When in Rome… Identification and acculturation strategies among minority members moderate the dehumanisation of the majority outgroup

The study of humanness as a dimension of social judgment has received extensive attention over the past decade. Although the common reported finding is that people attribute more human characteristics to their ingroup than to the outgroup, similar tendencies are expected to be tempered for minority groups when judging the host society. In Study 1, carried out with Gypsy minority members, we tested the hypothesis that those group members who adopt an assimilative strategy identifying more with the host compared with the heritage culture will display the lowest levels of dehumanisation. In Studies 2 and 3, conducted with immigrants in Italy and in Portugal, respectively, the hypothesis was extended from an identification conceptualisation to an acculturation one. Despite significant variability in intergroup settings and measures, results confirmed our hypothesis that immigrants who choose to assimilate with the host culture dehumanise the outgroup less compared with those who adopt any of the other acculturation strategies. Implications for the ethnocentric nature of dehumanisation biases and for intergroup relations in general are discussed. Copyright © 2014 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Immobility reaction at birth in newborn infant

Objective

To describe an immobility reaction (IR) that was not previously reported at or immediately after birth in human newborns.

Method

We analyzed 31 videos of normal term vaginal deliveries recorded from Time 0 of birth defined as the as the moment that lies between the birth of the thorax and the pelvis of the infant. We searched for perinatal factors associated with newborn's IR.

Results

IR at birth was observed in 8 of the 31 newborns. The main features of their behavior were immobilization, frozen face, shallow breathing and bradycardia. One of the 8 newborns had sudden collapse 2 h after birth. We found significant relationships between maternal prenatal stress (PS) and IR (p = .037), and a close to significant one between infants’ lividness at Time 0 and IR (p = .053). The first breath of the 31 newborns occurred before and was not associated with the first cry (p < .001).

Discussion

The main features of IR at birth are similar to those of the universal most severe response to severe stress or danger. The relationship with PS suggests that children who had IR at birth might be at risk for similar disorders as those associated with PS. Sudden neonatal collapse of one of the IR newborns needs further research to determine if they are at risk for sudden infant death syndrome.

Conclusion

This first report of an IR reaction at birth in human infants could open up new paths for improving early neonatal care. Further research is needed for maternal PS, stress hormones, umbilical cord blood pH measurements in IR newborns. The challenge of education and support for parents of IR newborns is outlined.     

The subjective effort of everyday mental tasks: Attending,assessing, and choosing

Why are some mental tasks experienced as more effortful than others? Answers to this question about subjective effort have begun to be addressed by researchers investigating why some mental tasks are associated with more ‘elbow grease’ or ‘depletion’ than other tasks. It has been proposed that tasks such as sustained attention should be accompanied by more subjective effort than other tasks, such as assessing (e.g., counting a handful of items) or choosing randomly between two alternatives. In general, these proposals coincide with people’s intuitions regarding how effort should vary by mental task. However, little laboratory data have corroborated these conclusions. In two studies, we cataloged the relative amount of subjective effort associated with some basic and ubiquitous mental activities: attending (most subjective effort), assessing, and choosing (least subjective effort). Results support hypotheses about subjective effort. Because subjective effort is perceived to be experienced by a subject, we explored also the relationship between effort and the involvement of the ‘psychological self.’     

The notion of happiness in early Wittgenstein: towards a non-contentful account of happiness

This paper examines the notion of ‘happiness’ in the writings of the early Wittgenstein as a notion that does not involve any particular content or states of mind. The main question that the paper addresses is how we can retain a non-contentful account of happiness without turning happiness into an abstract notion, isolated from our concrete lives in language. The paper examines two pivotal components of the Wittgensteinian account of happiness: the ‘good exercise of the will’ and the ‘artistic way of seeing’. In both cases, I try to stress their non-contentful dimension, while simultaneously trying to understand them through language. The central concept for such a non-contentful aspect of language is the notion of ‘meaningfulness’. Thus the paper examines the pivotal components of the Wittgensteinian account of happiness in relation to the notion of ‘meaningfulness’: happiness is then explained as seeing a world against the background of possibilities of meaning.     

BDNF serum levels in subjects developing or not post-traumatic stress disorder after trauma exposure

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a syndrome resulting from exposure to a severe traumatic event that poses threatened death or injury and produces intense fear and helplessness. The neural structures implicated in PTSD development belong to the limbic system, an important region for emotional processing. Brain-derived neurotrophic factor (BDNF) is a neurotrophin that serves as survival factor for selected populations of central nervous system (CNS) neurons and plays a role in the limbic system by regulating synaptic plasticity, memory processes and behavior. Impaired BDNF production in the brain can lead to a variety of CNS dysfunctions including symptoms associated with PTSD. However, so far fewer studies have investigated this neurotrophin in patients with PTSD. Furthermore, given the multiple role of BDNF in various CNS disorders, it cannot be excluded that traumatic events per se may influence neurotrophin levels, without a direct association to the PTSD syndrome.     

Differentiation of Self and Social Justice Commitment Mediated by Hope

This study tested a theoretical model of hope mediating the relationship between differentiation of self and social justice commitment among graduate students (N = 202) in the helping professions. The theory was based primarily on the social justice philosophies of Martin Luther King Jr., Cornel West, and Paulo Freire using a cultural psychology approach. Results generally supported the theoretical model. Implications are considered for both training and future research on social justice.     

The adaptation of the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW) for Italian

We developed affective norms for 1,121 Italian words in order to provide researchers with a highly controlled tool for the study of verbal processing. This database was developed from translations of the 1,034 English words present in the Affective Norms for English Words (ANEW; Bradley & Lang, 1999) and from words taken from Italian semantic norms (Montefinese, Ambrosini, Fairfield, & Mammarella, Behavior Research Methods, 45, 440–461, 2013). Participants evaluated valence, arousal, and dominance using the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) in a Web survey procedure. Participants also provided evaluations of three subjective psycholinguistic indexes (familiarity, imageability, and concreteness), and five objective psycholinguistic indexes (e.g., word frequency) were also included in the resulting database in order to further characterize the Italian words. We obtained a typical quadratic relation between valence and arousal, in line with previous findings. We also tested the reliability of the present ANEW adaptation for Italian by comparing it to previous affective databases and performing split-half correlations for each variable. We found high split-half correlations within our sample and high correlations between our ratings and those of previous studies, confirming the validity of the adaptation of ANEW for Italian. This database of affective norms provides a tool for future research about the effects of emotion on human cognition.