Self-denial as a paradox of political and regional social identity: Findings from a study of 16– and 18–year-olds

Data from a survey of 4591 16-19-year-olds from four parts of Britain demonstrate that a North-South divide is manifested both economically and politically. Southerners are materially better off and more supportive of the Conservative party. Adopting a social identity analysis of sectional effects, we hypothesized that party political support is a manifestation of identification with locality, and also that political support, rather than perceived deprivation, would be associated with intentions to stay in or move out of ones locality. Results revealed that Labour supporters in the north of England, and Conservative supporters in the south were most committed to their locality. In Scotland, where nationalism is more directly linked to political parties, those who supported the Scottish Nationalist Party or Labour Party identified more strongly with Scotland and had less intention to leave, but also perceived their situation as more disadvantaged than did Conservatives. These findings are interpreted as supporting a social identity approach to political support and geographical occupational mobility. We suggest that despite the apparent irrationality of self-denying perceptions and choices, these may also serve self-preserving functions in the longer term.     

Attention and perception: An information-integration perspective

Attentional effects in perceptual processing are analyzed within a framework of a fuzzy logical model of perception. The recognition of a pattern is conceptualized as involving three stages of processing: featural evaluation, integration of features, and pattern classification. The model predicts no loss of resolution when multiple sources of information are integrated to recognize a perceptual event. This model is contrasted with a single-channel model in which only one source of information can be recognized at a time. The task involves a relatively novel situation of speech perception by ear and eye. No attentional decrement is observed when observers process both auditory and visual speech specifying a single speech event. This result contrasts with previous studies showing a loss when attention has to be divided between different events along auditory and visual modalities. The different results are interpreted in terms of the number of events that have to be processed. Processing two different modalities leads to an attentional decrement when the two inputs specify different events whereas no attentional decrement occurs when these inputs are integrated to recognize a single event. A distinction is made between detection that requires only the evaluation of a single source of information and recognition that requires the evaluation and integration of multiple sources of information. The current framework is also used to discuss previous empirical and theoretical work and the issue of early versus late selection.