The Social Utility of Ambivalence: Being Ambivalent on Controversial Issues Is Recognized as Competence

Attitudes in an interpersonal context: Psychological safety as a route to attitude change

Interpersonal contexts can be complex because they can involve two or more people who are interdependent, each of whom is pursuing both individual and shared goals. Interactions consist of individual and joint behaviors that evolve dynamically over time. Interactions are likely to affect people’s attitudes because the interpersonal context gives conversation partners a great deal of opportunity to intentionally or unintentionally influence each other. However, despite the importance of attitudes and attitude change in interpersonal interactions, this topic remains understudied. To shed light on the importance of this topic. We briefly review the features of interpersonal contexts and build a case that understanding people’s sense of psychological safety is key to understanding interpersonal influences on people’s attitudes. Specifically, feeling psychologically safe can make individuals more open-minded, increase reflective introspection, and decrease defensive processing. Psychological safety impacts how individuals think, make sense of their social world, and process attitude-relevant information. These processes can result in attitude change, even without any attempt at persuasion. We review the literature on interpersonal threats, receiving psychological safety, providing psychological safety, and interpersonal dynamics. We then detail the shortcomings of current approaches, highlight unanswered questions, and suggest avenues for future research that can contribute in developing this field.

The relationship between ambivalence towards supervisor's behavior and employee's mental health

Ambivalence in social interactions has been linked to health-related outcomes in private relationships and recent research has started to expand this evidence to ambivalent leadership at the workplace by showing that ambivalent supervisor-employee relationships are related to higher stress levels in employees. However, the mental health consequences of ambivalent leadership have not been examined yet. Using a multilevel approach, this study estimated associations of ambivalent leadership with mental health indicators (depression, anxiety, vital exhaustion, fatigue) in 993 employees from 27 work groups. A total effect of ambivalent leadership was found for all four mental health measures, as well as within-group and between-group effects. The consistent relationships of ambivalent leadership with higher symptoms of mental ill-health at the individual- (i.e., within-group) and the group-level (i.e., between-group) support the existence of an un-confounded association, as well as group effects of collective ambivalence.

Chinese Immigrant Women's Experiences as Community Health Workers in Korea: A Focus Group Study

BACKGROUND

The number of immigrant women in Korea is rapidly increasing. Immigrant women in Korea experience a host of health problems associated with living in a new country. Community health workers (CHWs) may be effective at delivering health promotion programs to vulnerable groups such as recent immigrants.

PURPOSE

Qualitative analysis was performed to identify the main themes characterizing the experiences of CHWs in recommending and guiding preventive screening tests for immigrant women.

METHODS

This focus-group study was designed to investigate the experiences and perceptions of CHWs. We conducted interviews with 15 Chinese immigrant women who served as CHWs in a cancer screening program. We asked questions about the attitudes and perceptions that CHWs had from their research experiences. Each interview was audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim.

RESULTS

Three main themes emerged: (a) recognizing the need for preventive healthcare, (b) becoming the CHWs who help people to be healthy, and (c) challenges to overcome to make CHWs more active. The CHWs in this study were willing to help other Chinese immigrant women and to improve their competency to help more effectively. However, they recognized limitations on their ability to address problems when delivering a breast and cervical cancer screening program.

CONCLUSIONS

When training CHWs for immigrants in Korea, frequent opportunities for consultation should be provided during program delivery to facilitate troubleshooting and help CHWs overcome challenges. A program that utilizes CHWs for various minority groups is needed.

Ambivalence and Interpersonal Liking: The Expression of Ambivalence as Social Validation of Attitudinal Conflict

Literature on attitude similarity suggests that sharing similar attitudes enhances interpersonal liking, but it remains unanswered whether this effect also holds for ambivalent attitudes. In the present research, we shed light on the role attitudinal ambivalence plays in interpersonal liking. Specifically, we examine whether people express ambivalence strategically to generate a positive or negative social image, and whether this is dependent on the attitudinal ambivalence of their perceiver. We test two alternative hypotheses. In line with the attitude-similarity effect, people should express ambivalence toward ambivalent others to enhance interpersonal liking, as sharing ambivalence might socially validate the latter’s experience of attitudinal conflict. On the other hand, people might express more univalence, as ambivalence may drive ambivalent others toward the resolution of their attitudinal conflict, and univalent stances could help to achieve that goal. In two studies (N = 449, 149), people expressed similar attitudes to those of their perceivers, even when the latter experienced attitudinal conflict (Studies 1 and 2). Moreover, they composed an essay, the message of which validated their perceiver’s attitudinal conflict (Study 2). In line with these results, we further observe that the more people experienced their ambivalence as conflicting, the more they liked others who similarly experienced attitudinal conflict (Study 1). These findings suggest that the expression of ambivalence can have important interpersonal functions, as it might lead to an enhanced social image when interacting with those coping with attitudinal conflict.

Benefits of being ambivalent: The relationship between trait ambivalence and attribution biases

Ambivalence refers to the experience of having both positive and negative thoughts and feelings at the same time about the same object, person, or issue. Although ambivalence research has focused extensively on negative consequences, recently, scholars turned their lens to the positive effects of ambivalence, demonstrating beneficial effects on judgements and decision-making processes. So far, this work has focused on state ambivalence, which is ambivalence as a direct response to a specific stimulus. However, there are substantial individual differences in ambivalence: Some people are just more ambivalent than others. Taking a first step in understanding how these individual differences relate to judgement and decision-making, we examine the relationship between trait ambivalence and cognitive bias in social judgements tasks. Specifically, we look at two of the most pervasive and consequential attribution biases in person perception: correspondence bias and self-serving bias. We find a negative relationship between trait ambivalence and correspondence bias. The higher individuals are in trait ambivalence, the smaller their bias towards attributing behaviour to a person's disposition (Study 1A and B). We find the same for self-serving bias (Study 2A and B). In sum, we show that trait ambivalence is negatively related to cognitive bias in person perception.