Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Attitude (Psychology) Social psychology. Psychology, Social'

The history of intergroup research is built on groups that represent "endpoints" of a dimension of social identity, such as White, Black, heterosexual, and gay/lesbian. Social groups who fall between these more readily recognized advantaged and disadvantaged groups (e.g., biracial people, bisexual people) have received less attention. These intermediate social groups are increasingly visible and numerous in the United States, however, and a detailed account of the biases they face can contribute to a fuller understanding of intergroup relations. This dissertation examines attitudes and beliefs about intermediate social groups, focusing on bisexual people as the primary example at first, and then expanding the investigation to biracial people and novel groups to make the case that intermediate groups elicit a distinctive pattern of biases. Across studies, participants expressed beliefs that undermined the legitimacy of intermediate groups in a variety of ways. They endorsed the view that intermediate groups are low in social realness (conceptually invalid, meaningless, lacking a concrete social existence) and that intermediate group identities are unstable (provisional, lacking a genuine underlying truth, the result of confusion). These views of social realness and identity stability partially explained prejudice against intermediate groups.

The concept of social group intermediacy is abstract; actual intermediate groups (e.g., biracial and bisexual people) are different from each other because their defining types of intermediacy stem from different dimensions of social identity (race and sexual orientation). Therefore, focused research on each specific intermediate group is necessary to fully understand the types of attitudes they evoke due to their intermediate status. To demonstrate the value of attending to the details of a particular intermediate group, Chapters 2 through 5 focused on bisexual people. The observed patterns of attitudes and beliefs about bisexual people demonstrated the role of their perceived intermediate status in the context of sexual orientation.

Chapter 2 investigated attitudes toward sexual orientation groups in a large sample of heterosexual and gay/lesbian participants. Bisexuality was evaluated less favorably and perceived as less stable than heterosexuality and homosexuality. Stereotypes about bisexual people pertained to gender conformity, decisiveness, and monogamy; few positive traits were associated with bisexuality. Chapter 3 extended these findings, demonstrating that negative evaluation of sexual minorities was more closely associated with perceived identity instability than it was with the view that sexual orientation is a choice. This relationship was moderated by both participant and target sexual orientation.

Chapter 4 addressed one reason why bisexual people are evaluated more negatively than gay/lesbian people. A common explanation given for the discrepancy in evaluation is that bisexuality introduces ambiguity into a binary model of sexuality. In line with this explanation, we found that participants with a preference for simple ways of structuring information were especially likely to evaluate bisexual people more negatively than gay/lesbian people. Chapter 5 investigated how bisexual participants saw themselves as a group. Results suggested that bisexual people largely disagree with the prevailing stereotypes of their group; these stereotypes reflect non-bisexual people's impressions of the intermediate group rather than a consensus.

Chapter 6 shifted the focus from bisexual people as an example of an intermediate social group to intermediate social groups in general. Results from a set of studies involving novel groups demonstrated that perceiving a group as intermediate can cause negative evaluation and low ratings of social realness and identity stability. Similar results held for real-world intermediate groups (biracial people and bisexual people). The extent to which an intermediate group was perceived as less socially real than other groups predicted the extent to which it was evaluated less positively than those groups. Social realness seems to be a unique explanatory factor in the relative negative evaluation of these intermediate groups, working in conjunction with the more well-known processes of intergroup attitudes traditionally studied with respect to Black people and gay/lesbian people. The effects of social group intermediacy were amplified among participants who identified strongly with an advantaged ingroup. Acknowledging an intermediate group as legitimate may require one to acknowledge shared characteristics or overlapping boundaries between one's valued ingroup and the "opposite" outgroup, which can be threatening to highly identified group members.

Taken together, these chapters make the case that intermediate social groups incur particular biases due to their perceived intermediate status. The processes of intergroup bias that result in derogation of traditionally recognized disadvantaged groups may be insufficient to account for some forms of prejudice in the modern demographic landscape. As biracial people and bisexual people become more prevalent, researchers must address the conditions under which they are recognized or dismissed, included or excluded.

The purpose of this dissertation is to examine licensed mental health professionals' attitudes towards rape survivors. Research indicates that the attitudes of police officers, mental health professionals, and the general public may influence the psychological adjustment of rape survivors and, consequently, whether or not that person seeks mental health treatment after the assault (Vincent, 2009). The negative impacts of rape on a person may not be specific only to the act of violence, but may also include secondary victimization from the survivors' negative experiences with authorities such as legal and mental health professionals (Campbell & Raja, 1999) who may hold negative beliefs about sexual assault and rape survivors (Nagel, Matsuo, McIntyre, & Morrison, 2005). Exposure to these negative beliefs held by others may be associated with negative secondary emotions in the survivor, such as guilt; guilt associated with actions taken or not taken in the context of rape has been observed to be positively correlated with posttraumatic stress disorder, depression, low self-esteem, social anxiety, and suicidal ideation (Kubany, Abueg, Owens, Brennan, Kaplan, & Watson, 1995). It is therefore important to examine the attitudes licensed mental health workers hold towards rape survivors, as these rape survivors may seek services from mental health professionals, and the clinicians' attitudes towards these clients' experiences may significantly impact survivors' recovery from a sexual assault. In addition to measuring the acceptance of rape myths in licensed mental health providers, this study aims to explore how demographic variables in mental health professionals, such as gender, type of graduate degree, or participant rape survivor status, are related to the attitudes participants report about sexual assault. It was hypothesized that male study participants would attribute greater responsibility to survivors than female study participants would, based on the results of the updated Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale, and congruent with published research highlighting this gender difference (Grubb & Harrower, 2009). It was hypothesized that mental health providers who have had more years of training in their graduate degree program would report lower levels of rape myth acceptance compared with those who had a shorter degree program. It was also hypothesized that participants who themselves identified as a rape survivor or who had a close friend or family member who is a survivor would attribute less responsibility to rape survivors, as research supports the observation that those who identify as survivors or friends of survivors may reject negative biases towards sexual assault survivors.

After completing both independent t-tests and Mann-Whitney U statistical analyses, gender identity was the only demographic for which statistically significant mean differences were seen in total rape myth acceptance scores (p = .012). This finding is not surprising, as much of the current literature supports that men, in general, attribute more blame to rape survivors than women. Prior to the current study there was no published research using licensed mental health providers as participants in a study using the updated Illinois Rape Myth Acceptance Scale. Data gathered from the current study will therefore offer a valuable contribution to the literature on this topic. Further, it is hoped that this data can be used in the development of graduate programs, continuing education courses, and didactic seminars that debunk rape myths and promote competency around rape survivor issues.

This study examined the reliability and validity of the Global Relational Attitudes Conflict Exam (GRACE) Scale. Individuals were studied using an online survey to determine if the GRACE scale had reliable and interpretable components, and if the scale produced statistically significant levels of internal reliability. The study also evaluated for both convergent and discriminant validity through comparison of the scale with several selected assessments. A total of 333 participants participated in the survey. An exploratory factor analysis of the data produced from survey results revealed that the GRACE scale had reliable and interpretable components. Descriptive statistics and correlation coefficient comparisons of the data demonstrated that the scale was internally reliable and valid. The hypotheses were confirmed.

Keywords: grace, gratitude, appreciation, thankfulness, revenge, vengeance, relational conflict

Research on social judgment typically emphasizes one of three processes that enable unequivocal understanding of events with ambiguous causality. In the social influence perspective, people are susceptible to the interpretations offered by others. In the explicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with their consciously held attitudes and values. In the implicit attitudes perspective, people interpret events in line with unconscious biases. The model investigated in the present study assumes that these processes vary in salience depending on people’s mindset. When an event is encoded in high-level terms (i.e., its consequences), people’s judgments reflect their explicit attitudes. When encoded in low-level terms (i.e., its details), however, such attitudes are less accessible, rendering people susceptible to social influence. In the absence of social influence, people with a lower-level mindset form judgments that reflect their relevant implicit attitudes. These hypotheses were tested in the context of an altercation between an African-American and a White male for which responsibility could reasonably be allocated to either party. Participants with low versus high implicit racial bias toward Blacks read a narrative concerning this altercation under either a low-level or a high-level mindset and then read a summary that blamed one of the parties or they did not read a summary. As predicted, low-level participants allocated responsibility to the African-American if they had a high implicit racial bias and to the White if they had a low implicit racial bias, regardless of the summary manipulation. Contrary to prediction, however, high-level participants’ allocation of responsibility did not reflect their explicit prejudicial attitudes. Instead, they corrected for their implicit biases in their trait inferences and affective reactions, in line with research suggesting that a high-level mindset promotes self-regulatory processes in social judgment.