Personal Political Salience: The Role of Personality in Collective Identity and Action

Personal political salience (PPS) is proposed as a personality characteristic that assesses individuals' linkage of political events with their personal identities. Its role in facilitating the development of politicized collective identity and action is examined. In four samples of midlife and activist women, we show that PPS was consistently related both to politicized gender identity and political participation. Further analyses show similar results for PPS, politicized racial identity, and political participation. Politicized gender identity mediated the relationship between PPS and women's rights activism, and politicized racial identity mediated the relationship between PPS and civil rights activism. PPS is demonstrated to independently predict political action and also to provide a personality link between group memberships, politicized collective identity, and political participation.     

Reconciliation and variation in post-conflict stress in Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata fuscata): testing the integrated hypothesis

Reconciliation in primates, a post-conflict affiliative interaction between former opponents, appears to have two functions: (1) to repair relationship damaged by aggression such that animals who share more valuable relationships are more likely to reconcile, and (2) to reduce the post-conflict uncertainty and stress of former combatants. The 'integrated hypothesis' of reconciliation links these functions by arguing that the disturbance of a valuable relationship by aggression should result in particularly high levels of stress, which in turn should facilitate efforts to reconcile and thus gain relief from post-conflict stress. A key prediction of the integrated hypothesis is that victims of aggression suffer more stress following conflicts with individuals with whom they share a valuable relationship. In this article, we test the integrated hypothesis by observing the post-conflict behaviour of victims among a free-ranging provisioned troop of Japanese macaques (Macaca fuscata fuscata) living in Shiga Heights, Nagano, Japan. In this troop, monkeys reconciled roughly one in seven conflicts. The only factor that we could significantly relate to the occurrence of reconciliation was kinship; kin reconciled more frequently than non-kin did. Receiving aggression increased and reconciliation reduced the probability of being re-attacked after aggressive interactions, supporting the hypothesis that reconciliation repairs relationships. Victims' self-directed behaviour (SDB) – a behavioural index of stress comprising increases in scratching, self-grooming, and body-shaking – was elevated following aggression but decreased rapidly following reconciliation, supporting the idea that reconciliation functions to reduce post-conflict stress. Post-conflict SDB varied as follows: (1) victims showed a higher level of stress following aggression with kin than with non-kin, and (2) juvenile victims were less distressed than adults. The level of post-conflict SDB performed by juveniles following conflicts with kin was indistinguishable from that performed by adults but was greatly reduced following attacks from non-kin. These results indicate that post-conflict SDB keenly reflects the value of relationships between opponents, and that the post-conflict behaviour of free-ranging Japanese macaques fits the predictions of the integrated hypothesis. Accepted after revision: 11 September 2001 Electronic Publication     

Clowning—An opportunity for ministry

Experiences over five years interacting with patients as the clown Jingles and the experiment and experience of one afternoon as the clown Hairie in a hospital led the authors to reflect on the deeper meaning of clowns, their appearance during the centuries, their impact on people and relation to ministry. The presence of a clown changes the atmosphere and dynamics; clowns touch people in their deep feelings and may free them to laugh, to cry, or to play. Relating to others in lively ways brings up questions about the connections between the clown and God.     

Disclosure of Personal Problems, Self-Esteem, and the Facilitativeness of Friends and Lovers

The relationship between disclosure of personal problems, self-esteem, and Rogers' facilitative qualities of unconditional acceptance, empathy, and congruence in a casual friend, the closest friend of the same and opposite sex, and the romantic partner, was investigated in 104 females and 19 males (pooled together). They completed the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale, a shortened Barrett-Lennard Relationship Inventory, and a two-item index of disclosure of personal problems. Self-esteem was most strongly positively correlated with the facilitative qualities in the romantic partner, followed by the casual friend. Disclosure of personal problems was also positively related to these facilitative qualities. When the facilitativeness of the romantic relationship was controlled through partial correlation, the positive correlation between self-esteem and disclosure of personal problems was reduced to near zero, while that between self-esteem and the facilitativeness of the casual friend was little affected.     

Category effects in visual search: A failure to replicate the “oh-zero” phenomenon

In the experiment of Jonides and Gleitman (1972), subjects searched displays of digits or letters for single, specified digit or letter targets. The slope of the function relating reaction time to display size was positive (mean=25 msec/item) if target and nontargets belonged to the same alphanumeric category (within-category search), but zero if target and nontargets belonged to different categories (between-category search). This held even for the target O, whose categorical relationship to nontargets was determined entirely by the name it was given. In the present paper, two attempted replications are reported, one as close as practically possible. For the unambiguous targets A, Z, 2, and 4, slopes were greater in within-category search than in between-category search, but positive and very variable in both cases. For the ambiguous target O, slopes were identical in within-category and between-category search, and again positive. The results suggest that with single, specified targets, differences between within-category and between-category search may be due entirely to variation in the average physical resemblance between target and nontargets. In line with previous findings, they show that one cannot characterize within-category search as generally “serial” and between-category search as generally “parallel.”