A signal detection analysis of chronic attachment anxiety at speed dating: being unpopular is only the first part of the problem.

Initiating a romantic relationship invokes an approach-avoidance conflict between the desire for affiliation and the fear of rejection; optimally, people should selectively approach potential partners who reciprocate their interest. This may be difficult for anxiously attached people: They may be unpopular, and their ambivalence could lead to either a fearfully selective approach at the cost of missed opportunities or an unselective, indiscriminate approach at the cost of increasing rejection. Using a speed-dating paradigm, data were collected from 116 participants, and a signal detection framework was applied to examine the outcomes. For anxious participants, speed-dating attendance was motivated by loneliness. At speed dating, they were unpopular and unselective; they missed fewer opportunities but made more failed attempts. Anxious men made fewer matches than nonanxious men, whereas anxious women were buffered by having a response bias toward saying "yes" to potential partners. Attachment anxiety predicted outcomes above and beyond the powerful impact of attractiveness.

Cutting stress off at the pass: reducing vigilance and responsiveness to social threat by manipulating attention.

Personality processes relating to social perception have been shown to play a significant role in the experience of stress. In 5 studies, the authors demonstrate that early stage attentional processes influence the perception of social threat and modify the human stress response. The authors first show that cortisol release in response to a stressful situation correlates with selective attention toward social threat. Second, the authors show in 2 laboratory studies that this attentional pattern, most evident among individuals with low self-esteem, can be modified with a repetitive training task. Next, in a field study, students trained to modify their attentional pattern to reduce vigilance for social threat showed lower self-reported stress related to their final exam. In a final field study with telemarketers, the attentional training task led to increased self-esteem, decreased cortisol and perceived stress responses, higher confidence, and greater work performance. Taken together, these results demonstrate the impact of antecedent-focused strategies on the late-stage consequences of social stress.

Increasing implicit self-esteem through classical conditioning.

Implicit self-esteem is the automatic, nonconscious aspect of self-esteem. This study demonstrated that implicit self-esteem can be increased using a computer game that repeatedly pairs self-relevant information with smiling faces. These findings, which are consistent with principles of classical conditioning, establish the associative and interpersonal nature of implicit self-esteem and demonstrate the potential benefit of applying basic learning principles in this domain.