Kristi Costabile

Iowa State University | ISU · Department of Psychology

The prevalence of entertainment media in everyday life might offer unexpected social opportunities. The present paper examined whether cognitive overlap with the character and self-expansion occur as a result of exposure to fictional characters. Results of two studies indicated that transportation into a narrative leads to greater cognitive overlap...

One of the most exciting trends in psychology has been the increasing use of data and conceptual tools derived from the study of patients with neuropsychological syndromes to address questions about normal mental function. To date, however, personality theorists seldom have considered neuropsychological case material (Klein & Kihlstrom, 1998). In t...

The present investigation examined how three salient features of narrative thinking (situation model construction, linguistic concreteness, and perspective-taking) influenced the social inference process. Results of four experiments indicated that compared with those given other objectives, perceivers given narrative objectives were: (a) more likel...

Although research has given substantial attention to understanding the antecedents of dispositional inferences, less attention has been directed at the consequences of these inferences, such that evidence linking dispositional inferences to downstream effects is relatively scarce. The present investigation examined whether dispositional inferences...

Because diabetes is a chronic medical condition that consists of a broad superordinate group with nested subgroups of differing relative status (type 1 versus type 2), it is well-suited to an examination of identity management strategies used by individuals with chronic illness. Results indicated that individuals with type 1 diabetes reported great...

Background Individuals with diabetes experience a wide variety of psychosocial responses to their illness due, in part, to the nature of type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Variation in patient weight may play a central role in these differences, yet its influence on psychosocial variation is largely unknown. The current study investigates the relationship...

Conversational remembering, or sharing autobiographical memories with others, occurs frequently in everyday communication. The current project examined how the experience of shared reality with a conversation partner when describing autobiographical memories to them can operate to enhance the self, social, and directive uses of a recalled memory an...

Cybersickness is a barrier to widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR). We summarize the literature and conclude that women experience more cybersickness than do men, but that the size of the gender effect is modest. We present a mediation and moderation framework for organizing existing research and proposing new questions about gender and cybe...

Cybersickness is a barrier to widespread adoption of virtual reality (VR). We summarize the literature and conclude that women experience more cybersickness than do men, but that the size of the gender effect is modest. We present a mediation and moderation framework for organizing existing research and proposing new questions about gender and cybe...

Two experiments studied the evaluative adaptation process at the outset of a communication event to examine how autobiographical memory could be shaped by audience attitude, shared reality, and epistemic trust. Experiment 1 found that audience attitude influenced communicator perceptions of their own autobiographical memories and attitudes toward t...

The current investigation examined how experiencing a shared reality during the social reconstruction of the past might relate to communicators’ perceived authenticity and self-esteem. In two experiments, participants were randomly assigned to describe an autobiographical memory to an audience who had either a positive or negative attitude tow...

Two experiments examined how perceivers evaluated target individuals based on minimal information as presented in a typical social media post and whether inferences varied as a function of information source (self vs. other) and valence (positive vs. negative). Across experiments, results indicated that targets were: (a) less likely to be rated wit...

The present investigation examined whether autobiographical memory can function to regulate competence need satisfaction. Across two experiments, we examined how autobiographical memories affected perceived competence after competence was threatened or satisfied in a previous task. Experiment 1 results from an undergraduate student sample (N = 150)...

This study investigates the relationships among causal attributions, internalized stigma, and self-blame, along with downstream health and life satisfaction consequences for individuals with type 1 and type 2 diabetes. Data were analyzed from the Diabetes, Identity, Attributions, and Health study. Participants diagnosed with either type 1 or type 2...

Individuals create a sense of self-continuity by constructing a narrative identity that integrates their past experiences with an imagined future. Previous research indicates that men are more likely than women to include agentic themes in their narrative identities, whereas women are more likely than men to include communal themes. The present inv...

Narrative cognition is a fundamental component of event comprehension and social communication. The present article examines the role of mental simulation in narrative cognition and how the mental simulation process affects social judgments. In the course of narrative text comprehension, readers develop rich mental representations of the described...

To more fully understand the complex relationship between self-knowledge and significant autobiographical memories, two studies examined the degree to which agency and communion orientations were consistently represented across self-views and autobiographical memories, and measured the strength of these relationships in relation to prototypical the...

Objective: (1) To examine the degree to which overall beer advertising expenditure is related to youth brand awareness, preferences, and drinking behavior, and (2) to use multiple methods, including individual brand awareness and expectancies, to gain a broader understanding of the effects of alcohol advertising on youth alcohol-related expectanci...

Objective The present study aims to describe and compare causal attributions for type 1 diabetes (T1D) and type 2 diabetes (T2D) among affected and unaffected individuals and to investigate the relationships among attributions, attitudes, and beliefs. Research design and methods Adults with no diabetes (N=458), T1D (N=192), or T2D (N=207) complete...

For millennia, narratives have been a primary mode of oral discourse. Narrative presentation of information has been shown to facilitate interpersonal and group communication. However, research indicates that narratives are more than merely an adaptive mode of communication. Narrative is a fundamental – and perhaps foundational – element of social...

The presence of another person in a spatial scene has been shown to induce spontaneous perspective taking. This investigation presents two experiments exploring whether the presence of another person affects reference frame selection when representing object locations in memory. Participants studied objects from one view and later performed judgmen...

When a group commits a transgression, members who identify closely with the group often engage in defensive strategies in which they are less likely to experience guilt and shame in response to the transgression than are less identified group members. Subsequently, highly identified group members are often less willing to offer reparations to the i...

Autobiographical memories are particularly adaptive because they function not only to preserve the past, but also to direct our future thoughts and behaviours. Two studies were conducted to examine how communal and agentic themes of positive autobiographical memories differentially predicted the route from autobiographical memories to optimism for...

Two experiments examined the effect of film music on the narrative persuasion. In Experiment 1, participants viewed a short film with its original musical soundtrack or with soundtrack muted. In Experiment 2, musical soundtrack was added to a film that was originally produced without music. Findings indicated that participants reported greater tran...

Jones and Thibaut (1958) argue that information gleaned from social interaction depends on the perceiver's current objectives. Five experiments examined how narrative construction and impression formation objectives influenced interpretation of social behaviors. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants read a series of sentences describing persons perf...

People often look to others for guidance when selecting narrative entertainment. Previous work has demonstrated that this social guidance forms the basis of people’s expectations and subsequently affects people’s experience. The current work extends previous research by exploring the influence of peer evaluations of a story, on enjoyment of and psy...

Over the past two decades, an abundance of evidence has shown that individuals typically rely on semantic summary knowledge when making trait judgments about self and others (for reviews, see Klein, 2004; Klein, Robertson, Gangi, & Loftus, 2008). But why form trait summaries if one can consult the original episodes on which the summary was based? C...

Evidence suggests that stories are used universally to describe a series of events (e.g., Barthes, 1977). One reason for this universality may be that narrative construction aids in understanding and predicting social events: Narrative structures provide information about what can be expected in a given situation-as well as what might go wrong. In...

We investigated the effects of evidence order on juror verdicts. Results from 4 mock juror studies suggest that incriminating evidence is more likely to lead to a guilty verdict when it is presented late in the trial than when it is presented early. This recency effect was found both with admissible and inadmissible evidence. Further analyses sugge...

We report the case of K.R., an individual with Alzheimer's dementia. Although K.R. has difficulty retrieving even mundane facts about the world, she has accurate knowledge of her own personality. But the self she knows is out-of-date. K.R.'s inability to update her trait self-knowledge stands in contrast to other neuropsychological cases in which i...

Thesis (B.S.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 1999. Includes bibliographical reference (leaves 19-21) Microfiche,