Stereotypes,Prejudice, and the Taxonomy of the Implicit Social Mind1

How do cognition and affect interact to produce action? Research in intergroup psychology illuminates this question by investigating the relationship between stereotypes and prejudices about social groups. Yet it is now clear that many social attitudes are implicit (roughly, nonconscious or involuntary). This raises the question: how does the distinction between cognition and affect apply to implicit mental states? An influential view—roughly analogous to a Humean theory of action—is that “implicit stereotypes” and “implicit prejudices” constitute two separate constructs, reflecting different mental processes and neural systems. On this basis, some have also argued that interventions to reduce discrimination should combat implicit stereotypes and prejudices separately. We propose an alternative (anti‐Humean) framework. We argue that all putative implicit stereotypes are affect‐laden and all putative implicit prejudices are “semantic,” that is, they stand in co‐activating associations with concepts and beliefs. Implicit biases, therefore, consist in “clusters” of semantic‐affective associations, which differ in degree, rather than kind. This framework captures the psychological structure of implicit bias, promises to improve the power of indirect measures to predict behavior, and points toward the design of more effective interventions to combat discrimination.     

MEDIATING ROLE OF MATERNAL SENSITIVITY: ENHANCING LANGUAGE DEVELOPMENT IN AT‐RISK FAMILIES

Home‐visiting programs have gained increasing importance in family‐centered prevention and intervention. However, few studies have examined the mechanisms underlying early intervention treatment effects. The goal of this study is to analyze the mediating role of maternal sensitivity in enhancing language development with the home‐visiting program Parents as Teachers (PAT). Data were collected and analyzed within the ongoing, long‐term ZEPPELIN study, a randomized controlled trial with 251 participating at‐risk families. Via longitudinal mediation analysis, we examined whether effects of the PAT on receptive and expressive language outcomes at 24 and 36 months were mediated by maternal sensitivity at 12 months. Within a moderated mediation framework, we investigated whether the level of family psychosocial stress affects this mediation. Results showed that intervention effects on language outcomes are mediated by maternal sensitivity—weakly and through specific pathways. Moderation and moderated mediation analyses indicated that effects of the PAT and also specific mediation effects increase with the level of psychosocial stress. Implications of the results for practice are discussed.     

Epistemic Objects as Interactive Loci

Contemporary process metaphysics has achieved a number of important results, most significantly in accounting for emergence, a problem on which substance metaphysics has foundered since Plato. It also faces trenchant problems of its own, among them the related problems of boundaries and individuation. Historically, the quest for ontology may thus have been largely responsible for the persistence of substance metaphysics. But as Plato was well aware, an ontology of substantial things raises serious, perhaps insurmountable problems for any account of our epistemic access to such things. Physical things are subject to change, and as such, they are poor objects of knowledge—if knowledge is to be more reliable than mere opinion. There is a reading of Plato’s Theaetetus on which knowledge may be understood as a relation between an epistemic subject and a logos, where logoi are intrinsically dialectical, and where dialectic is a kind of intersubjective activity. Insofar as this epistemology may be attributed to Plato, the project of this paper is Platonic in spirit. It is also, in a sense, Kantian, in that it divorces ontology from the search for things-in-themselves, redirecting our attention from things to objects: epistemic objects. Such objects can be understood, as Maurice Merleau-Ponty proposed, as shared by multiple subjects by virtue of their participation in an intersubjective world, constituted by what Shaun Gallagher calls “participatory sense-making.” On an epistemology constructed in this way, the fact that both epistemic objects and their subject are mutable is no obstacle to knowledge. Far-from-equilibrium systems are forever mutable; at thermodynamic equilibrium, there would be neither subject, nor object. Epistemic objects, on this picture, are metastable loci of interactive potential.     

R��ckf?lligkeit nach nichtangeordneter nachtr?glicher Sicherungsverwahrung

Since 2001 under certain circumstances German courts have the right to order prisoner detention for preventive purposes retrospectively. As courts set limits to new facts after conviction more than 100 prisoners were released, although they were regarded as being very dangerous. The actual delinquency relapse of these persons was investigated in a study of the Ruhr University Bochum. The results are presented in this paper.     

Nuclear Brinkmanship: A Study in Non-Linguistic Communication

This article examines meaning making with nuclear bombs and military manoeuvres. The data is verbatim audio recordings from the White House during the Cuban Missile Crisis. The analysis uses concepts from impression management and dialogism. It is found that actions often speak louder than words and that even non-linguistic communication with nuclear weapons is often oriented to third-parties, in this case, world opinion. A novel process of ‘staging the other’ is identified, that is, when one side tries to create a situation which will force the other side to act in a way which will create a negative impression on world opinion. Staging the other is a subtle form of meaning making for it entails shaping how third parties will view a situation without those third parties being aware of the intentionality of the communication.     

Resource demands of object tracking and differential allocation of the resource

The attentional processes for tracking moving objects may be largely hemisphere-specific. Indeed, in our first two experiments the maximum object speed (speed limit) for tracking targets in one visual hemifield (left or right) was not significantly affected by a requirement to track additional targets in the other hemifield. When the additional targets instead occupied the same hemifield as the original targets, the speed limit was reduced. At slow target speeds, however, adding a second target to the same hemifield had little effect. At high target speeds, the cost of adding a same-hemifield second target was approximately as large as would occur if observers could only track one of the targets. This shows that performance with a fast-moving target is very sensitive to the amount of resource allocated. In a third experiment, we investigated whether the resources for tracking can be distributed unequally between two targets. The speed limit for a given target was higher if the second target was slow rather than fast, suggesting that more resource was allocated to the faster of the two targets. This finding was statistically significant only for targets presented in the same hemifield, consistent with the theory of independent resources in the two hemifields. Some limited evidence was also found for resource sharing across hemifields, suggesting that attentional tracking resources may not be entirely hemifield-specific. Together, these experiments indicate that the largely hemisphere-specific tracking resource can be differentially allocated to faster targets.     

Positive psychological approaches to therapy

The term positive psychology has become widely used in recent years to refer to the new movement among psychologists who have turned their attention to positive human functioning. In this article we will review what the emerging field of positive psychology tells us about therapeutic practice. The positive psychology movement has led to a questioning of the fundamental assumptions underlying the practice of psychological therapy, and it is our view that the emerging positive psychology research is supportive of those therapeutic approaches which serve to facilitate the client's ability to hear their own inner voice.     

Family response to traumatic brain injury

The stress experienced by families with a member who has experienced a traumatic brain injury (TBI) has recently been addressed in the counselling and rehabilitation literature. Given that rehabilitation centres have physical restoration of the patient as a primary mandate, the emotional and social adjustment needs of family members are often overlooked. Information on TBI and its effect on families will help counsellors and psychologists contribute to the family adjustment process.     

Neural substrates for episodic encoding and recognition of unfamiliar faces

Functional MRI was used to investigate brain activation in healthy volunteers during encoding of unfamiliar faces as well as during correct recognition of newly learned faces (CR) compared to correct identification of distractor faces (CF), missed alarms (not recognizing previously presented faces, MA), and false alarms (incorrectly recognizing newly presented faces, FA). Encoding was associated with frontal, occipital/fusiform, thalamic, and cerebellar activation. CR produced activation in frontal and cerebellar regions, whereas CF activated frontal and occipitotemporal regions as well as the thalamus. In contrast, MA was associated with frontal and thalamic activation, and FA with frontal activation. The CR minus CF comparison showed left lateral prefrontal and parietal activation, while no suprathreshold positive signal changes were detected when subtracting the other conditions (CR minus MA, CR minus FA, and vice versa). These results support the view that the successful episodic retrieval of newly learned faces is based on a dorsal visual stream mechanism.