Are members of low status groups perceived as bad, or badly off? Egalitarian negative associations and automatic prejudice

Three studies explored the hypothesis that implicit measures of prejudice can tap negative, yet egalitarian associations. In Study 1, automatically associating African Americans with oppression predicted greater automatic prejudice. In Studies 2 and 3, classically conditioning associations between the novel group Noffians and words like oppressed, maltreated, and victimized led to greater automatic prejudice against Noffians. Results suggest that White Americans’ negative automatic associations with African Americans may partly result from associating members of low status groups with unfair circumstances. Because automatic associations predict prejudiced behaviors, the burden of proof is on those wishing to argue that egalitarian negative associations complicate the assessment of automatic attitudes rather than contribute to prejudiced responses. Discussion focuses on the implications of egalitarian negative associations for the theory and measurement of automatic prejudice.     

Temporal Parts and Timeless Parthood

What is a temporal part? Most accounts explain it in terms of timeless parthood: a thing's having a part without temporal qualification. Some find this hard to understand, and thus find the view that persisting things have temporal parts—four‐dimensionalism—unintelligible. T. Sider offers to help by defining temporal parthood in terms of a thing's having a part at a time. I argue that no such account can capture the notion of a temporal part that figures in orthodox four‐dimensionalism: temporal parts must be timeless parts. This enables us to state four‐dimensionalism more clearly.     

Dishabituation in Aplysia can involve either reversal of habituation or superimposed sensitization

Dishabituation has been thought to be due either to reversal of the process of habituation or to a second process equivalent to sensitization superimposed on habituation. One way to address this question is by testing whether dishabituation and sensitization can be dissociated. Previous studies using this approach in Aplysia have come to different conclusions about the nature of dishabituation, perhaps because those studies differed in many respects, including (1) whether they also observed transient behavioral inhibition, and (2) whether they used test stimuli that activated the LE siphon sensory neurons or as yet unidentified sensory neurons. To attempt to resolve the apparent contradictions between the previous studies, we have explored the importance of these two factors by performing a parametric study of dishabituation and sensitization of gill withdrawal in a simplified preparation that does not exhibit transient behavioral inhibition, using two different test stimuli that are known to activate the LE (Touch) or unidentified (Not Touch) sensory neurons. We find that dishabituation and sensitization in this preparation have similar time courses and generally similar functions of shock intensity. However, under one condition, with the Not Touch stimulus 2.5 min after the shock, dishabituation has a reverse effect of shock intensity. Additional analyses suggest that dishabituation with the Not Touch stimulus 2.5 min after the shock is due to reversal of habituation, whereas 12.5 min after the shock, dishabituation is due to superimposed sensitization. These results thus suggest that dishabituation may involve either process in the same preparation, and begin to define the conditions that favor one or the other.     

Boys will be boys: a pre‐line‐up gameplay has beneficial effects on boys' but not girls' identification performance

Fifty children, aged between 4 and 7 years, underwent a sequential photo line‐up procedure in order to identify a man they had met the previous day. Half of the participants engaged in a pre‐procedure gameplay with the female interviewer. It was hypothesised that the game would stimulate rapport building and would ultimately result in an increased performance during the line‐up procedure. The beneficial effect was indeed observed, but only for the male participants. This finding suggests that gameplay may be a fruitful strategy to decrease child witness discomfort and to increase participation. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Messages about sex in the workplace: A content analysis of primetime television

Because television has the potential to shape cultural beliefs about both sexual norms and appropriate workplace behavior, it seems important to examine TV’s portrayal of “sexual etiquette” in the workplace. In a content analysis of two episodes of every primetime comedy aired on all broadcast and cable networks during fall 2000, we coded every sexual remark and behavior made in a workplace scene. Across all networks, 85 percent of programs and one in four workplace interactions contained some type of sexual content. Overall, a viewer is likely to hear eleven sexual remarks and see two to three sexual behaviors in a workplace setting per hour; this jumps to twenty-three remarks and nine behaviors on cable networks. Sexual remarks were mostly explicit, made in an office setting, by White men, and were rarely (1.4%) about sexual harassment or discrimination. Although sexual content in the workplace was generally less common on broadcast than cable networks, a broadcast network (Fox) actually had the highest overall rate, with sexual content in 38 percent of workplace scenes. Given that research suggests that TV teaches youth about sexuality and cultivates sexual attitudes and beliefs consistent with televised portrayals, it is alarming that youth may learn from television that sex in the workplace is not only commonplace, but also to be tolerated and enjoyed.     

Indiscernible Persons

In this article I discuss identity and indiscernibility for person-stages and persons. Identity through time is not an identity relation (it is a unity relation). Identity is carefully distinguished from persistence. Identity is timeless and necessary. Person-stages are carefully distinguished from persons. Theories of personal persistence are not theories of identity for persons. I deal not with the persistence of persons through time but with the timeless and necessary identity and indiscernibility of persons. I argue that it is possible that there are non-identical but indiscernible temporally whole persons. I discuss the biographies of persons and develop the type or token distinction for persons. Twins in symmetrical or eternally recurrent universes are examples of indiscernible persons. I discuss temporal and modal branching, and I end with survival for person-tokens and eternity for person-types.     

Religious Coping and Church-Based Social Support as Predictors of Mental Health Outcomes: Testing a Conceptual Model

This study assesses religious coping and church-based social support as mechanisms explaining religious benefits to mental health. We build on recent research and test an explanatory model using the 1998 General Social Survey. The model considers both institutional and individual aspects of religiousness, and their interrelations, as predictors of mental health outcomes. It considers negative effects of religion along with the well-known positive effects. We found that benefits of attendance, a measure of institutional participation, are mediated by church-based social support. Benefits of prayer, an individual form of religiousness, are mediated by the similarly privatized religious coping. Institutional measures of religion were found to impact individuals' religious coping styles. Implications are suggested for the scientific study of religion as well as for the applied efforts of clergy, pastoral counselors, and lay church members concerned with improving religious benefits.     

Manipulating the role of cognitive control while taking the implicit association test

The Implicit Association Test (IAT) is one of the most widely used methods for measuring attitudes in the behavioral and social sciences. Recent studies have found that individual differences in cognitive control correlate with IAT scores. However, these studies did not collect independent measures of attitude, which makes it difficult to isolate the construct of attitude separate from cognitive control. Furthermore, no study has examined whether the role of cognitive control can be manipulated, which is necessary to establish a causal link between cognitive control and IAT performance. By collecting independent measures of attitude (explicit attitude ratings and the Affect Misattribution Procedure: AMP), Experiment 1 factored out the role of attitude for two different IATs and still found a relationship between IAT scores and cognitive control (Stroop and stop-signal). Experiments 2 and 3 manipulated the role of cognitive control through instructions and feedback regarding the race IAT's measurement goal. These manipulations increased average IAT scores (i.e., stronger preference for whites), increased the relationship with cognitive control (Stroop), and decreased the relationship with attitude (AMP). These results demonstrate that cognitive control influences IAT performance rather than merely correlating with IAT performance.     

Chronically stressed female rats show increased anxiety but no behavioral alterations in object recognition or placement memory: a preliminary examination

Stress, depending on intensity and duration, elicits adaptive or maladaptive physiological effects. Increasing evidence shows those patterns of advantageous versus deleterious physiologic stress effects also exist for some brain functions, including learning and memory. For example, short stress enhances, while chronic stress impairs, performance on numerous cognitive tasks in male rats. In contrast, performance of female rats is enhanced, or not altered, following both short-term and long-term stress exposure on the same behavioral tasks. The current study was designed to better characterize the behavioral effects of sustained chronic restraint stress in female rats. Female Sprague Dawley rats were assigned to a stress (restraint, 6 h/day, 35 days) or control (no stress) condition, weighed weekly, and then tested on open field (OF), object recognition (OR) and object placement (OP) tasks. Stressed females gained less weight during stress than controls. On the OF, there were no group differences in locomotor activity, but stressed females made fewer inner visits than controls, indicating increased anxiety. Both groups successfully performed the OP and OR tasks across all inter-trial delays, indicating intact non-spatial and spatial memory in both control and stress females. The current results provide preliminary evidence that the commonly used chronic restraint stress model may not be an efficient stressor to female rats.     

The Slip Induction Task: Creating a window into cognitive control failures

Regardless of age, education, or social status, we all experience moments where we ask ourselves, "what was I thinking?!?" Typically, we experience errors of this sort, or slips of action, during routine tasks that require a whole sequence of movements. However, most action slip research has focused on creating response conflict within single movements. The Slip Induction Task (SIT) is a step toward creating response conflict within truer to life action routines. As such, the SIT attempts to induce action slips in a well-learned movement routine through the occasional presentation of unexpected cues. We find that the SIT is able to reliably induce action slips, especially when the unexpected cue necessitates a movement to an unexpected target location. Furthermore, when participants are able to avoid an action slip, these changes in movement routine are accompanied by a cost in speed.