28th International Congress of Psychology August 8 ... - U-netSURF

was used. Meta-attitude task produced greater recall than semantic task. That is, self-reference
effect occurred. In experiment 2, the task facilitation paradigm was used. When the initial task was
self-descriptive judgment, time for meta-attitude judgment in the target task was faster than when
the initial task was semantic judgment. These results suggest that meta-attitude is one of
self-knowledge in the semantic memory system and has same properties as other self-knowledge.
3118.83 Group identification and group-serving attribution bias, Weijun Ma, Minoru
Karasawa, Kobe University, Japan
Two studies examined effects of the strength of group identification on group-serving attribution
bias. Thirty-seven Hakka students (Study 1) and fifty-three Chaoshan students (Study 2) in China
read scenarios in which members of an excessively inclusive in-group, optimally inclusive
in-group, or an out-group engaged in desirable or undesirable behaviors. They then made causal
attributions for each behavior. Results consistently showed that the in-group serving bias
(attributing desirable behaviors to internal and undesirable behaviors to external causes) was
especially visible when the in-group size was optimally inclusive. The results are interpreted from
the viewpoint of Self Categorization Theory.
3118.84 The psychological meaning of the social situations, Midori Toyama, Gakushuin
University, Japan
Most theories in social psychology involve both personal and situational factors within their scope.
In attribution theory, for example, personal-situational causality is a central dimension of the
theory. However, the investigation of the situations has been far behind the research in personal
factors. This study is a preliminary attempt to determine the psychological meaning of the social
situations and to provide a tentative taxonomy. Participants' ratings were put into factor analysis,
cluster analysis, and multidimensional scaling to extract relevant dimensions and to classify
various situations. Results indicated that pleasantness, formality, and constraint might be major
components.
3118.85 Psychological concept of Europe and its semantic meaning for Latvian inhabitants,
Aleksejs Vorobjovs 1 , Aleksejs Ruza 2 , 1 Daugavpils University, Latvia; 2 Latvian University, Latvia
Joining the European Union for Latvia causes an important transformation of social reality and
“Life-space” of its inhabitants through their reflection of a new big state. The objective of the
given research is to investigate the content of psychological concept of European Union, which is
new for each Latvian inhabitant. Therefore, a basic category of this research is “meaning” of
European Union for Latvian inhabitants. “Meaning” in this case is a transformation and selective
reflection of individual of the content of the perceived object. It has three components: cognitive,
affective and behavioral.
3118.86 Do people automatically produce more force when responding to motivationally
relevant stimuli? Rosa Maria Puca, Gerhard Rinkenauer, Christian Breidenstein, University
of Tübingen, Germany
People automatically categorize stimuli as either positive or negative (Bargh, 1997). To test the
hypothesis that the valence of stimuli is automatically transferred to the motor system we
introduced response force besides response time as an additional dependent variable. In a go-nogo
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