Treating bed time resistance with the bed time pass: a systematic replication and component analysis with 3-year-olds

Bedtime resistance, a common pediatric problem, that was displayed by 4 unrelated 3-year-old children was treated with the bedtime pass (i.e., provision of a small notecard exchangeable for one trip out of the bedroom after bedtime) plus extinction. Bedtime resistance was eliminated for all participants. Further, treatment did not produce extinction bursts, as is common when using extinction procedures alone. Component analysis with 1 participant suggested that use of both components of the intervention produced the best outcomes. Findings extend the literature on the treatment of pediatric bedtime resistance as well as the application of behavior analysis to clinical psychology and pediatric care.     

Familiar eyes are smiling: on the role of familiarity in the perception of facial affect

Quickly and accurately perceiving others' facial affect is paramount for successful social interaction. This work investigates the role of familiarity in helping us to interpret others' facial emotions. In Experiments 1 and 2, participants viewed several faces, some familiar and some novel, and judged how happy each face appeared. As predicted, results showed that familiar faces were perceived as happier than were novel faces. In Experiment 3, participants again viewed several faces, some familiar and some not, and rated the perceived anger or happiness of these faces. As expected, familiar faces were perceived as happier and less angry than were novel faces. Thus, these results suggest that familiarity is one cue we use to interpret the facial affect of others. Copyright © 2007 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The cross-category effect: mere social categorization is sufficient to elicit an own-group bias in face recognition

Although the cross-race effect (CRE) is a well-established phenomenon, both perceptual-expertise and social-categorization models have been proposed to explain the effect. The two studies reported here investigated the extent to which categorizing other people as in-group versus out-group members is sufficient to elicit a pattern of face recognition analogous to that of the CRE, even when perceptual expertise with the stimuli is held constant. In Study 1, targets were categorized as members of real-life in-groups and out-groups (based on university affiliation), whereas in Study 2, targets were categorized into experimentally created minimal groups. In both studies, recognition performance was better for targets categorized as in-group members, despite the fact that perceptual expertise was equivalent for in-group and out-group faces. These results suggest that social-cognitive mechanisms of in-group and out-group categorization are sufficient to elicit performance differences for in-group and out-group face recognition.     

Harm concerns predict moral judgments of suicide: Comment on Rottman,Kelemen and Young (2014)

Two prominent theories offer different perspectives on the role of harm in moral cognition. Dyadic morality suggests that harm-related concerns are pervasive, whereas moral pluralism suggests that these concerns apply only to canonically harmful violations (e.g., murder), and not impure violations (e.g., suicide). Rottman et al. (2014) contrast these two theories by examining moral judgments of suicide. They conclude that suicide wrongness is independent of harm, therefore arguing against dyadic morality and for moral pluralism. However, these conclusions may be overstated; across all these studies, a meta-analysis reveals that harm is a significant predictor of suicide judgments. Moreover, the association between harm and suicide wrongness may be suppressed in individual studies by insufficient power, restrictive exclusion criteria, a single bivariate outlier, and reliance upon the conventional significance threshold of p < .05. In revised analyses harm is robustly associated with suicide wrongness, consistent with dyadic morality.     

Overgeneralizing Belonging: Limited Exposure to Baby-Faced Targets Increases the Feeling of Social Belonging

We tested the hypothesis that exposure to babyish faces can serve a social surrogacy function, such that even limited exposure to babyish faces can fulfill social belongingness needs. We manipulated the sex and facial maturity of a target face seen in an imagined social interaction, on a between-participants basis. Regardless of target sex, individuals indicated greater satisfaction of social belongingness needs following an imagined interaction with a babyish face, compared to a mature adult face. These results indicate that brief exposure to babyish (relative to mature) faces, even without an extensive interaction, can lead to the satisfaction of social belongingness needs.     

Historicism and Critique in Herder's Another Philosophy of History: Some Hermeneutic Reflections

In Another Philosophy of History, J.G. Herder claims that his aim is not to compare and judge different cultures, but merely to describe and explain how each came into being and thus to adopt the standpoint of an impartial observer. I argue, however, that there is a tension between Herder's understanding of his own project—his stated doctrine of historicism and cultural relativism—and the way in which it is actually put into practice. That is, despite Herder's stated aims, he is nevertheless unable to avoid justifying premodern forms of life and making context‐transcending evaluative judgments in the process of trying to understand cultures on their own terms and holding them up as exemplars vis à vis the Enlightenment. This tension presents the challenge of accounting for it in the most charitable and illuminating way. I argue that this goal can be achieved by appealing to the resources of the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans‐Georg Gadamer, which enables us to disclose two enabling conditions for Herder's project of which he was not explicitly aware, viz., the internal connection between understanding and justification and the enabling character of prejudice as the condition for the possibility of understanding as such.     

An American Drag Queen in West Berlin: The Negotiation of Homosexual Identity,Transgressive Behavior and Social Acceptance in late 1960s and early 1970s West Germany

My work analyzes a number of confrontations between Tobi Marsh, a gay drag queen, and his German-Jewish landlord, Stark, in late 1960s and early 1970s West Berlin. Based upon an extensive personal interview with Marsh, my work uses subjective testimony to examine the complexity of lived-experience for gay men in Bundesrepublik society right at the time when the West Germany government extended full political and legal equality to gay men. Marsh’s testimony details two separate incidents during which Stark, who knew Marsh was openly gay and performed as a drag queen, attacked Marsh’s sexual orientation. While perhaps not significant in and of itself, a closer look at Marsh’s account reveals that Stark made use of very specific social contexts in order to condemn Marsh’s sexual identity. In fact, on both occasions some other social transgression entirely served as a catalyst to the confrontation, one a racial transgression and another an ethno-religious transgression. In both cases, however, Stark made use of the situation of a “double-transgression” to censure Marsh and his company first and foremost as homosexuals. At the same time, the sexual nature of Stark’s outbursts reveals that Stark was actually concerned about the tenuous standing and respectability of his own person and household as a likewise marginalized individual in West German society. Indeed, Stark’s attacks on Marsh’s homosexuality were disguised attempts to assert his own position in “respectable” West German society at Marsh’s expense. Marsh’s run-ins with Stark, then, both add to the growing literature on the various forms of informal prejudice suffered by gay men in post-World War II West German society and serve as a larger lens through which to view the rich complexity of life for gay men in a country still undergoing democratization where social belonging was being negotiated along a number of fronts.