OBJECTIVE Writing in an emotional way about stressful or traumatic experiences has beneficial effects on emotional well-being and physical health. Yet the mechanisms that underlie these effects still need to be explored. Integrating research on the effects of positive expectancies, the authors suggest that positive effects of written emotional expression may, in part, depend on expectancies ind...

AIMS Alcohol expectancies are strong concurrent predictors of alcohol use and problems, but the current study addressed their unique power to predict from adolescence to midlife. METHOD Long-term longitudinal data from the national British Cohort Study 1970 (N = 2146, 59.8% female) were used to predict alcohol use and misuse in the mid-30s by alcohol expectancies reported in adolescence. RE...

Photographs are used as a research tool by anthropologists and as a technique to empower special populations, advocacy groups, and policy makers. This case describes how photography was used to develop a survey to study alcohol expectancies among Thai adolescents. A multi-cultural research team faced generational, linguistic, and cultural barriers in understanding Thai adolescent alcohol use we...

According to the Sensitivity-to-mean-intentions model, dispositional victim sensitivity involves a suspicious mindset that is activated by situational cues and guides subsequent information processing and behavior like a schema. Study 1 tested whether victim-sensitive persons are more prone to form expectancies of injustice in ambiguous situations and whether these expectancies mediate the rela...

Models of social phobia suggest that socially anxious individuals have critical evaluation expectancies, expecting others to be inherently critical in their appraisal of performance. One potential source for these expectancies is generalization or projection of an individual’s own critical evaluation tendencies. We recruited 89 students, informing them that they would be asked to deliver an imp...

The development of expectancies during the unfolding of auditory patterns in time is a recognized but poorly understood aspect of human cognition. This study investigates development of pitch-based expectancies in melody prediction. Two artificial neural networks tested the hypothesis that expectancies, such as pitch proximity and pitch reversal as proposed by Narmour [12], can be learned from ...

The authors estimate the influence that a person's expectancies and attitudes (about the future, toward planning for future events, regarding saving or spending money, etc.) have on economic outcomes. They find that people who expect to be economically successful generally will be so. The findings of previous research on this topic have been controversial and anything but unanimous. The present...

It is generally accepted that the sense of self is constructed rather than directly perceived or experienced. The hypothesis is advanced here that people's rules of self-inference derive in large part from if-then expectancies about the contingencies of interpersonal interaction; that is, expectancies about how other people will react to one's behaviors. If so, a central type of cognitive struc...

Senior management and the union executive committee of a forest products company set an organizational goal to reduce theft from approximately a million dollars a year to zero. Salaried and hourly employees, selected a t random, were interviewed regarding their outcome expectancies for honest and dishonest behavior. The responses were categorized within a 2 X 2 empathy box (honest/dishonest beh...