Socially Situated Transmission: The Bias to Transmit Negative Information is Moderated by the Social Context

Cultural evolutionary theory has identified a range of cognitive biases that guide human social learning. Naturalistic and experimental studies indicate transmission biases favoring negative and positive information. To address these conflicting findings, the present study takes a socially situated view of information transmission, which predicts that bias expression will depend on the social context. We report a large-scale experiment (N = 425) that manipulated the social context and examined its effect on the transmission of the positive and negative information contained in a narrative text. In each social context, information was progressively lost as it was transmitted from person to person, but negative information survived better than positive information, supporting a negative transmission bias. Importantly, the negative transmission bias was moderated by the social context: Higher social connectivity weakened the bias to transmit negative information, supporting a socially situated account of information transmission. Our findings indicate that our evolved cognitive preferences can be moderated by our social goals.     

Socialization within day care: A brief review

Studies examining the effects of day care are reviewed. Little evidence was found indicating a negative impact on child development. A number of weaknesses in the day care literature were pointed out, including problems of ecological validity and failure to examine for differential effects. Suggestions for future research are made, among them a “natural history” of day care and studies of children who have experienced trauma.     

Cumulative consequences of stigma: Possessing multiple concealable stigmatized identities is associated with worse quality of life

Large health disparities exist between stigmatized and nonstigmatized groups. In addition to experiencing and anticipating greater discrimination, members of stigmatized groups also tend to demonstrate greater ruminative tendencies in response, which may lead to these poor health outcomes. Even among stigmatized groups, differences in the visibility of stigma lead to different mechanisms through which stigma takes its toll. Previous work has primarily focused on the impact of belonging to a single marginalized group; however, people often belong to multiple marginalized groups, and this likely affects both their health outcomes and their anticipation of stigma. In the current study, we focused on individuals with concealable stigmatized identities (CSIs)—socially stigmatized identities that are not immediately apparent to others—and created a measure of concealable marginalization that captures multiple group memberships. We predicted that those possessing a greater number of CSIs would anticipate more stigma from others, and, in turn, ruminate more about the stigma, which would negatively impact the health. Surveying N = 288 adults with CSIs, we found that possessing a greater number of marginalized concealable identities predicted worse self-reported physical quality of life. These relationships were partially mediated by greater anticipated stigma and brooding rumination in regard to their CSI. This work illuminates a more complete picture of how living with CSIs can take its toll on health.     

Back to Basics: Application of the Principles of Bioethics to Heritable Genome Interventions

Science and Engineering Ethics - Prior to their announcement of the birth of gene-edited twins in China, Dr. He Jiankui and colleagues published a set of draft ethical principles for discussing the...     

Learning nonlinearly separable categories by inference and classification

Previous research suggests that learning categories by classifying new instances highlights information that is useful for discriminating between categories. In contrast, learning categories by making predictive inferences focuses learners on an abstract summary of each category (e.g., the prototype). To test this characterization of classification and inference learning further, the authors evaluated the two learning procedures with nonlinearly separable categories. In contrast to previous research involving cohesive, linearly separable categories, the authors found that it is more difficult to learn nonlinearly separable categories by making inferences about features than it is to learn them by classifying instances. This finding reflects that the prototype of a nonlinearly separable category does not provide a good summary of the category members. The results from this study suggest that having a cohesive category structure is more important for inference than it is for classification.     

Volume Contents

Volume Contents

Volume Contents     

Stewardship Models of Pastoral Care,Counselling and Supervision: The Commonians Meet Ricoeur at Worship

The common factors debate in psychology and, more recently, marriage and family therapy is slow to erupt in pastoral care and counselling. This article introduces the common factors debate into pastoral science by proposing the Stewardship Models of Pastoral Ministry and Supervision. The model integrates common factors research and pastoral practice using Ricoeur’s “economy of the gift” ethic. The model’s focus is pastoral care, counselling and supervision in congregations, a unique community context in search of an adequate pastoral praxis.     

Configural processing and perceptions of head tilt

Configural processing is important for face recognition, but its role in other types of face processing is unclear. In the present study, participants made judgments of head tilt for faces in which the vertical position of the internal facial region was varied. We found a highly reliable relationship between inner-face position and perceived head tilt. We also found that changes in inner-face position affected the perceived dimensions of an individual unchanged facial feature: compared to control faces, nearly two-thirds of faces in which the features had been moved down were judged to have a longer nose. This finding suggests an early integration of configural and featural processing to create a stable holistic percept of the face. The demonstration of holistic processing at a basic perceptual level (as opposed to during face recognition) is important as it constrains possible models of the relationships between featural and configural processing.