"If you know you exist, it's just marketing poison": meanings of tobacco industry targeting in the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender community

In the public health literature, it is generally assumed that the perception of "targeting" as positive or negative by the targeted audience depends on the product or message being promoted. Smoking prevalence rates are high among lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) individuals, but little is known about how they perceive tobacco industry targeting. We conducted focus groups with LGBT individuals in 4 US cities to explore their perceptions. Our findings indicated that focus group participants often responded positively to tobacco company targeting. Targeting connoted community visibility, legitimacy, and economic viability. Participants did not view tobacco as a gay health issue. Targeting is a key aspect of corporate-community interaction. A better understanding of targeting may aid public health efforts to counter corporate disease promotion.

Better, Stronger, Faster: Self-Serving Judgment, Affect Regulation, and the Optimal Vigilance Hypothesis

Self-serving judgments, in which the self is viewed more favorably than other people, are ubiquitous. Their dynamic variation within individuals may be explained in terms of the regulation of affect. Self-serving judgments produce positive emotions, and threat increases self-serving judgments (a compensatory pattern that restores affect to a set point or baseline). Perceived mutability is a key moderator of these judgments; low mutability (i.e., the circumstance is closed to modification) triggers a cognitive response aimed at affect regulation, whereas high mutability (i.e., the circumstance is open to further modification) activates direct behavioral remediation. Threats often require immediate response, whereas positive events do not. Because of this brief temporal window, an active mechanism is needed to restore negative (but not positive) affective shifts back to a set point. Without this active reset, an earlier threat would make the individual less vigilant toward a new threat. Thus, when people are sad, they aim to return their mood to baseline, often via self-serving judgments. We argue that asymmetric homeostasis enables optimal vigilance, which establishes a coherent theoretical account of the role of self-serving judgments in affect regulation.

Some problems with social cognition models: a pragmatic and conceptual analysis

Empirical articles published between 1997 and 2001 from 4 health psychology journals that tested or applied 1 or more social cognition models (theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior, health belief model, and protection motivation theory; N = 47) were scrutinized for their pragmatic and conceptual basis. In terms of their pragmatic basis, these 4 models were useful for guiding research. The analysis of their conceptual basis was less positive. First, these models do not enable the generation of hypotheses because their constructs are unspecific; they therefore cannot be tested. Second, they focus on analytic truths rather than synthetic ones, and the conclusions resulting from their application are often true by definition rather than by observation. Finally, they may create and change both cognitions and behavior rather than describe them.

Social implication of field dependence/independence: Within-group homogeneity and between-group differentiation effects 1The author would like to thank Gabriel Mugny, Juan-Manuel Falomir and Juan-Antonio Pérez for their comments. Special acknowledgement to Karima Amrani and Erika Hofmann for their assistance in translating and to Marie-Laure Curchod for her very valuable help in finding participants

If implication of field dependence/independence in social processes has been proved, an articulation between psychosocial theories and diffèrential theories is necessary to understand this implication. One study examined a possible link using social identity theory, homogeneity and differentiation between groups, taking into account the level of social categorization in the auto-categorization theory perspective and the well-known individual difference variable of field dependence/independence. The 2 levels of categorization (explicitly or not categorized at the intergroup level) × 2 field dependence/independence (more field-dependent versus more field-independent) show that when participants are not categorized into a group level but considered as individuals, field dependence/independence regulates the perception of homogeneity of members of the same social category. This result indicates higher homogeneity perception for field-dependent subjects compared to field-independent subject. However, when they are themselves members of one of the groups (i.e. they are categorized), the motivational involvement erases the effect of field dependence/independence in the perception of group members' homogeneity.