Examining awareness of privilege among midwestern college students: An analysis of race/ethnicity,gender, and religion

Dominant group members often are not aware of the privileges they benefit from due to their dominant group membership. Yet individuals are members of multiple groups and may simultaneously occupy multiple categories of dominance and marginality, raising the question of how different group memberships work in concert to facilitate or inhibit awareness of multiple forms of privilege. Examining awareness of privilege is important as awareness may be linked to action to dismantle systems of privilege that maintain oppression and inequality. Grounded in intersectional scholarship, in this study we examined how occupying intersecting categories of race/ethnicity, gender, and religion corresponded to an awareness of White, male, and Christian privilege. In a sample of 2321 Midwestern college students, we demonstrated that students from marginalized groups broadly reported greater awareness of all forms of privilege than students from dominant groups, and the difference between marginalized and dominant groups was most pronounced when the specific group category (e.g., gender) aligned with the type of privilege (e.g., male privilege). We also tested interactions among race/ethnicity, gender, and religion, only finding an interaction between race/ethnicity and religion for awareness of White and male privilege. These findings helped to clarify that multiple group memberships tended to contribute to awareness as multiple main effects rather than as multiplicative. Finally, we examined mean differences among the eight intersected groups to explore similarities and differences among groups in awareness of all types of privilege. Taken together, these findings quantitatively demonstrate the ways in which group memberships work together to contribute to awareness of multiple forms of privilege. We discuss study limitations and implications for community psychology research and practice.     

Language preference in the domestic dog (Canis familiaris)

Animal Cognition - Studies have shown that both cotton-top tamarins as well as rats can discriminate between two languages based on rhythmic cues. This is similar to the capabilities of young...     

Reducing intergroup anxiety: Applying an imagined contact intervention with counselors-in-training

This study assessed the impacts of an (elaborated) imagined contact intervention (eICI) with graduate-level counseling students (N = 38) in a multicultural counseling course. Participant levels of intergroup anxiety were assessed, comparing those who completed an eICI versus those who did not. Intergroup anxiety decreased for both groups over time, albeit with a greater immediate reduction for those who received the ICI. Qualitative commentary suggests specific student learning from the activity.     

Effects of surface texture on weight perception when lifting objects with a precision grip

In this paper, we show that, when lifting an object using a precision grip with the distal pads of the thumb and index finger at its sides, the perceived weight depends on the object’s surface texture. The smoother the surface texture, the greater the perceived weight. We suggest that a smoother object is judged to be heavier because the grip force, normal to the surface, required to prevent it from slipping is greater. The possibility of there being an influence of surface texture per se is excluded by a second experiment that employed a variant of the precision grip in which the thumb supports the weight of the object from underneath. With the grip oriented in this way, there is no need to match grip force to surface texture and, under these conditions, there is no effect of surface texture on weight perception. In the first two experiments, the test and comparison weights were lifted successively by the same hand. In a third experiment, the effect of surface texture was replicated for sequential lifts made with separate hands. Thus, the effect is not restricted to comparisons made with the same hand.     

Repetition blindness and bilingual memory: Token individuation for translation equivalents

The repetition blindness effect (RB) occurs when individuals are unable to recall a repeated word relative to a nonrepeated word in a sentence or string of words presented in a rapid serial visual presentation task. This effect was explored across languages (English and Spanish) in an attempt to provide evidence for RB at a conceptual level using noncognate translation equivalents (e.g.,nephew-sobrino). In the first experiment, RB was found when a word was repeated in an English sentence but not when the two repetitions were in different languages. In the second experiment, RB was found for identical repetitions in Spanish and in English using word lists. However, the crosslanguage condition produced significant facilitation in recall, suggesting that although conceptual processing had taken place, semantic overlap was not sufficient to produce RB. The results confirm Kanwisher’s (1987) token individuation hypothesis in the case of translation equivalents.     

Sexual responding of “nonrapists” to aggressive sexual themes: Normative data

The present study presents data relevant to the sexual responding to aggressive cues of a large sample of nonrapist males recruited from the community. Two hundred three subjects received physiological assessment of sexual arousal to heterosexual and rape stimuli. Results indicated that under instructions not to interfere with sexual responding, approximately 80% of the nonrapists would be correctly classified, which was significantly different from chance. However, under instructions to suppress arousal, classification was no better than chance. The rape index was not related to age, socioeconomic status, sexual experience, or amount of arousal shown in the laboratory. However, there was a small but significant relationship to IQ. Overall, the data suggest that for instructions not to interfere with responding, the error rate seen in this larger-scale sample was equivalent to that in previous studies using smaller normative samples and that classification in general is not biased by the subject characteristics measured in this study.Portions of this project were supported by USPHS Grant MH-34030-02 from the Center for the Studies of Crime and Delinquency and by Tennessee Department of Mental Health and Mental Retardation Research Contract ID-0783 to the Department of Psychiatry.     

Distignuishing the source of memories reported during prior waking and hypnotic recall attempts

Subjects attempted to identify the occasion on which they first reported particular responses to questions that were asked twice during an experiment on hyphosis and memory 1 week earlier. During this earlier experiment, subjects of high and low hypnotizability had been randomly allocatd to one of two recall test sequences: wake-hypnosis ro wake-wake. Recall improved from the first (R1) to the second test (R2) in a comparable manner for both test sequences, indicating a failure of hypnosis to enhance memory. It is noteworthy that, when later queried about the origins of specific recollections, the majority of subjects exhibited a bias to attribute their responses to R1, regardless of whether hypnosis was used during R2. Moreover, low hypnotizables exposed to the hypnotic procedure and, to a lesser extent, high hypnotizables who recalled both times in the waking condition displayed and exaggerated tendency to overattribute recollections to R1. These data indicate that individuals cannot distinguish between memories retrieved prior to hypnosis and those that occured during hypnosis. Implications for implementing judicial standards regarding hypnosis are discussed.     

A factor analytic study of teachers' ratings of the personality of school children

Teachers' rating on 70 adjectives that described the personality of school children were factor analysed. Four main factors emerged, and the adjectives loading most highly on each were selected to form four subscales of a New Teachers Rating Scale (NTRS). The subscales were named Good Pupil, Extraversion, Psychoticism and Neuroticism. Normative data for the scale were reported. Correlations with self-rated personality inventories such as the JEPQ, JEPI and CPQ indicated that: the Extraversion subscale correlated with JEPI-E and CPQ-Exvia, the Psychoticism subscale correlated with EPQ-P, CPQ-Exvia and CPQ-Anxiety, while the Good Pupil subscale correlated positively with JEPI-E, and negatively with JEPQ-P and CPQ-Anxiety. The Neuroticism subscale did not correspond to Eysenck's measures of Neuroticism but correlated with CPQ-Anxiety. Test-retest reliability of the subscales ranged between 0.75 and 0.92. The usefulness of the NTRS in complementing self-rated personality measures and the need to explore the nature of self-rated and teacher-rated neuroticism were discussed.