Clinical depression and day-to-day social interaction in a community sample.

Adult participants recruited from the community, one half of whom met criteria for clinical depression, described their day-to-day social interactions using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record. Compared with the nondepressed participants, depressed participants found their interactions to be less enjoyable and less intimate, and they felt less influence over their interactions. Differences between the two groups in intimacy occurred only in interactions with close relations and not in interactions with nonintimates, and differences in influence were more pronounced for those who were cohabiting than for those who were not. There were no differences in how socially active depressed and nondepressed people were or in the amount of contact they had with different relational partners.

Body image and day-to-day social interaction.

Participants maintained a social interaction diary and completed a measure of body image. Body image was found to have three factors, body attractiveness, social attractiveness (how attractive people believed others found them to be), and general attractiveness. For both men and women, self-perceptions of body attractiveness and of social attractiveness were positively related to the intimacy they found in interaction. Self-perceptions of social attractiveness were positively related to women's confidence in social interaction and their perceived influence over interaction, whereas for men, confidence and influence were unrelated to social attractiveness. For both men and women, body image was unrelated to how enjoyable people found interactions to be and was weakly related to how responsive they felt others were to them. For both men and women, body image was also unrelated to how socially active people were and to the relative distribution of same- and opposite-sex interactions.

Level and instability of day-to-day psychological well-being and risk for depression.

For 21 days, 123 undergraduates provided measures of their self-esteem, anxiety, causal uncertainty, perceived control over outcomes, and the three constructs comprising A. T. Beck's (1972) cognitive triad. Factor analyses of measures of the mean level and day-to-day instability of these constructs produced 2 factors, level of well-being and day-to-day instability of well-being. Participants also provided 4 measures of risk for depression over 2 1/2 months. For participants who were not at risk for depression, level of day-to-day well-being was negatively related to risk for depression, and this effect was not moderated by day-to-day instability. In contrast, for participants who were classified as at-risk for depression, day-to-day instability of well-being moderated the strength of the negative relationship between level of well-being and risk for depression. The relationship between level of well-being and depression was stronger for participants who were more unstable.

Depression and everyday social interaction.

The present study examined the relationships between depressive symptoms and everyday social interaction in a nonclinical population. Depressive symptoms were measured using the Center for Epidemiological Studies Depression Scale, and social interaction was measured using a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record. People who were classified as at risk for depression had less rewarding interactions than people who were not at risk. Depressive symptoms and interaction quantity and quality were negatively correlated for participants above the cutpoint, whereas they were uncorrelated for those below the at-risk cutpoint. The results also suggested that, compared with nondepressed people, depressed people derive more rewards from interactions with their closest opposite-sex friends, relative to the rewards they derive from interactions with other opposite-sex friends.

Self-presentation in everyday interactions: effects of target familiarity and gender composition.

This study examined people's self-presentation motives in unstructured, everyday social interaction as a function of participants' gender similarity to, and general familiarity with, the targets of their self-presentations. Participants maintained a variant of the Rochester Interaction Record for 1 week. For every interaction that lasted 10 min or more, they rated the degree to which they wanted to make each of 4 impressions (likable, competent, ethical, and attractive), how much they thought about the impressions others in the interaction formed of them, and how nervous they felt in the interaction. In general, participants' self-presentational motives were lower in interactions with highly familiar people of their own sex than they were either in interactions with less familiar people of their sex or in interactions with people of the other sex regardless of familiarity. When participants' interactions with only their 3 most familiar interactants were examined, self-presentational concerns decreased with familiarity in same-sex interactions but increased with familiarity in cross-sex interactions.

Moderation in excess: binge drinking and social interaction among college students.

The research on the relationships between sociability and alcohol consumption has produced inconsistent findings, leading some to conclude that there are no such relationships. However, this research has tended to focus on sociability as a personality construct, not sociability defined as social activity. In the present study, college students (N = 90) used a social interaction diary to provide measures of their social activity, and they provided descriptions of their total alcohol consumption and of their frequency of binge drinking. Although total consumption per se was not reliably related to the quality or quantity of participants' social lives, frequency of binge drinking was related to some aspects of social interaction. Specifically, participants who had no binge-drinking episodes reported less intimacy and less disclosure in their interactions than those who had some episodes. However, men who reported having three or more binge episodes per week experienced less intimacy in their interactions than any other group of men or women. It is possible that because some binge drinking is normative and may be seen as desirable among college students, students who have a more normative number of binge-drinking episodes are integrated more fully into the college community than students who have no episodes or too many episodes.

Developing and maintaining state-wide adolescent pregnancy prevention coalitions: a preliminary investigation.

This paper presents the results of a study of state-wide adolescent pregnancy prevention coalitions. Key informants in five states throughout the southern United States were given semi-structured interviews regarding the adolescent pregnancy prevention coalitions in their states. From these interviews and other documents, conclusions were drawn regarding the nature and importance of the environments within which these coalitions operate, the universe of activities in which coalitions engage, and the stages of development of these coalitions. Katz and Kahn's model of social organizations served as the basis for understanding coalitions in terms of these three considerations. Future research should consider the utility of organizational models that can explain more fully the organization--committee hybrid structure that tends to characterize these coalitions.

On specificity in the impact of social participation on physical and psychological health.

Although it has been suggested that social participation is likely to be beneficial for health and well-being, there is little research demonstrating specifically which aspects of socializing may be responsible. This study distinguishes specific components of social interaction and health and examines differential relationships among them. Three distinct categories of social participation variables were posited: quality, quantity, and social traits. If was hypothesized that health problems would be more frequent among persons with poor quality interaction. The only exception to this prediction was that illnesses that are socially communicated were expected to be more prevalent among persons with a greater quantity of social participation, regardless of quality. Results confirmed these predictions for females. For males, the pattern of results was more complex, in that masculinity and femininity influenced the manner in which symptoms were expressed. These results supported the notion that social relations have a specific impact on health, and that if research is to provide useful information for intervention, we must learn more about which specific aspects of social participation are beneficial as well as how this occurs.

Loneliness, social interaction, and sex roles.

Forty-three male and 53 female college seniors maintained the Rochester Interaction Record for 2 weeks, providing information about every social interaction of 10 minutes or more. Subjects then completed the revised UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles) Loneliness Scale and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, measuring sex-role orientation. For both sexes, loneliness was negatively related to the amount of time spent with females and to the meaningfulness of interaction with males and females. However, meaningfulness with males was more important than meaningfulness with females. Femininity was negatively related to loneliness for both sexes and partially mediated the above relationships. There were sex differences, however, in the extent to which variables overlapped in predicting loneliness. For example, a large group of nonlonely males was characterized both by having meaningful relationships with males and by spending time with females, whereas a second group of nonlonely males was characterized simply by having meaningful relationships with males. The largest group of nonlonely females was characterized simply by having meaningful relationships with males, but another sizable group was characterized simply by spending time with females. Females doing both accounted for very little of the variance.

Hostility as a function of the opportunity to counteraggress.

Half of the subjects, college students, were insulted by the experimenter while half were not. Within each of these conditions, half of the subjects were led to believe they would have an opportunity to administer electric shock to the experimenter, while the other half were not. A measure of hostility toward the experimenter was taken before there was any actual opportunity to shock him. As predicted from reactance theory, it was found that the mere opportunity to shock the experimenter reduced hostility that was produced by his insulting behavior. Alternative interpretations and implications were discussed.