Jessica J. Cameron

University of Manitoba | UMN · Department of Psychology

Social risk elicits self-esteem differences in signature social motivations and behaviors during the relationship-initiation process. In particular, the present research tested the hypothesis that lower self-esteem individuals' (LSEs) motivation to avoid rejection leads them to self-protectively underestimate acceptance from potential romantic part...

Despite the potential benefits of self-disclosure, individuals with lower self-esteem (LSEs) tend to avoid self-revelations. The present study investigated the role of self-esteem in predicting detrimental responses to the disclosure of a personal failure. We employed a novel experimental design where all participants experienced a lab-induced stre...

The association between attachment dimensions (anxiety and avoidance) can influence measurement creation and statistical analyses. Our goal was to test the assumption that anxiety and avoidance was orthogonal in two popular measures: the ‘Experience in Close Relationships Scale – Revised’ (ECR-R) and the original ‘Experiences in Close Relationships...

Empirical evidence affirms that gender is a nonbinary spectrum. Yet our review of recently published empirical articles reveals that demographic gender measurement in psychology still assumes that gender comprises just two categories: women and men. This common practice is problematic. It fails to represent psychologists' current understanding of g...

Self-esteem promises to serve as the nexus of social experiences ranging from social acceptance, interpersonal traits, interpersonal behavior, relationship quality, and relationship stability. Yet previous researchers have questioned the utility of self-esteem for understanding relational outcomes. To examine the importance of self-esteem for under...

Researchers aren’t always working with primary data, they often work with pre-existing, secondary and older data. Sometimes, this means that the data being used was not collected in a way that aligns with recommended practices for measuring gender, sex and sexuality. How should researchers deal with these issues, and responsibly use data that has i...

Individuals with low self-esteem (LSE) may be devalued, whereas individuals with high self-esteem (HSE) are typically praised in Western society. People readily infer traits based on impressions of self-esteem. Across two studies, we address whether impressions of a hypothetical target person’s self-esteem influence judgments beyond the target’s pe...

Would you like your research to be responsive to ever-changing understandings of how to measure gender/sex/sexuality variables? As the research landscape changes, this tool serves as a guide for attending to inadequate measures used in the past and trying to plan and design better research in the future. It cover topics like accounting for shifts i...

Social connections are important to maintain health across adulthood. Loneliness and social isolation are global issues and are linked to negative mental health outcomes worldwide, especially among older adults. Past research focuses primarily on loneliness and isolation separately, though many older people experience them simultaneously. Also, the...

Tool #1 in the Gender & Sex in Method & Measurement Research Equity Toolkit is for researchers who are interested in ensuring that their research eligibility criteria are precise, inclusive and clearly communicated.

Tool #3 in the Gender & Sex in Method & Measurement Research Equity Toolkit is about sampling plans and data analyses. Whether you're engaging in planned or emergent analyses, you need to ensure you're thinking about people who are marginalized based on their genders, sexes and sexualities. It covers topics like achieving statistical power with min...

Tool #2 in the Gender & Sex in Method & Measurement Research Equity Toolkit, this resource provides guidance and recommendations on how to effectively recruit research participants who are marginalized and minoritized based on their genders, sexes and sexualities. The tool covers online and community-based recruitment, compensation, research fatigu...

This tool helps researchers understand whether, when and how to ask participants about their genders & sexes. There is no single, correct way to measure people’s genders and sexes, in part because these terms have multiple meanings. This tool serves as a guide to walk researchers through some common approaches to gender and sex measurement with a f...

There is more than one pathway to romance, but relationship science does not reflect this reality. Our research reveals that relationship initiation studies published in popular journals (Study 1) and cited in popular textbooks (Study 2) overwhelmingly focus on romance that sparks between strangers and largely overlook romance that develops between...

Romantic relationships activate a process of psychological attunement whereby self-esteem becomes responsive to the romantic bond, thereby potentially benefitting relationship quality and bolstering self-esteem. Yet some people are romantically single, raising the question: Do single people also exhibit psychological attunement? In a 2-year longitu...

First dates set the tone for future interactions and determine whether such interactions will even occur. Although people may want to showcase their virtues, first date scripts involving a man and a woman reflect traditional gender roles wherein men are expected to be proactive and women, reactive. As gender-based attitudes and roles have begun to...

Would-be-daters are surrounded by media messages that both target one gender and pit men and women against each other in the dating game (i.e., gendered relationship messages). How do these messages influence relationship initiation? In the present research, we focus on the consequences of being primed with gendered dating messages via actual book...

Both high quality friendship and romantic bonds are essential for well-being. Yet, during emerging adulthood, these bonds compete for importance (Rawlins, 1992). We followed two-hundred and fifty undergraduates over two years to examine how relationship status (single vs. partnered) influenced friendship quality over time. We hypothesized that frie...

People use impressions of an evaluative target’s self-esteem to infer their possession of socially desirable traits. But will people still use this self-esteem proxy when trait-relevant diagnostic information is available? We test this possibility in two experiments: participants learn that a target person has low or high self-esteem, and then rece...

Self-esteem has been studied extensively by psychologists, with thousands of empirical articles exploring its potential causes, consequences, and correlates. Despite this considerable attention, disagreements persist over how best to define and conceptualize self-esteem. Most psychologists view it as a global evaluation of the value of the self or...

Romantic relationships have a large impact on health and well-being, thus how these relationships begin is an important area of research. The majority of the existing romantic relationship initiation research has focused on initiation between strangers or acquaintances. However, romantic relationships can also originate as friendships. Making the t...

Social support is critical to personal and relational well-being. Yet, receiving support appears to be contingent upon adequately conveying need to a receptive partner who both understands and is willing to provide said support. Or is it? We provide the first evidence of a covert haptic support system between adult intimates, showing that literally...

Sociometer theory contends that the self-esteem system is an evolved regulatory system aimed at helping people form and maintain high-quality social bonds that were and are essential for human survival. The motivational heart of the self-esteem system is the fundamental need to belong, which is a drive to form lasting and satisfying interpersonal a...

Social threats during relationship initiation often cause people to engage in cold behaviors that bring about rejection. However, interpersonal risk-regulation theory suggests that such processeswill be moderated by global self-esteem. In two experiments that manipulated the threat of rejection, single participants communicated via video camera wit...

Social risk interacts with self-esteem to predict relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. However, because socially risky situations afford both rewards and costs, it is unclear which affordance is responsible for these effects. Two experiments primed social rewards or costs within different relationship-initiation contexts and then evalua...

This research examines whether acceptance messages from close others about one's weight predict changes in stressful weight concern and body mass index (BMI) over time. Participants reported weight concern and BMI in three waves of data collection spanning approximately 9 months, and reported the messages they received from parents, friends, and ro...

Objective: To investigate if the presence of a smile, regardless of an individual's dental aesthetics, had any significant impact on the perception of facial aesthetics of already attractive faces. It was also designed to explore the influence of hair colour, evaluator ethnicity, and evaluator dental education in these attractiveness ratings. Met...

Successful romantic relationship initiation often requires bold and direct action, but direct action can increase the possibility of rejection. These dual possible outcomes create interpersonal risk, which should prompt self-esteem differences in behavior. When risk is present, lower self-esteem individuals, who prefer to avoid social costs, will b...

Though self-esteem is known to positively impact individuals’ romantic relationship outcomes and those of their partners, the interactive nature of both partners’ self-esteem levels has not been systematically investigated. Using actor–partner interdependence model analyses we estimated actor, partner, and four types of dyadic effects of self-estee...

People expect intimate partners to understand their personality, including feelings of self-worth. These general assumptions about transparency may influence situation-specific estimates of how others view the self (i.e., metaperceptions). In contexts that elicit evaluative concerns, lower self-esteem individuals, who think their chronic self-doubt...

Dating partners, friends, and parent/adult-child pairs indicated their trust in each other and their tendencies to react to hurt feelings with relationship-destructive behaviors. Actor-Partner Interdependence Model analyses revealed that overall, greater trust within a dyad was linked to a lowered tendency for either pair-member to react destructiv...

Humans have a fundamental need to belong and be accepted by others (Baumeister & Leary, 1995). Yet, the people by whom we expect to be highly regarded sometimes behave in rejecting or hurtful ways. People can respond to hurt feelings in ways that promote the maintenance of valued bonds, or they can react destructively (Leary et al., 1998; Rusbult,...

Signal amplification bias, the tendency to overestimate how much one’s behavior conveys internal states, has been theorized to negatively affect relationships. The present study is the first to test whether signal amplification has negative consequences in close relationships and whether this form of miscommunication is more detrimental to lower se...

The social support provided in intimate relationships is an important contributor to physical, psychological, and relational well-being (e.g., Collins & Feeney, 2000; Schachner et al., 2005; Reblin & Uchino, 2008). Unfortunately, some people do not feel supported by their partners. Inhibition to convey needs to a potentially rejecting partner may i...

People's expectations of acceptance often come to create the acceptance or rejection they anticipate. The authors tested the hypothesis that interpersonal warmth is the behavioral key to this acceptance prophecy: If people expect acceptance, they will behave warmly, which in turn will lead other people to accept them; if they expect rejection, they...

Individuals’ metaperceptions regarding how another person views them tend to be egocentrically biased by their own private self-knowledge: They overestimate the extent to which their traits, feelings, and intentions are ‘transparent’, perceiving more congruence between their inner self and the other person's impressions than actually exists. In the...

The authors draw upon social, personality, and health psychology to propose and test a self-and-social-bonds model of health. The model contends that lower self-esteem predicts health problems and that poor-quality social bonds explain this association. In Study 1, lower self-esteem prospectively predicted reports of health problems 2 months later,...

The authors examined the degree to which ratings of negative affectivity (NA) and relational security predicted the breakup of long-distance and same-city dating relationships. Couples completed initial surveys and were contacted 1 year later about the status of their relationship. In the initial surveys, both partners completed NA and relational s...

Part 1. The Emergence of the Self and Memory. Denise R. Beike, James M. Lampinen, Douglas A. Behrend, Evolving Conceptions of the Self and Memory. Jochen Barth, Daniel J. Povinelli, John G. H. Cant, Bodily Origins of Self. Mark L. Howe, Early Memory, Early Self, and the Emergence of Autobiographical Memory. Part 2. Narrative Conceptions of the Self...

Four studies demonstrated that fears of rejection prompt individuals to exhibit a signal amplification bias, whereby they perceive that their overtures communicate more romantic interest to potential partners than is actually the case. The link between rejection anxieties and the bias was evident regardless of whether fears of rejection were assess...

The present research demonstrated that horizontal collectivism (HC), the tendency to emphasize social bonds and interdependence, is associated with overestimating the extent to which one's preferences, feelings, and behavioral inclinations are transparent to close others. The link between HC and felt transparency was mediated by self-other merging...

The present research demonstrated that horizontal collectivism (HC), the tendency to emphasize social bonds and interdependence, is associated with overestimating the extent to which one's preferences, feelings, and behavioral inclinations are transparent to close others. The link between HC and felt transparency was mediated by self-other merging...

Intimate partners described a past transgression in which one of them had been a victim and the other a perpetrator and then evaluated each other and their relationship. Participants had been randomly assigned to the perpetrator or victim role. Perpetrators described their actions as more justifiable, perceived greater improvement since the transgr...