Implicit self-esteem compensation: automatic threat defense.

Four experiments demonstrated implicit self-esteem compensation (ISEC) in response to threats involving gender identity (Experiment 1), implicit racism (Experiment 2), and social rejection (Experiments 3-4). Under conditions in which people might be expected to suffer a blow to self-worth, they instead showed high scores on 2 implicit self-esteem measures. There was no comparable effect on explicit self-esteem. However, ISEC was eliminated following self-affirmation (Experiment 3). Furthermore, threat manipulations increased automatic intergroup bias, but ISEC mediated these relationships (Experiments 2-3). Thus, a process that serves as damage control for the self may have negative social consequences. Finally, pretest anxiety mediated the relationship between threat and ISEC (Experiment 3), whereas ISEC negatively predicted anxiety among high-threat participants (Experiment 4), suggesting that ISEC may function to regulate anxiety. The implications of these findings for automatic emotion regulation, intergroup bias, and implicit self-esteem measures are discussed.

Redescription disembeds relations: evidence from relational transfer and use in problem solving.

How relational information becomes disembedded from its original context is an important issue for theories of cognition. Two experiments tested the hypothesis that a process called redescription disembeds relations, resulting in abstract and, therefore, more transferable and robust representations. In Experiment 1, participants solved simple problems involving an alternating sequence. Participants who discovered the alternating-sequence relation through redescription transferred the relation to a second type of problem more quickly and used it more consistently than did participants who had been directly instructed on the alternating-sequence strategy. Experiment 2 showed similar effects for participants who discovered the alternating-sequence relation through redescription, as compared with participants who had discovered the relation through information available in the display. The present results converge with previous experimental and correlational evidence that suggests that redescription creates abstract representations of relations.