Sovereign Debt

This essay examines the concept of sovereign debt in both political‐economic and theological registers. Elaborating the dynamics of monetary economy, I demonstrate how postures of indebtedness characterize the relationship between sovereign power and the governed. While taxation signals the debt of obedience and fealty owed to sovereignty, the monetary circuit reveals that sovereign power exists in a state of indebtedness to the governed. The morally valenced proximity between debt and guilt helps to perpetuate such relations. Tracing these resonances and resemblances in the theological realm, I consider the centrality of debt as a structuring principle in key soteriological traditions within Christian thought. Not only does God appear to uphold debt logic, but God, I claim, becomes identified with debt and marked as a debtor. The divine sovereign as debtor and as enforcing debt provides cues for earthly sovereigns and legitimates cultures of debt. In light of the theopolitical legacy in the West, the mutual influence between theology and the political realm, refiguring this set of influential theological concepts may prove helpful in decentering debt as a governing principle in modern life.     

Perceived COVID-induced racism and contextual predictors of fear and psychological distress among Black men

The present study examined if Black men's perceptions of COVID-induced racism (i.e., the extent to which racism increased during the beginning months of the COVID-19 pandemic) were associated with their reported fear of COVID-19 and psychological distress. Self-report COVID-related variables and psychological distress data from 231 Black men in the U.S. were analyzed alongside archival percentages of confirmed cases and deaths by participants' county at the time of participation. Hierarchical regressions identified perceptions of COVID-induced racism as a significant predictor of Black men's psychological distress over and above contextual (e.g., county-level COVID-19 case %) and individual-level predictors (i.e., perceived race-related infection risk and self-reported COVID-related stressful life events). This work contributes to the growing literature on health inequities during the COVID-19 pandemic with a snapshot of Black men's experiences during the COVID-19 and racism pandemics of 2020 in the U.S.     

Eastern versus Western Control Beliefs at Work: An Investigation of Secondary Control, Socioinstrumental Control, and Work Locus of Control in China and the US

La théorie et la recherche concernant les croyances (LOC) et les perceptions du contrôle suggèrent que les Asiatiques tendent à obtenir des scores plus bas et àêtre plus passifs que les Américains, mais ces travaux ont été menés à l’aide de concepts et d’échelles développés principalement aux USA qui certifient une primauté du contrôle interne (ex: en changeant l’environnement pour l’adapter à soi). Une équipe de recherche internationale a étendu la notion de croyance dans le contrôle en développant des échelles qui permettent de reconsidérer la notion en faisant état de croyances secondaires dans le contrôle (ex: en adaptant le soi à l’environnement) et de faire état d’un concept nouveau de croyances socio‐instrumentales (ex: le contrôle par les relations interpersonelles) qui permettent de rendre compte de manière plus pertinente des croyances en un contrôle dans les cultures collectivistes. Nous nous attendions à ce que, par l’utilisation d’échelles culturellement appropriées, les Américains n’obtiennent pas une croyance en un contrôle plus importante que les Asiatiques. Les hypothèses ont été partiellement confirmées en ce que les Américains se sont montrés comme obtenant un contrôle plus bas que les Chinois (de Hong Kong et de RP de Chine) sur ces échelles. Il est suggéré que voir les Asiatiques comme évitant passivement le contrôle au travail peut être incorrect et dû aux insuffisances de contrôle socio‐instrumental. Research and theory concerning beliefs (locus of control) and perceptions of control suggest that Asians tend to be lower and more passive than Americans, but this work has been conducted mainly with US‐developed constructs and scales that assess primary control (i.e. changing the environment to adapt to the self). An international research team expanded the notion of control beliefs by developing scales to assess secondary control beliefs (i.e. adapting the self to the environment) and the new construct of socioinstrumental control beliefs (i.e. control via interpersonal relationships), both of which were thought to better fit the control beliefs of collectivist cultures than Western‐developed control scales. We expected that, when culturally appropriate scales were employed, Americans would not show higher control beliefs than Asians. Hypotheses were partially confirmed that Americans would be lower than Chinese (Hong Kong and PR China) on these new scales. It is suggested that views of Asians as passive avoiders of control at work may be incorrect and due to the overlooking of socioinstrumental control.     

Violence Exposure and PTSD: The Role of English Language Fluency in Latino Youth

Although Latinos have been a rapidly growing population in the US, little is known about how mental health symptoms may present in Latino children especially in the context of those living in poverty and exposed to violence. We explored the level of violence exposure and trauma symptoms in Latino youth and the relationship of these factors with English language fluency. During 2000–2002, 1,601, Latino students from seven middle schools participated in a school-based screening to identify students with exposure to community violence and symptoms of Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD). The students completed a self-report instrument, in either Spanish or English, that combined a modified version of the Life Events Scale and the Child PTSD Symptom Scale (CPSS). Bivariate analyses and multivariate regression models showed that youth with higher English language fluency reported greater violence exposure and PTSD symptoms than those with lower fluency. No difference was found in functioning by English language fluency. English language fluency appears to be related to violence exposure and PTSD symptoms in these Latino youth. We discuss the importance of school-based programs especially designed to serve Latino students of varying English language fluency.     

Redefining synaesthesia?

In a thought-provoking paper, Simner (2012) highlights and criticizes a number of assumptions concerning synaesthesia. She specifically takes issue with the following assumptions: (1) synaesthesia is strictly a sensory-perceptual phenomenon; (2) consistency of inducer-concurrent pairs is the gold standard for establishing the authenticity of an individual's synaesthesia; and (3) synaesthesia is not heterogeneous. In the wake of this critique, Simner advances a working definition of synaesthesia as a neurological hyper-association that aims to be more inclusive of its variants. We are very sympathetic to Simner's approach and believe that it raises important points that will advance our understanding of synaesthesia. Here we supplement, and sometimes challenge, some of these ideas.     

Cross-group recognition bias generalizes to diverse non-face representations of digital identity

We investigated the potential for cross-group recognition bias, the reliable tendency for perceivers to better recognize people who share their ethnic or social groups than people who do not share their ethnic or social groups, with diverse non-face representations of digital identity. We compared German participants' memory for people they believed to be German or French when those people were identified using non-face pictorial representations of identity (Studies 1 and 2) and verbal written representations of identity (Study 3) taken from the World Wide Web. Participants better recognized ingroup targets than outgroup targets regardless of type of identity representation. These results generalize cross-group recognition bias to an important new domain as well as to a new class of stimuli and suggest that process explanations of cross-group recognition bias that are domain specific to faces do not provide a comprehensive account of the bias.     

Working Memory Capacity and Learning Underlying Conceptual Relationships Across Multiple Documents

A common usage of textual repositories of information is to seek out and gather important information for a specific learning goal. However, not all material is organized in a single location, and users are often forced to visit multiple pages or sources to develop understanding. In these situations, are different learners more or less sensitive to drawing the underlying connections between multiple documents, which are relevant for the eventual learning goals? This study examines the performance of undergraduates who vary in working memory capacity as they were asked to learn about plants from a Wiki‐like website. Participants were pretested on their knowledge of both biology and the plant kingdom. Results indicate that learning underlying conceptual structure is indeed predicted by working memory, but not prior knowledge. This suggests that individual characteristics should be considered when designing learning technologies in the future. Copyright © 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Alignment to visual speech information

Speech alignment is the tendency for interlocutors to unconsciously imitate one another’s speaking style. Alignment also occurs when a talker is asked to shadow recorded words (e.g., Shockley, Sabadini, & Fowler, 2004). In two experiments, we examined whether alignment could be induced with visual (lipread) speech and with auditory speech. In Experiment 1, we asked subjects to lipread and shadow out loud a model silently uttering words. The results indicate that shadowed utterances sounded more similar to the model’s utterances than did subjects’ nonshadowed read utterances. This suggests that speech alignment can be based on visual speech. In Experiment 2, we tested whether raters could perceive alignment across modalities. Raters were asked to judge the relative similarity between a model’s visual (silent video) utterance and subjects’ audio utterances. The subjects’ shadowed utterances were again judged as more similar to the model’s than were read utterances, suggesting that raters are sensitive to cross-modal similarity between aligned words.     

Modality effects in rhythm processing: Auditory encoding of visual rhythms is neither obligatory nor automatic

Modality effects in rhythm processing were examined using a tempo judgment paradigm, in which participants made speeding-up or slowing-down judgments for auditory and visual sequences. A key element of stimulus construction was that the expected pattern of tempo judgments for critical test stimuli depended on a beat-based encoding of the sequence. A model-based measure of degree of beat-based encoding computed from the pattern of tempo judgments revealed greater beat sensitivity for auditory rhythms than for visual rhythms. Visual rhythms with prior auditory exposure were more likely to show a pattern of tempo judgments similar to that for auditory rhythms than were visual rhythms without prior auditory exposure, but only for a beat period of 600 msec. Slowing down the rhythms eliminated the effect of prior auditory exposure on visual rhythm processing. Taken together, the findings in this study support the view that auditory rhythms demonstrate an advantage over visual rhythms in beat-based encoding and that the auditory encoding of visual rhythms can be facilitated with prior auditory exposure, but only within a limited temporal range. The broad conclusion from this research is that “hearing visual rhythms” is neither obligatory nor automatic, as was previously claimed by Guttman, Gilroy, and Blake (2005).