Social judgment of aggressive language: Effects of target and sender sex on the evaluation of slurs

We investigated the influence of the sex of the target and the sex of the sender on the judgment of slurs (verbal derogation). From previous research, we selected and clustered slurs into seven categories and respondents rated their degree of perceived insult in two consecutive questionnaire surveys (N = 281 and N = 224, respectively). Results confirm that slurs are generally judged as being more insulting when directed towards females than towards males. In comparison, differences in sex of sender were small. When directed towards females, slurs referring to “being loose” were rated as the most insulting. For both target sexes, remarks referring to homosexuality and physical unattractiveness were among those rated as the most insulting. Least insulting were slurs referring to unethical acts, lack of intelligence and cowardliness. A sex of respondent effect was found, suggesting that women rated slurs generally more insulting than men. The pattern of results showed considerable stability across surveys attesting for the reliability of the method for measuring the social evaluation of slurs.     

Temporal integration of face view sequences and recognition of novel views

When faces are learned from rotating view sequences, novel views may be recognized by matching them with an integrated representation of the sequence or with individual views. An integrated-representation process should benefit from short view durations, and thus from the inclusion of views in a short temporal window, allowing the distribution of attention over the entire sequence. A view-matching process should benefit from long view durations, allowing the attention to focus on each view. In a sequential comparison task, we tested the recognition of learned and novel interpolated and extrapolated views after learning faces from rapid and slow sequences (240 ms or 960 ms for each view). We found a superiority of rapid over slow sequences, in favour of the integrated-representation hypothesis. In addition, the recognition pattern for the different viewpoints in the sequence depended on the absence or presence of extrapolated views, showing a bias of the distribution of attention.     

Fan effects in event-based prospective memory

Three experiments investigated whether event-based prospective memory was affected by the associative fan of the cues to be detected. The associative fan was operationally defined as the number of associates paired with event-based cues in a paired associate learning phase. Subsequent to the paired associate learning, participants were given a lexical decision task in which event-based cues were embedded. The results from Experiments 1 and 2 confirmed that a larger associative fan significantly reduced event-based cue detection. The third experiment confirmed that the absolute strength of an association does not affect performance, rather the number of associations does. As an ancillary issue, the authors tested whether cue detection was affected by the familiarity of the background words used in the lexical decision task. No consistent evidence for a discrepancy plus search model of prospective memory was found.     

Focused attention on one contextual attribute does not reduce source memory for a different attribute

In three experiments, participants were asked to learn a particular contextual dimension of a study episode for a later memory test. The hypothesis being evaluated was that focused attention towards learning a particular source‐specifying attribute would decrease memory for a different attribute dimension. Although source memory for the attribute dimensions in the focus of attention were generally improved, memory was not diminished for contextual attributes ostensibly outside the focus of primary attention. The absence of any decrease in memory appears to be a somewhat general phenomenon because it was found with external–external, internal–external, and internal–internal combinations of attribute dimensions. The results may be most consistent with a model of cognitive processing in which people have separate pools of attentional resources rather than a single pool of general resources.     

Personal values and political activism: A cross‐national study

Using data from 28 countries in four continents, the present research addresses the question of how basic values may account for political activism. Study (N = 35,116) analyses data from representative samples in 20 countries that responded to the 21‐item version of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ‐21) in the European Social Survey. Study (N = 7,773) analyses data from adult samples in six of the same countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Poland, and United Kingdom) and eight other countries (Australia, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, and United States) that completed the full 40‐item PVQ. Across both studies, political activism relates positively to self‐transcendence and openness to change values, especially to universalism and autonomy of thought, a subtype of self‐direction. Political activism relates negatively to conservation values, especially to conformity and personal security. National differences in the strength of the associations between individual values and political activism are linked to level of democratization.     

Engaged,Committed and Helpful Employees: The Role of Psychological Empowerment

Although previous research has been focused on the relationship among personality, empowerment, and outcomes, little is known about the incremental effect of empowerment on positive work outcomes. This article aims at exploring the relation between personality factors (i.e., extraversion and conscientiousness) and positive work outcomes (i.e., work engagement, affective organizational commitment, and organizational citizenship behavior), and at determining the incremental effect of psychological empowerment on these outcomes. A convenience sample from three organizations has been used for data collection (N = 258; 52% women, mean age 38.55 years, SD = 10.21). Hierarchical multiple regressions indicate that personality and psychological empowerment explain a significant amount of the variance in the positive organizational outcomes, and that psychological empowerment has a significant incremental value over demographics and personality for the studied outcomes.     

A General Methodology for the Translation of Behavioral Terms into Vernacular Languages

As the field of behavior analysis expands internationally, the need for comprehensive and systematic glossaries of behavioral terms in the vernacular languages of professionals and clients becomes crucial. We created a Spanish-language glossary of behavior-analytic terms by developing and employing a systematic set of decision-making rules for the inclusion of terms. We then submitted the preliminary translation to a multi-national advisory committee to evaluate the transnational acceptability of the glossary. This method led to a translated corpus of over 1200 behavioral terms. The end products of this work included the following: (a) a Spanish-language glossary of behavior analytic terms that are publicly available over the Internet through the Behavior Analyst Certification Board and (b) a set of translation guidelines summarized here that may be useful for the development of glossaries of behavioral terms into other vernacular languages.     

Hope as a Primitive Mental State

We criticize attempts to define hope in terms of other psychological states and argue that hope is a primitive mental state whose nature can be illuminated by specifying key aspects of its functional profile. 1     

Reproducing affective norms with lexical co-occurrence statistics: Predicting valence,arousal, and dominance

Human ratings of valence, arousal, and dominance are frequently used to study the cognitive mechanisms of emotional attention, word recognition, and numerous other phenomena in which emotions are hypothesized to play an important role. Collecting such norms from human raters is expensive and time consuming. As a result, affective norms are available for only a small number of English words, are not available for proper nouns in English, and are sparse in other languages. This paper investigated whether affective ratings can be predicted from length, contextual diversity, co-occurrences with words of known valence, and orthographic similarity to words of known valence, providing an algorithm for estimating affective ratings for larger and different datasets. Our bootstrapped ratings achieved correlations with human ratings on valence, arousal, and dominance that are on par with previously reported correlations across gender, age, education and language boundaries. We release these bootstrapped norms for 23,495 English words.