Health benefits derived from personal trauma disclosure are well established. This study examined whether disclosing emotions generated by imaginative immersion in a novel traumatic event would similarly enhance health and adjustment. College women, preselected for trauma presence, were randomly assigned to write about real traumas, imaginary traumas, or trivial events. Yoked real-trauma and imaginary-trauma participants wrote about real-trauma participants' experiences. Imaginary-trauma participants were significantly less...

McClelland (1975) argued that reform movements have the unintended result of creating an action orientation that makes war possible. The use of one's own accumulated power to save the others is often the link between an imperial motivation pattern (i.e., the gap created between a high need for power and a low need for affiliation) and later wars. Conflict-related documents, real and fictional, were analyzed...

Five studies explored the ways relative rank is revealed among individuals in small groups through their natural use of pronouns. In Experiment 1, four-person groups worked on a decision-making task with randomly assigned leadership status. In Studies 2 and 3, two-person groups either worked on a task or chatted informally in a get-to-know-you session. Study 4 was a naturalistic study of incoming and outgoing e-mail...

The vertical dimension of interpersonal relations (relating to dominance, power, and status) was examined in association with nonverbal behaviors that included facial behavior, gaze, interpersonal distance, body movement, touch, vocal behaviors, posed encoding skill, and others. Results were separately summarized for people's beliefs (perceptions) about the relation of verticality to nonverbal behavior and for actual relations between verticality and nonverbal behavior. Beliefs/perceptions were stronger and...

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this research, gender differences in language use were examined using...

Numerous disclosure studies have demonstrated that individuals randomly assigned to write about emotional topics evidence improved physical health compared with those who write about superficial topics. The writing samples from three previously published studies of 74 first-year students, 50 upper-division students, and 59 maximum-security prisoners were reanalyzed using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to explore possible relationships of writing content and style to changes in frequency...

Can psychotherapy reduce the incidence of health problems? A general model of psychosomatics assumes that inhibiting or holding back one's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors is associated with long-term stress and disease. Actively confronting upsetting experiences—through writing or talking—is hypothesized to reduce the negative effects of inhibition. Fifty healthy undergraduates were assigned to write about either traumatic experiences or superficial topics for 4 consecutive days. Two...

There are many tasks in which people are called on to disregard information that they have already processed. Dealing with inadmissible evidence in a courtroom setting, second-guessing the past, and responding to experimental psychologists' debriefing instructions are 3 tasks of this type; in all these cases, people have been found to experience considerable difficulty. The present experiments investigated these difficulties in a general form, using...

When looking at a scene, observers feel that they see its entire structure in great detail and can immediately notice any changes in it However, when brief blank fields are placed between alternating displays of an original and a modified scene, a striking failure of perception is induced Identification of changes becomes extremely difficult, even when changes are large and made repeatedly Identification is much...

Recent research on change detection has documented surprising failures to detect visual changes occurring between views of a scene, suggesting the possibility that visual representations contain few details. Although these studies convincingly demonstrate change blindness for objects in still images and motion pictures, they may not adequately assess the capacity to represent objects in the real world. Here we examine and reject the possibility that...