Raising One Eyebrow and Re‐envisioning Justice,Gender, and the Family

As part of a celebration of Susan Okin's Justice, Gender, and the Family (JGF), this article notes how some impacts of the book were so accepted that their original source (JGF) has been forgotten. It goes on to make three critical arguments about 1) Okin's pared‐down account of gender injustice, 2) her choice to embrace the Rawlsian distributive view of justice, and 3) her treatment of the family as the linchpin of gender injustice.     

SCIENCE AND THE FORTUNES OF NATURAL THEOLOGY: SOME HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVES

Abstract. The object is to examine strategies commonly used to heighten a sense of the sacred in nature. It is argued that moves designed to reinforce a concept of Providence have been the very ones to release new opportunities for secular readings. Several case studies reveal this fluidity across a sacred-secular divide. The irony whereby sacred readings of nature would graduate into the secular is also shown to operate in reverse as anti-providentialist strategies invited their own refutation. The analysis is used to support the claim that the sciences have put fewer constraints on religious belief than is generally assumed.     

Error patterns in the judgment and production of numerical proportions

Sinusoidal constant error curves frequently occur in the judgment of nurnerical proportions, but there are puzzling discrepancies in the direction of constant error reported in various experiments. An experiment showed that the direction of constant error was reversed when the required response changed from judgment to production of proportions. It is concluded that errors are perceptual in origin rather than reflecting response biases. One subject showed an error pattern opposite to the group mean, both in judgment and in production. It is speculated that the discrepancies hetween reported results may primarily reflect the random assortment of subjects with consistent, but fundamentally different, characteristics.     

The role of postdeployment social factors in linking deployment experiences and current posttraumatic stress disorder symptomatology among male and female veterans

Background and Objectives: The postdeployment social context is likely highly salient in explaining mental health symptoms following deployment. The aim of this study was to examine the role of postdeployment social factors (social support and social reintegration difficulty) in linking deployment-related experiences (warfare exposure, sexual harassment, concerns about relationship disruptions, and deployment social support) and posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) symptomatology in male and female veterans.

Design: A survey was administered to 998 potential participants (after accounting for undeliverable mail) who had returned from deployment to Afghanistan or Iraq. Completed surveys were received from 469 veterans, yielding a response rate of 47%.

Methods: Hypotheses were examined using structural equation modeling.

Results: For male and female veterans, deployment factors predicted later PTSD symptoms through postdeployment social support and social reintegration, with lower support and higher social reintegration difficulty both associated with higher PTSD symptomatology. While the final models for women and men indicated similar risk mechanisms, some differences in pathways were observed. Sexual harassment presented more of a risk for women, whereas lower social support was a greater risk factor for men.

Conclusions: Postdeployment social factors appear to represent potentially important targets for interventions aiming to reduce the potential impact of stressful deployment experiences.     

Social likeability,conformity, and body talk: Does fat talk have a normative rival in female body image conversations?

Fat talk, dialogues among women involving negative body-focused discussions, was studied as a function of conformity and social likeability through the use of four vignettes depicting young women in conversation. Using a 2 (body presentation style of the group: negative or positive) × 2 (body presentation style of the target, Jenny: negative or positive) factorial design, 215 college women (92.1% non-Hispanic Caucasian) read one of four vignettes in a classroom setting and made ratings on a social likeability scale. Participants’ personal ratings of Jenny's likeability were higher when she spoke positively about her body, whereas they expected the other group members in the vignette to like Jenny more when she conformed to the group's body presentation style. This study is the first to support two competing norms for women's body image—the existing norm to fat talk versus a newly documented norm that some women like others who express body acceptance.     

Measuring Implicit British Perceptions of German Intentions in 1938–1939

Implicit British perceptions of German leaders during the period September 30, 1938–September 1, 1939 (from the Munich Agreements to the German invasion of Poland) are studied with a "ratio of threat accentuation" measure. This ratio is calculated by comparing the densities of power motive imagery in two kinds of archival material: full texts of major Hitler speeches versus summaries in The Times of London, and British versus German accounts of meetings between British diplomats and major Nazi leaders. In both cases, the British ratio of threat accentuation increases following the unexpected German occupation of Prague and the rest of Czechoslovakia on March 15, 1939. These changes in implicit perception are congruent with changes in British explicit perceptions and foreign policy after the German action.