Infra-humanization: Ambivalent sexism and the attribution of primary and secondary emotions to women

Leyens and colleagues (e.g., Leyens et al., 2001) have observed that people are more likely to attribute uniquely human (secondary) emotions to the in-group than to the out-group. We examined whether males and females differentially attribute primary and secondary emotions to women. We hypothesized that individual differences in hostile sexism (HS) and benevolent sexism (BS), rather than participant sex, would predict the attribution of emotions to women. As expected, high BS individuals were more likely to attribute positive secondary emotions to women than low BS individuals. In contrast, high HS individuals were more likely to deny positive secondary emotions to women than low HS individuals. Participant sex was not related to the attribution of emotions to women after the effects of HS and BS were accounted for.     

Trade-offs in visual processing for stimuli near the hands

It is known that stimuli near the hands receive preferential processing. In the present study, we explored changes in early vision near the hands. Participants were more sensitive to low-spatial-frequency information and less sensitive to high-spatial-frequency information for stimuli presented close to the hands. This pattern suggests enhanced processing in the magnocellular visual pathway for such stimuli, and impaired processing in the parvocellular pathway. Consistent with that possibility, we found that the effects of hand proximity in several tasks were eliminated by illumination with red diffuse light—a manipulation known to impair magnocellular processing. These results help clarify how the hands affect vision.     

Predicting uptake of housing services: The role of self-categorization in the theory of planned behaviour

The theory of planned behaviour (TPB) and self-categorization theory (SCT) were used to predict homeless people’s (n = 80) uptake of housing support services. Homeless people’s uptake behaviour was measured one year after a TPB/SCT-based interview schedule was administered. Congruent with previous research, TPB variables were influential predictors of both intention and behaviour. However, the addition of self-categorization variables, such as friendship group norms and identification as a housing support service user, significantly increased the rate prediction for both intention and behaviour, respectively. The implications of the research are firstly, that social cognition models are useful for understanding uptake of housing support services; and secondly, the addition of self-categorization variables aids in exploring the central role that social norms play in understanding the uptake of these services. These findings are discussed in terms of their impact on theory and practice.     

Investigating the Big Five Personality Factors and Smoking: Implications for Assessment

Global personality dispositions may be important for understanding population-based individual differences in smoking outcomes, yet few studies have been executed using measures of these global dispositional constructs from the contemporary field of personality. This study explored whether the Big Five personality factors (Extraversion, Neuroticism, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, and Intellect) were concurrently associated with key smoking (e.g., nicotine dependence, smoking rate, age at first cigarette) and cessation (e.g., self-efficacy to quit, motivation to quit, number of prior quit attempts, length of most recent quit) variables in a sample of regular smokers (n = 130). Of the 35 correlations computed, only 2 were significant: Intellect was positively correlated with motivation to quit and number of 24-hr quit attempts in the last year. These results have implications for using trait variables to study individual differences in smokers.     

The role of tone duration in dichotic temporal order judgment

Over the past two decades, a number of studies have been based on the dichotic temporal order judgment (TOJ) paradigm, to compare auditory temporal processing in various subpopulations to that of young, normal controls. The reported estimates of dichotic TOJ thresholds, expressed as the interstimulus intervals (ISIs) for 75 % accuracy among the controls, have varied. In the present study, we examined the influence of tone duration, within the 10- to 40-msec range, on dichotic TOJ accuracy and threshold. The results indicated that increases in either ISI or tone duration increased dichotic TOJ accuracy similarly, implying that changes in tone duration may affect dichotic TOJs simply by adding to the delay between onset of the tone at the lead ear and onset of the tone at the lag ear. The dichotic TOJ thresholds from three published studies that had used tones as stimuli and the dichotic thresholds from the present study all fell within 0.5 standard deviations from the theoretical line of a 10-msec reduction in threshold for every 10-msec increase in tone duration. When the dichotic TOJ threshold data from the present study and from the published studies were converted to stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and plotted as a function of tone duration, they fell very close to or on a zero-slope line, indicating that when ISI and duration are summed to yield an SOA, dichotic TOJ thresholds are invariant to tone duration within the range of 10–40 msec.     

Guessing Strategies in Perceptual Identification: A Reply to McKoon and Ratcliff

Light and Kennison (this issue) found that bias effects in the forced-choice perceptual identification of words occurred only in a subset of participants, those who claimed on a strategy questionnaire to be deliberately guessing words they had studied previously. McKoon and Ratcliff (this issue) raised a number of objections to the proposal that bias effects are due to guessing strategies, citing difficulties in our statistical treatment of data, our use of subjective reports to classify participants, and our approach to the general problem of separating implicit from explicit influences on performance. This article responds to these objections.     

Visuomotor binding in older adults

Action integration is the process through which actions performed on a stimulus and perceptual aspects of the stimulus become bound as a unitary object. This process appears to be controlled by the dopaminergic system in the prefrontal cortex, an area that is known to decrease in volume and dopamine functioning in older adults. Although the decline should lead to reduced action integration in older adults, we found equivalent integration in both young and older adults. This indicates that older adults may be able to compensate for their dopaminergic deficiencies by activating additional neural networks that are not used by young adults.     

Social influence in newly formed groups: The roles of personal and social intentions, group norms, and social identity

Intentions to participate in a group activity in newly formed groups were followed over time. Two forms of intentions were examined: traditional behavioral intention to take part in a group-based act (personal intention), and social intentions to act as an agent of the group (social intention). In addition, the study explored other group process variables as distinctive predictors of ‘social identification’. The paper concludes with a discussion of the role of social intentions, linking the findings to social identification development and maintenance over time.