Karen Gonsalkorale

• The University of Sydney

Individuals ostracize others for myriad reasons, yet the influence of those reasons on the psychological experience of ostracizing is yet unknown. Two studies aimed to determine the emotional and behavioral sequelae of ostracizing for different motives, directly comparing punitive to defensive motives. We focused our examination on a suite of emoti...

Although intergroup contact is effective at reducing prejudice, avoidance of intergroup contact often creates a barrier to prejudice reduction. The present study aimed to reduce majority members' desire to avoid intergroup interactions by devising an intervention aimed at altering cognitive appraisals. Majority group participants (156 Anglo Austral...

Men are more likely than women to engage in so-called ‘strategic’ forms of gambling, particularly wagering and casino table games, but the reasons for this preference are unclear. Previous research on male gender roles found that behaviours that are effective at establishing masculinity are those perceived as being risky, skill-based and public – w...

Three studies were conducted to examine the role of order effects in attributions of blame in cases of acquaintance rape. Participants were presented with a vignette describing an acquaintance rape and were then asked to respond to a victim blame scale and a perpetrator blame scale, the presentation order of which was manipulated. The results of St...

About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-report...

The idea that differentiated selves almost always improve group outcomes is overly simplistic. We argue that it is essential to distinguish between two distinct elements of differentiated selves – identifiability and specialization – and to identify conditions under which they influence group outcomes. Adopting a group-by-situation perspective, in...

Australia and Italy are both nations where complex contradictions exist in the current social roles and expectations for women. The current study used the Conformity to Feminine Norms Inventory (CFNI: Mahalik et al. 2005) to compare the endorsement of eight feminine norms (Nice in Relationships, Thinness, Care for Children, Modesty, Domestic, Roman...

Ostracism, a complex social phenomenon, involves both targets (ostracized individuals) and sources (ostracizers). The current experiment redressed a gap in the ostracism literature by devising a novel, three-phase paradigm to investigate motivated ostracizing. In the current study, 83 females were assigned to one of four conditions during a Cyberba...

Although intergroup contact is an effective way of reducing prejudice, negative expectancies about interacting with out-group members often create a barrier to intergroup contact. The current study investigated cognitive appraisals by which negative expectancies may arise. Specifically, we examined whether increasing Anglo Australians' appraisals o...

The combination of multiple social identities into a coherent in-group construal is of immediate relevance in today's complex and diverse societies. This paper proposes a conceptual and operational framework to examine how individuals subjectively construe their in-group in the context of multiple, cross-cutting group memberships. The subjective co...

The current study examined the impact of observing successful women being attacked on gender lines through reactions to gender-based criticism directed towards Australia's first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. Australian undergraduate students completed a measure of conformity to gender norms and then read statements about either: (a) generic...

With the increasing popularity and affordability of DNA sequencing through direct-to-consumer DNA sequencing services, it has become apparent that researchers need to understand how the results of sequencing one's DNA affects consumers psychologically and behaviorally. In this paper, the authors discuss several intrapersonal processes that may impa...

Performance on implicit attitude measures is influenced both by the nature of activated evaluative associations and by people's ability to regulate those associations as they respond. One consequence is that identical implicit attitude scores may conceal different underlying processes. This study demonstrated this phenomenon and also shed light on...

Until recently, researchers in the field of ostracism (i.e., the act of being excluded and ignored) have focused on investigating this phenomenon from the perspective of targets (i.e., the ostracized person). Although this has yielded important discoveries about the consequences of being ostracized, very little is known about the nature and consequ...

Previous research has linked threats to masculinity and gender harassment, the most pervasive form of sexual harassment. Using a computer harassment paradigm, an ingroup bonding explanation of this link was directly examined. The study was conducted with heterosexual male undergraduate students from an inner city Australian university. Participants...

In the present study, we aimed to compare the primary-need depletion elicited by three common ostracism paradigms: autobiographical recall (e.g., Zhong & Leonardelli in Psychological Science 19:838-842, 2008), Cyberball (Williams, Cheung, & Choi in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 79:748-762, 2000), and O-Cam (Goodacre & Zadro in Behavi...

Social identity complexity (SIC) as defined by Roccas and Brewer is an individual’s subjective representation of the combination of his or her multiple ingroup memberships. Almost all prior research on SIC and its relationship to intergroup attitudes has been conducted with members of ethnic majority groups. The present research assesses SIC and it...

Although implicitly measured bias was once assumed to be highly stable, subsequent research has shown that it is, in fact, malleable. One technique for altering implicit bias is through counter‐prejudicial training. At least two broad mechanisms may drive this effect. First, training people to respond in counter‐prejudicial ways may diminish the ex...

Ostracism, the act of being excluded or ignored by another individual or group (Williams, 1997; Williams et al., 2002), is a powerful, pervasive, and complex phenomenon that transcends time and affects individuals throughout their lifespan, with some of the most damaging exclusionary experiences occurring during childhood (Williams, Forgas, & von H...

Homosexuality has been found to be a risk factor for body dissatisfaction in men. An online sample of 64 homosexual men was used to examine the relationship between psychosocial variables hypothesised to play a role in this link (connection to gay community, rejection sensitivity, self-esteem, stigma consciousness, and internalised homophobia) and...

Individuals who are primarily internally motivated to respond without prejudice show less bias on implicit measures than individuals who are externally motivated or unmotivated to respond without prejudice. However, it is not clear why these individuals exhibit less implicit bias than others. We used the Quad model to examine motivation-based indiv...

Processes that permit control over automatic impulses are critical to a range of goaldirected behaviors. This chapter examines the role of self-control in implicit attitudes. It is widely assumed that implicit attitude measures reflect the automatic activation of stored associations, whose expression cannot be altered by controlled processes. We re...

This research examines the mechanisms underlying group-based differences in implicit attitudes and malleability of implicit attitudes resulting from exposure to exemplars. We tested whether these effects are due to differences in activated associations or to the regulation of those associations. In Study 1, Black participants exhibited less pro-Whi...

About 70% of more than half a million Implicit Association Tests completed by citizens of 34 countries revealed expected implicit stereotypes associating science with males more than with females. We discovered that nation-level implicit stereotypes predicted nation-level sex differences in 8th-grade science and mathematics achievement. Self-report...

A popular view holds that older adults are more prejudiced than younger adults because they grew up in a less tolerant era. An alternative view proposes that aging corresponds with stronger prejudice among older adults because they have reduced capacity to inhibit biased associations that come to mind automatically. To independently assess these po...

Previous research suggests that automatically activated bias manifests itself in behavior that can jeopardize the quality of intergroup interactions. However, regulation of automatic associations has the potential to attenuate their influence on intergroup interaction. To test this possibility, 46 non-Muslim White participants interacted with a Mus...

In order to investigate the systems underlying the automatic and controlled processes that support social attitudes, we conducted an fMRI study that combined an implicit measure of race attitudes with the Quadruple Process model (Quad model). A number of previous neural investigations have adopted the Implicit Association Test (IAT) to examine the...

The distinction between automatic processes and controlled processes is a central organizational theme across areas of psychology. However, this dichotomy conceals important differences among qualitatively different processes that independently contribute to ongoing behavior. The Quadruple process model is a multinomial model that provides quantita...

Previous research has shown that ostracism even by outgroup members is aversive. In this study we examined whether ostracism by a particular type of outgroup, a despised outgroup, was sufficient to inflict emotional distress. We manipulated ostracism using Cyberball, an on-line ball toss game. Ostracized participants reported lower levels of belong...

Although many theories of intergroup relations propose that threat leads to outgroup hostility, relatively little research has examined the effects of collective threat on stereotyping. Two studies were conducted to test the hypothesis that intergroup threat leads to greater implicit stereotyping of the threatening group. In Study 1, White particip...

An experiment explored the hypothesis that inhibitory ability helps people stop themselves from engaging in socially inappropriate behavior. All participants completed a Stroop color-naming task, after which half of the participants were asked to remember an eight-digit number (inducing divided attention). Participants were then offered an unfamili...

Studies on grandparental investment have revealed that mothers' fathers are emotionally closer to their grandchildren than are fathers' mothers. In the current study, it was hypothesized that this difference is caused by the fact that fathers' mothers often have the potential to invest in genetically more certain kin (children through their daughte...