Jessica J Cameron
Biographic Data
| ID | 109654 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jessica J Cameron |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jessica J |
| FAMILY NAME | Cameron |
| SIGNATURE | CAMERON J J |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Manitoba |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8676-0945 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 27 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 96 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 27 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2002 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2024 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
The content and application of the lay theory of self-esteem
Impressions of self-esteem influence impressions of close others and predictions for hypothetical events
Individuals with low self-esteem (LSE) may be devalued, whereas individuals with high self-esteem (HSE) are typically praised in Western society. People readily infer traits based on impressions of self-esteem. Across two studies, we address whether impressions of a hypothetical target person’s self-esteem influence judgments beyond the target’s personality. Results revealed that the target’s self-esteem influenced impressions of personality not …
The Friends-to-Lovers Pathway to Romance: Prevalent, Preferred, and Overlooked by Science
There is more than one pathway to romance, but relationship science does not reflect this reality. Our research reveals that relationship initiation studies published in popular journals (Study 1) and cited in popular textbooks (Study 2) overwhelmingly focus on romance that sparks between strangers and largely overlook romance that develops between friends. This limited focus might be justified if friends-first initiation was rare or undesirable,…
Singlehood and Attunement of Self-Esteem to Friendships
Romantic relationships activate a process of psychological attunement whereby self-esteem becomes responsive to the romantic bond, thereby potentially benefitting relationship quality and bolstering self-esteem. Yet some people are romantically single, raising the question: Do single people also exhibit psychological attunement? In a 2-year longitudinal study of young adults ( N = 279), we test whether singles psychologically attune to their frie…
Gender (mis)measurement: Guidelines for respecting gender diversity in psychological research
Empirical evidence affirms that gender is a nonbinary spectrum. Yet our review of recently published empirical articles reveals that demographic gender measurement in psychology still assumes that gender comprises just two categories: women and men. This common practice is problematic. It fails to represent psychologists' current understanding of gender, violates our ethical principles as scientists, and can result in gender misclassification. Ps…
Gender Roles and Date Context in Hypothetical Scripts for a Woman and a Man on a First Date in the Twenty-First Century
Gendered dating messages have consequences for both intended and unintended audiences
Would-be-daters are surrounded by media messages that both target one gender and pit men and women against each other in the dating game (i.e., gendered relationship messages). How do these messages influence relationship initiation? In the present research, we focus on the consequences of being primed with gendered dating messages via actual book titles. We propose that such messages should have mixed consequences depending on (a) whether the re…
Reconsidering Radical Feminism: Affect and the Politics of Heterosexuality
What’s the right way to be a feminist? The political discourse of sexuality in the 1980s and ’90s was framed by the divergent, passionately held positions of radical feminism and sex-positive feminism. Reconsidering Radical Feminism is a precise summary of late-twentieth-century feminist debates about the politics of heterosexuality. But it is more than that. Transcending a right/wrong approach, Jessica Joy Cameron examines how we become invested…
Dworkin's subjects: Interpellation and the politics of heterosexuality
This article provides a critical rereading of Andrea Dworkin's infamous text Intercourse. I use Judith Butler's post-structural theory to contest the common view that Dworkin forwards an immutable position on heterosexual intercourse. Instead, I argue that she identifies a particularly pernicious discourse used to represent vaginal penetration - the discourse of intercourse-as-violation. This discourse is important for feminists to consider becau…
Self-Esteem Reflects Assessments of Valuation
The robust self-esteem proxy: Impressions of self-esteem inform judgments of personality and social value
People use impressions of an evaluative target’s self-esteem to infer their possession of socially desirable traits. But will people still use this self-esteem proxy when trait-relevant diagnostic information is available? We test this possibility in two experiments: participants learn that a target person has low or high self-esteem, and then receive diagnostic information about the target’s academic success or failure and positive or negative a…
Self-Esteem
When in Doubt, Reach Out: Touch Is a Covert but Effective Mode of Soliciting and Providing Social Support
Social support is critical to personal and relational well-being. Yet, receiving support appears to be contingent upon adequately conveying need to a receptive partner who both understands and is willing to provide said support. Or is it? We provide the first evidence of a covert haptic support system between adult intimates, showing that literally reaching out to a loved one can result in feeling supported even when the receiver of haptic suppor…
The good, the bad, and the risky: Self-esteem, rewards and costs, and interpersonal risk regulation during relationship initiation
Social risk interacts with self-esteem to predict relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. However, because socially risky situations afford both rewards and costs, it is unclear which affordance is responsible for these effects. Two experiments primed social rewards or costs within different relationship-initiation contexts and then evaluated participants' relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. Results revealed that global self…
A little acceptance is good for your health: Interpersonal messages and weight change over time
This research examines whether acceptance messages from close others about one's weight predict changes in stressful weight concern and body mass index (BMI) over time. Participants reported weight concern and BMI in three waves of data collection spanning approximately 9 months, and reported the messages they received from parents, friends, and romantic partners concerning their weight in the second wave of data collection. Participants normativ…
Warming Up and Cooling Down: Self-Esteem and Behavioral Responses to Social Threat During Relationship Initiation
Social threats during relationship initiation often cause people to engage in cold behaviors that bring about rejection. However, interpersonal risk-regulation theory suggests that such processes will be moderated by global self-esteem. In two experiments that manipulated the threat of rejection, single participants communicated via video camera with an opposite-sex interaction partner (actually a confederate). As expected, social threat caused h…
The Bold and the Bashful: Self-Esteem, Gender, and Relationship Initiation
Successful romantic relationship initiation often requires bold and direct action, but direct action can increase the possibility of rejection. These dual possible outcomes create interpersonal risk, which should prompt self-esteem differences in behavior. When risk is present, lower self-esteem individuals, who prefer to avoid social costs, will be less likely to use direct initiation behaviors than higher self-esteem individuals, who prefer to …
Orthogonal dreams in an oblique world: A meta-analysis of the association between attachment anxiety and avoidance
Self-esteem is a shared relationship resource: Additive effects of dating partners’ self-esteem levels predict relationship quality
Don’t You Know How Much I Need You: Consequences of Miscommunication Vary by Self-Esteem
Signal amplification bias, the tendency to overestimate how much one’s behavior conveys internal states, has been theorized to negatively affect relationships. The present study is the first to test whether signal amplification has negative consequences in close relationships and whether this form of miscommunication is more detrimental to lower self-esteem individuals, who doubt their partner’s regard. Dating couples participated in a lab-induce…
Cascading Metaperceptions: Signal Amplification Bias as a Consequence of Reflected Self-esteem
People expect intimate partners to understand their personality, including feelings of self-worth. These general assumptions about transparency may influence situation-specific estimates of how others view the self (i.e., metaperceptions). In contexts that elicit evaluative concerns, lower self-esteem individuals, who think their chronic self-doubts are obvious to partners, should believe that their partners will infer they are anxious, whether t…
Acceptance is in the eye of the beholder: Self-esteem and motivated perceptions of acceptance from the opposite sex
Social risk elicits self-esteem differences in signature social motivations and behaviors during the relationship-initiation process. In particular, the present research tested the hypothesis that lower self-esteem individuals' (LSEs) motivation to avoid rejection leads them to self-protectively underestimate acceptance from potential romantic partners, whereas higher self-esteem individuals' (HSEs) motivation to promote new relationships leads t…
When self-disclosure goes awry: Negative consequences of revealing personal failures for lower self-esteem individuals
The cost of lower self-esteem: Testing a self- and social-bonds model of health
The authors draw upon social, personality, and health psychology to propose and test a self-and-social-bonds model of health. The model contends that lower self-esteem predicts health problems and that poor-quality social bonds explain this association. In Study 1, lower self-esteem prospectively predicted reports of health problems 2 months later, and this association was explained by subjective reports of poor social bonds. Study 2 replicated t…
Invisible overtures: Fears of rejection and the signal amplification bias
Four studies demonstrated that fears of rejection prompt individuals to exhibit a signal amplification bias, whereby they perceive that their overtures communicate more romantic interest to potential partners than is actually the case. The link between rejection anxieties and the bias was evident regardless of whether fears of rejection were assessed in terms of chronic attachment anxiety or were induced by reflection on a previous rejection expe…
The cost of lower self-esteem: Testing a self- and social-bonds model of health
The authors draw upon social, personality, and health psychology to propose and test a self-and-social-bonds model of health. The model contends that lower self-esteem predicts health problems and that poor-quality social bonds explain this association. In Study 1, lower self-esteem prospectively predicted reports of health problems 2 months later, and this association was explained by subjective reports of poor social bonds. Study 2 replicated t…
Gender Roles and Date Context in Hypothetical Scripts for a Woman and a Man on a First Date in the Twenty-First Century
Self-esteem is a shared relationship resource: Additive effects of dating partners’ self-esteem levels predict relationship quality
Orthogonal dreams in an oblique world: A meta-analysis of the association between attachment anxiety and avoidance
Acceptance is in the eye of the beholder: Self-esteem and motivated perceptions of acceptance from the opposite sex
Social risk elicits self-esteem differences in signature social motivations and behaviors during the relationship-initiation process. In particular, the present research tested the hypothesis that lower self-esteem individuals' (LSEs) motivation to avoid rejection leads them to self-protectively underestimate acceptance from potential romantic partners, whereas higher self-esteem individuals' (HSEs) motivation to promote new relationships leads t…
Invisible overtures: Fears of rejection and the signal amplification bias
Four studies demonstrated that fears of rejection prompt individuals to exhibit a signal amplification bias, whereby they perceive that their overtures communicate more romantic interest to potential partners than is actually the case. The link between rejection anxieties and the bias was evident regardless of whether fears of rejection were assessed in terms of chronic attachment anxiety or were induced by reflection on a previous rejection expe…
Loving the One You Hurt: Positive Effects of Recounting a Transgression against an Intimate Partner
When self-disclosure goes awry: Negative consequences of revealing personal failures for lower self-esteem individuals
So close, and yet so far: Does collectivism foster transparency overestimation
The present research demonstrated that horizontal collectivism (HC), the tendency to emphasize social bonds and interdependence, is associated with overestimating the extent to which one's preferences, feelings, and behavioral inclinations are transparent to close others. The link between HC and felt transparency was mediated by self-other merging but was not significantly mediated by perceived similarity, behavioral closeness, or metaperception …
The good, the bad, and the risky: Self-esteem, rewards and costs, and interpersonal risk regulation during relationship initiation
Social risk interacts with self-esteem to predict relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. However, because socially risky situations afford both rewards and costs, it is unclear which affordance is responsible for these effects. Two experiments primed social rewards or costs within different relationship-initiation contexts and then evaluated participants' relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. Results revealed that global self…
Dworkin's subjects: Interpellation and the politics of heterosexuality
This article provides a critical rereading of Andrea Dworkin's infamous text Intercourse. I use Judith Butler's post-structural theory to contest the common view that Dworkin forwards an immutable position on heterosexual intercourse. Instead, I argue that she identifies a particularly pernicious discourse used to represent vaginal penetration - the discourse of intercourse-as-violation. This discourse is important for feminists to consider becau…
Gendered dating messages have consequences for both intended and unintended audiences
Would-be-daters are surrounded by media messages that both target one gender and pit men and women against each other in the dating game (i.e., gendered relationship messages). How do these messages influence relationship initiation? In the present research, we focus on the consequences of being primed with gendered dating messages via actual book titles. We propose that such messages should have mixed consequences depending on (a) whether the re…
Loving the One You Hurt: Positive Effects of Recounting a Transgression against an Intimate Partner
So close, and yet so far: Does collectivism foster transparency overestimation
The present research demonstrated that horizontal collectivism (HC), the tendency to emphasize social bonds and interdependence, is associated with overestimating the extent to which one's preferences, feelings, and behavioral inclinations are transparent to close others. The link between HC and felt transparency was mediated by self-other merging but was not significantly mediated by perceived similarity, behavioral closeness, or metaperception …
Invisible overtures: Fears of rejection and the signal amplification bias
Four studies demonstrated that fears of rejection prompt individuals to exhibit a signal amplification bias, whereby they perceive that their overtures communicate more romantic interest to potential partners than is actually the case. The link between rejection anxieties and the bias was evident regardless of whether fears of rejection were assessed in terms of chronic attachment anxiety or were induced by reflection on a previous rejection expe…
When self-disclosure goes awry: Negative consequences of revealing personal failures for lower self-esteem individuals
The cost of lower self-esteem: Testing a self- and social-bonds model of health
The authors draw upon social, personality, and health psychology to propose and test a self-and-social-bonds model of health. The model contends that lower self-esteem predicts health problems and that poor-quality social bonds explain this association. In Study 1, lower self-esteem prospectively predicted reports of health problems 2 months later, and this association was explained by subjective reports of poor social bonds. Study 2 replicated t…
Don’t You Know How Much I Need You: Consequences of Miscommunication Vary by Self-Esteem
Signal amplification bias, the tendency to overestimate how much one’s behavior conveys internal states, has been theorized to negatively affect relationships. The present study is the first to test whether signal amplification has negative consequences in close relationships and whether this form of miscommunication is more detrimental to lower self-esteem individuals, who doubt their partner’s regard. Dating couples participated in a lab-induce…
Cascading Metaperceptions: Signal Amplification Bias as a Consequence of Reflected Self-esteem
People expect intimate partners to understand their personality, including feelings of self-worth. These general assumptions about transparency may influence situation-specific estimates of how others view the self (i.e., metaperceptions). In contexts that elicit evaluative concerns, lower self-esteem individuals, who think their chronic self-doubts are obvious to partners, should believe that their partners will infer they are anxious, whether t…
Acceptance is in the eye of the beholder: Self-esteem and motivated perceptions of acceptance from the opposite sex
Social risk elicits self-esteem differences in signature social motivations and behaviors during the relationship-initiation process. In particular, the present research tested the hypothesis that lower self-esteem individuals' (LSEs) motivation to avoid rejection leads them to self-protectively underestimate acceptance from potential romantic partners, whereas higher self-esteem individuals' (HSEs) motivation to promote new relationships leads t…
Orthogonal dreams in an oblique world: A meta-analysis of the association between attachment anxiety and avoidance
Self-esteem is a shared relationship resource: Additive effects of dating partners’ self-esteem levels predict relationship quality
The Bold and the Bashful: Self-Esteem, Gender, and Relationship Initiation
Successful romantic relationship initiation often requires bold and direct action, but direct action can increase the possibility of rejection. These dual possible outcomes create interpersonal risk, which should prompt self-esteem differences in behavior. When risk is present, lower self-esteem individuals, who prefer to avoid social costs, will be less likely to use direct initiation behaviors than higher self-esteem individuals, who prefer to …
A little acceptance is good for your health: Interpersonal messages and weight change over time
This research examines whether acceptance messages from close others about one's weight predict changes in stressful weight concern and body mass index (BMI) over time. Participants reported weight concern and BMI in three waves of data collection spanning approximately 9 months, and reported the messages they received from parents, friends, and romantic partners concerning their weight in the second wave of data collection. Participants normativ…
Warming Up and Cooling Down: Self-Esteem and Behavioral Responses to Social Threat During Relationship Initiation
Social threats during relationship initiation often cause people to engage in cold behaviors that bring about rejection. However, interpersonal risk-regulation theory suggests that such processes will be moderated by global self-esteem. In two experiments that manipulated the threat of rejection, single participants communicated via video camera with an opposite-sex interaction partner (actually a confederate). As expected, social threat caused h…
Self-Esteem
When in Doubt, Reach Out: Touch Is a Covert but Effective Mode of Soliciting and Providing Social Support
Social support is critical to personal and relational well-being. Yet, receiving support appears to be contingent upon adequately conveying need to a receptive partner who both understands and is willing to provide said support. Or is it? We provide the first evidence of a covert haptic support system between adult intimates, showing that literally reaching out to a loved one can result in feeling supported even when the receiver of haptic suppor…
The good, the bad, and the risky: Self-esteem, rewards and costs, and interpersonal risk regulation during relationship initiation
Social risk interacts with self-esteem to predict relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. However, because socially risky situations afford both rewards and costs, it is unclear which affordance is responsible for these effects. Two experiments primed social rewards or costs within different relationship-initiation contexts and then evaluated participants' relationship-initiation motivation and behavior. Results revealed that global self…
Self-Esteem Reflects Assessments of Valuation
The robust self-esteem proxy: Impressions of self-esteem inform judgments of personality and social value
People use impressions of an evaluative target’s self-esteem to infer their possession of socially desirable traits. But will people still use this self-esteem proxy when trait-relevant diagnostic information is available? We test this possibility in two experiments: participants learn that a target person has low or high self-esteem, and then receive diagnostic information about the target’s academic success or failure and positive or negative a…
Dworkin's subjects: Interpellation and the politics of heterosexuality
This article provides a critical rereading of Andrea Dworkin's infamous text Intercourse. I use Judith Butler's post-structural theory to contest the common view that Dworkin forwards an immutable position on heterosexual intercourse. Instead, I argue that she identifies a particularly pernicious discourse used to represent vaginal penetration - the discourse of intercourse-as-violation. This discourse is important for feminists to consider becau…
Reconsidering Radical Feminism: Affect and the Politics of Heterosexuality
What’s the right way to be a feminist? The political discourse of sexuality in the 1980s and ’90s was framed by the divergent, passionately held positions of radical feminism and sex-positive feminism. Reconsidering Radical Feminism is a precise summary of late-twentieth-century feminist debates about the politics of heterosexuality. But it is more than that. Transcending a right/wrong approach, Jessica Joy Cameron examines how we become invested…
Gender (mis)measurement: Guidelines for respecting gender diversity in psychological research
Empirical evidence affirms that gender is a nonbinary spectrum. Yet our review of recently published empirical articles reveals that demographic gender measurement in psychology still assumes that gender comprises just two categories: women and men. This common practice is problematic. It fails to represent psychologists' current understanding of gender, violates our ethical principles as scientists, and can result in gender misclassification. Ps…
Gender Roles and Date Context in Hypothetical Scripts for a Woman and a Man on a First Date in the Twenty-First Century
Gendered dating messages have consequences for both intended and unintended audiences
Would-be-daters are surrounded by media messages that both target one gender and pit men and women against each other in the dating game (i.e., gendered relationship messages). How do these messages influence relationship initiation? In the present research, we focus on the consequences of being primed with gendered dating messages via actual book titles. We propose that such messages should have mixed consequences depending on (a) whether the re…
Singlehood and Attunement of Self-Esteem to Friendships
Romantic relationships activate a process of psychological attunement whereby self-esteem becomes responsive to the romantic bond, thereby potentially benefitting relationship quality and bolstering self-esteem. Yet some people are romantically single, raising the question: Do single people also exhibit psychological attunement? In a 2-year longitudinal study of young adults ( N = 279), we test whether singles psychologically attune to their frie…
The Friends-to-Lovers Pathway to Romance: Prevalent, Preferred, and Overlooked by Science
There is more than one pathway to romance, but relationship science does not reflect this reality. Our research reveals that relationship initiation studies published in popular journals (Study 1) and cited in popular textbooks (Study 2) overwhelmingly focus on romance that sparks between strangers and largely overlook romance that develops between friends. This limited focus might be justified if friends-first initiation was rare or undesirable,…
Psychology (25 works) · Social Psychology (24 works) · Developmental psychology (20 works) · Self-esteem (15 works) · Attachment and Relationship Dynamics (12 works) · Death Anxiety and Social Exclusion (11 works) · Evolutionary Psychology and Human Behavior (11 works) · Social Psychology (11 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (10 works) · Perception (7 works)