“You Can Catch More Flies with Honey than Vinegar”: Objectification Valence Interacts with Women’s Enjoyment of Sexualization to Influence Social Perceptions

Although objectification is a common experience for women (Fredrickson & Roberts, 1997), little is understood about how women perceive sources of objectifying commentary and behaviors. The current work provides a novel integration of objectification and consistency theories to understand how valence of sexual objectification and women’s feelings about sexual attention interact to predict perceptions of objectifying sources. In two online vignette studies with 121 and 110 U.S. women recruited through MTurk, female participants were asked to recall an experience of complimentary or critical objectification and report perceptions of source warmth, approach behavioral intentions, perceived overlap between the self and the source, and enjoyment of sexualization. Consistent with hypotheses, regression analyses revealed that reporting experiences of complimentary objectification led to more positive source perceptions among women who reported that they enjoy being sexualized relative to reporting experiences of critical objectification. Furthermore, path analyses revealed that self-other overlap emerged as a mechanism of women’s more positive source perceptions, with a significant indirect effect of self-other overlap emerging for the link between enjoyment of sexualization and warmth and approach in the complimentary objectification condition. The effects were replicated across two studies. The discussion centers on how understanding women’s objectifying source perceptions could illuminate when interpersonal objectification will lead to more experiences of objectification or women’s internalization of objectifying self-perceptions.

     

Expository Texts in First-Grade Classroom Libraries: Issues in Teacher Selection

Abstract

In 2010, the Common Core State Standards (CCSS) were adopted by most states in the US. The authors of these standards called for a shift from previous standards by recommending that young children experience a 50-50 balance between informational and literary reading. For this mixed-methods study, researchers examined the contents of 23 first-grade classroom libraries 8?years after the implementation of the CCSS to determine the percentage of expository texts found in these libraries and if these percentages differed based on the SES of the school or the number of years a teacher had been teaching. In addition, researchers interviewed twelve selected classroom teachers to gain an understanding of how they selected books for their libraries and what influenced their decisions. Results indicated that 22.8% of the texts found in first-grade classroom libraries were expository and there was no difference based on SES of the school or years a teacher had been in the classroom. Teacher interviews indicated that book cost, reading level, student interest, and genre (both narrative and expository/nonfiction) influenced their library text selections. Only two teachers indicated that the CCSS impacted their book choices.     

The honest mirror: Morality as a moderator of spontaneous behavioral mimicry

Two studies examined whether morality-related information has a greater impact than sociability- or competence-related information upon the spontaneous mimicry of an interaction partner. Participants were video recorded during an interaction with a confederate previously presented as moral versus lacking morality, or sociable versus lacking sociability (Study 1), or competent versus lacking competence (Study 2). Two coders rated the extent to which participants imitated the gestures of the confederate, participants’ postural openness, and the general smoothness of the interaction. When the confederate lacked moral qualities, mimicry and postural openness were lower, and the interaction was less smooth than when the confederate was highly moral, unsociable, or incompetent. Moreover, our findings showed that global impression is the key mediating mechanism driving such an effect. Indeed, knowing that another person behaved immorally resulted in a negative impression, which in turn hindered behavioral mimicry.     

Ferenczi and Freud – From psychoanalysis as a “professional and personal home” to the creation of a “psychoanalytic home” for the patient1

Abstract

The author explores the relationship between Sándor Ferenczi and Sigmund Freud in the light of their correspondence. This allows us to see how Freud was able to offer and create for Ferenczi a “professional and personal home” that enabled the latter to find a much more meaningful and creative contact with himself. According to the author, this experience played an important role in Ferenczi’s later readiness to offer to and create with his patients a similar “psychoanalytic home.” As Freud was not able to share such clinical research work with Ferenczi, a conflict developed between them whose nature has occupied psychoanalysts ever since, and whose seeds can be found in the 1246 letters that they exchanged between January 1908 and May 1933. From this point of view, Ferenczi’s Clinical diary (written in 1932 and published only in 1985) can be seen as the continuation of the dialogue they had entertained for so many years, as well as Ferenczi’s attempt not to give up the “professional and personal home” that they had created together.     

How to separate coordinate and categorical spatial relation components in integrated spatial representations: A new methodology for analysing sketch maps

Spatial relations between landmarks can be represented by means of categories and coordinates. In the present research, this paradigm was applied to sketch maps based on information acquired in goal-directed behaviour of exploration of a university campus area. The first aim was to investigate whether categorical and coordinate information can be considered conceptually independent in sketch maps. The second aim was to assess which kind of distance measure served better to represent coordinate information in the present case study, and finally to assess the factorial structure of coordinate and categorical data. Analytic methodology as well as statistical analysis were found to confirm that separating coordinate and categorical components was formally as well as empirically appropriate. A series of confirmatory factor analyses showed the best fit for the model with two correlated components, as well as an acceptable reliability of measures emerged. The two components were moderately correlated. Moreover, the adoption of Manhattan distance seemed to be the most effective method to represent coordinate spatial relations in spatial sketch maps of areas acquired through navigation.     

Semantic effects in word naming: Evidence from English and Japanese Kanji

Three experiments investigated whether reading aloud is affected by a semantic variable, imageability. The first two experiments used English, and the third experiment used Japanese Kanji as a way of testing the generality of the findings across orthographies. The results replicated the earlier findings that readers were slower and more error prone in reading low-frequency exception words when they were low in imageability than when they were high in imageability (Strain, Patterson, & Seidenberg, 1995). This result held for both English and Kanji even when age of acquisition was taken into account as a possible confounding variable, and the imageability effect was stronger in Kanji compared to English.