The social network of solidarity with migrants: The role of perceived injunctive norms on intergroup helping behaviors

Using an ego-centered network approach, we examine across two studies whether and how injunctive network norms—behaviors that are approved by alters—are related to majority members’ decisions to participate in helping actions supporting migrants. We hypothesize that the more people perceive their personal social networks as positive toward humanitarian actions for migrants, the more they consider their opinions on migration issues as self-defining, and the more they are willing to mobilize in helping behaviors. With a name generator approach, we collected personal social network data among majority members of Belgian, mobilized volunteers (Study 1, N = 204) and Swiss, non-mobilized participants (Study 2, N = 247). Results demonstrate the impact of injunctive network norms in promoting and maintaining helping actions for migrants, and the role of self-defining attitudes. Overall, the results highlight the importance of injunctive norms within personal social networks for participation in intergroup helping behaviors.     

Holy Apparition or Hyper-Religiosity: Prevalence of Explanatory Models for Religious and Spiritual Experiences in Patients with Bipolar Disorder and Their Associations with Religiousness

Pastoral Psychology - One point that emerges from qualitative research on religion and bipolar disorder (BD) is the problem patients with BD experience in distinguishing between genuine religious...     

The influence of mood on the search for supporting versus conflicting information: dissonance reduction as a means of mood regulation?

Focusing on similarities between the mood regulation approach and dissonance theory, this article addresses the interplay between dissonance and mood by examining how individuals search for information after making a decision while under the influence of positive versus negative mood. Study 1 suggested that negative mood increased the preference for consonant over dissonant information after decisions, whereas positive mood led to a more balanced information search. In Study 2, participants in negative mood rated consonant information as more pleasant and dissonant information as more annoying than participants in positive mood. In addition, the results suggested that mood regulation processes took place. In Study 3, the findings from Study 1 were replicated with a paradigm in which higher stakes were involved.     

Guilty by mere association: evaluative conditioning and the spreading attitude effect

Five experiments investigated the phenomenon that attitude formation is not confined to the co-occurrence of an attitudinal object with an evaluated experience. The pairing of a target with a (dis)liked person not only affects the evaluation of the previously neutral person but spreads to other individuals who are (pre)associated with the target (spreading attitude effect). Experiments 1 and 2 provided evidence for the spreading attitude effect in appetitive as well as aversive evaluative conditioning. Experiment 3 showed that the spreading attitude effect is a robust phenomenon resistant to extinction. Experiment 4 demonstrated that attitude spread can be transferred to 2nd-order conditioning. Finally, Experiment 5 supports the notion that the spreading attitude effect is not dependent on cognitive resources. Implications for social as well as applied psychology are discussed.     

Multidimensionality and bipolarity of a Spanish version of Warr's (1990) well-being measures

The validity and reliability of the Spanish version of the 2 scales measuring work-related well-being proposed by P. Warr (1990; Anxiety-Contentment and Depression-Enthusiasm) were examined in a cross-sectional questionnaire study among 299 Spanish factory employees. Two methods suggested by Warr (1990) to control the response bias (acquiescent response set) were used. The 1st method involved separate analyses for the 6 positive and 6 negative items that make up the 2 scales. The 2nd was a series of 4 principal component analyses with oblique rotation on the estimated response set controlled in partial correlation between each item. The results support the existence of these 2 independent scales for measuring work-related psychological well-being as hypothesised by Warr (1990). However, 2 main problems appear: the cross-loading of the items contented and cheerful and the fact that only I factor appears in the pre-rotated solution. Possible explanations for these results are discussed.     

The case for responsibility of the IT industry to promote equality for women in computing

This paper investigates the relationship between the role that information technology (IT) has played in the development of women’s employment, the possibility of women having a significant influence on the technology’s development, and the way that the IT industry perceives women as computer scientists, users and consumers. The industry’s perception of women and men is investigated through the portrayal of them in computing advertisements. While women are increasingly updating their technological skills and know-how, and through this process are entering some positions in the workplace traditionally occupied by men, these achievements are not mirrored in their social and occupational status. The computer industry and higher education have worryingly low numbers of women, while the possibility of women influencing the development of computer technology is just emerging in feminist research. This paper argues that, though the IT industry, through their self-regulatory codes, subscribes to equal treatment of sexes, races and persons with disabilities, the industry nevertheless paints a stereotyped picture of inequality when portraying men and women in computer advertisements. As long as such a perception of women prevails within the industry, it will stand as a barrier to women having equal access to computer technology. If advertisements influence the way society perceives major social constructs and issues, then the computing industry has a social responsibility to portray men and women in an equal and non-stereotypical fashion. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the ETHICOMP98 Conference, Rotterdam, Holland, March 1998.     

Semisupervised category learning facilitates the development of automaticity

In the human category of learning, learning is studied in a supervised, an unsupervised, or a semisupervised way. The rare human semisupervised category of learning studies all focus on early learning. However, the impact of the semisupervised category learning late in learning, when automaticity develops, is unknown. Therefore, in Experiment 1, all participants were first trained on the information-integration category structure for 2 days until they reached an expert level. Afterwards, half of the participants learned in a supervised way and the other half in a semisupervised way over two successive days. Both groups received an equal number of feedback trials. Finally, all participants took part in a test day where they were asked to respond as quickly as possible. Participants were significantly faster on this test in the semisupervised group than in the supervised group. This difference was not found on day 2, implying that the no-feedback trials in the semisupervised condition facilitated automaticity. Experiment 2 was designed to test whether the higher number of trials in the semisupervised condition of Experiment 1 caused the faster response times. We therefore created an almost supervised condition where participants almost always received feedback (95%) and an almost unsupervised condition where participants almost never received feedback (5%). All conditions now contained an equal number of trials to the semisupervised condition of Experiment 1. The results show that receiving feedback almost always or almost never led to slower response times than the semisupervised condition of Experiment 1. This confirms the advantage of semisupervised learning late in learning.