“We’re a walking picket sign”: Management of a Stigmatized Religious Identity

This study analyzes qualitative data from interviews with 18 members of the Westboro Baptist Church (WBC) focusing on the group’s religious identity and relationships with “mainstream” society. Two primary themes emerged. First, the WBC religious identity appears to hinge on external conflict with society which is promoted by their core religious ideology and negotiated through various stigma management strategies. Second, members of the church enjoy strong internal group cohesion promoted by their religious ideology and symbolic boundaries that separate them from outside institutions. This study therefore suggests stigmatization offers social benefits to members of the WBC in addition to social consequences.     

When your heart is in your mouth: the effect of second language use on negative emotions

Research on bilingualism and emotions has shown stronger emotional responses in the native language (L1) compared to a foreign language. We investigated the potential of purposeful second language (L2) use as a means of decreasing the experience of psychological distress. Native Swedish speakers read and answered questions about negative and neutral texts in their L1 (Swedish) and their L2 (English) and were asked to rate their level of distress before or after the questions. The texts and associated questions were either written in the same (within-language), or different languages (cross-language). We found that within-language trials when the text was written in participants’ native language (Swedish–Swedish) resulted in an increase of distress, whilst cross-language trials (Swedish–English) resulted in a decrease of distress. This implies that purposeful second language use can diminish levels of distress experienced following a negative event encoded in one's first language.     

Interactions of reading and semantics along the ventral visual processing stream

Converging evidence supports a distributed-plus-hub view of semantic processing, in which there are distributed modular semantic sub-systems (e.g., for shape, colour, and action) connected to an amodal semantic hub. Furthermore, object semantic processing of colour and shape, and lexical reading and identification, are processed mainly along the ventral stream, while action semantic processing occurs mainly along the dorsal stream. In Experiment 1, participants read a prime word that required imagining either the object or action referent, and then named a lexical word target. In Experiments 2 and 3, participants performed a lexical decision task (LDT) with the same targets as in Experiment 1, in the presence of foils that were legal nonwords (NW; Experiment 2) or pseudohomophones (PH; Experiment 3). Semantic priming was similar in effect size regardless of prime type for naming, but was greater for object primes than action primes for the LDT with PH foils, suggesting a shared-stream advantage when the task demands focus on orthographic lexical processing. These experiments extend the distributed-plus-hub model, and provide a novel paradigm for further research.     

Ethical and Regulatory Considerations for Using Social Media Platforms to Locate and Track Research Participants

As social media becomes increasingly popular, human subjects researchers are able to use these platforms to locate, track, and communicate with study participants, thereby increasing participant retention and the generalizability and validity of research. The use of social media; however, raises novel ethical and regulatory issues that have received limited attention in the literature and federal regulations. We review research ethics and regulations and outline the implications for maintaining participant privacy, respecting participant autonomy, and promoting researcher transparency when using social media to locate and track participants. We offer a rubric that can be used in future studies to determine ethical and regulation-consistent use of social media platforms and illustrate the rubric using our study team’s experience with Facebook. We also offer recommendations for both researchers and institutional review boards that emphasize the importance of well-described procedures for social media use as part of informed consent.     

“Know Whence you Came”: Psychoanalytic Theory,Queer Theory,and the Mixed-Race Experience

Deeply rooted U.S. cultural practices and legislative processes have facilitated the dissociation, erasure, and evasion of engagement with mixed-race subjectivities. As multiracial clinicians, we attempt to reexamine the discourse around race in psychoanalytic literature, questioning the process by which dominant monoracial norms have been constructed, reproduced, and codified as normal and acceptable. We propose that the absence of multiracial subjectivities from the psychoanalytic literature reflects a broader social discomfort with and cultural dissociation of the mixed-race experience. We further suggest that it is necessary to engage both analytically and queer-ly with the subjective experience of racial multiplicity—positing that multiracial subjectivities might best be understood as subjectivities that are “racially queer.”     

The Ethnic Adornment Survey (EAS): Measuring Individuals’ Use of Clothing to Express Ethnic Identity

The present paper introduces the Ethnic Adornment Survey as a measure of the relative frequency with which individuals use clothing to express their ethnic identity. Results of exploratory factor analyses in a pilot study (n = 174) and confirmatory factor analyses in a main study (n = 217) revealed that the Ethnic Adornment Survey measures two positively correlated, yet distinct, ethnic adornment factors (i.e., socially desirable and undesirable aspects). Moreover, results of regression analyses indicated that (1) self-esteem was positively predicted by socially desirable aspects of ethnic adornment (p’s < .05 in both studies); whereas (2) self-esteem was negatively predicted by socially undesirable aspects of ethnic adornment (p’s < .05 in the pilot study and < .10 in the main study). Implications for research on ethnic identity are discussed.     

Social Comparisons on Subjective Well-Being: The Role of Social and Cultural Capital

Using the German Socio-Economic Panel, we analyze the relevance of modeling social comparisons to determine their effect on subjective well-being. We find that it is important to model social comparisons in such a way that captures the sensitivity of individuals to proximity. The impact on subjective well-being differs depending on the manner in which proximity is modeled, revealing that the underlying processes in comparisons are not homogenous along the income distribution. Additionally, our results point out that social and cultural capital modify the effect of social comparisons and such modification depends on the sensitivity to proximity.     

Ecological Validity as a Key Feature of External Validity in Research on Human Development

This issue addresses the topic of ecological validity in research in human development across the life span. Although recent developments in study design, data collection methods, and data analysis techniques have greatly advanced researchers’ ability to collect large amounts of data on large groups of individuals in natural settings, it is important to approach these data with a reflected understanding of their ecological validity. Just because data were collected using everyday and familiar stimuli or ecological momentary assessment methods does not mean automatically that the ecological validity of these data is guaranteed and can go unquestioned.     

Bidirectional relations between different forms of prosocial behaviors and substance use among female college student athletes

Bidirectional, longitudinal relations between alcohol and marijuana use and prosocial behaviors in women college student athletes were examined. Participants were 187 female college students (M_age = 19.87 years; 91% White) who completed questionnaires on their use of marijuana and alcohol, and six forms of prosocial behaviors across 6 years (2004–2010). The findings yield overall evidence that earlier marijuana use predicted lower levels of most specific forms of prosocial behaviors for women athletes in later young adulthood. Early expressions of altruistic behaviors predicted less marijuana use in later young adulthood. Expression of public prosocial behaviors early in young adulthood predicted higher levels of hazardous drinking in late young adulthood. These novel findings have important implications for links between prosocial development and substance use in women college athletes.