The first two studies investigated reactions to several different types of humorous comments. Participants indicated they would be significantly more likely to continue interacting with a friend who used adaptive self-enhancing or affiliative humor rather than maladaptive aggressive or self-defeating humor; with the most detrimental effects being evident for aggressive humor. Adaptive humorous ...

Perceivers’ shared theories about the social world have long featured prominently in social inference research. Here, we investigate how fundamental diVerences in such theories inXuence basic inferential processes. Past work has typically shown that integrating multiple interpretations of behavior during social inference requires cognitive resources. However, three studies that measured or mani...

This study sought to explore the range of beliefs about weight gain and whether these beliefs varied according to personal weight management history. A questionnaire specifically designed for the study was completed by 376 participants (94 males, 282 females; mean age 43.65 years, SD=13.24). Principal component analysis identified five causal attribution factors which were interpreted as Lack-o...

Is sequence learning an autonomous process that relies on independent resources? In this paper, I attempt to answer this question by exploring whether sequence learning occurs even despite the availability of reliable explicit information about the material to be learned. I report on a series of experiments during which participants performed a sequential choice reaction task. On each trial, pa...

This study's aim was to assess the validity of naive subjects' implicit personality theories, the correspondence among the theories, and the influence of social desirability on them. High school girls classified the items from the MMPI Psychopathic Deviate scale into clusters representing different traits. These clusters agreed closely with the factors obtained in previous factor analyses of se...