God and Dispositional Essentialism: An Account of the Laws of Nature

It is common to appeal to governing laws of nature in order to explain the existence of natural regularities. Classical theism, however, maintains the sovereignty thesis: everything distinct from God is created by him and is under his guidance and control. It follows from this that God must somehow be responsible for natural laws and regularities. Therefore, theists need an account of the relation between (i) regularities, (ii) laws, and (iii) God. I examine competing accounts of laws of nature and conclude that dispositional essentialism provides the most satisfactory explanation of the relation between (i), (ii) and (iii).     

Biased language use in stereotype maintenance: the role of encoding and goals

In 4 studies, the authors investigated the relative impact of biased encoding of information and communication goals on biased language use. A category label (linguistic expectancy bias, Study 1) or a group label (linguistic intergroup bias, Study 2) was presented either before or after a story that participants were asked to communicate. Biased language use only emerged when participants learned about the group membership of the actor or the category label before hearing the story. However, communication goals had an effect on language use at the retrieval stage, independent of encoding (Studies 3 and 4). Although communication goal effects seemed to overwhelm encoding effects, encoding still influenced language use under externally imposed time pressure (Study 3) and self-imposed time constraints (Study 4). This research reaffirms the importance of both cognitive and communicative processes in stereotype maintenance and highlights the conditions under which they each operate.     

Societal Risk Perception Among Children, Adolescents, Adults, and Elderly People

This study reported on mean risk magnitude judgments expressed by French participants aged 8 to 75 years, on a set of 91 hazardous activities, substances, and technologies. It then systematically analyzed the effects of the age factor on the judgments. Between elderly people and young and mature adults, few notable differences were detected. The most important result was that a considerable proportion of the children were able to estimate the risk associated with most items of the present study, and that the linear association between children's ratings and adults' ratings was very high. This finding supports the view that the learning of the risk associated with various technologies, common in society, is a fast process, depending probably much more on exposure to media information and family discussions (socialization) than on exposure to everyday reality.     

Lesbian and bisexual women’s interpretations of lesbian and ersatz lesbian pornography

The purpose of the current study was to examine non-heterosexual women’s interpretations of “lesbian” material contained in pornography targeting male viewers and pornography made by and for lesbian women. Four focus groups were conducted (N=17) in which participants saw two pornographic sequences; one ostensibly for heterosexual males and the other for lesbian women. Participants then engaged in a semi-structured discussion for approximately 90 minutes. Conversations were tape-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed for themes. Stated briefly, results indicated that participants differentiated between the two sequences on a variety of dimensions including performers’ bodies, the emphasis on penetration, and the presence or absence of intimacy. The implications of these findings and ideas for subsequent research are outlined.     

Family therapy alone is not enough or the dirty story of Dorian

When serious malfunctioning of an individual occurs in a secondary system (school, hospital, rehabilitation center, dormitory setting), the tendency often is to focus on the family as both the cause of the malfunctioning and the arena of intervention. Many times, family therapy alone is not enough because a parallel destructive constellation has formed around the Identified Patient in the secondary system as well and the symptoms catalyze that system's own maladaptive patterns. Often the IP is caught in the web of rigid pathological patterns of interactions between the two systems. A unique model of conjoined intersystemic intervention for dealing with such resistance to change is presented.     

Goal relevance moderates evaluative conditioning effects

An important process by which preferences emerge is evaluative conditioning, defined as a change in the evaluation of a stimulus by pairing it repeatedly and consistently with an affective stimulus. The current research focuses on the role of motivation in this learning process. Specifically, it was investigated whether a conditioning procedure that is relevant to an individual's current goals is more effective than an irrelevant procedure. To this end, beverages were conditioned with either disgusted faces (relevant) or fearful faces (irrelevant). The results showed that thirsty(rather than non-thirsty) participants’ choice and evaluation of beverages were influenced by pairing beverages with disgust but not with fear. As similar results were obtained under optimal and suboptimal presentation of the conditioned stimuli, it is suggested that goals can affect automatic, associative learning, adding to the emerging body of research demonstrating that goals unconsciously affect evaluative processes.     

Biased allocation of faces to social categories

Three studies show that social categorization is biased at the level of category allocation. In all studies, participants categorized faces. In Studies 1 and 2, participants overallocated faces with criminal features--a stereotypical negative trait--to the stigmatized Moroccan category, especially if they were prejudiced. On the contrary, the stereotype-irrelevant negative trait stupid did not lead to overallocation to the Moroccan category. In Study 3, using the stigmatized category homosexual, the previously used negative trait criminal--irrelevant to the homosexual stereotype--did not lead to overallocation, but the stereotype-relevant positive trait femininity did. These results demonstrate that normative fit is higher for faces with stereotype-relevant features regardless of valence. Moreover, individual differences in implicit prejudice predicted the extent to which stereotype-relevant traits elicited overallocation: Whereas more negatively prejudiced people showed greater overallocation of faces associated with negative stereotype-relevant traits, they showed less overallocation of faces associated with positive stereotype-relevant traits. These results support our normative fit hypothesis: In general, normative fit is better for faces with stereotypical features. Moreover, normative fit is enhanced for prejudiced individuals when these features are evaluatively congruent. Social categorization thus may be biased in itself.