Interpersonal Cognition: Measuring, Manipulating and Modifying
Professor Mark Baldwin,
McGill University
Mark W. Baldwin
McGill University
Way, way back in the 1980s I read, in close succession, Sullivan’s (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of psychiatry, Greenberg and Mitchell’s (1983) Object relations in psychoanalytic theory, and Markus’s (1977) Self-schemata and processing information about the self. I was excited about all three of these excellent works and I tried to integrate their ideas with each other and with other things I had learned. My take-away thought at the time was that while mainstream social-personality psychologists were enthusiastically embracing social cognitive approaches to all manner of questions, the models being discussed in the literature generally tended to underemphasize the interpersonal nature of human existence. To a large extent this remains true today.
I became convinced of the benefits of theoretical and empirical work toward identifying basic processes of interpersonal cognition. My own initial theoretical contribution came in 1992 when I advanced --borrowing heavily from other writers whom I admired-- the notion of relational schemas, or “cognitive structures representing regularities in patterns of interpersonal relatedness,” which would consist of “an interpersonal script for the interaction pattern, a self-schema for how self is experienced in that interpersonal situation, and a schema for the other person in that interaction” (Baldwin, 1992, p. 461). A key part of this formulation was the idea of an if…then interpersonal script, which would allow a person to generate expectancies about and plan behavior in their interactions.
Fortunately, a similar view of the field was held by other researchers at the time (many of whom later contributed to the edited volume Interpersonal Cognition; Baldwin, 2005), who were examining issues of transference, interpersonal self-esteem, attachment working models, and basic personality structure from an interpersonal cognitive perspective. It became clear that one benefit of adopting the current social cognitive paradigm was the sharing of a common language, with ideas of activation, associative networks, and so on. This opened up a greater opportunity for exchanging insights among researchers in different content areas.
I hope the reader will indulge me as I take stock of some of the progress that has been made, by engaging in a highly selective and likely rambling review particularly of work from our lab. I will first give a brief overview of the theoretical perspective my colleagues, students and I have worked with. Then I will focus on three central research issues, namely measurement, manipulation, and modification.
Theory
We start with the assumption that people represent in memory not just “self” and “others,” as isolated concepts, but also interpersonal knowledge such as self-with-Mom and self-with-authority-figure. The core of this interpersonal knowledge is a set of if…then expectancies about typical interaction patterns. Content of such scripts can be as idiosyncratic as relationships can be, although in our research we have tended to focus on common patterns including those found in insecure attachment working models (e.g., If I depend on my partner, he/she will leave me) and conditional acceptance (e.g., If I fail, he/she will reject me).
Interpersonal knowledge structures are then assumed, and have been shown, to influence social perception much like any other knowledge structure that has been examined in the social cognition literature. For example, activated interpersonal knowledge guides attention toward schema-relevant aspects of an interaction. Activation can spread to autobiographical memories of similar situations, and also shape the person’s encoding of and memory for the current experience. One straightforward but important hypothesis in this area is that interpersonal knowledge of this kind can be used by the individual to predict and interpret the behavior of others (see, e.g., Andersen’s work on transference; e.g., Andersen & Chen, 2002). Another assumption is that if…then knowledge can inform specific outcome expectancies through a kind of simulation heuristic (Khaneman & Tversky, 1982): The person considers an “IF” (e.g., “What if I were to forget Valentine’s Day?), and via spreading activation this activates a “THEN” (e.g., “My partner would express hurt feelings”), making it more cognitively fluent so the person experiences “I can easily imagine that happening.” This kind of expectancy can shape behavioral choices as well as affective responses. In the case of self-esteem feelings, for example, we share the view of other interpersonal theorists (e.g., Mark Leary, Carl Rogers) that the implicit sense that If I fail I will be rejected can- not surprisingly-lead a person to feel anxious and depressed about perceived shortcomings, producing insecurity and low self-esteem feelings.
In terms of measurement, we have sought ways to assess if…then scripts. We have dabbled with self-report measures of explicit expectancies and we have also worked on implicit measures of cognitive activation patterns. In terms of manipulation we have done dozens of priming studies. One clear message from the social cognitive literature is that most people tend to have more than one cognitive model available to them – in terms of interpersonal cognition, they know more than one way to interact with others – so the critical issue is which interpersonal knowledge is activated and used in a given situation or with a given person. Priming studies provide one tool for examining this phenomenon of activation. Finally, our recent work has focused on modification, or trying to change the associations that underlie interpersonal thought. That is, we believe that the nuts and bolts of interpersonal cognition are the if…then expectancies that get activated to then channel the spread of cognitive activation: We have therefore used basic learning paradigms to try to modify associations and thereby modify interpersonal perception and behavior.
Measuring
The first step in studying a phenomenon or process is to find ways to measure it. We have been drawn to those explicit measures that specifically focus on if… then expectancies, as well as to implicit measures that seek to assess these same associations.
In Hill and Safran’s (1994) Interpersonal Schema Questionnaire, people consider various “ifs” (e.g., “Imagine yourself feeling weak or passive and wanting the other person to take the lead” ) and then rate the likelihood of potential interpersonal outcomes (e.g., He/she “would be impatient or quarrelsome”). Because all the ifs and thens are derived directly from octants of the interpersonal circumplex, the researcher can calculate individual differences in contingency expectations, for example to assess complementarity patterns and correlate these with other variables of interest. In our own research, we (Baldwin & Keelan, 1999) found that expectations varied in interesting ways as a function of people’s level of self-esteem. Consistent with interpersonal formulations of self-esteem, high self-esteem was broadly correlated with expectancies of acceptance – in particular, confident expectancies that acting in a warm and friendly manner would lead to similarly communal responses from others. Interestingly, there were gender differences along the dominance dimension: Women were more likely than men to expect that acting submissively would lead to warm responses from others, and this gender difference in expectancies was especially pronounced among high self-esteem individuals.
My collaborators and I have tried our hand at designing self-report questionnaires, including to assess if...then expectancies for expressing anger (Fehr, Baldwin, Collins, Patterson & Benditt, 1999), if..then expectancies relating to attachment working models (Baldwin, Fehr, Keedian, Seidel, & Thomson, 1993), and general tendencies to focus attention on the possibility of rejection from other people (Ronen & Baldwin, 2010).
The social cognitive approach becomes particularly useful when we move beyond self-report to an assessment of implicit processes. In a recent chapter (Baldwin, Lydon, McClure & Etchison, 2010), my coauthors and I noted that while measures of implicit cognition in many domains simply involve assessing people’s evaluative responses – liking or disliking, for example- the questions of interest in the interpersonal domain are typically more nuanced. There remains much work to be done here, but thus far the field has made meaningful progress.
Some implicit measures of interpersonal cognition assess a kind of “set” or general orientation toward others’ behavior. In our work using a modified Stroop test, for example, we found that individuals with low self-esteem show cognitive interference from words relating to rejection (Dandeneau & Baldwin, 2004). In a dot-probe task we found that individuals with low self-esteem showed a rejection bias, in that they were quicker to identify probes that replaced frowning, rejection faces indicating that their attention was quickly drawn toward social threat (Dandeneau et al., 2007). Presumably this attentional bias both results from and sustains a threatening view of the social world that contributes to the insecurity felt by individuals with low self-esteem.
More complex measures of interpersonal cognition use sequential priming techniques to assess if…then expectancies. For example, low self-esteem individuals are quicker to recognize rejection-related words in a lexical decision task on those trials where they have first been briefly primed with words relating to failure; That is, they show an automatic if…then association to the effect that “If I fail, then I will be rejected” (Baldwin & Sinclair, 1996; Baldwin, Baccus, & Fitzsimons, 2004). Similarly, in a study Beverley Fehr and I conducted in the attachment domain, avoidantly attached individuals showed a similar associative link between trusting their partner and being hurt (Baldwin, Fehr, Keedian, Seidel & Thomson, 1993). This sequential priming approach is particularly appealing because it captures the spreading of activation to the expected social outcome, and the emotional consequences associated with it.
Other measurement techniques use questionnaire approaches, but seek to assess implicit processes. In the self-esteem literature there is an ongoing debate about the contribution of more communal aspects – self-liking based on feeling accepted by others—versus more agentic aspects – e.g., feeling powerful, high status or admired by others. When we examined questionnaire measures of implicit self-esteem we (Sakellaropoulo & Baldwin, 2007) noticed that there exist two slightly different versions of the Name Letter test of implicit self-esteem: In the standard version, the participant rates how much he or she likes each letter of the alphabet and implicit self-esteem is calculated as the preference they show for their own initials. In a different version that is sometimes used, however, the person instead rates each letter for how attractive it is. We suspected there was something meaningfully different between these measures, such that whereas one seemed to measure implicit self-liking, the other seemed to measure a more narcissistic form of self-admiration. We created two forms of the questionnaire; one in which participants rated how much they liked the letters of the alphabet, and another in which they rated how attractive they found the letters of the alphabet. Participants were led to recall instances of feeling proud of themselves, and then were given the two forms of the name letter task to complete. We found that state ratings of narcissism (Study 1) and aggressiveness (Study 2) were predicted by a pattern in which a low level of self-liking was combined with a high level of self-attractiveness. These findings have inspired us to continue to try to assess communal versus agentic aspects of implicit self-esteem and interpersonal cognition.
Manipulating
It is pretty much impossible to mention social cognition without talking about priming, and indeed dozens of studies have shown that primes can be used to manipulate the cognitive activation of particular interpersonal representations – to, in some sense, put a certain type of person or interpersonal context “in the back of the mind”. In my doctoral research with John Holmes we found that priming various representations of accepting versus critical others produced effects on people’s self-evaluations. Priming an unconditionally-accepting person, for example, led people to be less self-critical after a failure, compared to a group where a contingently-accepting other was primed (Baldwin & Holmes, 1987). Priming young women with thoughts of their college-aged peers led them to be more enthusiastic about sexually-permissive literature compared to if they were primed with their parents (Baldwin & Holmes, 1987). Subsequent research confirmed that such processes of interpersonal cognition could function implicitly, as subliminal primes of Pope John Paul II led Catholic women to be more self-critical and anxious, and subliminal primes of renowned psychologist Robert Zajonc had roughly similar effects on graduate students at the University of Michigan (Baldwin, Carrell & Lopez, 1990). I expect that these parallel effects were because both primes represented a similar kind of authority figure in the respective participants’ representational worlds (notwithstanding a waggish reviewer’s alternative hypothesis that it might be because both primes were of Polish septuagenarians).
In the years since that early work we have gone on to explore a range of priming techniques and interpersonal domains. When people are very briefly – or even subliminally - shown the names of particular significant others, this can shape their self-evaluations depending on whether the significant other is highly critical or relatively accepting (Baldwin, 1994). On lexicial decision tasks, people are more likely to show the failure-rejection if-then pattern if they have been primed with a critical, rather than accepting, other (Baldwin & Sinclair, 1996). We found that it is possible to prime relationships matching particular attachment orientations so that, for example, priming a secure relationship makes people more likely to be drawn to secure – rather than insecure - potential dating partners (Baldwin et al., 1996; see also Baldwin, 2007 for a discussion). And we’ve found that people who find it difficult to call to mind an image of an inner self-compassionate or self-reassuring presence, after a failure, are more prone to self-criticism and depression (Gilbert, Baldwin, Irons, Baccus & Palmer, 2006).
In our most recent work we have gone beyond self-evaluative dependent measures to ask whether interpersonal cognitive structures can even influence basic perceptual processes. Here we draw from the literature on cultural differences in cognition, where some of the more remarkable findings have shown that people from different cultures – or even bi-cultural individuals who are primed to think according to one culture versus the other – show different ways of perceiving their environment. We adopted one of the dependent measures used in that literature, the Rod and Frame Test (Witkin et al., 1954) and administered it to our undergraduate student participants. Before they did it, though, we primed them with one of their own same-sex or other-sex significant others. Consistent with other research showing that mixed-sex relationships tend to be somewhat more interdependent rather than focusing on individuation, we found that people primed with a mixed-sex relationship were more distracted by the frame on the Rod and Frame test and so performed less well (Baldwin et al., under review). In other words, their ability to perform a simple perceptual/cognitive task was shaped by the interpersonal knowledge that was currently activated in the back of their mind. Much as the culture literature has found that cognitive processes are often grounded in cultural practices, and the embodied cognition literature has found that they are grounded in bodily experiences, I anticipate that future research will reveal a host of basic cognitive processes that rest upon inner dialogues, self-and-other positions, and other aspects of interpersonal cognition.
Modifying
Much of our recent work has involved trying to modify people’s interpersonal cognition. We have mostly used two general approaches, the first of which is associative learning: By repeatedly pairing a stimulus (say, a specific computer tone sequence) with an interpersonal representation (say, a smiling face image or a visualization of a significant other), we have sought to create or modify associations in people’s memory. To be honest, probably nobody was more surprised than I was when this first worked. But we have since taken this approach in quite a few studies and it has reliably turned up interesting results.
Lexical decision tasks have confirmed that the tones activate different types of content, as the now conditioned stimulus (CS) for acceptance leads to slower reaction times for rejection words than does the CS-rejection (Baldwin & Main, 2001) -- Although interestingly, this seems to vary as a function of the person’s chronic attachment style (Baldwin & Kay, 2003; Baldwin & Meunier, 1999). The conditioned stimuli also produce differences in emotion and behavior. In one study, having the CS-acceptance played in the background led people to feel and also act less socially anxious during a stressful interview (Baldwin & Main, 2001). A tone that has been associated to acceptance tends to lead to higher self-esteem, particularly among women (Baldwin, Granzberg, Pippus, & Pritchard, 2003). Conversely, a tone paired with highly controlling feedback produces lowered intrinsic motivation if the tone is later played during a novel and potentially interesting task (Ratelle, Baldwin & Vallerand, 2005).
Other conditioning studies have been aimed more directly at truly interpersonal associations, in the sense that we paired aspects of the person’s own self-concept with representations of others’ reactions. Baccus, Baldwin & Packer (2004) first developed a simple computer game to pair the self-concept with images of social acceptance. The participant clicks on words as they appear on the computer screen, and anytime the word is something related to the participant (e.g., their name, or home town), a smiling face is briefly presented. Repeated pairing of this kind, pairing self with acceptance, has been shown to boost implicit self-esteem (Baccus, Baldwin & Packer, 2004), and to reduce feelings of aggressiveness among teenagers (Baldwin, Baccus & Milyavskaya, 2010). Other labs have since used a similar approach to successfully reduce speech anxiety (Clerkin & Teachman, 2010) and improve body image among women (Martijn et al., 2010).
Our second general approach to modifying interpersonal cognition is to give people practice in inhibiting attention toward social threat. It has been well established that selectively attending to social threats, such as frowning faces, can contribute to a vicious cycle of anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem (e.g., MacLeod, Mathews & Tata, 1986; Ronen & Baldwin, 2010). Dandeneau & Baldwin (2004) developed a computer game in which the goal is to locate a smiling, accepting face in a 4X4 matrix of scowling, rejecting faces. As previous research on the face-in-the-crowd effect might suggest, this task is remarkably difficult to do at first. Over time it becomes easier, and we reasoned that this improvement might reflect a kind of procedural learning where repeatedly disengaging from frowning faces, in search of the accepting face, creates an automatic attentional response. Indeed we found that playing this game for 5 or 10 minutes did lead to a reduced attentional bias toward rejection, whether measured with a dot-probe task or a Stroop task made up of rejection-related words. The attentional training influenced emotions and behavior: It produced lowered stress among students and among telemarketers (Dandeneau, Baldwin, Baccus, Sakellaropoulo, & Pruessner, 2007) as well as higher self-esteem among adult education students (Dandeneau & Baldwin, 2009). In the telemarketer study, there was behavioral evidence that the training led the operators to act more confidently with skeptical customers, and also produced a higher success rate on a measure of sales performance. Most recently, another lab has found that clinically anxious children playing a version of the game over twelve training sessions later showed positive changes in attention as well as reductions in clinician-rated diagnoses (Waters et al, in press). Taken together these studies show that if a person can practice disengaging attention from social threat, this can yield benefits in the form of heightened self-esteem and confidence, and reduced anxiety and stress. Versions of this training program are available from our lab website, and we hope that other researchers continue to study the effects of attentional training.
More recently, in her doctoral research in our lab Sara Etchison is examining the influence of interpersonal cognition on personal motivational processes. One central question involves the extent to which a person commits to pursuing a particular identity, versus disidentifying from that goal domain. In the case of women and math, for example, the literature tells us that although young girls often show an affinity for math it is not uncommon that they begin to disidentify from the domain during adolescence. There has been some suggestion that this distancing from math is due to a concern about rejection and criticism, particularly from male evaluators. In one study (Etchison & Baldwin, in preparation), some women were randomly assigned to practice inhibiting male rejection faces, while searching for a male accepting face. This condition indeed led the women to subsequently express greater identification with mathematics; compared to both a control condition and a condition in which they inhibited female rejection faces. Tune down the anticipation of male rejection, and this frees up the possibility of identifying with math.
Final thoughts
I will close with a few thoughts about where I think we should be going next.
In the sphere of measurement, there is still much to be done toward the assessment of people’s interpersonal cognition. As mentioned our lab has dabbled in self-report measures, but I have never been convinced that we were adequately assessing people’s true expectancies. Part of this may be because many of the questions of interest in our lab involve insecurities which people may not be too willing to express on a self-report measure. Other researchers have had success, though: Ames, 2008, for example found that a measure of people’s anticipated success from using assertive negotiation tactics did predict whether they used these tactics in the future. Also, I am not aware of any implicit measure that distinguishes expectancies for communal versus agentic outcomes. We have tried, this, and continue to try, by using lexical decision targets based on acceptance versus respect. Thus far our results have been less than perfectly clear, although as we refine our item set going forward I am hopeful we will meet with success.
When it comes to the manipulation of interpersonal cognitive structures, my impression is that with some exceptions the focus tends to be on issues of communion. It would be interesting to do more on priming interpersonal patterns of dominance and submission, or priming motivational conflicts between communion and agency. To some extent our work on evaluation and esteem probably conflates the two circumplex dimensions somewhat: perhaps disentangling them at the point of priming rather than of measurement would yield clearer results. A second topic for priming studies involves the effects of interpersonal primes on basic cognitive processes. As our Rod and Frame research indicates, the mind appears to be interpersonal to its core, and we might all be surprised by the extent to which seemingly noninterpersonal thought processes might be influenced by interpersonal structures.
The idea that it is possible to modify the activation patterns underlying interpersonal cognition is an exciting one. Our work thus far with conditioning and procedural learning paradigms is only scratching the surface. I see this approach as a useful tool for basic research, as we can modify elements of the associative network and observe whether this produces theoretically predicted changes in inferences, expectancies, and behavior. There are also practical implications, of course, as suggested by our findings of reduced stress and anxiety. Indeed we (Baldwin & Dandeneau, 2009) have argued that it it would be useful to try to develop truly engaging “serious games,” that would be more interesting and enjoyable to play than the attention training tasks used in lab research, but that might nonetheless allow the user to practice helpful associations and cognitive responses. There is still work to be done to demonstrate that such changes are durable, but initial research in the Cognitive Bias Modification literature (e.g., MacLeod & Matthews, 2012) suggest that they are.
The human mind cannot be fully understood without considering the importance of our interpersonal being. We think about our relationships and interactions, we experience our own identity in relation to others, and even our basic cognitive processes may be rooted in interpersonal structures. As research continues into implicit measures and techniques for priming and modifying interpersonal cognition, and as researchers continue to share insights across content domains, the field comes closer and closer to a unified model of the interpersonal mind.
References
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Andersen, S. M., & Chen, S. (2002). The relational self: An interpersonal social-cognitive theory. Psychological Review, 109(4), 619-645.
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Dandeneau, S. D., & Baldwin, M. W. (2004). The inhibition of socially rejecting information among people with high versus low self-esteem: The role of attentional bias and the effects of bias reduction training. Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, 23(4), 584-602.
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McGill University
Way, way back in the 1980s I read, in close succession, Sullivan’s (1953) The Interpersonal Theory of psychiatry, Greenberg and Mitchell’s (1983) Object relations in psychoanalytic theory, and Markus’s (1977) Self-schemata and processing information about the self. I was excited about all three of these excellent works and I tried to integrate their ideas with each other and with other things I had learned. My take-away thought at the time was that while mainstream social-personality psychologists were enthusiastically embracing social cognitive approaches to all manner of questions, the models being discussed in the literature generally tended to underemphasize the interpersonal nature of human existence. To a large extent this remains true today.
I became convinced of the benefits of theoretical and empirical work toward identifying basic processes of interpersonal cognition. My own initial theoretical contribution came in 1992 when I advanced --borrowing heavily from other writers whom I admired-- the notion of relational schemas, or “cognitive structures representing regularities in patterns of interpersonal relatedness,” which would consist of “an interpersonal script for the interaction pattern, a self-schema for how self is experienced in that interpersonal situation, and a schema for the other person in that interaction” (Baldwin, 1992, p. 461). A key part of this formulation was the idea of an if…then interpersonal script, which would allow a person to generate expectancies about and plan behavior in their interactions.
Fortunately, a similar view of the field was held by other researchers at the time (many of whom later contributed to the edited volume Interpersonal Cognition; Baldwin, 2005), who were examining issues of transference, interpersonal self-esteem, attachment working models, and basic personality structure from an interpersonal cognitive perspective. It became clear that one benefit of adopting the current social cognitive paradigm was the sharing of a common language, with ideas of activation, associative networks, and so on. This opened up a greater opportunity for exchanging insights among researchers in different content areas.
I hope the reader will indulge me as I take stock of some of the progress that has been made, by engaging in a highly selective and likely rambling review particularly of work from our lab. I will first give a brief overview of the theoretical perspective my colleagues, students and I have worked with. Then I will focus on three central research issues, namely measurement, manipulation, and modification.
Theory
We start with the assumption that people represent in memory not just “self” and “others,” as isolated concepts, but also interpersonal knowledge such as self-with-Mom and self-with-authority-figure. The core of this interpersonal knowledge is a set of if…then expectancies about typical interaction patterns. Content of such scripts can be as idiosyncratic as relationships can be, although in our research we have tended to focus on common patterns including those found in insecure attachment working models (e.g., If I depend on my partner, he/she will leave me) and conditional acceptance (e.g., If I fail, he/she will reject me).
Interpersonal knowledge structures are then assumed, and have been shown, to influence social perception much like any other knowledge structure that has been examined in the social cognition literature. For example, activated interpersonal knowledge guides attention toward schema-relevant aspects of an interaction. Activation can spread to autobiographical memories of similar situations, and also shape the person’s encoding of and memory for the current experience. One straightforward but important hypothesis in this area is that interpersonal knowledge of this kind can be used by the individual to predict and interpret the behavior of others (see, e.g., Andersen’s work on transference; e.g., Andersen & Chen, 2002). Another assumption is that if…then knowledge can inform specific outcome expectancies through a kind of simulation heuristic (Khaneman & Tversky, 1982): The person considers an “IF” (e.g., “What if I were to forget Valentine’s Day?), and via spreading activation this activates a “THEN” (e.g., “My partner would express hurt feelings”), making it more cognitively fluent so the person experiences “I can easily imagine that happening.” This kind of expectancy can shape behavioral choices as well as affective responses. In the case of self-esteem feelings, for example, we share the view of other interpersonal theorists (e.g., Mark Leary, Carl Rogers) that the implicit sense that If I fail I will be rejected can- not surprisingly-lead a person to feel anxious and depressed about perceived shortcomings, producing insecurity and low self-esteem feelings.
In terms of measurement, we have sought ways to assess if…then scripts. We have dabbled with self-report measures of explicit expectancies and we have also worked on implicit measures of cognitive activation patterns. In terms of manipulation we have done dozens of priming studies. One clear message from the social cognitive literature is that most people tend to have more than one cognitive model available to them – in terms of interpersonal cognition, they know more than one way to interact with others – so the critical issue is which interpersonal knowledge is activated and used in a given situation or with a given person. Priming studies provide one tool for examining this phenomenon of activation. Finally, our recent work has focused on modification, or trying to change the associations that underlie interpersonal thought. That is, we believe that the nuts and bolts of interpersonal cognition are the if…then expectancies that get activated to then channel the spread of cognitive activation: We have therefore used basic learning paradigms to try to modify associations and thereby modify interpersonal perception and behavior.
Measuring
The first step in studying a phenomenon or process is to find ways to measure it. We have been drawn to those explicit measures that specifically focus on if… then expectancies, as well as to implicit measures that seek to assess these same associations.
In Hill and Safran’s (1994) Interpersonal Schema Questionnaire, people consider various “ifs” (e.g., “Imagine yourself feeling weak or passive and wanting the other person to take the lead” ) and then rate the likelihood of potential interpersonal outcomes (e.g., He/she “would be impatient or quarrelsome”). Because all the ifs and thens are derived directly from octants of the interpersonal circumplex, the researcher can calculate individual differences in contingency expectations, for example to assess complementarity patterns and correlate these with other variables of interest. In our own research, we (Baldwin & Keelan, 1999) found that expectations varied in interesting ways as a function of people’s level of self-esteem. Consistent with interpersonal formulations of self-esteem, high self-esteem was broadly correlated with expectancies of acceptance – in particular, confident expectancies that acting in a warm and friendly manner would lead to similarly communal responses from others. Interestingly, there were gender differences along the dominance dimension: Women were more likely than men to expect that acting submissively would lead to warm responses from others, and this gender difference in expectancies was especially pronounced among high self-esteem individuals.
My collaborators and I have tried our hand at designing self-report questionnaires, including to assess if...then expectancies for expressing anger (Fehr, Baldwin, Collins, Patterson & Benditt, 1999), if..then expectancies relating to attachment working models (Baldwin, Fehr, Keedian, Seidel, & Thomson, 1993), and general tendencies to focus attention on the possibility of rejection from other people (Ronen & Baldwin, 2010).
The social cognitive approach becomes particularly useful when we move beyond self-report to an assessment of implicit processes. In a recent chapter (Baldwin, Lydon, McClure & Etchison, 2010), my coauthors and I noted that while measures of implicit cognition in many domains simply involve assessing people’s evaluative responses – liking or disliking, for example- the questions of interest in the interpersonal domain are typically more nuanced. There remains much work to be done here, but thus far the field has made meaningful progress.
Some implicit measures of interpersonal cognition assess a kind of “set” or general orientation toward others’ behavior. In our work using a modified Stroop test, for example, we found that individuals with low self-esteem show cognitive interference from words relating to rejection (Dandeneau & Baldwin, 2004). In a dot-probe task we found that individuals with low self-esteem showed a rejection bias, in that they were quicker to identify probes that replaced frowning, rejection faces indicating that their attention was quickly drawn toward social threat (Dandeneau et al., 2007). Presumably this attentional bias both results from and sustains a threatening view of the social world that contributes to the insecurity felt by individuals with low self-esteem.
More complex measures of interpersonal cognition use sequential priming techniques to assess if…then expectancies. For example, low self-esteem individuals are quicker to recognize rejection-related words in a lexical decision task on those trials where they have first been briefly primed with words relating to failure; That is, they show an automatic if…then association to the effect that “If I fail, then I will be rejected” (Baldwin & Sinclair, 1996; Baldwin, Baccus, & Fitzsimons, 2004). Similarly, in a study Beverley Fehr and I conducted in the attachment domain, avoidantly attached individuals showed a similar associative link between trusting their partner and being hurt (Baldwin, Fehr, Keedian, Seidel & Thomson, 1993). This sequential priming approach is particularly appealing because it captures the spreading of activation to the expected social outcome, and the emotional consequences associated with it.
Other measurement techniques use questionnaire approaches, but seek to assess implicit processes. In the self-esteem literature there is an ongoing debate about the contribution of more communal aspects – self-liking based on feeling accepted by others—versus more agentic aspects – e.g., feeling powerful, high status or admired by others. When we examined questionnaire measures of implicit self-esteem we (Sakellaropoulo & Baldwin, 2007) noticed that there exist two slightly different versions of the Name Letter test of implicit self-esteem: In the standard version, the participant rates how much he or she likes each letter of the alphabet and implicit self-esteem is calculated as the preference they show for their own initials. In a different version that is sometimes used, however, the person instead rates each letter for how attractive it is. We suspected there was something meaningfully different between these measures, such that whereas one seemed to measure implicit self-liking, the other seemed to measure a more narcissistic form of self-admiration. We created two forms of the questionnaire; one in which participants rated how much they liked the letters of the alphabet, and another in which they rated how attractive they found the letters of the alphabet. Participants were led to recall instances of feeling proud of themselves, and then were given the two forms of the name letter task to complete. We found that state ratings of narcissism (Study 1) and aggressiveness (Study 2) were predicted by a pattern in which a low level of self-liking was combined with a high level of self-attractiveness. These findings have inspired us to continue to try to assess communal versus agentic aspects of implicit self-esteem and interpersonal cognition.
Manipulating
It is pretty much impossible to mention social cognition without talking about priming, and indeed dozens of studies have shown that primes can be used to manipulate the cognitive activation of particular interpersonal representations – to, in some sense, put a certain type of person or interpersonal context “in the back of the mind”. In my doctoral research with John Holmes we found that priming various representations of accepting versus critical others produced effects on people’s self-evaluations. Priming an unconditionally-accepting person, for example, led people to be less self-critical after a failure, compared to a group where a contingently-accepting other was primed (Baldwin & Holmes, 1987). Priming young women with thoughts of their college-aged peers led them to be more enthusiastic about sexually-permissive literature compared to if they were primed with their parents (Baldwin & Holmes, 1987). Subsequent research confirmed that such processes of interpersonal cognition could function implicitly, as subliminal primes of Pope John Paul II led Catholic women to be more self-critical and anxious, and subliminal primes of renowned psychologist Robert Zajonc had roughly similar effects on graduate students at the University of Michigan (Baldwin, Carrell & Lopez, 1990). I expect that these parallel effects were because both primes represented a similar kind of authority figure in the respective participants’ representational worlds (notwithstanding a waggish reviewer’s alternative hypothesis that it might be because both primes were of Polish septuagenarians).
In the years since that early work we have gone on to explore a range of priming techniques and interpersonal domains. When people are very briefly – or even subliminally - shown the names of particular significant others, this can shape their self-evaluations depending on whether the significant other is highly critical or relatively accepting (Baldwin, 1994). On lexicial decision tasks, people are more likely to show the failure-rejection if-then pattern if they have been primed with a critical, rather than accepting, other (Baldwin & Sinclair, 1996). We found that it is possible to prime relationships matching particular attachment orientations so that, for example, priming a secure relationship makes people more likely to be drawn to secure – rather than insecure - potential dating partners (Baldwin et al., 1996; see also Baldwin, 2007 for a discussion). And we’ve found that people who find it difficult to call to mind an image of an inner self-compassionate or self-reassuring presence, after a failure, are more prone to self-criticism and depression (Gilbert, Baldwin, Irons, Baccus & Palmer, 2006).
In our most recent work we have gone beyond self-evaluative dependent measures to ask whether interpersonal cognitive structures can even influence basic perceptual processes. Here we draw from the literature on cultural differences in cognition, where some of the more remarkable findings have shown that people from different cultures – or even bi-cultural individuals who are primed to think according to one culture versus the other – show different ways of perceiving their environment. We adopted one of the dependent measures used in that literature, the Rod and Frame Test (Witkin et al., 1954) and administered it to our undergraduate student participants. Before they did it, though, we primed them with one of their own same-sex or other-sex significant others. Consistent with other research showing that mixed-sex relationships tend to be somewhat more interdependent rather than focusing on individuation, we found that people primed with a mixed-sex relationship were more distracted by the frame on the Rod and Frame test and so performed less well (Baldwin et al., under review). In other words, their ability to perform a simple perceptual/cognitive task was shaped by the interpersonal knowledge that was currently activated in the back of their mind. Much as the culture literature has found that cognitive processes are often grounded in cultural practices, and the embodied cognition literature has found that they are grounded in bodily experiences, I anticipate that future research will reveal a host of basic cognitive processes that rest upon inner dialogues, self-and-other positions, and other aspects of interpersonal cognition.
Modifying
Much of our recent work has involved trying to modify people’s interpersonal cognition. We have mostly used two general approaches, the first of which is associative learning: By repeatedly pairing a stimulus (say, a specific computer tone sequence) with an interpersonal representation (say, a smiling face image or a visualization of a significant other), we have sought to create or modify associations in people’s memory. To be honest, probably nobody was more surprised than I was when this first worked. But we have since taken this approach in quite a few studies and it has reliably turned up interesting results.
Lexical decision tasks have confirmed that the tones activate different types of content, as the now conditioned stimulus (CS) for acceptance leads to slower reaction times for rejection words than does the CS-rejection (Baldwin & Main, 2001) -- Although interestingly, this seems to vary as a function of the person’s chronic attachment style (Baldwin & Kay, 2003; Baldwin & Meunier, 1999). The conditioned stimuli also produce differences in emotion and behavior. In one study, having the CS-acceptance played in the background led people to feel and also act less socially anxious during a stressful interview (Baldwin & Main, 2001). A tone that has been associated to acceptance tends to lead to higher self-esteem, particularly among women (Baldwin, Granzberg, Pippus, & Pritchard, 2003). Conversely, a tone paired with highly controlling feedback produces lowered intrinsic motivation if the tone is later played during a novel and potentially interesting task (Ratelle, Baldwin & Vallerand, 2005).
Other conditioning studies have been aimed more directly at truly interpersonal associations, in the sense that we paired aspects of the person’s own self-concept with representations of others’ reactions. Baccus, Baldwin & Packer (2004) first developed a simple computer game to pair the self-concept with images of social acceptance. The participant clicks on words as they appear on the computer screen, and anytime the word is something related to the participant (e.g., their name, or home town), a smiling face is briefly presented. Repeated pairing of this kind, pairing self with acceptance, has been shown to boost implicit self-esteem (Baccus, Baldwin & Packer, 2004), and to reduce feelings of aggressiveness among teenagers (Baldwin, Baccus & Milyavskaya, 2010). Other labs have since used a similar approach to successfully reduce speech anxiety (Clerkin & Teachman, 2010) and improve body image among women (Martijn et al., 2010).
Our second general approach to modifying interpersonal cognition is to give people practice in inhibiting attention toward social threat. It has been well established that selectively attending to social threats, such as frowning faces, can contribute to a vicious cycle of anxiety, stress, and low self-esteem (e.g., MacLeod, Mathews & Tata, 1986; Ronen & Baldwin, 2010). Dandeneau & Baldwin (2004) developed a computer game in which the goal is to locate a smiling, accepting face in a 4X4 matrix of scowling, rejecting faces. As previous research on the face-in-the-crowd effect might suggest, this task is remarkably difficult to do at first. Over time it becomes easier, and we reasoned that this improvement might reflect a kind of procedural learning where repeatedly disengaging from frowning faces, in search of the accepting face, creates an automatic attentional response. Indeed we found that playing this game for 5 or 10 minutes did lead to a reduced attentional bias toward rejection, whether measured with a dot-probe task or a Stroop task made up of rejection-related words. The attentional training influenced emotions and behavior: It produced lowered stress among students and among telemarketers (Dandeneau, Baldwin, Baccus, Sakellaropoulo, & Pruessner, 2007) as well as higher self-esteem among adult education students (Dandeneau & Baldwin, 2009). In the telemarketer study, there was behavioral evidence that the training led the operators to act more confidently with skeptical customers, and also produced a higher success rate on a measure of sales performance. Most recently, another lab has found that clinically anxious children playing a version of the game over twelve training sessions later showed positive changes in attention as well as reductions in clinician-rated diagnoses (Waters et al, in press). Taken together these studies show that if a person can practice disengaging attention from social threat, this can yield benefits in the form of heightened self-esteem and confidence, and reduced anxiety and stress. Versions of this training program are available from our lab website, and we hope that other researchers continue to study the effects of attentional training.
More recently, in her doctoral research in our lab Sara Etchison is examining the influence of interpersonal cognition on personal motivational processes. One central question involves the extent to which a person commits to pursuing a particular identity, versus disidentifying from that goal domain. In the case of women and math, for example, the literature tells us that although young girls often show an affinity for math it is not uncommon that they begin to disidentify from the domain during adolescence. There has been some suggestion that this distancing from math is due to a concern about rejection and criticism, particularly from male evaluators. In one study (Etchison & Baldwin, in preparation), some women were randomly assigned to practice inhibiting male rejection faces, while searching for a male accepting face. This condition indeed led the women to subsequently express greater identification with mathematics; compared to both a control condition and a condition in which they inhibited female rejection faces. Tune down the anticipation of male rejection, and this frees up the possibility of identifying with math.
Final thoughts
I will close with a few thoughts about where I think we should be going next.
In the sphere of measurement, there is still much to be done toward the assessment of people’s interpersonal cognition. As mentioned our lab has dabbled in self-report measures, but I have never been convinced that we were adequately assessing people’s true expectancies. Part of this may be because many of the questions of interest in our lab involve insecurities which people may not be too willing to express on a self-report measure. Other researchers have had success, though: Ames, 2008, for example found that a measure of people’s anticipated success from using assertive negotiation tactics did predict whether they used these tactics in the future. Also, I am not aware of any implicit measure that distinguishes expectancies for communal versus agentic outcomes. We have tried, this, and continue to try, by using lexical decision targets based on acceptance versus respect. Thus far our results have been less than perfectly clear, although as we refine our item set going forward I am hopeful we will meet with success.
When it comes to the manipulation of interpersonal cognitive structures, my impression is that with some exceptions the focus tends to be on issues of communion. It would be interesting to do more on priming interpersonal patterns of dominance and submission, or priming motivational conflicts between communion and agency. To some extent our work on evaluation and esteem probably conflates the two circumplex dimensions somewhat: perhaps disentangling them at the point of priming rather than of measurement would yield clearer results. A second topic for priming studies involves the effects of interpersonal primes on basic cognitive processes. As our Rod and Frame research indicates, the mind appears to be interpersonal to its core, and we might all be surprised by the extent to which seemingly noninterpersonal thought processes might be influenced by interpersonal structures.
The idea that it is possible to modify the activation patterns underlying interpersonal cognition is an exciting one. Our work thus far with conditioning and procedural learning paradigms is only scratching the surface. I see this approach as a useful tool for basic research, as we can modify elements of the associative network and observe whether this produces theoretically predicted changes in inferences, expectancies, and behavior. There are also practical implications, of course, as suggested by our findings of reduced stress and anxiety. Indeed we (Baldwin & Dandeneau, 2009) have argued that it it would be useful to try to develop truly engaging “serious games,” that would be more interesting and enjoyable to play than the attention training tasks used in lab research, but that might nonetheless allow the user to practice helpful associations and cognitive responses. There is still work to be done to demonstrate that such changes are durable, but initial research in the Cognitive Bias Modification literature (e.g., MacLeod & Matthews, 2012) suggest that they are.
The human mind cannot be fully understood without considering the importance of our interpersonal being. We think about our relationships and interactions, we experience our own identity in relation to others, and even our basic cognitive processes may be rooted in interpersonal structures. As research continues into implicit measures and techniques for priming and modifying interpersonal cognition, and as researchers continue to share insights across content domains, the field comes closer and closer to a unified model of the interpersonal mind.
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