Gender Differences and Similarities in Dominance Hierarchies in Same-Gender Groups Based on Speaking Time

This study aimed at investigating whether all-women and all-men groups differed in their hierarchical organization and stability of their rank orders across time. One hundred and sixteen European, middle-class, noncollege women and men (average age: 38) participated in small-group discussions twice within a week with the same group members. Speaking time served as the behavioral dominance indicator on which group hierarchies were based. Additionally, group members rank ordered each other on dominance after each interaction. In the first session, all-men groups were more hierarchically structured than all-women groups. During each session, all-women and all-men groups showed a similar significant increase in hierarchical structuring. For both women and men, rank orders remained stable during interactions and from the first to the second session. Results are discussed in terms of three theoretical models describing dominance hierarchies.     

Multimodal Perception of Reachability Expressed Through Locomotion

We investigated the information that supports perception of whether an object is within reach using a locomotor task. Participants adjusted their own position relative to a fixed target by stepping or by propelling a wheelchair until they judged it to be within reach. The to-be-reached object was presented in virtual reality. The display of the target was driven in real time as a function of the observer's movement, thus depicting a stationary virtual object at a definite distance only through the relation across optical and nonoptical patterns of stimulation. We asked participants to judge the distance they could reach with their unaided hand or when holding a rod that extended their effective reach. They could see neither their body nor the rod thereby limiting available visual information about “reachability.” As expected, our results showed that despite the limited information that was available, participants' locomotor adjustments were influenced by (a) their simulated distance from the target, (b) their arm length, and (c) the presence or absence of the rod. The type of motion (stepping or wheelchair) had little influence. However, judgment accuracy was influenced by participants' initial simulated distance from the target. We compare the performance obtained in our locomotor judgment task with previous studies that have used different methods for measuring perceived reaching-ability. We discuss perceptual information that could have supported performance within the framework of the global array.     

Multiple Mediators of the Attitude Similarity-Attraction Relationship: Dominance of Inferred Attraction and Subtlety of Affect

The authors examined the mediation of the attitude similarity–attraction relationship. When affect was the sole measured mediating variable, the hypothesized partial mediation held in Experiment 1 (N = 60). In Experiment 2 (N = 96), ratings of the 3 potential mediators (affect, inferred attraction, and cognitive evaluation) and of an irrelevant variable (inferred cognitive evaluation) were taken at 2 orders of mediator measurement. The attitude similarity-attraction link was more strongly mediated by inferred attraction than by cognitive evaluation. Surprisingly, however, the effect of affect on attraction was reversed in the multiple-mediation analysis. Post hoc analyses disclosed that affect transmitted the similarity effect from its preceding variable only to the succeeding one. Theoretical and methodological implications of the dominance of inferred attraction and the subtlety of affect are discussed.     

Identity Through Time and Trope Bundles

This paper brings together two theories that I have propounded separately elsewhere. The first is the view that concrete individuals are constituted completely by tropes, that they are trope bundles. The second and more recently developed theory is that of the two major categories of concrete individuals, continuants and occurrents, the latter are ontologically more basic than the former and that continuants are to be viewed as invariants among occurrents under equivalence relations. The latter theory embodies on its own an account of the nature of identity through time of things that are in time but not extended in time. The question is whether this view is compatible with the trope bundle account of concrete particulars, and, assuming it is (both theories being separately attractive) whether bringing them together entails any modifications (other than complexity) to either theory. After examining likely metaphysical difficulties the tentative conclusion is that the attractiveness of the trope bundle theory persists despite the marriage, but that the mental picture of what tropes and trope bundles are must be overhauled. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Eye Movements Reveal Mental Looking Through Time

People often make use of a spatial “mental time line” to represent events in time. We investigated whether the eyes follow such a mental time line during online language comprehension of sentences that refer to the past, present, and future. Participants' eye movements were measured on a blank screen while they listened to these sentences. Saccade direction revealed that the future is mapped higher up in space than the past. Moreover, fewer saccades were made when two events are simultaneously taking place at the present moment compared to two events that are happening in different points in time. This is the first evidence that oculomotor correlates reflect mental looking along an abstract invisible time line during online language comprehension about time. Our results support the idea that observing eye movements is likely to “detect” invisible spatial scaffoldings which are involved in cognitively processing abstract meaning, even when the abstract meaning lacks an explicit spatial correlate. Theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

Inferred characteristics of successful suicides as function of gender and context.

This paper examines college students' attributions about suicide as a function of gender and context (athletic vs. relationship failure). Results indicated that male athletes who suicided were considered more emotionally well-adjusted compared to males who suicided because of a relationship failure and all females. Male and female athletes who suicided were seen as more competent and less distressed compared to those who suffered a failed relationship. Females were also seen as more distressed compared to males. These results are discussed in terms of a positive bias toward athletes in our society as well as gender stereotypes. Implications of these findings as well as methodological limitations are discussed.     

Perception of Time and Causation Through the Kinesthesia of Intentional Action

Perception is an intentional action through space in time by which the finite brain explores the infinite world. By acting, the brain thrusts its body into the future space–time of the world while predicting the sensory consequences. Through perceiving its actions and their results, it remembers its predictions, its actions, and their consequences. To perform these operations the brain, through chaotic dynamics, constructs and uses finite perceptual matrices of space–time and infers causation. Perceived time differs from world time in ways that are determined by the neural mechanisms of intentionality. In particular, perception of the self in action, through the mechanism of preafference, gives structure and content to the concepts of continuity, contiguity, duration, temporal order, cause, and effect. We expand our perceptual scales beyond kinesthesia by converting time into space by use of clocks and calendars. Remembered time differs from perceived time in being dependent on awareness, which makes it episodic, fragmentary, and subject to large variations in rates of time lapse in the flow of meanings. The attribution of causal agency to objects and events in the world results from the experience of temporal sequencing in the action–perception cycle: “I act” [cause] “I feel” [effect] during Piaget’s somatomotor phase in early human development.

Positive Evaluations Expressed Through Original Stories: An Intervention to Promote Resilience in Japan1

This study aimed to design a program incorporating a narrative perspective that promotes resilience. A program was implemented that conveys an appreciation for the internal qualities of a familiar other person through the creation of a story about them. The experiment was conducted with 36 pairs of women; each pair had a “giver” and a “recipient.” The giver created a story that praised the “good points” of the recipient. There were significant increases in recipients' scores on measures of resilience, self-esteem, and sense of acceptance of the giver. Additionally, the use of a story can help expand the interpretative ability of receiving and expressing praise.     

Screen Time as a Mechanism Through Which Cumulative Risk is Related to Child Socioemotional and Developmental Outcomes in Early Childhood

Research on Child and Adolescent Psychopathology - Socio-demographic risks are associated with higher child screen time and higher screen time is associated with poor socioemotional and...     

Expressed vs inventoried interests as predictors of paramedical effectiveness

Two interest measures, a composite of six items which provide a direct assessment of an individual's preferences for Navy health care work and a Navy Vocational Interest Inventory (NVII) scale which assessed the degree of similarity between an individual's activity preferences and those of hospital corpsmen (HMs), were considered along with aptitude test scores as potential predictors of effectiveness among 2429 Navy enlisted personnel assigned to training for HM jobs. Effectiveness was defined as completion of HM training and remaining on the job for at least 2 years. The six-item composite and NVII HM scale scores were correlated .51 with each other and were correlated .27 and .28, respectively, with the effectiveness criterion. When these measures were added to the aptitude measure by using multiple regression procedures, the validity for predicting effectiveness was increased significantly from .36 to .42 with a cross-validity of .42 for the three-variable equation. These findings provide support for the contention that interest measures can be useful predictors of occupational success as well as occupational entry. Furthermore, since most of the interest-related attrition that was found in this study occurred during HM training, these findings suggest that job withdrawal attributable to mismatches in vocational interests may tend to occur very soon after the individual enters the occupational field.     

The Time Course of Grammatical and Phonological Processing During Speaking: Evidence from Event-Related Brain Potentials

Motor-related brain potentials were used to examine the time course of grammatical and phonological processes during noun phrase production in Dutch. In the experiments, participants named colored pictures using a no-determiner noun phrase. On half of the trials a syntactic–phonological classification task had to be performed before naming. Depending on the outcome of the classifications, a left or a right push-button response was given (go trials), or no push-button response was given (no-go trials). Lateralized readiness potentials (LRPs) were derived to test whether syntactic and phonological information affected the motor system at separate moments in time. The results showed that when syntactic information determined the response-hand decision, an LRP developed on no-go trials. However, no such effect was observed when phonological information determined response hand. On the basis of the data, it can be estimated that an additional period of at least 40 ms is needed to retrieve a word's initial phoneme once its lemma has been retrieved. These results provide evidence for the view that during speaking, grammatical processing precedes phonological processing in time.     

Social Dominance and Sexual Self-Schema as Moderators of Sexist Reactions to Female Subtypes

Theoretically, ambivalent sexism maintains gender hierarchy through benevolence toward conforming women but hostility toward nonconforming women. Men have shown ambivalent sexism to sex-typed vignettes describing “chaste” and “promiscuous” women (Sibley and Wilson 2004). This study of 117 Florida male and female undergraduate participants examined whether, benefiting more from gender hierarchy, men respond more extremely. If sexism supports gender hierarchy, social dominance also should moderate ambivalent sexism. Sexual self-schema (detailed, self-confident sexual information-processing) might moderate men’s and women's hostility. Supporting ambivalent sexism theory, women's hostility targeted the promiscuous character, but their benevolence targeted the chaste character, with men unexpectedly differentiating less. Social dominance enhanced Hostile Sexism and its differentiating the two female subtypes. Sexual self-schema moderated women’s but not men’s hostility.     

Speaking truth to power: Empowerment ideology as social intervention and policy

The popularity, and subsequent ambiguity, in the use of the term “empowerment” has created an even greater need for reassessment in the applied context than in the theory and research literatures. This paper outlines some of the areas of community, organizational, and societal level social intervention and policy ostensibly based on the concept of empowerment. These include neighborhood voluntary associations (for environmental protection, community crime prevention, etc.), self-help groups, competence-building primary prevention, organizational management, health care and educational reforms, and national and international community service and community development policies. Issues in applying social research to community organizations and to legislative and administrative policy making are reviewed. Ten recommendations are offered, including the value of a dialectical analysis, for helping researchers and policy makers/administrators make more effective use of empowerment theory and research. Humpty Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean neither more nor less.” King of Hearts: “If there's no meaning in it, that saves a world of trouble, you know, as we needn't try to find any.”—Lewis Carroll Portions of this paper were first presented in the program “Empowerment Theory, Research and policy” at the Biennial Conference on Community Research and Action, Williamsburg, Virginia, June 18, 1993. The author thanks Barbara B. Brown, Jo Ann Lippe, Ken Maton and his students, David V. Perkins, Marc A. Zimmerman, and the anonymous reviewers for their very helpful comments on earlier drafts.     

Stochastic Dominance and Opaque Sweetening

This paper addresses the problem of opaque sweetening and argues that one should use stochastic dominance in comparing lotteries even when dealing with incomplete orderings that allow for non-comparable outcomes.