This research views dispositional inference as a process whereby perceivers integrate multiple inferences about a target person's motives and traits. The findings suggest that although perceived motives may stimulate extra attributional processing (S. Fein, 1996), the content of the inferred motive is important as well. Perceivers learned about situational forces implying that a target person had free choice, no choice, or an ulterior motive for helpful behavior. Inferences about the target's helpfulness differed depending on whether the target's behavior was attributed to an obedience motive (no-choice condition) or to a selfish motive (ulterior-motive condition). In general, inferences about motives were more predictive of dispositional inferences than were global causal attributions (to situational vs. dispositional forces) or base rate assumptions.

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We explored the possibility of a general brightness bias: brighter pictures are evaluated more positively, while darker pictures are evaluated more negatively. In Study 1 we found that positive pictures are brighter than negative pictures in two affective picture databases (the IAPS and the GAPED). Study 2 revealed that because researchers select affective pictures on the extremity of their affective rating without controlling for brightness differences, pictures used in positive conditions of experiments were on average brighter than those used in negative conditions. Going beyond correlational support for our hypothesis, Studies 3 and 4showed that brighter versions of neutral pictures were evaluated more positively than darker versions of the same picture. Study 5 revealed that people categorized positive words more quickly than negative words after a bright prime picture, and vice versa for negative pictures.Together, these studies provide strong support for the hypotheses that picture brightness influences evaluations. Brightness of Affective Pictures 3 Brightness Differences Influence the Evaluation of Affective PicturesWhether a picture is judged to be positive or negative is obviously determined by the content of the picture. A picture of two puppies on a sunny meadow will be liked more than a

a b s t r a c tPeople make a variety of automatic inferences when observing others' actions. These include inferences about stable dispositions as well as transitory goal states and social situations. However, models of social inference have rarely considered whether different types of automatic inferences can co-occur. We present three experiments in which participants were incidentally exposed to texts depicting behaviors that afforded inferences about actors' traits and the social situations these actors were experiencing. Results from lexical decision and probe-recognition tasks revealed heightened activation of both trait and situational inferences; furthermore, this co-occurring activation was spontaneous, unconscious, and independent of processing resources or specific impression-formation goals. A fourth experiment extended these findings by showing that when participants were asked to make deliberate attributional judgments of the same set of behaviors, typical goal-directed biases reflecting the selection of either trait or situational interpretations emerged. Implications for social inference processes are discussed.

Current self-report medication adherence measures often provide heavily skewed results with limited variance, suggesting that most participants are highly adherent. This contrasts with findings from objective adherence measures. We argue that one of the main limitations of these self-report measures is the limited range covered by the behaviors assessed. That is, the items do not match the adherence behaviors that people perform, resulting in a ceiling effect. In this paper, we present a new self-reported medication adherence scale based on the Rasch model approach (the ProMAS), which covers a wide range of adherence behaviors. The ProMAS was tested with 370 elderly receiving medication for chronic conditions. The results indicated that the ProMAS provided adherence scores with sufficient fit to the Rasch model. Furthermore, the ProMAS covered a wider range of adherence behaviors compared to the widely used Medication Adherence Report Scale (MARS) instrument, resulting in more variance and less skewness in adherence scores. We conclude that the ProMAS is more capable of discriminating between people with different adherence rates than the MARS.