To thine own self be true? Clarifying the effects of identity discrepancies on psychological distress and emotions.

After many years of research across disciplines, it remains unclear whether people are more motivated to seek appraisals that accurately match self-views (self-verification) or are as favorable as possible (self-enhancement). Within sociology, mixed findings in identity theory have fueled the debate. A problem here is that a commonly employed statistical approach does not take into account the direction of a discrepancy between how we see ourselves and how we think others see us in terms of a given identity, yet doing so is critical for determining which self-motive is at play.

Predicting performance expectations from affective impressions: linking affect control theory and status characteristics theory.

Affect control theory (ACT) and status characteristics theory (SCT) offer separate and distinct explanations for how individuals interpret and process status- and power-relevant information about interaction partners. Existing research within affect control theory offers evidence that status and power are related to the affective impressions that individuals form of others along the dimensions of evaluation and potency, respectively. Alternately, status characteristics theory suggests that status and power influence interaction through the mediating cognitive construct of performance expectations.

Moderators and mediators of the stress-aggression relationship: executive function and state anger.

The present study examined the effects of executive function (i.e., EF) and anger/hostility on the relationship between stress (across individual stress domains, as well as at the aggregate level) and aggression.

Effects of dichotically enhanced electronic communication on crash risk and performance during simulated driving.

In a driving simulator experiment, male and female college students received turn-by-turn driving directions and cognitive tasks while interacting with an experimenter via an audio communication system. In an Enhanced condition (n = 29), lower speech frequencies (containing the speech fundamental frequency) were routed to participants' left ears (with right cerebral-hemisphere processing) and verbal frequencies above the speech fundamental frequency were routed to right ears (with left hemisphere processing). A control group (n = 31) heard unfiltered communications in both ears.

Targeted high and low speech frequency bands to right and left ears respectively improve task performance and perceived sociability in dyadic conversations.

Past research shows that the lower nonverbal frequencies of the human voice, beneath .5 kHz, transmit an acoustic signal promoting social convergence and status accommodation between human interlocutors. We conducted a laboratory experiment and a validation study to explore the possible communications benefits of targeting the low-frequency band to the left ears of human participants and the high-frequency band to the right ears.