No full-text available
To read the full-text of this research,
you can request a copy directly from the authors.
The heritability of implicit self-esteem: A twin study
Abstract
In a twin sample (117 monozygotic and 115 dizygotic twin pairs), we assessed implicit self-esteem by using the implicit association test (IAT). Results showed that implicit self-esteem was heritable with substantial environmental influences. The heritability of implicit self-esteem suggests that it is a fundamental individual difference.
... In this respect, abnormal ISE has more potential to be an endophenotype of MDD. As supporting evidence, a recent twin study (39) has proved the heritability of ISE, although the current mainstream view is that ISE is mainly determined by environmental factors. Our result further supported the assumption that ISE reflects different psychological constructs of self-esteem from ESE. ...
Implicit self-esteem (ISE) has been considered a critical factor in the development and maintenance of major depressive disorder (MDD). Further investigating the event-related potential (ERP) characteristics underlying abnormal ISE in MDD would be helpful for understanding the neural mechanism of MDD. For this purpose, 32 MDD patients and 31 age- and sex-matched healthy controls (HCs) were enrolled in this study. The Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) was used to evaluate explicit self-esteem (ESE), and a self-esteem go/no-go association task (GNAT) was used to assess ISE. Electroencephalograms were synchronously recorded when performing the self-esteem GNAT. Behavioral data and ERP characteristics under different conditions were analyzed and compared within and across groups. The results showed that compared to HCs, MDD patients had significantly lower RSES scores and self-D scores of GNAT, which reflected lower levels of ESE and ISE, respectively. No significant correlation was found between RESE and self-D scores, and only RESE scores were significantly negatively correlated with the Hamilton Depression Rating Scale (HAMD) score. The averaged centroparietal go-P3 amplitude under the self-positive condition was significantly smaller in MDD than in HCs. Moreover, HCs had a significantly larger average centroparietal go-P3 amplitude in self-positive than in self-negative conditions, while this pattern was opposite in the MDD group. The neural activity patterns for other conditions were similar between MDD and HCs. Our results suggested that patients with MDD have a decreased level of both ESE and ISE, and ISE might be more independent of clinical symptoms. Decreased neural processing that implicitly associate self with positive conditions (and relatively increased implicit association between self and negative conditions) might be important neural correlates for abnormal ISE in MDD.
... Therefore, it seems appropriate to include self-efficacy for fruit and vegetable intake or selfefficacy for energy-dense food intake reduction in research explaining food intake in families with young children. Moreover, as shown in twin studies (Cai & Luo, 2017), child self-efficacy is explained by heritability and, to a lesser extent, by environmental factors (e.g. parental modeling). ...
Background:
According to social cognitive theory and socio-ecological models, self-efficacy and temptation-related self-regulation (the use of distraction or suppression) are modifiable predictors of health behaviors, such as food intake. Yet, there is limited evidence explaining how these factors are interlinked among parent-child dyads. This study investigated indirect effects of parental and child self-efficacy on food intake, via parental and child self-regulation.
Methods:
The prospective study (the baseline [T1] and the 10-month follow-up [T2]) enrolled 924 parent-child dyads (1,848 individuals; 54.3% girls, aged 5-11 years, 88.9% mothers). Dyads were interviewed or completed self-report measures. Path analyses with maximum likelihood estimation were conducted.
Results:
Child self-efficacy and distraction (T1) mediated between parental self-efficacy (T1) and higher levels of child fruit and vegetable intake (T2). No significant mediating effects of suppression were found, nor indirect effects of parental self-efficacy (T1) on energy-dense food intake (T2).
Conclusion:
Health promotion interventions aiming at changing fruit and vegetable intake among 5-11-year-old children should target enhancing parental and child self-efficacy that may facilitate the use of self-regulation and, in turn, healthy diet.
... The BeTwiSt has produced numerous important results regarding the genetic and environmental bases of some vital social and personality factors such as different categories of narcissism (Table 4; Cai & Luo, 2017;Cai et al., 2016;Cai et al., 2015;Luo, Cai, Sedikides et al., 2014;Luo et al., 2016;Luo, Shi et al., 2014;Zhou, Wong et al., 2018). As shown in Table 4, most phenotypes were influenced by genes and non-shared environments. ...
The Beijing Twin Study (BeTwiSt), which was established in 2006, is an ongoing study aiming to investigate the genetic and environmental etiology of adolescent psychopathology. Resting-state brain imaging datasets have been examined for same-sex twins, and other psychological traits and emotional and behavioral variables have been examined for all twins. Based on the registry, the main findings regarding the etiological mechanism underlying adolescent development, magnetic resonance imaging results, and genetic and environmental influences on other psychological traits have been published. This article summarizes the key findings in these three areas and discusses future plans for the BeTwiSt.
Objective:
Correlational research aiming to validate measures and the construct of implicit self-esteem (ISE) has produced heterogeneous results in the past. We argue that this might be caused by two underappreciated obstacles: the situational malleability of and the construct irrelevant variance in conventional ISE measures. In this study, we aim to address these problems.
Methods:
To this end, we applied process and latent state-trait modeling to Implicit Association Test and Name Letter Task data collected on four occasions across six weeks in a preregistered online study (initial N = 360, final N = 302). We investigated the relation of supposed trait ISE parameters with trait explicit self-esteem (ESE) and a set of criteria.
Results:
Results indicated no latent trait correlation among the different supposed indicators of ISE, small latent trait correlations of indicators of ISE and ESE, and little incremental validity of the supposed ISE measures in predicting potential criterion measures over and above ESE.
Conclusions:
These findings align with previous critical evaluations regarding the supposed measures of ISE and the conceptual validity of ISE as an association and call for a more careful terminology in the field.
The dual-process models explaining cognitive functioning paved the way for handling explicit and implicit dimensions of self-evaluations. In this direction, the focus has been on implicit self-esteem, which is one important element of unconscious self-evaluations. Many methods have been developed in which self-related stimuli are presented to measure implicit self-esteem. Thus, a new variable that can play a critical role in contexts such as personality, interpersonal relationships, and psychopathology has been defined in the literature on self-esteem, which is generally based on findings measured by self-reporting. The present review aims to shed light on the characteristics of implicit self-esteem, its role in psychopathologies, and traditional and second-generation measurement methods in this field. In this context, a review of studies focusing on the role of implicit self-assessment in different areas such as depression, anxiety, psychosis, and personality disorders is presented. Furthermore, the strengths and limitations of measurement methods are discussed. As a result, it has been observed that implicit self-esteem can play a central role in psychopathologies both in terms of its relation to explicit self-esteem and independently from it, however, studies on the subject have revealed inconsistent findings in some areas. Besides, it was determined that measurement methods are not strong enough in terms of psychometric properties and further studies are needed in this regard.
Emerging adulthood is one of the most important life stages for self and identity development. The present research tracked the development of implicit self-esteem during emerging adulthood at both the group and individual levels. We used the implicit association test to assess implicit self-esteem with the improved D score as the index. We surveyed 327 students each year from the beginning of their first year of university until their graduation, with an extra assessment run in the middle of the first year. First-order autoregressive structural equation modeling indicated that implicit self-esteem remained quite stable during the university years in terms of rank-order stability. Latent growth modeling showed that implicit self-esteem decreased slightly during the university years with females initially manifesting a higher level. These findings enrich our understanding of implicit self-esteem and its development as well as self-construction during emerging adulthood.
The gender-science stereotype of associating males, rather than females, with science is pervasive and influential. The present study challenged the common-sense assumption that it is environment that leads to the gender-science stereotype by conducting a genetically informative study. A total of 304 pairs of twins (152 monozygotic [MZ] and 152 dizygotic [DZ]) completed explicit and implicit gender-science stereotype measures twice across 2 years. Results showed that both explicit and implicit gender-science stereotypes were heritable, with significant nonshared environmental influence. Moreover, genetic and nonshared environmental factors influencing the explicit gender-science stereotype also affected the implicit gender-science stereotype to some extent. These findings have important implications for understanding the nature of the gender-science stereotype and implicit social cognition.
The gender-science stereotype of associating males, rather than females, with science is pervasive and influential. The present study challenged the common-sense assumption that it is environment that leads to the gender-science stereotype by conducting a genetically informative study. A total of 304 pairs of twins (152 monozygotic [MZ] and 152 dizygotic [DZ]) completed explicit and implicit gender-science stereotype measures twice across 2 years. Results showed that both explicit and implicit gender-science stereotypes were heritable, with significant nonshared environmental influence. Moreover, genetic and nonshared environmental factors influencing the explicit gender-science stereotype also affected the implicit gender-science stereotype to some extent. These findings have important implications for understanding the nature of the gender-science stereotype and implicit social cognition.
In this chapter, I review my program of research on implicit attitudes and beliefs. These attitudes and beliefs are often acquired without individuals' awareness and influence judgments, decisions, and actions without intention. My work seeks to identify circumstances that produce changes in people's implicit attitudes and beliefs toward social groups. Over the course of a dozen years, my collaborators and I have found that implicit attitudes and beliefs are remarkably malleable even in the absence of active attempts at persuasion. I review four lines of research relevant to this issue. Collectively, this work shows that implicit attitudes and beliefs are mirror-like reflections of local environments and communities within which individuals are immersed. Changes in local environments (and sometimes emotions elicited by them) produce corresponding changes in people's implicit attitudes and beliefs. In essence, implicit attitudes and beliefs are better described as situational adaptations or reflections rather than personal possessions acquired and discarded by conscious acts of will.
Despite a century of research on complex traits in humans, the relative importance and specific nature of the influences of genes and environment on human traits remain controversial. We report a meta-analysis of twin correlations and reported variance components for 17,804 traits from 2,748 publications including 14,558,903 partly dependent twin pairs, virtually all published twin studies of complex traits. Estimates of heritability cluster strongly within functional domains, and across all traits the reported heritability is 49%. For a majority (69%) of traits, the observed twin correlations are consistent with a simple and parsimonious model where twin resemblance is solely due to additive genetic variation. The data are inconsistent with substantial influences from shared environment or non-additive genetic variation. This study provides the most comprehensive analysis of the causes of individual differences in human traits thus far and will guide future gene-mapping efforts. All the results can be visualized using the MaTCH webtool.
Behavioral research has established that humans implicitly tend to hold a positive view toward themselves. In this study, we employed the event-related potential (ERP) technique to explore neural manifestations of positive implicit self-esteem using the Go/Nogo association task (GNAT). Participants generated a response (Go) or withheld a response (Nogo) to self or others words and good or bad attributes. Behavioral data showed that participants responded faster to the self paired with good than the self paired with bad, whereas the opposite proved true for others, reflecting the positive nature of implicit self-esteem. ERP results showed an augmented N200 over the frontal areas in Nogo responses relative to Go responses. Moreover, the positive implicit self-positivity bias delayed the onset time of the N200 wave difference between Nogo and Go trials, suggesting that positive implicit self-esteem is manifested on neural activity about 270 ms after the presentation of self-relevant stimuli. These findings provide neural evidence for the positivity and automaticity of implicit self-esteem.
Implicit self-esteem has remained an active research topic in both the areas of implicit social cognition and self-esteem in recent decades. The purpose of this study is to explore the development of implicit self-esteem in adolescents. A total of 599 adolescents from junior and senior high schools in East China participated in the study. They ranged in age from 11 to 18 years with a mean age of 14.10 (SD = 2.16). The degree of implicit self-esteem was assessed using the Implicit Association Test (IAT) with the improved D score as the index. Participants also completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (α = 0.77). For all surveyed ages, implicit self-esteem was positively biased, all ts>8.59, all ps<0.001. The simple correlation between implicit self-esteem and age was significant, r = -.25, p = 1.0×10(-10). A regression with implicit self-esteem as the criterion variable, and age, gender, and age × gender interaction as predictors further revealed the significant negative linear relationship between age and implicit self-esteem, β = -0.19, t = -3.20, p = 0.001. However, explicit self-esteem manifested a reverse "U" shape throughout adolescence. Implicit self-esteem in adolescence manifests a declining trend with increasing age, suggesting that it is sensitive to developmental or age-related changes. This finding enriches our understanding of the development of implicit social cognition.
Processing self-related material recruits similar neural networks regardless of whether the self-relevance is made explicit
or not. However, when considering the neural mechanisms that distinctly underlie cognitive and affective components of self-reflection,
it is still unclear whether the same mechanisms are involved when self-reflection is explicit or implicit, and how these mechanisms
may be modulated by individual personality traits, such as self-esteem. In the present functional MRI study, 25 participants
were exposed to positive and negative words that varied with respect to the degree of self-relevance for each participant;
however, the participants were asked to make a judgment about the color of the words. Regions-of-interest analysis showed
that medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) and posterior cingulate cortex were associated with gauging the self-relevance of information.
However, no main effect of valence or an interaction effect between self-relevance and valence was observed. Further, positive
correlations were observed between levels of self-esteem and response within dorsal mPFC (dmPFC) both in the contrast positive-high
in self-relevance trials vs positive-low in self-relevance trials and in the contrast negative-low in self-relevance trials vs positive-low in self-relevance trials. These results suggested that the activation of dmPFC may be particularly associated
with the processes of self-positivity bias.
Is self-enhancement culturally universal or relativistic? This article highlights a nuanced dynamic in East Asian culture. Modesty is a prevailing norm in China. The authors hypothesized that because of socialization practices and prohibitive cultural pressures, modesty would be associated with and lead to low explicit self-enhancement but high implicit self-enhancement, that Chinese participants would deemphasize explicitly the positivity of the self when high on modesty or situationally prompted to behave modestly but would capitalize on their modest disposition or situationally induced behavior to emphasize implicitly the positivity of the self. In support of the hypotheses, dispositionally or situationally modest Chinese participants manifested low explicit self-esteem while manifesting high implicit self-esteem. Modesty among American participants constrained explicit self-esteem but yielded no associations with implicit self-esteem. The results showcase the tactical nature of self-enhancement in Chinese culture and call for research on when and how self-enhancement is pursued tactically in different cultures.
Rates of emotional and behavioral problems among children and adolescents in China are increasing and represent a major public health concern. To investigate the etiology of such problems, including the effects and interplay of genes and environment, the Beijing Twin Study (BeTwiSt) was established. A representative sample of adolescent twins in Beijing (N = 1,387 pairs of adolescent twins, mostly between the ages of 10 and 18 years) was recruited and assessed longitudinally. Data collection included the following: emotional and behavioral problems (e.g., depressive symptoms, anxiety, delinquency, drinking, and smoking); family, peer, and school environments; stress; social and academic competence; cognitive traits (e.g., emotion suppression, rumination, and effortful control); and saliva samples for DNA genotyping and sequencing. The combination of quantitative and molecular genetic approaches and the timeliness of the project, with the sample residing in a region with a rapidly changing economic and cultural climate, are particular strengths of this study. Findings from this study are expected to help understanding of the etiological mechanisms underlying child and adolescent normal and abnormal development in regions undergoing substantial social, cultural, and economic changes.
The current studies extend previous research on self-esteem by examining one of the likely origins of implicit self-esteem. Three studies showed that young adult children who reported that their parents were more nurturing reported higher implicit self-esteem compared with those whose parents were less nurturing. Studies 2 and 3 added a measure of overprotectiveness and revealed that children who reported that their parents were overprotective also reported lower implicit self-esteem. Moreover, Study 3 revealed that mothers’ independent reports of their early interactions with their children were also related to children’s level of implicit self-esteem. In all three studies, these findings remained reliable when we controlled statistically for participants’ explicit self-esteem. These findings contribute to a growing body of literature validating the construct of implicit self-esteem.
Gaining insight into the nature and consequences of people's global self-evaluations (i.e., their self-esteem) has been fraught with difficulty. Nearly 2 decades ago, researchers suggested that such difficulties might be addressed by the development of a new class of measures designed to uncover implicit self-esteem. In this article, we evaluate the construct validity of the 2 most common measures of implicit self-esteem, the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and Name-Letter Test (NLT). Our review indicates that the research literature has not provided strong or consistent support for the validity of either measure. We conclude that both tests are impoverished measures of self-esteem that are better understood as measures of either generalized implicit affect (IAT) or implicit egotism (NLT). However, we suggest that there surely are aspects of self-esteem that people are unwilling or unable to report and suggest a general approach that may allow researchers to tap these unspoken aspects of self-esteem.
The genetic basis of individual differences in attitudes was examined in a survey of 195 pairs of monozygotic twins and 141 pairs of same-sex dizygotic twins. A principal components analysis of the 30 attitude items in the survey identified 9 attitude factors, of which 6 yielded significant heritability coefficients. Nonshared environmental factors accounted for the most variance in the attitude factors. Possible mediators of attitude heritability were also assessed, including personality traits, physical characteristics, and academic achievement. Analyses showed that several of these possible mediators correlated at a genetic level with the heritable attitude factors, suggesting that the heritability of the mediator variables might account for part of the heritable components of some attitudes. There was also some evidence that highly heritable attitudes were psychologically "stronger" than less heritable attitudes.
Three studies examined the relationship between the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and explicit attitudes. In the 1st and all subsequent studies, the lack of any correlation between the IAT and explicitly measured attitudes supports the view that the IAT is independent from explicit attitudes. Study 2 examined the relationships among the IAT, explicit attitudes, and behavior and found that the explicit attitudes predicted behavior but the IAT did not. Finally, in Study 3 it was found that the IAT was affected by exposing participants to new associations between attitude objects, whereas the explicit attitudes remained unchanged. Taken together, these results support an environmental association interpretation of the IAT in which IAT scores reflect the associations a person has been exposed to in his or her environment rather than the extent to which the person endorses those evaluative associations.
Twin studies have been a valuable source of information about the genetic basis of complex traits. To maximize the potential of twin studies, large, worldwide registers of data on twins and their relatives have been established. Here, we provide an overview of the current resources for twin research. These can be used to obtain insights into the genetic epidemiology of complex traits and diseases, to study the interaction of genotype with sex, age and lifestyle factors, and to study the causes of co-morbidity between traits and diseases. Because of their design, these registers offer unique opportunities for selected sampling for quantitative trait loci linkage and association studies.
Long-standing theories have suggested high self-esteem (SE) can assume qualitatively different forms that are related to defensiveness. The authors explored whether some high-SE individuals are particularly defensive because they harbor negative self-feelings at less conscious levels, indicated by low implicit SE. In Study 1, participants high in explicit SE but low in implicit SE showed the highest levels of narcissism--an indicator of defensiveness. In Studies 2 and 3, the correspondence between implicit and explicit SE predicted defensive behavior (in-group bias in Study 2 and dissonance reduction in Study 3), such that for high explicit-SE participants, those with relatively low implicit SE behaved more defensively. These results are consistent with the idea that high SE can be relatively secure or defensive.
The authors argue that the Implicit Association Test (IAT; A.G. Greenwald, D.E. McGhee, & J.L.K. Schwartz, 1998) can be contaminated by associations that do not contribute to one's evaluation of an attitude object and thus do not become activated when one encounters the object but that are nevertheless available in memory. The authors propose a variant of the IAT that reduces the contamination of these "extrapersonal associations." Consistent with the notion that the traditional version of the IAT is affected by society's negative portrayal of minority groups, the "personalized" IAT revealed relatively less racial prejudice among Whites in Experiments 1 and 2. In Experiments 3 and 4, the personalized IAT correlated more strongly with explicit measures of attitudes and behavioral intentions than did the traditional IAT. The feasibility of disentangling personal and extrapersonal associations is discussed.
In 2 studies, the authors examined the degree to which implicit self-attitudes predicted people's spontaneous affective experiences in daily life. Across both studies, implicit attitudes toward the self (as measured by Implicit Association Tests) strongly predicted negative feeling states (as measured by computerized experience-sampling procedures), suggesting that implicit self-attitudes may be linked to changes in undifferentiated negative affect. Explicit attitudes toward the self generally did not account for these relations. Findings extend understanding of the factors that contribute to experienced affect and are the first to empirically link implicit self-attitudes with phenomenological affective experience in real-life settings over time.
The present research compared the validity of popular direct and indirect measures of selfesteem
in predicting self-confident behavior in different social situations. In line with
behavioral dual-process models, both implicit and explicit self-esteem were hypothesized to
be related to appearing self-confident to unacquainted others. 127 participants responded to
the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, the Multidimensional Self-Esteem Scale, and an adjective
scale for measuring explicit self-esteem (ESE). Participants’ implicit self-esteem (ISE) was
assessed with four indirect measures: the Implicit Association Test (IAT), the name-letter task
(NLT), and two variants of an affective priming task, the reaction-time affective priming task
(RT-APT) and the error-based affective priming task (EB-APT). Self-confident behavior was
observed in four different social situations: (a) self-introduction to a group, (b) an ostracism
experience, (c) an interview about the ostracism experience, and (d) an interview about one’s
personal life. In general, appearing self-confident to unknown others was independently
predicted by ESE and ISE. The indirect measures of self-esteem were, as expected, not
correlated, and only the self-esteem APTs—but not the self-esteem IAT or the NLT—
predicted self-confident behaviors. It is important to note that in particular the predictive
power of the self-esteem EB-APT pertained to all four criteria and was incremental to the
ESE measures.
In reporting Implicit Association Test (IAT) results, researchers have most often used scoring conventions described in the first publication of the IAT (A. G. Greenwald, D. E. McGhee, & J. L. K. Schwartz, 1998). Demonstration IATs available on the Internet have produced large data sets that were used in the current article to evaluate alternative scoring procedures. Candidate new algorithms were examined in terms of their (a) correlations with parallel self-report measures, (b) resistance to an artifact associated with speed of responding, (c) internal consistency, (d) sensitivity to known influences on IAT measures, and (e) resistance to known procedural influences. The best-performing measure incorporates data from the IAT's practice trials, uses a metric that is calibrated by each respondent's latency variability, and includes a latency penalty for errors. This new algorithm strongly outperforms the earlier (conventional) procedure.
This article explores the links between implicit self-esteem and the automatic self (D. L. Paulhus, 1993). Across 4 studies, name letter evaluations were positively biased, confirming that implicit self-esteem is generally positive (A. G. Greenwald & M. R. Banaji, 1995). Study 1 found that this name letter bias was stable over a 4-week period. Study 2 found that positive bias for name letters and positive bias for birth date numbers were correlated and that both biases became inhibited when participants were induced to respond in a deliberative manner. Studies 3-4 found that implicit self-evaluations corresponded with self-reported self-evaluations, but only when participants were evaluating themselves very quickly (Study 3) or under cognitive load (Study 4). Together, these findings support the notion that implicit self-esteem phenomena are driven by self-evaluations that are activated automatically and without conscious self-reflection.
Three studies examined the implicit (nonconscious) and explicit (conscious) self-concepts of people who varied in their degree of exposure to individualistic cultures. Studies 1 and 2 compared the implicit and explicit self-concepts of recent Asian immigrants with those of European Americans and Asian Americans reared in the United States. Implicit measures revealed clear differences in the self-evaluations of the three groups, and these differences were generally consistent with recent analyses of culture and the self-concept. In contrast, explicit measures revealed that all three groups possessed positively valenced, individualistic self-concepts. Additionally, there was evidence that the implicit self-evaluations of the recent immigrants were becoming increasingly individualistic over time. Study 3 examined the implicit and explicit self-concepts of Japanese students who either had or had not lived abroad in the United States or Canada. For both the implicit and the explicit measures, the findings were conceptually similar to those of Studies 1 and 2. Implications for the nature of self-representations and the need for positive regard are discussed.
Dissertation (Ph.D.)--University of Michigan.
For most psychological, physiological, and medical variables there are substantial age and sex effects. In assessing twin similarity for these variables, one can either fail to adjust for the effects of age and sex, adjust for these effects using normative data, or use information in the twin sample to define an age-sex adjustment. It is shown that failing to correct for age and sex effects when they exist will result in overestimation of the twin intraclass correlation. Using normative data to define an age-sex adjustment will also result in overestimation of the twin intraclass correlation, although the magnitude of this overestimation is slight for moderate-sized normative samples and virtually nonexistent for large normative samples. Using a twin-based age-sex adjustment will lead to an underestimation of the twin intraclass correlation, but this underestimation can be corrected for through proper specification of the degrees of freedom for the between-pairs mean square. Illustration of the effects of age-sex adjustment are provided as well as the results of a computer simulation comparison of the various approaches. It is concluded that, even with moderately sized samples, the effects of age and sex can best be adjusted for through a twin-based approach.
Social behavior is ordinarily treated as being under conscious (if not always thoughtful) control. However, considerable evidence now supports the view that social behavior often operates in an implicit or unconscious fashion. The identifying feature of implicit cognition is that past experience influences judgment in a fashion not introspectively known by the actor. The present conclusion--that attitudes, self-esteem, and stereotypes have important implicit modes of operation--extends both the construct validity and predictive usefulness of these major theoretical constructs of social psychology. Methodologically, this review calls for increased use of indirect measures--which are imperative in studies of implicit cognition. The theorized ordinariness of implicit stereotyping is consistent with recent findings of discrimination by people who explicitly disavow prejudice. The finding that implicit cognitive effects are often reduced by focusing judges' attention on their judgment task provides a basis for evaluating applications (such as affirmative action) aimed at reducing such unintended discrimination.
An implicit association test (IAT) measures differential association of 2 target concepts with an attribute. The 2 concepts appear in a 2-choice task (2-choice task (e.g., flower vs. insect names), and the attribute in a 2nd task (e.g., pleasant vs. unpleasant words for an evaluation attribute). When instructions oblige highly associated categories (e.g., flower + pleasant) to share a response key, performance is faster than when less associated categories (e.g., insect & pleasant) share a key. This performance difference implicitly measures differential association of the 2 concepts with the attribute. In 3 experiments, the IAT was sensitive to (a) near-universal evaluative differences (e.g., flower vs. insect), (b) expected individual differences in evaluative associations (Japanese + pleasant vs. Korean + pleasant for Japanese vs. Korean subjects), and (c) consciously disavowed evaluative differences (Black + pleasant vs. White + pleasant for self-described unprejudiced White subjects).
The Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study found that even though children from all East Asian countries outperformed American children, American students reported higher self-evaluation of their math and science abilities than did students from East Asian countries such as China, Korea, and Japan (Mullis, Martin, Gonzalez, & Chrostowski, 2004). Such cross-cultural differences in self-appraisal fit the stereotype of the modest East Asian and contribute to the received view that East Asians have less positive self-concepts than Americans. This view was summarized recently by Heine, Lehman, Markus, and Kitayama ( 1999) as follows: "The need for positive self-regard, as it is currently conceptualized, is not a universal, but rather is rooted in significant aspects of North American culture'' ( p. 766; but cf. Sedikides, Gaertner,& Vevea, 2005).
OpenMx 1.2 user guide
- S M Boker
- M C Neale
- H H Maes
- M J Wilde
- M Spiegel
- T R Brick
- A Brandmaier
Boker, S. M., Neale, M. C., Maes, H. H., Wilde, M. J., Spiegel, M., Brick, T. R.,... Brandmaier, A.
(2012). OpenMx 1.2 user guide. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, The
OpenMX Project.
Formation, change, and contextualization of mental associations
- B Gawronski
- R Sritharan
Gawronski, B., & Sritharan, R. (2010). Formation, change, and contextualization of mental
associations. In B. Gawronski, & B. K. Payne (Eds.), Handbook of implicit social cognition: Measurement, theory, and applications (pp. 216-240). New York: The Guilford
Press.
Bayesian model selection in structural equation models
- A E Raftery
Raftery, A. E. (1993). Bayesian model selection in structural equation models. In K. A.
Bollen, & J. S. Long (Eds.), Testing structural equation models (pp. 163-180). Newbury
Park, CA: Sage.
Apparent universality of positive implicit self-esteem
- S Yamaguchi
- A G Greenwald
- M R Banaji
- F Murakami
- D Chen
- K Shiomura
- A Krendl
Yamaguchi, S., Greenwald, A. G., Banaji, M. R., Murakami, F., Chen, D., Shiomura, K.,...
Krendl, A. (2007). Apparent universality of positive implicit self-esteem.
Psychological Science, 18, 498-500. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9280.2007.
01928.x.
OpenMx 1.2 user guide
- A Brandmaier
Brandmaier, A.
(2012). OpenMx 1.2 user guide. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia, The
OpenMX Project.