Images of Nuclear Activists in Four Countries

Students at colleges or universities in North Carolina (United States), Bath (England), Munich (West Germany) and Selangor (Malaysia) were asked to evaluate a nuclear activist who had engaged in one of three forms of protest against nuclear weapons, ranging from conventional to nonconventional. The age and gender of the activist was also varied; the activist was either male or female and either 22 years old or 72 years old. The overall images of the various activists were positive in all four locations, though the nature of the positive image differed in the four studies. In all four studies, the nature of the activism was of much greater importance than either the age or gender of the activist; the activist who engaged in the most nonconventional form of protest (resulting in his or her arrest) received the least positive ratings. Women evaluated the activists more positively than did men.     

Judgment Difficulty and the Moral Intensity of Unethical Acts: A Cognitive Response Analysis of Dual Process Ethical Judgment Formation

This study analyzes cognitive responses to explore a dual processing perspective of ethical judgment formation. Specifically, the study investigates how two factors, judgment task difficulty and moral intensity, influence the extent of deontological and teleological processing and their effects on ethical judgments. A single experiment on 110 undergraduate research participants found that judgment task difficulty affected the extent of deontological and teleological processing. Although moral intensity affected ethical judgments, it did not produce effects on either deontological or teleological cognitive responses. Results did not support the hypotheses that deontological and teleological cognitive responses would mediate the relationships between the experimental factors and ethical judgments. Overall, the results support continued research of factors that affect the nature of information processing in ethical decision situations and the use of cognitive response analysis as a tool for conducting this research.     

Doing and Redoing Emphasized Femininity: How Women Use Emotion Work to Manage Competing Expectations in College Hookup Culture

Sex Roles - Emphasized femininity plays a key role in maintaining gender inequality. Yet, classic conceptualizations of emphasized femininity render it static and inflexible, and obscure...     

Integrating The Diverse Definitions of Happiness: A Time-Sequential Framework of Subjective Well-Being

The field of subjective well-being (SWB) is primarily concerned with people's evaluation of their lives; however, it includes a wide range of concepts, from momentary moods to global life satisfaction judgments. We propose a framework that integrates these diverse constructs. Our sequential temporal framework of subjective well-being describes experiences of well-being from the events and circumstances that cause evaluative reactions, through the emotional reactions to these events, to recall of these reactions, and finally to global judgments of well-being based on the previous stages. The hypothesized processes that translate the various steps in the sequence into one another are described, and supporting evidence is reviewed. We outline the implications of our framework for understanding subjective well-being, and discuss the research that is needed to further explore the proposed framework.     

Evidence for dissociable neural mechanisms underlying inference generation in familiar and less-familiar scenarios

In this study, we investigated whether the left and right hemispheres are differentially involved in causal inference generation. Participants read short inference-promoting texts that described either familiar or less-familiar scenarios. After each text, they performed a lexical decision on a letter string (which sometimes constituted an inference-related word) presented directly to the left or right hemisphere. Response-time results indicated that hemisphere of direct presentation interacted with type of inference scenario. When test stimuli were presented directly to the left hemisphere, lexical decisions were facilitated following familiar but not following less-familiar inference scenarios, whereas when test stimuli were presented directly to the right hemisphere, facilitation was observed in both familiar and less-familiar conditions. Thus, inferences may be generated in different ways depending on which of two dissociable neural subsystems underlies the activation of background information.     

Hemispheric processing of anaphoric inferences: the activation of multiple antecedents

This research investigates the hemispheric processing of anaphors when readers activate multiple antecedents. Participants read texts promoting an anaphoric inference and performed a lexical decision task to inference-related target words that were consistent (Experiment 1) or inconsistent (Experiment 2) with the text. These targets were preceded by constrained or less constraining text and were presented to participants' right visual field-left hemisphere or to their left visual field-right hemisphere. In Experiment 1, both hemispheres showed facilitation for consistent antecedents and the right hemisphere showed an advantage over the left hemisphere in processing antecedents when preceded by less constrained text. In Experiment 2, the left hemisphere only showed negative facilitation for inconsistent antecedents. When readers comprehend text with multiple antecedents: both hemispheres process consistent information, the left hemisphere inhibits inconsistent information, and the right hemisphere processes less constrained information.