Biomedical subjects

A Fenigstein

Publications and source records attributed to A Fenigstein.

3 recordsLinked to original sources

PubMed1992

Paranoia and self-consciousness.

A new instrument designed to assess paranoid thought in college students, together with reliability and validity data, was presented in Study 1. A single general factor accounted for a substantial portion of the variance in the full scale. Public self-consciousness was consistently and significantly correlated with the present measure of paranoia. In Study 2, both pretested paranoia and public self-consciousness were related to feelings of being watched (a classical manifestation of paranoia), although public self-consciousness had an effect only when there was a 2-way mirror present. In Study 3, self-attention, experimentally induced using a story construction task, again resulted in a heightened sense of being observed. Discussion focuses on paranoid cognition as characteristic of everyday thought and the implications of self-attention for social perception processes.

Adult↗

PubMed1979

Does aggression cause a preference for viewing media violence?

Virtually all of the research concerned with media violence has attempted to determine whether the viewing of violence is associated with or causes aggression. Little experimental research has been directed at understanding why persons view media violence. The present research experimentally tested the hypotheses that physical aggression and fantasy aggression would lead to a preference for viewing violence. In Experiment 1, undergraduate men and women were induced to express aggressive, nonaggressive, or no fantasies and were then given an opportunity to select film clips for viewing. The films chosen by men contained more violence than those chosen by women. In addition, aggressive fantasies in males, compared to nonaggressive fantasies, increased the preference for viewing violence. Experiment 2, using only males, replicated the results of the first study and also found that men who were given an opportunity to aggress physically, compared to those who had no such opportunity, were more likely to choose to view films containing violent content. These results provide an additional perspective on the relationship between the observation of violence and the expression of aggression by suggesting that the causal effects are bidirectional: Just as the viewing of violence may increase aggression, so, too, aggressive behavior may increase the preference for viewing violence.

Aggression↗

PubMed1978

Self-focusing effects of heartbeat feedback.

Two studies tested the hypothesis that auditory heartbeat feedback leads to an increase in self-directed attention. In Experiment 1, subjects exposed to a sound representing their heartbeat made greater self-attributions for hypothetical outcomes than did subjects exposed to the same sound identified as an extraneous noise. Furthermore, subjects in the heartbeat condition showed a pattern of color-naming latencies (on a color-word test) that was consistent with the hypothesis that self-related information was being activated in memory. In contrast, no such pattern was observed among subjects in the noise condition. In Experiment 2, comparisons with appropriate control groups indicated that neither an extraneous noise nor the attachment of a heartbeat-recording device influenced self-attribution, but that the presence of either a constant or an accelerating heartbeat increased self-attribution. The latter two conditions did not differ from each other. Discussion centers on the findings' methodological and theoretical implications.

Acoustic Stimulation↗