Social Dominance Orientation and Right-Wing Authoritarianism: Additive and Interactive Effects

The additive and interactive effects of Social Dominance Orientation (SDO) and Right-Wing Authoritarianism (RWA) were examined using 16 independent samples of New Zealand European participants ( N =  2,164). Consistent with Duckitt's (2001) Dual Process Model, SDO and RWA displayed strong additive effects across various domains of intergroup-related attitude, including measures of racism, sexism, homosexual prejudice, and ethnic and religious ingroup identification. In each of these five domains, meta-analysis indicated that the statistical interaction of SDO and RWA accounted for an average of less than .001% variance in addition to their linear combination. It is concluded that the association between SDO and various discriminatory attitudes and beliefs is only extremely weakly dependent on RWA, and vice-versa, suggesting that these two ideological attitudes are primarily additive, rather than interactive, in nature.     

Does How I Feel About It Matter? The Role of Affect in Cognitive and Behavioral Reactions to an Illness Diagnosis

Individuals often have low rates of compliance with treatment recommendations. We examined the role that experienced affect at the time of illness diagnosis might play in influencing thoughts and feelings relating treatment compliance. Participants were randomly assigned to receive a positive, neutral, or negative affect induction after imagining they were diagnosed with kidney cancer. They then reported on thoughts and feelings about the illness and the treatment regimen. Participants also reported interest in additional information about the illness and behavioral intentions for complying with the treatment regimen. Affect significantly influenced interest in information and behavioral intentions. Both effects were mediated by the influence of affect on participants' self-efficacy beliefs. These mediational findings support a mood-as-resource interpretation of the role of affect in treatment compliance.     

The similarity–attraction relationship revisited: divergence between the affective and behavioral facets of attraction

In contemporary attitudes‐and‐attraction research, attraction has been viewed as a multidimensional construct. Moreover, the effects of dissimilar and similar attitudes have been shown to vary with the facets of attraction measured. The hypotheses tested are that (1) only the proportion of similar attitudes relevant to the social context or interaction goals affects behavioral attraction (i.e. interpersonal distance between the participant and targets), and (2) the proportion of similar attitudes influences affective attraction (i.e. Byrne's attraction measure), regardless of attitude relevance. Two experiments were conducted with classroom activities (Experiment 1) and a writing workshop (Experiment 2) as the social contexts. The results of both experiments supported the hypotheses. Clearly, a solely affective measure of attraction seems inadequate for understanding the similarity–attraction relationship. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Relation Between Anxiety Sensitivity and Attachment Style in Adolescence and Early Adulthood

Given the accumulating evidence for a role of anxiety sensitivity in the etiology of panic, it is important to understand the developmental origins of anxiety sensitivity. To this end, this study examined the relation between attachment beliefs and anxiety sensitivity in a sample of high school students (n = 203; mean age 15.7 years) and university students (n = 324; mean age 21.7 years). The Experiences in Close Relationships (ECR; K. Brennan, C. Clark, &; P. Shaver, 1998) was used to assess attachment beliefs and to classify participants into attachment groups. The Anxiety Sensitivity Index (ASI; R. A. Peterson &; S. Reiss, 1987) was used to assess participants' levels of anxiety sensitivity. Results supported the hypothesis that individuals with insecure attachment, specifically those classified as preoccupied and fearful (i.e., those with a negative model of self), had significantly higher anxiety sensitivity scores than securely attached individuals in both the high school and college samples.     

Canadian bulk water exports: Analyzing the sun belt conflict using the graph model for conflict resolution

A conflict over the proposed bulk export of water from Canada is systematically studied using the graph model for conflict resolution in order to illustrate how strategic conflicts of this type can be better understood and managed. The ongoing conflict involving a US company, Sun Belt Water Inc., and the Canadian federal and provincial governments is modeled and analyzed using the graph model methodology. This dispute reflects the kinds of controversies that can arise when international trade laws, which stress competition and profits, are in conflict with environmental and social laws. The Sun Belt conflict is especially interesting because of its evolution over several stages; at each stage of the conflict, the objectives of the disputants, and their strategic implications, can be realistically modeled and thereby investigated using the graph model. Amer Obeidi received his B.Sc. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Jordan in 1990 and M.A.Sc. in Management Sciences in 2002 from the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. He is currently pursuing a PhD degree in the Department of Systems Design Engineering, at the University of Waterloo. His currents research interests include confrontation analysis, conflict analysis, negotiation, cognitive and emotional processes effect on decision making, and choice theory. Dr. Hipel’s major research interests are the development and application of conflict resolution and time series analysis techniques from a systems design engineering perspective. The main application areas of these decision technologies are water resources management, hydrology, environmental engineering and sustainable development. Dr. Hipel is the author/co-author of four books, nine edited books, many journal papers and is an associate editor of six international journals. Moreover, he is a professional Engineer and has carried out consulting activities with engineering firms, government agencies, and utilities in many countries. Director of the Laurier Centre for Military Strategic and Disarmament Studies, and Adjunct Professor of Systems Design Engineering at the University of Waterloo. Dr. Kilgour’s research interests lie at the intersection of mathematics, social science, and engineering. He has applied game theory and related formal techniques to analyze decision problems in international security and arms control, environmental management, negotiation and arbitration, voting, fair division, and coalition formation, and has pioneered the development of systems for decision support in strategic conflict. His most recent books are Perfect Deterrence (Cambridge) and Designing Institutions for Environmental and Resource Management (Edward Elgar).     

Evaluation and treatment of covert stereotypy

The treatment of behavior maintained by automatic reinforcement (e.g. stereotypy) can present a unique challenge if practitioners cannot control delivery of the maintaining reinforcer. Further, some individuals might engage in stereotypy only when care providers are absent. In the current evaluation, an adolescent boy's hand flapping was demonstrated to occur in the absence of social contingencies and care providers. To reduce the behavior, two treatment strategies were assessed. In the first approach, verbal reminders to refrain from hand flapping were delivered on time‐based schedules. In the second approach (differential reinforcement of other behavior, DRO), we provided access to a preferred item contingent on prespecified time lengths with no hand flapping when the participant was alone in a room. Results of the investigation indicated that the verbal reminders were unsuccessful, whereas the DRO program resulted in near‐zero levels of stereotypy. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

A non‐human primate’s understanding of solidity: dissociations between seeing and acting

Studies often reveal a dissociation between what infants know as revealed by action and what they know as revealed by perception. We explored whether non‐human primates exhibit a similar dissociation, focusing on what rhesus macaques know about solidity. In a series of search experiments, Hauser (2001) found that rhesus do not possess a complete understanding of solidity, searching below a solid shelf for an invisibly displaced object. In the present experiments, we explored how rhesus would perform in expectancy violation versions of the same tasks. Subjects looked longer when an apple appeared to fall through a solid shelf and when it appeared to roll through a solid barrier. These results suggest that macaques have some understanding of solidity when tested using looking paradigms even though they do not appear to use this knowledge when searching for food. We speculate that this dissociation is similar to that demonstrated in human development.     

The extreme-right and enfranchisement of immigrants: Main issues in the public “debate” on integration in Belgium

In Belgium, the issue of (local) enfranchisement of foreign residents has without any doubt become the most salient topic of public debate on integration of immigrants and their descendants. Although debate about the issue dates back to the early 1970s, at the start of the 21st century it is still one of the hottest topics in Belgian politics. A second salient topic concerns the strategy against the Flemish extreme-right wing party the Vlaams Blok, or the debate about the so-called ‘cordon sanitaire’ since the 1990s. This contribution wants to discuss the public debate on voting rights for non-Belgians and the strategy against the Vlaams Blok as the most contentious issues in the wider debate about (the future of) immigrant incorporation in Belgian society. Thus, we hope to be able to clarify the (absence of) debate on integration and multiculturalism in Belgium.     

WordGen: A tool for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch,English, German,and French

WordGen is an easy-to-use program that uses the CELEX and Lexique lexical databases for word selection and nonword generation in Dutch, English, German, and French. Items can be generated in these four languages, specifying any combination of seven linguistic constraints: number of letters, neighborhood size, frequency, summated position-nonspecific bigram frequency, minimum position-nonspecific bigram frequency, position-specific frequency of the initial and final bigram, and orthographic relatedness. The program also has a module to calculate the respective values of these variables for items that have already been constructed, either with the program or taken from earlier studies. Stimulus queries can be entered through WordGen’s graphical user interface or by means of batch files. WordGen is especially useful for (1) Dutch and German item generation, because no such stimulus-selection tool exists for these languages, (2) the generation of nonwords for all four languages, because our program has some important advantages over previous nonword generation approaches, and (3) psycholinguistic experiments on bilingualism, because the possibility of using the same tool for different languages increases the cross-linguistic comparability of the generated item lists. WordGen is free and available athttp://expsy.ugent.be/wordgen.htm.