Reach Out and Reduce Prejudice: The Impact of Interpersonal Touch on Intergroup Liking

A brief, casual interpersonal touch results in positive behavior toward the toucher, presumably because touch is a cue to friendship. Research on intergroup contact shows that feelings of friendship toward an individual outgroup member reduce prejudice toward that entire group. Integrating these areas, we examined whether interpersonal touch by an outgroup member could reduce prejudice. In three replications in two studies, interpersonal touch decreased implicit, though not explicit, prejudice toward the toucher's group. Effects of interpersonal touch can extend beyond the toucher to others sharing the toucher's ethnicity, and findings suggest that such effects are automatic and outside conscious awareness.     

Children's understanding of religion: Interviews with Arab-Muslim,Asian-Muslim,Christian and Hindu children aged 5–11 years

Research into children's awareness of group differences has been an active area of research for some time, with work focusing on areas such as nationality, ethnicity, gender and religion. The majority of the work in these areas has taken the cognitive-constructivist framework as a background, offering a domain-general approach to all social cognition. This paper reports a qualitative study investigating children's understanding of religion and the importance of religion, broadly following an interview schedule based on Verbit's (1970 Verbit, MF. 1970. “The components and dimensions of religious behaviour: Toward a reconceptualisation of religiosity”. In American Mosaic, Edited by: Hammond, PE and Johnson, B. 124–139. New York: Random House. (Eds.) [Google Scholar]) definition of religion. A semi-structured interview procedure was used with 58 Arab Muslim, Asian Muslim, Christian, and Hindu children aged between 5 and 11 years living in North London. Religion appeared to be highly salient to the children interviewed, and findings suggested that children's religious identity is subject to a complex pattern of influences which cannot be solely explained by either age or cognitive differences.     

Counterfactual potency

Counterfactual thoughts typically take the form of implied or explicit if-then statements. We propose that the multiplicative combination of "if likelihood" (the degree to which the antecedent condition of the counterfactual is perceived to be likely) and "then likelihood" (the perceived conditional likelihood of the outcome of the counterfactual, given the antecedent condition) determine the strength and impact of counterfactuals. This construct, termed counterfactual potency, is a reliable predictor of the degree of influence of counterfactual thinking upon judgments of regret, causation, and responsibility. Through 4 studies, we demonstrate the predictive power of this construct in a variety of contexts and show that it plays a causal role in determining the strength of the effects of counterfactual thought. Implications of counterfactual potency as a central factor of counterfactual influence are discussed.     

Haptic and visual influences on grasp point selection

When using precision grip to pick up objects, there are many possible pairs of grasp points that permit the thumb and index finger to exert opposed forces for secure grip. Previously, it was shown that individuals select grasp points so that the line between them (grasp axis) passes through or near the center of mass (CoM), thus minimizing the torque around the grasp axis during lifting. The accuracy of grasp axis selection depended on object spatial symmetry, indicating the importance of vision. The authors investigated how grasp point selection is influenced by haptic as well as visual information. Ten participants lifted cuboids whose CoM was located either symmetrically in the geometric center or asymmetrically toward one end. Results for the asymmetric cuboid revealed that grasp points migrated toward the asymmetric CoM from the geometric center. This was more pronounced in the presence of visual cues that reliably indicated the location of CoM. The results suggest that grasp point selection is influenced by a multimodal representation of CoM.     

The holophrastic hypothesis: Conceptual and empirical issues

A conceptual distinction is drawn between a structural and a functional version of the holophrastic hypothesis. The structural version of this hypothesis views the single-word utterances of children as implicit expressions of either syntactic or semantic structural relations, while the functional version views each of these utterances as consisting of a single lexical item which is used for a particular communicative function. The arguments which have been proposed in favour of these two versions of the hypothesis are critically examined in the light of the empirical evidence which is currently available. It is concluded that this evidence only supports the functional version of the holophrastic hypothesis, there being no evidence available to support the interpretation of children's single-word utterances as implicit expressions of either syntactic or semantic relations.     

Power and fundamentalism

The following article is the second of two on fundamentalism. The first article, published in Journal of Contemporary Religion 10 (1), 1995: 83–91, advanced a definition of fundamentalism by using five ‘hallmarks’. This second article offers a way of ‘reading or interpreting fundamentalisms in modernity and post‐modernity.     

The relationship between sex-role orientation and vocational undecidedness: An exploratory study

The relationship between sex-role orientation and vocational choice has attracted empirical interest but many studies conducted have been inconclusive. Giankos and Subich (1986), however, produced a highly significant result (p < .001) which suggested that non-traditionally sex-typed subjects are more vocationally indecisive than traditionally sex-typed subjects. To attempt a replication of this finding, data were collected from 65 subjects, of whom 32 were unemployed and the remaining 33 were in full-time tertiary education. Although statistical analysis revealed no main effect on vocational indecision for either the sex-role identity or unemployed/student distinctions, the data suggested an interaction between these two factors. The level of statistical significance fell between .05 and .10. This trend, together with Gianakos and Subich's finding, suggest that vocational indecision may be associated with an interaction between sex-role orientation and socio-economic factors.     

Abstractions and Metaphysical Politics

Books reviewed in this article:
David Toole, Waiting for Godot in Sarajevo: Theological Reflections on Nihilism, Tragedy and Apocalypse