Male Athletes and the Cult(ure) of Thinness in Sport

This article troubles the “down low” (DL) discourse by focusing on an Internet forum—Craigslist.org—where people on the “down low” post. The advertisements, gathered from seven cities in two U.S. regions, reinforce some of the “down low” discussion in the previous literature, as they show a pattern of seeking “masculine” men. These ads also depart from general perceptions such as the DL being a term used predominantly by black men. The authors discuss methodological implications in research with posts, and suggest advancing analyses on the relationship between race, sexuality and power, and gender and sexuality in DL research.     

Symbolic control of visual attention: Semantic constraints on the spatial distribution of attention

Humans routinely use spatial language to control the spatial distribution of attention. In so doing, spatial information may be communicated from one individual to another across opposing frames of reference, which in turn can lead to inconsistent mappings between symbols and directions (or locations). These inconsistencies may have important implications for the symbolic control of attention because they can be translated into differences in cue validity, a manipulation that is known to influence the focus of attention. This differential validity hypothesis was tested in Experiment 1 by comparing spatial word cues that were predicted to have high learned spatial validity (“above/below”) and low learned spatial validity (“left/right”). Consistent with this prediction, when two measures of selective attention were used, the results indicated that attention was less focused in response to “left/right” cues than in response to “above/below” cues, even when the actual validity of each of the cues was equal. In addition, Experiment 2 predicted that spatial words such as “left/right” would have lower spatial validity than would other directional symbols that specify direction along the horizontal axis, such as “←/→” cues. The results were also consistent with this hypothesis. Altogether, the present findings demonstrate important semantic-based constraints on the spatial distribution of attention.     

“Be careful what you wish for…”: A quantitative and qualitative investigation of “fata1 attractions”

This study uses questionnaire data from 301 terminated romantic relationships to investigate hypotheses concerning the conditions under which a quality that is initially appealing in a partner is later disliked (i.e., a “fatal attraction”). Individuals are expected to be prone to fatal attractions when they are attracted to a quality in a romantic partner that is “different” in any of three ways: (1) different from the individual's own qualities (i.e., dissimilar); (2) different from average (i.e., extreme, or unique); or (3) different from normative expectations (i.e., gender atypical). Such attractions are less likely, however, when individuals are drawn to similarity in another. Findings from a logistic regression analysis provide support for four of the five hypotheses. Fatal attractions are significantly more likely when an individual is drawn to partner characteristics seen either as “dissimilar” from her or his own, as “unique,” or as “extreme” in nature. When these characteristics are viewed as “similar,” disenchantment is less likely. Fatal attractions are neither more, nor less, probable, however, when partner qualities contradict gender stereotypes. A qualitative analysis of open-ended questionnaire responses provides further support for these attraction patterns. The findings have implications for diverse theories, including those of mate selection and dialectics.     

Expectation and autokinesis

The reported direction of autokinesis for naive observers is not biased by gaze deviations of 22.5 deg of arc. However, instructions to expect either “inward” or “outward” movement produce reports of autokinetic movement that are progressively biased in the expected direction. Instructions to expect “more” or “less” movement resulted in a decrease in the reported duration of apparent movement for the “less” group but no change for the “more” group. Response bias is not considered to play a role in these results. The results are discussed in terms of fixational bias and selective attention mechanisms of autokinesis.     

Introduction to the Special Issue on Migration Problems in the US and Their Implications for Group Work

Abstract

In this introduction I provide an overview of this Special Issue on migration problems at the southwestern border of the United States. These problems are framed against the rising world-wide tide of anti-immigrant rhetoric and the ascendance of right-wing nationalist leaders. I maintain that, from a group dynamic perspective, we in the US are witnessing the emergence of an authoritarian fight group leader (Bion, 1961) who has capitalized on the systematic arousal and manipulation of our most primitive fears, and who encourages the use of developmentally regressive projective mechanisms that permit us to disown, externalize and deposit into the “other” all that is bad or destructive. A series of critical interrelated questions is posed for group therapists to consider in order to respond effectively to the challenges we face. I explain the context in which this volume took shape and offer a set of guidelines for how to address these problems. In addition, I review more recent developments regarding how our government is responding to this situation, and explore the linkages between the “immigration crisis”, racism, White nationalism and violence. I then describe the articles that comprise this Special Issue, acknowledging that these contributions depart from the more typically neutral and “objective” pieces published in a professional journal, and represent an amalgam of both professional and more personal statements that emanate from deeply held ethical principles and humanitarian concerns. I conclude by inviting our readers to share their reactions to this volume and to the concept that is advanced of the group therapist as a potential social change advocate.     

Being responsible versus acting responsibly: Effects of agency and risk taking on responsibility judgments

In three experimental studies, with managers and students as participants, we explore in this paper the relation between two kinds of responsibility judgments, called Responsibility 1 (R1) and Responsibility 2 (R2). Decision makers can be viewed as being more or less responsible for their choice and its consequences (R1). Their actions can also be evaluated, from a normative point of view, as instances of more or less responsible behavior (R2). Experiment 1 showed that managers who depart from the default or “normal” course of action, by choosing a new (versus familiar) alternative, changing (versus sticking to) an initial decision, or going against (versus following) the advice of a management team, are rated as more responsible (R1) for the outcomes of their decision. At the same time, they are perceived to act in a less responsible way (R2). Experiment 2 compared decision makers choosing between more or less risky options. High risk takers were held more responsible (R1) for their choice and for its consequences, but were again viewed as behaving in a less responsible way (R2) than low risk takers. In Experiment 3, participants judged decision makers who followed or opposed others' advice by choosing either a high or a low risk option. Opposing others' advice led to higher R1 and lower R2 scores, especially when choosing the high risk option, moderated by outcome (successful decisions appearing more responsible than those that went wrong). Thus R1 and R2 judgments should be distinguished as having different and sometimes even opposite determinants.     

Fearlessness and courage in paratroopers undergoing training

105 recruits to the Parachute Regiment were studied during parachute training. From information given regarding their expectancies and experiences of jumping, three profiles were identified. These were labelled “Courageous”, “Fearless” and “Over-confident”. Two-thirds of the sample belonged to the first category and less than 10% to the last. A number of bodily reactions were frequently associated with anxiety during parachute jumping. These reactions were similar to those reported by veteran soldiers and airmen during combat. They differ from reactions reported by patients suffering from ‘clinical anxiety’, and it is suggested that this contrast might reflect differences in preparation for “fight” or “flight”.     

On the nature and accuracy of attributions that change over time

“Actor” subjects engaged in a brief getting-acquainted conversation while “observer” subjects watched. Ratings of and causal attributions for behavior during the conversation were obtained immediately upon its conclusion and three weeks later from the same subjects and from an independent group of subjects not asked for immediate attributions. Comparison between immediate and the independent, “postponed” assessments showed that attributions by actors and observers tended to emphasize situational factors more over time, and personal factors less. Attributions by the “repeated assessment” subjects did not show a significant change over time, but their delayed attributions were significantly less likely to emphasize situational factors than were the delayed attributions of the “postponed assessment” group. The relative accuracy of these attributions could not, of course, be directly assessed. However, valid attributions presumably must be based upon valid perceptions or memories of the behaviors they seek to explain, and reliable criterion ratings of behaviors in the present study could be obtained from the experimenters. Actors' and observers' delayed behavior ratings agreed less with these criteria than did their immediate ratings, an indirect indication that attributions do not increase, and may decrease, in accuracy over time.     

Vocational Satisfaction Among Ministerial Students

84 graduate students attending the Seventh-day Adventist Seminary for North America Q-sorted 50 self-relevant, socially neutral statements to measure self-concept and occupational role percept of the “ideal” Seventh-day Adventist minister. Correlations were computed for congruence between self-percepts and occupational role percepts, as an operational approximation to the construct “vocational satisfaction.” Mean correlations in extreme quartiles of the resultant distribution differed beyond .001; subjects in extreme quartiles were accordingly regarded as “more” or “less” vocationally satisfied. Significant differences were found between more- and less-satisfied subjects on 3 of 16 personality factors (adventuresomeness, shrewdness, ergic tension); on 1 of 6 values (social); on 1 of 10 vocational interests (social service); and on 2 of 15 elements of educational-social history (extent of previous church-conducted education, vocational preference during high school).     

The Zhuangzi on Coping with Society

Stories in the Zhuangzi detailing expert artisans and other extraordinary people are often read as celebrations of “skills” or “knacks.” In this paper, I will argue that they would be more accurately understood as “coping” stories. Taken as a celebration of one’s “skill” or “knack” they transform the Zhuangzi into an implicit advocate of conforming to, or even identifying with, one’s social roles. I will argue that the stories of artisans and extraordinarily skilled people are less about cultivating one’s talents so as to “find one’s calling,” better fulfill social expectations, or achieve oneness with Dao, than they are concerned with developing strategies for coping with natural and social contingencies. Read in this way, there is much to learn from the Zhuangzi when reflecting on contemporary social and political issues, especially those related to meritocratic hubris.     

Is Colour incompatibility analytic?

It is widely believed that some a priori necessary truths are not analytic in the sense of transformable by substitution of synonyms into logical truths. One much-cited example comes from the supposed incompatibility between colour predicates. The idea is that sentences like “Nothing is both blue all over (or uniformly or at a point) and also red” are not transformable into a logical truth in the same way as “Nothing is both a bachelor and married” because the requisite conceptual link between “bachelor” and “not married” is absent between “blue” and “not red”. This paper examines whether colour exclusion may be more like the bachelor case than it initially appears. It transpires that the most promising line of thought is not, however, as has been argued at length in the literature, that “blue” in some more or less convoluted way manages to mean “not red”. Instead it is suggested that the requisite conceptual link may reside in the oft-ignored qualifications (“all over”, “uniformly”, etc.), without which there is no incompatibility in the first place.     

数量对时间知觉的影响-来自抽象数量和实际数量的证据

本研究采用抽象数量和实际数量叠加的方式呈现刺激,进一步探讨数量对时间知觉的影响。两个实验都运用时间的系列比较任务,以抽象数量和实际数量这两种数量的一致和不一致为条件,将阿拉伯数字和其字体大小叠加及阿拉伯数字和其呈现个数叠加的方式系列呈现在屏幕中央,要求被试比较判断刺激呈现的时间长短。结果显示被试均依靠实际数量的大小判断时间长短,而似乎忽略了抽象数量的存在。这一结果表明实际数量对时间知觉的影响要比抽象数量大,支持并扩展了数量理论。     

"What is my avatar seeing?": The coordination of "out-of-body" and "embodied" perspectives for scene recognition across views

Scene recognition across a perspective change typically exhibits viewpoint dependence. Accordingly, the more the orientation of the test viewpoint departs from that of the study viewpoint, the more time its takes and the less accurate observers are to recognize the spatial layout. Three experiments show that observers can take advantage of a virtual avatar that specifies their future “embodied” perspective on the visual scene. This “out-of-body” priming reduces or even abolishes viewpoint dependence for detecting a change in an object location when the environment is respectively unknown or familiar to the observer. Viewpoint dependence occurs when both the priming and primed viewpoints do not match. Changes to permanent extended structures (such as walls) or altered object-to-object spatial relations across viewpoint change are detrimental to viewpoint priming. A neurocognitive model describes the coordination of “out-of-body” and “embodied” perspectives relevant to social perception when understanding what another individual sees.     

Uncertainty processing in bees exposed to free choices: Lessons from vertebrates

Bees tend to avoid or to show indifference to uncertain (“risky”) relative to certain (“safe”) food rewards, whether in nectar volume or in nectar concentration. The unattractiveness of uncertain food rewards is also sometimes independent of the energy budget of bees. This pattern of responses seems to differ from that observed in mammals and birds, which may exhibit a strong preference for the uncertainty over the certainty of food delivery on a given trial in dual-choice tasks. Upon analysis of the conditions that determine preference and aversion for uncertain food rewards in “higher” vertebrates, I attempt to demonstrate that bees react to uncertainty in a similar way. It is argued that, because of their social organization and of the type of resources they seek, bees are essentially exposed to situations in which “higher” vertebrates find reward uncertainty unattractive as well. The nature of their representation of food distribution is discussed, and it is suggested that scout bees may differ from recruits with respect to uncertainty processing.     

Exploratory Bifactor Analysis: The Schmid-Leiman Orthogonalization and Jennrich-Bentler Analytic Rotations

Analytic bifactor rotations have been recently developed and made generally available, but they are not well understood. The Jennrich-Bentler analytic bifactor rotations (bi-quartimin and bi-geomin) are an alternative to, and arguably an improvement upon, the less technically sophisticated Schmid-Leiman orthogonalization. We review the technical details that underlie the Schmid-Leiman and Jennrich-Bentler bifactor rotations, using simulated data structures to illustrate important features and limitations. For the Schmid-Leiman, we review the problem of inaccurate parameter estimates caused by the linear dependencies, sometimes called “proportionality constraints,” that are required to expand a p correlated factors solution into a (p + 1) (bi)factor space. We also review the complexities involved when the data depart from perfect cluster structure (e.g., item cross-loading on group factors). For the Jennrich-Bentler rotations, we describe problems in parameter estimation caused by departures from perfect cluster structure. In addition, we illustrate the related problems of (a) solutions that are not invariant under different starting values (i.e., local minima problems) and (b) group factors collapsing onto the general factor. Recommendations are made for substantive researchers including examining all local minima and applying multiple exploratory techniques in an effort to identify an accurate model.     

Turning observers into actors: Differential causal attributions as a function of “empathy”

After being instructed either to “empathize with the actor” or to “picture the events clearly,” two groups of observers read a story describing an actor's behavior, and then gave free-response explanations of that behavior, and rated the importance of personal and situational causal factors. The hypothesis that causal attributions of empathizing observers would be less personal and more situational than those of nonempathizing observers received strong support, both from subjects' free responses and from their scale ratings. These findings provide evidence for an information-processing explanation of actor/observer attributional differences. Some practical applications of increasing the situationality of observers' causal attributions are discussed. The results also suggest a novel operational definition of “empathy”; and are interpreted as evidence for the effectiveness of “interpersonal simulations”.     

Post-iconic visual storage: chunking in the reproduction of briefly displayed visual patterns

Two experiments are reported which investigate the organization of visuospatial information in post-iconic storage. In both experiments, stimuli consisting of 10 disks randomly placed in a four-by-five array were tachistoscopically presented to subjects whose task was to recreate the pattern. In Experiment 2, reproduction was constrained (on a row-by-row basis) while in Experiment 1 it was unconstrained. The results of Experiment 1 showed that subjects recalled in terms of “chunks” of spatially adjacent disks, with most “chunks” consisting of about three of four disks. Within each sequence of 10 responses the probability of correctly recalling a chunk decreased with its serial position but was relatively independent of chunk size per se (for chunks containing seven or less disks). In addition, clear topographical variations in accuracy were found, which tended to covary strongly with order of recall. In Experiment 2, the order of reproduction was prespecified (either top row down to bottom row, or bottom row up to top row) in order to induce chunking by rows. The direction of reproduction was either pre- or post-cued. The results of this study showed that subjects encode the stimulus, wherever possible, in a form which is compatible with the constraints imposed on recall order. The results for the postcued conditions provide strong support for the argument that topographical variations in accuracy are a function of variations in accuracy of encoding, and not simply a function of order of report. The results are discussed in terms of an attentional model. It is proposed that a general “anticipatory schema” (cf. Neisser, Cognition and Reality 1976) presets the distribution of attention in the visual field, preselects a set of coding heuristics, and subsequently interacts with the present stimulus pattern. Spatial discontinuities in the distribution of attention resulting from this interaction are regarded as “defining” chunks of stimulus elements.     

Can We Make Sense of the Notion of Trustworthy Technology?

In this paper we raise the question whether technological artifacts can properly speaking be trusted or said to be trustworthy. First, we set out some prevalent accounts of trust and trustworthiness and explain how they compare with the engineer’s notion of reliability. We distinguish between pure rational-choice accounts of trust, which do not differ in principle from mere judgments of reliability, and what we call “motivation-attributing” accounts of trust, which attribute specific motivations to trustworthy entities. Then we consider some examples of technological entities that are, at first glance, best suited to serve as the objects of trust: intelligent systems that interact with users, and complex socio-technical systems. We conclude that the motivation-attributing concept of trustworthiness cannot be straightforwardly applied to these entities. Any applicable notion of trustworthy technology would have to depart significantly from the full-blown notion of trustworthiness associated with interpersonal trust.     

Right-left confusion in the adult: A verbal labeling effect

Directional judgments are typically slower when relative location is described by the words “east” and “west” or “right” and “left” than when described by the words “north” and “south” or “up” and “down.” A series of experiments are reported that disentangle verbal from perceptual encoding explanations for right-left difficulty. Overall, our results support a verbal encoding explanation for right-left confusion in the adult. Experiments 1-3 demonstrate that in a response-differentiation task, it is response to the labels “north,” “east,” “south,” and “west” that is responsible for right-left confusion. In addition, Experiments 4-6 demonstrate that right-left difficulty in a mirror image discrimination task is contingent on the use of directional labels. (The data also suggest that it may be more difficult to deal with “up,” “down,” “left,” and “right” than with “north,” “south,” “east,” and “west”) The data are interpreted as inconsistent with a bilateral symmetry explanation for right-left confusion.     

Novelty,complexity, and hedonic value

Two experiments, in which Ss were exposed to sequences of colored shapes, investigated effects on ratings of “pleasingness” and “interestingness” of variables that had previously been shown to affect ratings of “novelty.” The results indicate, on the whole, that both pleasingness and interestingness increase with novelty. These findings run counter to those of experiments indicating an inverse relation between novelty and verbally expressed preference. Two further experiments examined effects of some variables that might account for this apparent discrepancy. Homogeneous sequences declined in judged “pleasantness” more than sequences in which several stimuli were interspersed, and simple stimuli became less pleasant as they became less novel, while complex stimuli declined less or became more pleasant. The findings are related to hypotheses regarding mechanisms of hedonic value. Two crucial predictions were confirmed in a fifth experiment.