions of the ACC or lidocaine microinjection into this region resulted in decreased responsiveness of these neurons. Electrolytic lesions or microinjection of lidocaine into the ACC reduced behavioral responses to acute noxious stimuli as well as measures of enhanced pain in animal models of inflammation. Behavioral studies suggest that ACC lesions may block the aversive component of pain rather than modulating the response to pain intensity. Avoidance of noxious stimuli was attenuated by lesions of the ACC. In humans, brain imaging studies show that the ACC is activated by acute painful stimuli as well as by pain conditions such as headache and neuropathic pain. Functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) studies also indicate that the ACC responds in anticipation of pain. Patients with lesions of the ACC demonstrate a reduced affective response to chronic pain states. Based on such observations, it is believed that the ACC is integral in the integration of the motivational and affective components of pain. This region integrates inputs from the limbic, sensory, and motor regions to perform a global assessment of situational cues along with the noxious inputs and to form the interpretation of the quality of pain.

The ACC may facilitate pain in part though the activation of the pain facilitatory neurons of the RVM because microinjection of lidocaine or an α-amino-3-hydroxy-5-methyl-4-isoxazole propionic acid (AMPA)/kainate receptor antagonist into the RVM blocked the facilitation of nociceptive reflexes produced by electrical or chemical stimulation of the ACC. Other studies suggest that pain facilitation from the ACC is processed through the medullary dorsal reticular nucleus (DRT).

Implementation Intentions

Peter Gollwitzer has developed a model of volitional planning that relies heavily on what are called implementation intentions. These are specific and (deceptively) simple action plans for how a goal will be attained. Implementation intentions are always stated in an ‘if–then’ format. Let's call your goal ‘Z,’ the effective response ‘Y,’ and the situation cue ‘X.’ An implementation intention to reach a goal would be stated like this:

When I encounter situation X, I will initiate behavior Y, in order to reach goal Z.

Specific examples of implementation intentions usually imply, but do not explicitly state, the goal. Instead, they focus on the situational cue and the required behavior:

After I start the coffee machine, I will take my vitamins.

If I feel tempted to eat a piece of chocolate, I will ignore that thought and eat an apple.

After I go swimming tomorrow, I will perform a breast self-examination.

When I arrive at the office, I will not turn on my computer until I have finished the paperwork on my desk.

When I turn on my computer, I will do a literature search before reading my email.

If it is Monday, then I will do my math homework.

Following our earlier guidelines for setting an effective goal, the situational cue and behavioral response of an implementation intention should be as specific as possible.

Poor: If it is the weekend, then I will exercise more.

Better: If it is 9 a.m. on Saturday, then I will run 3 miles on the treadmill.

Note the difference between an implementation intention and a simple statement of one's goal, for example, I will floss my teeth more. An implementation intention requires that an explicit connection be made between a situational cue (when the 11 p.m. news comes on) and a behavior (I will walk to the bathroom and floss my teeth). This helps to automate the process so that we need not depend on our memory to remember to do the task. Once the connection is made, the situation automatically cues the behavior. Implementation intentions have a moderate to large effect compared to simple goal intentions (i.e., I will perform a breast self-exam) that do not reference a situational cue (when I take a shower after swimming).

The benefits of implementation intentions are largest when people are confronted with aversive tasks (eat more vegetables) or difficult or complex ones (write a term paper). These sorts of goals tend to suffer from the following problems:

Failing to get started

Getting distracted

Overextending oneself

Failing to call a halt to fruitless goal-striving.

Implementation intentions are important because they facilitate both the initiation of desired behaviors as well as maintaining persistence in the face of potential distractions, setbacks, or challenges. But, they can also help us to drop subgoals if it appears that they are not working. For example, consider the amount of time one could spend (waste) researching a topic using a search engine like Google. A useful implementation intention here might be: if I do not find an answer after the fifth page, I will stop searching and move on to the next subgoal. Of course, Implementation intentions are most effective when you have a strong goal commitment. Indeed, you are unlikely to engage in such intentions if you are not committed to your goal.

Implementation intentions are most useful to people who have poor self-regulatory skills (e.g., schizophrenia, drug addicts in withdrawal, children with attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD), and people with damage to their frontal lobe), but they are also useful for people who are preoccupied with distracting thoughts and anyone who has recently engaged in an ego-depleting task. As mentioned earlier, self-control suffers if we engage in multiple resource (ego) depleting tasks in a relatively short period. Working hard at one task makes us less likely to find the strength to work hard at a second task. Similarly, resisting one temptation makes a second temptation more difficult to resist, unless we remind ourselves to work harder. Research has found that making an implementation intention while engaged in an ego-depleting task can help us to persist longer and perform better at a difficult second task.

It is somewhat ironic that although the focus of social psychologists has been on long-range personal goals, the most effective solution to goal-striving seems to be to make very simple short-term plans!

24.3 Cue Disambiguation

Ancestry information is not the only cue that might moderate the effects of phenotypicality on racial categorizations. A growing literature has explored how situational cues can guide racial judgments, especially in terms of disambiguating the category of mixed-race targets. In one of the first studies on the topic, Maclin and Malpass (2001) presented participants with racially ambiguous faces and manipulated whether the face was presented with a stereotypically Black or stereotypically Hispanic hairstyle. Their results showed a movement towards the stereotypical cue, such that ambiguous targets were judged to be Black more frequently when shown with stereotypically Black hairstyles, and as Hispanic more frequently when the hairstyle was more stereotypically Hispanic.

People may rely on context cues when processing ambiguous faces, such that ambiguous faces may be assimilated to the race of the unambiguous faces in the environment (i.e., target categorization moves towards the race of the context faces) or contrasted against the race of the unambiguous faces in the environment (i.e., target categorizations move away from the race of the context faces; Webster, Kaping, Mizokami, & Duhamel, 2004). To examine this, Rhodes, Lie, Ewing, Evangelista, and Tanaka (2010) presented White participants with a task-irrelevant monoracial (Asian or White) face followed by an Asian–White mixed-race face to be categorized. The authors found a contrast effect on categorizations, such that mixed-race faces that were preceded by a monoracial face of one race (e.g., White) were more likely to be categorized as the other race (e.g., Asian).

Consistent with Rhodes and colleagues’ (2010) findings, Willadsen-Jensen and Ito (2006) found that White participants more frequently categorized Asian–White mixed-races faces as Asian (vs. White) when presented in the context of White (vs. Asian) faces. A contrast effect was also observed in participants’ neural responses, such that Asian and Asian–White targets evoked larger late positive potentials (LPPs; a general term for a positive deflection late in the waveform) when presented in the context of White (vs. Asian) faces. Furthermore, White and Asian–White faces evoked larger LPPs when in the context of Asian (vs. White) faces. In a follow-up study, Willadsen-Jensen and Ito (2008) found a nearly identical contrast pattern in neural responses and categorizations among Asian American participants, providing additional evidence for the generalizability of these findings. On the other hand, there is also evidence that ambiguous faces are sometimes assimilated with the other faces in a given context. Sun and Balas (2012) found that ambiguous faces were categorized as White more often when surrounded by inverted White faces (thus an assimilative effect), but not upright White faces or Black faces (either inverted or upright), compared to a control condition with no context faces. In a second experiment, they manipulated the facial physiognomy and skin tone of the context faces. They found that the facial physiognomy of the surrounding faces had a contrast effect on categorizations (e.g., if surrounded by faces with Black physiognomic features, the target was more often categorized as White), but that skin color was assimilative (e.g., if surrounded by faces with light skin tone, the target was more often categorized as White). These studies provide insights into the way that other faces within a given context, which are often present in everyday perception, influence categorizations of race. These findings on contrast and assimilative effects highlight the complex ways in which comparisons to other faces sway racial judgments, particularly when it comes to racially ambiguous or mixed-race faces.

Some of the effects of cues used in disambiguating racially ambiguous faces are moderated by individual differences among observers. For example, the extent to which people believe that personality traits are unchanging and highly predictive of a person’s underlying essence (Eberhardt, Dasgupta, & Banaszynski, 2003) moderates the effect of labeling (e.g., as Black or White) a racially ambiguous face. Specifically, for those who believe that personality traits are fixed features of individuals, the effect of labels is assimilative (e.g., Black labels lead participants to misremember faces as more phenotypically Black). In contrast, for those who believe that personality traits are not fixed features, labels create a contrast effect (e.g., Black labels lead participants to misremember faces as more phenotypically White). This finding speaks to the complexity of racial categorizations, especially for ambiguous targets, as not only target characteristics (e.g., ancestry) and external cues (e.g., faces in the surrounding of the target) can sway racial judgments, but also the characteristics and experiences of the observer can interact with these factors to predict racial categorizations. This topic is further explored in subsequent sections where the role of observers’ personality, motivation, and familiarity in categorizations is discussed.

Faces in the surrounding area are not the only contextual cues that influence assimilation. A number of studies have shown that non-phenotypical, stereotype-consistent cues can shift categorizations of multiracial and racially ambiguous targets towards the stereotype-consistent racial categorizations. Cues that influence assimilation include stereotypical names (Hilliar & Kemp, 2008), images of sceneries stereotypical of a race (e.g., a city with Chinese street signs for Asian categorizations; Freeman et al., 2015), demographic information (e.g., parent’s education level and neighborhood socioeconomic status; Young, Sanchez, & Wilton, 2015), and attire (through high- or low-status attire; Freeman, Penner, Saperstein, Scheutz, & Ambady, 2011).

Willadsen-Jensen and Ito (2015) found that for White participants neural processing of racially ambiguous faces was affected by racial labels (i.e., Black or White). Specifically, faces that were preceded by the label “Black” elicited larger P200s and smaller N200s than faces preceded by the label “White,” consistent with their findings for unambiguous Black and White faces. Thus, these differences in brain activity were in line with an assimilative effect of labels, such that ambiguous faces were processed like monoracial faces that matched the label. These findings were supported by behavioral evidence from an implicit attitude (i.e., obtained through indirect measures, hard to control) task. Specifically, they found that when ambiguous faces were labeled as Black they elicited implicit anti-Black bias that was indistinguishable from monoracial Black faces. This last finding, while not directly related to categorization, provides insight into the processing and consequences of categorical judgments and perceptions.

When Social Value Orientations Do Not Make a Difference

People do not always behave in accord with their social value orientation. Often, personality variables, such as social values, have their greatest influence when situational cues are weak or ambiguous. With strong situational constraints, people tend to conform to environmental cues. For example, given a choice between a million dollars for the self and a million dollars for another versus $20 for the self and $1 for another, a competitor should – technically – choose the latter choice, which affords a $19 advantage to the self rather than the zero advantage of each receiving a million dollars. In practice, it is probably safe to assume that everyone, regardless of social value orientation, would prefer the million dollar outcome. In other words, the external pressure to obtain a certain reward overwhelms the influence of an internally based social value orientation.

Social norms might influence behavior in interdependence settings. The norm of social responsibility is the tendency to help those who are in need of help. Although people, especially competitors, might be tempted to exploit someone who seemed weak or vulnerable, it is also possible that people would act more charitably toward someone in need or who acted in a supplicating fashion. The norm of reciprocity refers to behaving toward a person in a manner similar to how the person behaved. This is how a tit-for-tat strategy works. Reciprocity would mean making cooperative choices toward an opponent who acted cooperatively and making competitive choices toward an opponent who acted competitively. One application of the norm of reciprocity involves keeping promises to cooperate. One interesting research program found that people were willing to keep promises when they played a prisoners' dilemma with a computer program, even when they knew they were playing against a computer. Equality is another influential decision rule because it seems to appeal to a sense of fairness. There is research that shows both prosocials and proselfs will adopt an equality allocation rule when dealing with a social dilemma. However, if group members see that they are failing to manage the task properly, then social value orientation will exert a greater influence on choice, with prosocials restricting their consumption to a greater degree than proselfs.

Much of the research on social values has been conducted in the United States or other Western cultures. As a rule, these Western cultures tend to have more individualistic rather than collective orientations. Cultural norms toward collectivism could increase levels of cooperative behavior. However, in a recent research conducted in Taiwan, ROC has found evidence for the presence of both proself and prosocial value orientations, thus suggesting that social value orientations may exist among very different cultures.

Increasing incentives for cooperating or competing will reduce the influence of social value orientation. Expecting to interact with the person in the future would increase the social costs of competing and, therefore, encourage cooperation. Sharing a collective identity can also increase the tendency to cooperate, especially among proselfs. Interpersonal dynamics would probably affect cooperation rates. People might be less likely to exploit a likeable or attractive opponent. It is interesting to speculate on the role of sexual attraction on behavior in a mixed-motive game. We would expect more competitive behavior when people are deindividuated, that is, given a situation where their identities are anonymous. In this instance, there would be fewer social costs associated with competing.

One limitation of using matrix games such as the prisoners' dilemma to understand social behavior is that the game, while useful, is only a limited model of human social behavior. People are required by the experimental instructions to make one of two possible choices. One feature missing from game simulations is that people often walk away from aversive real world situations with a mixed-motive structure. Research has shown that everyone, regardless of social value orientation, will avoid interacting with a competitive opponent. Cooperators and individualists appreciate tit-for-tat partners, but competitors avoid them. Thus, social value orientation may influence not only the way a person acts in an interdependent situation but also the types of situations people get into in the first place.

Trait theory

In this book the discussion of personality will be based on the dispositional perspective, with a particular emphasis on the five-factor model (Costa and McCrae, 1992). According to this viewpoint, personality consists of physiologically based traits which guide our behavior. Traits can be described as tendencies to behave and react in a certain way (Phares, 1991: 254). States, on the other hand, are responses to situational cues – reactions which may be modified, strengthened or weakened by individual inclination. Persons with high negative affectivity are, for instance, more likely than calm and stable persons to feel anxious in a threatening situation. Traits may thus be regarded as dispositions to states (Humphreys and Revelle, 1984). Negative affectivity may consequently not always be apparent but instead merely manifest under stressful circumstances. Persons with high negative affectivity would overall be particularly sensitive to any kind of threat: they would feel nervous in performance situations, anxious related to health concerns and likely to worry about possible setbacks. They have a latent sensitivity to signals of danger which is triggered by situational cues and manifest in feelings of anxiety (Endler and Kocovski, 2001).