‘Too black or not black enough’: Social identity complexity in the political rhetoric of Barack Obama

The election of the first African‐American President of the United States, Barack Obama, has been widely recognised as an extraordinary milestone in the history of the United States and indeed the world. With the use of a discursive psychological approach combined with central theoretical principles derived from social identity and self‐categorisation theories, this paper analyses a corpus of speeches Obama delivered during his candidacy for president to examine how he attended to and managed his social identity in his political discourse. Building on a social identity model of leadership, we examine specifically how Obama mobilises political support and social identification by building an identity for himself as a prototypical representative of the American people, notwithstanding the protracted public debate within both the White and Black American communities that had questioned and contested Obama's identity. Moreover, we demonstrate how Obama managed the dilemmas around his identity by actively crafting an in‐group identity that was oriented to an increasingly socially diverse America—a diversity that he himself exemplified and embodied as a leader. As an ‘entrepreneur’ of identity, Obama's rhetorical project was to position himself as an exceptional leader, whose very difference was represented as ‘living proof’ of the widely shared collective values that constitute the ‘American Dream’. Drawing on social identity complexity theory, we suggest that by providing more inclusive and complex categories of civic and national identity, Obama's presidency has the potential to radically transform what it means to be a prototypical in‐group member in America. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Development of Borderline Personality Disorder in Adolescence and Young Adulthood: Introduction to the Special Section

Recognizable symptoms and features of borderline personality disorder (BPD) appear during adolescence. However, there has been resistance to diagnose or research this disorder prior to adulthood because of clinical lore that BPD is a long-standing illness and that personality traits are not stable until adulthood. This has resulted in little information regarding the development of and risk factors for BPD in youth. The goal of this special section is to examine the development of BPD in adolescence and young adulthood using a broad collection of approaches, including a theoretical review paper, two prospective studies, and a multi-method cross-sectional study. This body of work provides new insights into vulnerabilities that may transact with early attachment relationships and experiences to predict the emergence of BPD in adolescence and young adulthood. These papers also point to future research that is needed to better understand the etiology, development, and course of BPD.     

Toddlers benefit from labeling on an executive function search task

Although labeling improves executive function (EF) performance in children older than 3 years, the results from studies with younger children have been equivocal. In the current study, we assessed performance in a computerized multistep multilocation search task with older 2-year-olds. The correct search location was either (a) not marked by a familiar picture or given a distinct label, (b) marked by a familiar picture but not given a distinct label, (c) marked by a familiar picture and labeled by the experimenter, or (d) marked by a familiar picture and labeled by the participant. The results revealed that accuracy improved across conditions such that children made the fewest errors when they generated the label for the hiding location. These findings support the hierarchical competing systems model, which postulates that improved performance can be explained by more powerful representations that guide search behavior.     

Liking and identifying emotionally expressive music: age and gender differences

Adults and children 5, 8, and 11 years of age listened to short excerpts of unfamiliar music that sounded happy, scary, peaceful, or sad. Listeners initially rated how much they liked each excerpt. They subsequently made a forced-choice judgment about the emotion that each excerpt conveyed. Identification accuracy was higher for young girls than for young boys, but both genders reached adult-like levels by age 11. High-arousal emotions (happiness and fear) were better identified than low-arousal emotions (peacefulness and sadness), and this advantage was exaggerated among younger children. Whereas children of all ages preferred excerpts depicting high-arousal emotions, adults favored excerpts depicting positive emotions (happiness and peacefulness). A preference for positive emotions over negative emotions was also evident among females of all ages. As identification accuracy improved, liking for positively valenced music increased among 5- and 8-year-olds but decreased among 11-year-olds.     

Integrating advice and experience: learning and decision making with social and nonsocial cues

When making decisions, people typically gather information from both social and nonsocial sources, such as advice from others and direct experience. This research adapted a cognitive learning paradigm to examine the process by which people learn what sources of information are credible. When participants relied on advice alone to make decisions, their learning of source reliability proceeded in a manner analogous to traditional cue learning processes and replicated the established learning phenomena. However, when advice and nonsocial cues were encountered together as an established phenomenon, blocking (ignoring redundant information) did not occur. Our results suggest that extant cognitive learning models can accommodate either advice or nonsocial cues in isolation. However, the combination of advice and nonsocial cues (a context more typically encountered in daily life) leads to different patterns of learning, in which mutually supportive information from different types of sources is not regarded as redundant and may be particularly compelling. For these situations, cognitive learning models still constitute a promising explanatory tool but one that must be expanded. As such, these findings have important implications for social psychological theory and for cognitive models of learning.     

The use of stereotypes and individuating information in political person perception

This article introduces the political person perception model, which identifies conditions under which perceivers rely on stereotypes (party membership), individuating information (issue position), or both in political person perception. Three studies supported the model's predictions. Study 1 showed that perceivers gave primacy to target information that was narrowly relevant to a judgment, whether that information was stereotypic or individuating. Study 2 found that perceivers relied exclusively on individuating information when it was narrowly relevant to the judgment and relied on both stereotype and individuating information when individuating information was not narrowly relevant to the judgment but did imply a political ideology. Study 3 replicated these findings in a more ecologically valid context and showed that people relied on party information in the absence of narrowly relevant policy positions and when individuating information did not imply a political ideology. Implications for political person perception and theories of stereotyping are discussed.     

Predictors of treatment attendance among adolescent substance abusing runaways: a comparison of family and individual therapy modalities

This study explored and compared predictors of session attendance among substance abusing runaway adolescents and their parents using three manual‐driven interventions: ecologically‐based family therapy (EBFT), motivational enhancement therapy (MET), and the community reinforcement approach (CRA). Individual and family‐level variables, as well as time between intake and first session were used as predictors of session attendance. Adolescents (N=179) between the ages of 12–17 years old were recruited from the only runaway shelter in Columbus, Ohio. The findings showed that adolescents assigned to EBFT were more likely to attend at least one therapy session than those assigned to either CRA or MET. Fewer days between intake and the first therapy session were associated with higher family therapy attendance. Overall, individual and family factors predicted therapy attendance but these factors differed depending upon the treatment modality.     

Perceiving onset clusters in infancy

By 9-months infants are sensitive to native-language sound combinations. Our studies show that while younger infants discriminate clusters, they are not sensitive to differences in statistical frequency. Thus, the emergence of phonotactic knowledge is driven by experience with the frequency of occurrence of the sound combinations in one's language.