Altruistic behavior and the bidimensional just world belief

Thirty participants were sampled after donating charity to a street beggar and were compared by means of 2 short scales of belief in ajust world for self (BJWS) and belief in a just world for others (BJWO) with 30 randomly selected people who passed the beggar by without donating charity. We assumed that BJWO would be negatively related to altruistic behavior, whereas BJWS would be positively linked with it. A logistic regression analysis introducing BJWS, BJWO, and participants' age and gender as predictors showed that BJWO was negatively related to altruistic behavior, whereas the BJWS tended to be positively associated to it. No effects were observed for age or gender.     

Alcohol and Aggression: Perspectives on Controlled and Uncontrolled Social Information Processing

This paper reviews the main current social cognitive explanations of the effects of acute alcohol consumption on aggression: the cognitive disruption model, the attributional model, and model of automaticity. The cognitive disruption model posits that intoxication affects controlled processing arising from the impairment of executive cognitive functions by alcohol's pharmacological properties. The individual consequently focuses on the most salient and proximal situational factors, thereby spoiling self‐regulatory processes. According to the attributional model, drinkers expect alcohol to mitigate social sanctions following aggression by shifting blame to alcohol. These explicit expectations represent an extrapharmacological cause of the alcohol–aggression link. Finally, the model of automaticity implies that alcohol meanings stored in long‐term memory and activated in drinking contexts automatically trigger aggressive thoughts and behavior without the individual's awareness. The explanation of intoxicated aggression should integrate these co‐etiological social cognitive models that take into account pharmacological as well as extrapharmacological consequences of alcohol consumption.     

Toward a transnational history of the social sciences

Historical accounts of the social sciences have too often accepted local or national institutions as a self-evident framework of analysis, instead of considering them as being embedded in transnational relations of various kinds. Evolving patterns of transnational mobility and exchange cut through the neat distinction between the local, the national, and the inter-national, and thus represent an essential component in the dynamics of the social sciences, as well as a fruitful perspective for rethinking their historical development. In this programmatic outline, it is argued that a transnational history of the social sciences may be fruitfully understood on the basis of three general mechanisms, which have structured the transnational flows of people and ideas in decisive ways: (a) the functioning of international scholarly institutions, (b) the transnational mobility of scholars, and (c) the politics of trans-national exchange of nonacademic institutions. The article subsequently examines and illustrates each of these mechanisms.     

Hidden profiles and the consensualization of social stereotypes: how information distribution affects stereotype content and sharedness

We examined the impact of the distribution of information regarding social groups on the formation of shared stereotypes within triads in two studies. Three‐person groups discussed which of three groups (A, B, and C) was the most able and the most sociable. In Study 1, some of the information about these three groups was available to all group members (shared) whereas the remainder was distributed among group members (unique). Based on the total profile, there was more evidence of group A being sociable and of group B being able than of A being able and B sociable. In Study 1 (n = 58), sampling was manipulated as ‘representative’ (information in line with the overall differences was shared) or ‘unrepresentative’ (only information contradicting these differences was shared). In a third condition, all items of information were shared. Emerging stereotypes were directly influenced by sampling of information independently of the discussion. As well as this, the discussion consensualized initial stereotypes. In Study 2 (n = 52), sampling was always unrepresentative and we manipulated the labels associated with the target groups in such a way that the stereotype associated with the label was either inconsistent or consistent with the overall differences between the target groups. In the inconsistent condition, participants were more likely to discuss information that violated stereotypical expectations, and to be less influenced by sampling as a result of discussion. Altogether, these findings suggest that information sampling directly affects the consensualization of social stereotypes. Copyright © 2003 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Handling Locally Stratified Inconsistent Knowledge Bases

This paper investigates the idea of reasoning, in a local (or contextual) way, under prioritized and possibly inconsistent knowledge bases. Priorities are not supposed to be given globally between all the beliefs in the knowledge base, but locally inside sets of pieces of information responsible for inconsistencies. This local stratification offers more flexibility for representing priorities between beliefs. Given this local ordering, we discuss five basic definitions of influence relations between conflicts. These elementary notions of influence between two conflicts A and B exhaustively explore the situations where solving A leads to solve B. Then we propose natural approaches to restore the coherence of a knowledge base on the basis of influence relations between locally-stratified conflicts.     

Gender Roles and Empathic Accuracy: The Role of Communion in Reading Minds

Although empathic accuracy is considered a stable skill, few individual difference measures consistently predict performance on Ickes’ (e.g., 2001) empathic accuracy measure. Because past work has shown that women are more empathically accurate than men when female gender roles are made salient before an empathic accuracy task, we hypothesized that self-reported communion and related variables might predict empathic accuracy. Participants (194 undergraduates) from a northwestern U.S. university completed an empathic accuracy task and self-report measures of communion and empathy. Communion and empathic concern predicted greater empathic accuracy, but only after controlling for socially desirable responding. The role of communion in empathic inference is discussed, along with the need to include measures of social desirability when examining correlates of empathic accuracy.     

On the role of global and local visual information in goal-directed walking.

The aim of the present study was to determine what interactions occur between the visual information available to walking subjects in the global optical flow and those of a more local nature relating to the dilation rate of a target on the retina. A goal-directed walking task was used in which thirteen subjects were asked to stop spontaneously as near as possible to a stationary target. The experiment was carried out in a special room, by means of a texture flow generator with which the velocity and direction of the optical flow arising from the ground were varied. Twelve experimental conditions were tested, involving various combinations of target size and texture velocity. The results show that with both of the targets, modifications to the global flow significantly affected the subjects' performances (walking speed and time-to-contact with the target upon braking) in the fast-approaching texture situation, but not in the receding or slowly-approaching situations. The results are discussed as to what they reveal about the visual strategies used by an actively moving observer to anticipate a collision with a stationary target.     

Fluency versus conscious recollection in category-production performance: the performance of schizophrenic patients

The purpose of this study was to investigate the relative contribution in schizophrenics of automatic processes (fluency) and conscious processes (conscious recollection) for the control of preencoded material in category production tasks. In one condition (Exclusion condition), subjects were told specifically not to produce previously presented words during the category-production task. This condition was compared with a standard category-production task in which subjects were told to produce the six first words that came to mind for a semantic category (Inclusion condition). In the inclusion condition, the effects of conscious control and automatic processes operated in the same direction, whereas in the exclusion condition automatic influences and conscious control were opposed. A recognition task followed the category-production tasks. Since the exclusion condition required conscious control of encoded items, we hypothesized that schizophrenic patients would be less able than control subjects to avoid producing study list items. These results indicated that schizophrenics' performance differed from these of control subjects in the exclusion condition but not in inclusion condition. Recognition performance was similar in both the schizophrenic and the control groups. These results suggest a defective conscious control in schizophrenic patients and confirm the data from the literature on explicit memory in these patients.     

Click monitoring revisited: An on-line study of sentence comprehension

Spoken sentence comprehension is based upon rapid and complex psychological processes, yielding a constantly fluctuating cognitive load. The aim of this study was to evaluate on-line click monitoring, a classical but poorly exploited experimental method, which should allow for an easy measurement of processing load at any chosen point of experimental sentences. In Experiments 1 and 2, we obtained longer latencies to clicks located at the boundary of reversible object relative clauses than to clicks identically located in subject relatives and to clicks located earlier within object relatives. Experiment 3 further revealed that this effect of syntactic type was specific to transposed object relatives and did not occur with normal object relatives. In Experiment 4, we observed longer latencies with semantically reversible than with irreversible sentences, but no difference between actives and passives. These results were obtained under strict control of potential lexical and phonological biases, and suggest that on-line click monitoring may be one useful tool in the study of sentence comprehension.     

Family interference with work and workplace cognitive failure: The mitigating role of recovery experiences

The first goal of this study was to test whether family interference with work (FIW) is positively related to increased workplace cognitive failure (WCF), which is defined as errors made at work that indicate lapses in memory (e.g., failing to recall work procedures), attention (e.g., not fully listening to instruction), and motor function (e.g., unintentionally pressing control switches on machines). The second goal was to determine whether recovery experiences (psychological detachment and relaxation) during free time on evenings and weekends can mitigate (weaken) the positive relationship between FIW and WCF. Results based on data collected from 118 water utility employees suggest that FIW is indeed related to more WCF, and that psychological detachment from work mitigates this positive relationship. It was relatively less evident that relaxation plays such a mitigating role.