Transference in interpersonal relations: inferences and affect based on significant-other representations

Stock market reaction to affiliated sports teams’ performance: evidence from China

Purpose

Drawing on the affect transfer and stakeholder theories, this study aims to examine how the performance of a sports team that a firm owns or sponsors may affect the firm’s market value. It explicates that a sports team wins (loses) in the field raises the public’s positive (negative) affect, which can spill over to the associated firm.

Design/methodology/approach

Based on a sample of publicly listed firms in Chinese stock exchanges that are owners or sponsors of soccer teams that competed in the National soccer league of China during 2004–2017, the authors find good support for the hypotheses.

Findings

The findings reveal that a firm’s cumulative abnormal return is positively related to its soccer team’s winning and negatively related to the team’s losing, and these relationships are moderated by both firm and match characteristics. By showing a relationship between sports team’s performance and associated firm’s market value, executives need cautions when their firms want to own or sponsor sports team. However, owned sports team’s winning could be a good strategy to improve a firm’s market value.

Originality/value

This study enriches the spillover literature and deepens the understanding of spillover effect. It provides evidence for the concept of affect transfer and broadens its application scope.

Agitation and despair in relation to parents: activating emotional suffering in transference

Affect and motivation are known to arise in the social‐cognitive process transference, which occurs when a new person minimally resembles a significant other, implicitly activating the mental representation of this significant other (Andersen, Reznik, & Manzella, 1996) and indirectly, the relational self (i.e. Andersen & Chen, 2002). Triggering the significant‐other representation should also indirectly activate any self‐discrepancy held from this other's perspective, resulting in shifts in discrete affect and self‐regulation. Participants (n = 110; 34 men, 76 women) with an actual‐ideal or actual‐ought self‐discrepancy from their parent's perspective (Higgins, 1987) learned about a new person who did or did not minimally resemble this parent. As predicted, this evoked positive evaluation of the new person, that is, a positive transference, and yet, as a function of self‐discrepancy, also increased discrete negative mood with ideal‐discrepant individuals becoming more dejected and ought‐discrepant individuals more hostile and less calm. Self‐regulatory focus shifted as well in terms of motivation to avoid emotional closeness. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

In humans, only attractive females fulfil their sexually imprinted preferences for eye colour

Early exposure to parental features shapes later sexual preferences in fish, birds, and mammals. Here I report that human males' preferences for a conspicuous trait, colourful eyes, are affected by the eye colour of mothers. Female faces with light (blue or green) eyes were liked better by men whose mother had light eyes; the effect broke down in those who had felt rejected by her as children. These results, garnered on over one thousand men, complete those of a symmetrical study on one thousand women, painting a fuller picture of human sexual imprinting. Both men and women appear to have imprinted on their opposite-sex parents unless these were perceived as cold and unjustly punitive. Birds require strong attachment to sexually imprint-a constraint in place to reduce the perils of acquiring the wrong sort of information. Parents who form no bond with their offspring may fail to be recognised as appropriate parental imprinting objects. Consistent with human females being, as in most of the animal kingdom, the choosier sex, imprinted preferences were displayed by both sexes but translated into real-life partner choices solely in women-attractive women. Apparently, not all of us can afford to follow our own inclinations.

Attachment Orientations Guide the Transfer of Leadership Judgments: Culture Matters

Two experiments tested the role of global and relationship-specific attachment orientations in leader transference, a social-cognitive process in which mental representations of past leaders are associated with the evaluations of new, similar leaders. Individuals scoring higher on anxious attachment were more likely to hold high just treatment expectations of new leaders who were similar to their previous leaders. Conversely, avoidant individuals evaluated new similar leaders low on just treatment expectations and perceived them as less effective. Relationship-specific attachment orientations predicted transfer of behavioral judgments of just treatment, while global attachment orientations predicted transfer of perceived leader effectiveness. These effects were moderated by culture. In two collectivistic cultures (Greece and India), avoidant individuals demonstrated low just treatment expectations of their new similar leader. In an individualistic culture (United States), avoidant participants showed high behavioral expectations of their new, similar, leader. The results inform emerging views on relational social-cognitive processes in leader-follower interactions.

Viewing Adaptive Social Choice Through the Lens of Associative Learning

Because humans live in a dynamic and evolving social world, modeling the factors that guide social behavior has remained a challenge for psychology. In contrast, much progress has been made on understanding some of the more basic elements of human behavior, such as associative learning and memory, which has been successfully modeled in other species. Here we argue that applying an associative learning approach to social behavior can offer valuable insights into the human moral experience. We propose that the basic principles of associative learning-conserved across a range of species-can, in many situations, help to explain seemingly complex human behaviors, including altruistic, cooperative, and selfish acts. We describe examples from the social decision-making literature using Pavlovian learning phenomena (e.g., extinction, cue competition, stimulus generalization) to detail how a history of positive or negative social outcomes influences cognitive and affective mechanisms that shape moral choice. Examining how we might understand social behaviors and their likely reliance on domain-general mechanisms can help to generate testable hypotheses to further understand how social value is learned, represented, and expressed behaviorally.

Fathers' eye colour sways daughters' choice of both long- and short-term partners

In several species, mate choice is influenced by parental features through sexual imprinting, but in humans evidence is scarce and open to alternative explanations. We examined whether daughters' preference for mates with light vs dark eyes is affected by the eye colour of parents. In an online study, over one thousand women rated the attractiveness of men as potential partners for either a long- or a short-term relationship. Each male face was shown twice, with light (blue or green) and with dark (brown or dark brown) eyes. Having a light-eyed father increased the preference for light-eyed men in both relationship contexts. Having light eyes increased this preference too, but only when men were regarded as potential long-term companions. Asymmetrically, in real life, father's eye colour was the only predictor of partner's eye colour; own colour was irrelevant. Mother's eye colour never mattered, affecting neither preferences nor real-life choices. The effect of paternal eye colour was modulated by the quality of the relationship between father and daughter, suggesting (flexible) sexual imprinting rather than a simple inheritance of maternal preferences. Our data provide evidence that in humans, as in birds and sheep, visual experience of parental features shapes later sexual preferences.

Stimulus generalization as a mechanism for learning to trust

How do humans learn to trust unfamiliar others? Decisions in the absence of direct knowledge rely on our ability to generalize from past experiences and are often shaped by the degree of similarity between prior experience and novel situations. Here, we leverage a stimulus generalization framework to examine how perceptual similarity between known individuals and unfamiliar strangers shapes social learning. In a behavioral study, subjects play an iterative trust game with three partners who exhibit highly trustworthy, somewhat trustworthy, or highly untrustworthy behavior. After learning who can be trusted, subjects select new partners for a second game. Unbeknownst to subjects, each potential new partner was parametrically morphed with one of the three original players. Results reveal that subjects prefer to play with strangers who implicitly resemble the original player they previously learned was trustworthy and avoid playing with strangers resembling the untrustworthy player. These decisions to trust or distrust strangers formed a generalization gradient that converged toward baseline as perceptual similarity to the original player diminished. In a second imaging experiment we replicate these behavioral gradients and leverage multivariate pattern similarity analyses to reveal that a tuning profile of activation patterns in the amygdala selectively captures increasing perceptions of untrustworthiness. We additionally observe that within the caudate adaptive choices to trust rely on neural activation patterns similar to those elicited when learning about unrelated, but perceptually familiar, individuals. Together, these findings suggest an associative learning mechanism efficiently deploys moral information encoded from past experiences to guide future choice.

Shared reality in interpersonal relationships

Close relationships afford us opportunities to create and maintain meaning systems as shared perceptions of ourselves and the world. Establishing a sense of mutual understanding allows for creating and maintaining lasting social bonds, and as such, is important in human relations. In a related vein, it has long been known that knowledge of significant others in one's life is stored in memory and evoked with new persons-in the social-cognitive process of 'transference'-imbuing new encounters with significance and leading to predictable cognitive, evaluative, motivational, and behavioral consequences, as well as shifts in the self and self-regulation, depending on the particular significant other evoked. In these pages, we briefly review the literature on meaning as interpersonally defined and then selectively review research on transference in interpersonal perception. Based on this, we then highlight a recent series of studies focused on shared meaning systems in transference. The highlighted studies show that values and beliefs that develop in close relationships (as shared reality) are linked in memory to significant-other knowledge, and thus, are indirectly activated (made accessible) when cues in a new person implicitly activate that significant-other knowledge (in transference), with these shared beliefs then actively pursued with the new person and even protected against threat. This also confers a sense of mutual understanding, and all told, serves both relational and epistemic functions. In concluding, we consider as well the relevance of co-construction of shared reality n such processes.

Attachment Stability From Infancy to Adulthood: Meta-Analysis and Dynamic Modeling of Developmental Mechanisms

A central tenet of attachment theory is that a person's attachment pattern in adulthood is a reflection of his or her attachment history—-beginning with the person's earliest attachment relationships. However, the precise way in which early representations might shape adult attachment patterns is ambiguous, and different perspectives on this issue have evolved in the literature. According to the prototype perspective, representations of early experiences are retained over time and continue to play an influential role in attachment behavior throughout the life course. In contrast, the revisionist perspective holds that early representations are subject to modification on the basis of new experiences and therefore may or may not reflect patterns of attachment later in life. In this article, I explore and test mathematical models of each of these theoretical processes on the basis of longitudinal data obtained from meta-analysis. Results indicate that attachment security is moderately stable across the first 19 years of life and that patterns of stability are best accounted for by prototype dynamics.

Personality as a Dynamical System: Emergence of Stability and Distinctiveness from Intra and Interpersonal Interactions

The implications of conceptualizing personality as a cognitive-affective processing system that functions as a parallel constraint satisfaction network are explored. Computer simulations show that from dynamic interactions among the units in such a network, a set of stable attractor states and functionally equivalent groups of situations emerge, such that IF exposed to situation group X, THEN the system settles in attractor Y. This conceptualization explicitly models the effect of situations on a given individual, and therefore can also be used to model the function of interpersonal systems. We demonstrate this possibility by modeling dyadic systems in which one partner's behavior becomes the situational input into the other partner's personality system, and vice versa. The results indicate that each member of the dyad will, in general, exhibit new attractor states. This suggests that the thoughts, affects, and behaviors that an individual typically experiences are a function not of that individual's personality system alone, but rather a function of the interpersonal system of which the individual is a part. Just as individuals have distinctive and stable IF-THEN signatures, so do interpersonal relationships. Understanding the structure of the cognitive-affective processing system of each relationship partner also should enable predictions of their distincitve relational signatures as emergent properties of the interpersonal system that develops.

The Relationship between Children's Reported Exposure to Interparental Conflict and Memory Biases in the Recogniton of Aggressive and Constructive Conflict Words

A total of 70 Latino children between the ages of 7 and 12 years completed measures of exposure to interparental conflict and listened to audio taped simulations of interparental conflict. Children's memory for aggressive and constructive conflict words used during the session was then assessed with a word recognition task. Results indicate that older children who report witnessing high levels of marital conflict made significantly more false positive and fewer false negative memory errors for aggressive words than did all other children. This study provides preliminary support for the theory that children develop marital conflict representations that reflect their socialization experiences with interparental conflict and that guide information processing in the context of novel marital conflict.

Perceived Acceptance From Outsiders Shapes Security in Romantic Relationships: The Overgeneralization of Extradyadic Experiences

Romantic relationships unfold in the context of people's other interpersonal relationships, and processes that occur in those other relationships have been shown to affect the functioning of romantic relationships. In accordance with this perspective, two dyadic daily report studies demonstrated that people generalize experiences of interpersonal acceptance and rejection from other people onto their romantic partners. Participants felt more confident that they were valued by their romantic partners on days they experienced acceptance, relative to rejection, from outsiders. In addition, this overgeneralization of daily extradyadic acceptance and rejection had prospective effects on romantic relationship security the following day, was independent of the romantic partner's actual relationship evaluations on each day, was partially mediated by daily self-esteem, and predicted daily enactment of prosocial and antisocial behaviors toward romantic partners. These results suggest that overgeneralization of daily acceptance and rejection from outsiders shapes the functioning of romantic relationships.

Contextual Variability in Personality From Significant-Other Knowledge and Relational Selves

We argue that the self is intrinsically embedded in an interpersonal context such that it varies in IF-THEN terms, as the relational self. We have demonstrated that representations of the significant other and the relationship with that other are automatically activated by situational cues and that this activation affects both experienced and expressed aspects of the self and personality. Here, we expand on developments of the IF-THEN cognitive-affective framework of personality system (Mischel and Shoda, 1995), by extending it to the domain of interpersonal relationships at the dyadic level (Andersen and Chen, 2002). Going beyond Mischel's early research (Mischel, 1968), our framework combines social cognition and learning theory with a learning-based psychodynamic approach, which provides the basis for extensive research on the social-cognitive process of transference and the relational self as it arises in everyday social interactions (Andersen and Cole, 1990), evidence from which contributes to a modern conceptualization of personality that emphasizes the centrality of the situation.

Microinterventions targeting regulatory focus and regulatory fit selectively reduce dysphoric and anxious mood

Depression and generalized anxiety, separately and as comorbid states, continue to represent a significant public health challenge. Current cognitive-behavioral treatments are clearly beneficial but there remains a need for continued development of complementary interventions. This manuscript presents two proof-of-concept studies, in analog samples, of "microinterventions" derived from regulatory focus and regulatory fit theories and targeting dysphoric and anxious symptoms. In Study 1, participants with varying levels of dysphoric and/or anxious mood were exposed to a brief intervention either to increase or to reduce engagement in personal goal pursuit, under the hypothesis that dysphoria indicates under-engagement of the promotion system whereas anxiety indicates over-engagement of the prevention system. In Study 2, participants with varying levels of dysphoric and/or anxious mood received brief training in counterfactual thinking, under the hypothesis that inducing individuals in a state of promotion failure to generate subtractive counterfactuals for past failures (a non-fit) will lessen their dejection/depression-related symptoms, whereas inducing individuals in a state of prevention failure to generate additive counterfactuals for past failures (a non-fit) will lessen their agitation/anxiety-related symptoms. In both studies, we observed discriminant patterns of reduction in distress consistent with the hypothesized links between dysfunctional states of the two motivational systems and dysphoric versus anxious symptoms.

Social attributions from faces: determinants, consequences, accuracy, and functional significance

Since the early twentieth century, psychologists have known that there is consensus in attributing social and personality characteristics from facial appearance. Recent studies have shown that surprisingly little time and effort are needed to arrive at this consensus. Here we review recent research on social attributions from faces. Section I outlines data-driven methods capable of identifying the perceptual basis of consensus in social attributions from faces (e.g., What makes a face look threatening?). Section II describes nonperceptual determinants of social attributions (e.g., person knowledge and incidental associations). Section III discusses evidence that attributions from faces predict important social outcomes in diverse domains (e.g., investment decisions and leader selection). In Section IV, we argue that the diagnostic validity of these attributions has been greatly overstated in the literature. In the final section, we offer an account of the functional significance of these attributions.

Cognitive-affective processing system analysis of intra-individual dynamics in collaborative therapeutic assessment: translating basic theory and research into clinical applications

According to the cognitive-affective processing system (CAPS) model, behavior is a function of how the distinctive cognitive-affective system of the individual responds to one's subjective experience of the situation encountered. Thus an individual's maladaptive coping processes may be understood by identifying the nature of the situations that a client experiences as highly stressful and the psychological reactions they trigger. An initial study established the feasibility and utility of an Internet-based CAPS daily diary program; it was then used to facilitate a clinical stress-management intervention. The daily diary enabled researchers and clinicians to gather Highly-Repeated Within-Persons (HRWP) data on the situational features, cognitions, affect, and coping behaviors associated with daily life stress, which were then analyzed separately for each participant to identify each individual's unique and distinctive pattern of intra-individual dynamics. Results suggested that individuals differed reliably in the features of psychological situations that triggered stress and maladaptive coping behaviors. HRWP analysis of daily diary data enhanced the efficacy of clinical intervention, and clients' self-regulatory capabilities and life satisfaction were shown to increase over the course of the intervention. We discuss how our program of research fits into the larger goals of translational science and current NIMH clinical research priorities.

Subliminal activation of social ties moderates cardiovascular reactivity during acute stress

OBJECTIVE

The quality of one's personal relationships has been reliably linked to important physical health outcomes, perhaps through the mechanism of physiological stress responses. Most studies of this mechanism have focused on whether more conscious interpersonal transactions influence cardiovascular reactivity. However, whether such relationships can be automatically activated in memory to influence physiological processes has not been determined. The primary aims of this study were to examine whether subliminal activation of relationships could influence health-relevant physiological processes and to examine this question in the context of a more general relationship model that incorporates both positive and negative dimensions.

METHOD

We randomly assigned participants to be subliminally primed with existing relationships that varied in their underlying positivity and negativity (i.e., indifferent, supportive, aversive, ambivalent). They then performed acute psychological stressors while cardiovascular and self-report measures were assessed.

RESULTS

Priming negative relationships was associated with greater threat, lower feelings of control, and higher diastolic blood pressure reactivity during stress. Moreover, priming relationships high in positivity and negativity (ambivalent ties) was associated with the highest heart rate reactivity and greatest respiratory sinus arrhythmia decreases during stress. Exploratory analyses during the priming task itself suggested that the effects of negative primes on biological measures were prevalent across tasks, whereas the links to ambivalent ties was specific to the subsequent stressor task.

CONCLUSIONS

These data highlight novel mechanisms by which social ties may impact cardiovascular health, and further suggest the importance of incorporating both positivity and negativity in the study of relationships and physical health.

The Role of Episodic Memories in Current and Future Well-Being

The purpose of the present research was to examine the automatic role of psychological need satisfaction in episodic memories and in their associated networked memories on people’s sense of well-being. In each of four studies, participants were asked to describe a main episodic memory and networked memories, that is, other memories related to their main episodic memory. Results of Studies 1 and 2 revealed that levels of need satisfaction in a main episodic memory and in its networked memories both uniquely contributed to the prediction of well-being (based on either participants’ or peers’ ratings). Study 3 examined the automatic effect of priming an episodic memory network on people’s well-being in the here and now. Study 4 revealed that need satisfaction in episodic memory networks predicted changes in well-being over time. In addition, this relationship held after controlling for broad dispositional traits, mental health, and general need satisfaction ratings.

Facial-Feature Resemblance Elicits the Transference Effect

In transference, a perceiver’s representation of a significant other is activated and used to interpret and respond to a new target person who bears some resemblance to the particular significant other. Integrating research on face perception and transference, we hypothesized that transference can occur on the basis of the resemblance of a target’s facial features to those of a perceiver’s significant other. Experimental results supported this hypothesis. Manipulating an upcoming interaction partner’s facial features to resemble those of participants’ significant other led participants to make representation-consistent inferences about and evaluations of the partner. Moreover, participants undergoing transference experienced shifts in their self-concept, so that they described themselves more like the person they are when with the relevant significant other. The results represent the first evidence of transference processes occurring through facial-feature resemblance. Implications for research on impression formation, social cognition, and emotions are discussed.

"Seizing and freezing" on a significant-person schema: need for closure and the transference effect in social judgment

Two experimental studies examined the possibility that the need for cognitive closure (NfCC) affects the tendency to exhibit transference effects in social encounters. They reveal that the transference effect is more pronounced when individuals' (dispositional) NfCC is high (vs. low). In Study 1, this effect is demonstrated with respect to the transference of false memories about a newly encountered target person generalized from one's representation of a significant other. In Study 2, it is demonstrated with respect to the transference of both false memories and affective reaction to a new leader based on one's representation of a past leader. The discussion considers the role of motivation in the transference effect in relation to the social cognitive and psychodynamic views of transference.

Night and Day, You Are the One

A study examined the relation between individuals' circadian rhythm and their tendency to exhibit transference effects in social perception. Individuals tested at times of circadian mismatch (i.e., morning persons tested in the evening and evening persons tested in the morning) exhibited more pronounced transference effects than individuals tested at times of circadian match (i.e., morning persons tested in the morning and evening persons tested in the evening). These findings are compatible with the notion that transference effects represent everyday social-cognitive functioning related to activation of social schemata. Additionally, however, they suggest that transference effects are not the inevitable consequence of activating the significant other's schema. Rather, such effects might be particularly likely to occur when an individual's mental resources are limited, as might be the case during circadian mismatches. This latter suggestion differs from psychodynamic views of transference as exclusively a driven, energy-intensive phenomenon.

Simple Kindness Can Go a Long Way

Abstract. This paper reviews literature on relationships and draws a link to social identity using an integrative model that has implications for cooperative behavior within and between groups, and for establishing cultures of peace. For example, the group-value model suggests that how communications are delivered (e.g., through conveying respect) matters for cooperation and acceptance of group decisions. Extending this, and based on research on relationships, our integrative model points to the importance of conveying interpersonal warmth and kindness for facilitating pursuit of shared aims among people from different groups/backgrounds. We consider the implications of this for peaceful resolution of conflict.

Automatic activation of attachment-related goals

When people encounter threats, their attachment systems are activated and they become motivated to seek protection and support through proximity to their attachment figures. Theoretically, therefore, mental representations of attachment figures should be associated with goals related to attaining proximity and safety. The present studies explore this idea by examining the effects of a person's chronic attachment style and exposure to a particular attachment figure's name on the automatic activation of attachment-related goals. Studies 1 and 2 examine effects of exposure to the name of a security-providing attachment figure on willingness to self-disclose and seek support (two behaviors related to gaining proximity). Study 3 examines how exposure to names of different relationship partners (with whom a participant has felt secure, anxious, or avoidant) affects the mental accessibility of attachment-related goal words. Taken together, the studies support the idea that mental representations of attachment figures are associated with attachment-related goals.

Transference and attachment: how do attachment patterns get carried forward from one relationship to the next?

This research investigated how working models of attachment are carried forward from one relationship to the next. A two-part study was conducted in which participants learned about two potential dating partners: one that was constructed to resemble a romantic partner from their past and one that resembled a partner from another participant's past. Results showed that people applied their attachment representations of past partners to both targets but did so to a greater degree when the target resembled a past partner. People also tended to feel more anxious and less avoidant toward the target that resembled their past partner. Overall, the findings were consistent with the hypothesis that working models of attachment are transferred in both general and selective ways in new relationships.