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Abstract
This study investigated the effects of power, gender, and gender of partner on content (agency and communal themes) and structure (differentiated and integrated cognitive style) of autobiographical memories for previous power experiences. The results showed that assigned power affected memory content, with helpers including more communal themes in their memories. Gender also affected memory structure, with females structuring memories in a more integrated style, and males in a more differentiated style. Assigned power significantly interacted with gender of partner in affecting the memory content and structure. Helpers who interacted with female leaders structured memories in a more integrated style. Helpers who interacted with male leaders structured memories in a more differentiated style. Participants who interacted with females included more communal themes in their memories.
Notes
1. The self-report questionnaires focused on gender role personality-related constructs, and included the Self-Construal Questionnaire (Singelis, Citation1994); the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (Spence & Helmreich, Citation1978); and the Dominance Scale of the California Personality Inventory (Gough, Citation1969). These questionnaires were administered to control for pre-experimental differences among the groups. Subsequent analyses showed no group differences. Although all groups were exposed similarly to a possible priming effect by filling out these questionnaires, one caveat is that the self-report measures might have had a differential effect as a function of gender, exacerbating or minimizing between-gender effects. Using a counterbalancing strategy for these measures in future studies would address such concerns.
2. Since past research has shown that the simple forms of complexity coding do not yield significant additional predictive information than elaborated forms (Woike et al., Citation1999), only the elaborated forms of differentiation and integration were coded.
3. We thank an anonymous reviewer for this suggestion.