Globalization, Neo-Liberalism and Community Psychology

A longitudinal analysis (1984–2005) of media language in Norway is presented, demonstrating how the current globalized capitalist market ideology is now permeating this long-established Scandinavian welfare state. This ideological shift carries powerful implications for community psychology, as traditional welfare state values of equal services based on a universalistic principle are set aside, and social and material inequalities are increasingly accepted. The methodology developed in the present study may serve as a “barometer of community changes”, to borrow a metaphor used by Sarason (2000).     

Talking about others: Emotionality and the dissemination of social information

There is evidence that we may be more likely to share stories about other people to the extent that they arouse emotion. If so, this emotional social talk may have important social consequences, providing the basis for many of our social beliefs and mobilising people to engage or disengage with the targets of the talk. Across three studies, we tested the situated communicability of emotional social information by examining if the ability of emotionality to increase communicability would depend on the emotion that was aroused and the identity of the audience. Study 1 showed that participants were more willing to share social anecdotes that aroused interest, surprise, disgust and happiness with an unspecified audience. Study 2 provided a behavioural replication of these findings. Study 3 showed that the communicability of emotional social talk did vary with audience identity (friend or stranger). Together, these findings suggest that emotional social events (particularly those that arouse disgust and happiness) are likely to become part of a society's social beliefs, with important consequences for the structure of social relationships. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Activating event knowledge

An increasing number of results in sentence and discourse processing demonstrate that comprehension relies on rich pragmatic knowledge about real-world events, and that incoming words incrementally activate such knowledge. If so, then even outside of any larger context, nouns should activate knowledge of the generalized events that they denote or typically play a role in. We used short stimulus onset asynchrony priming to demonstrate that (1) event nouns prime people (sale-shopper) and objects (trip-luggage) commonly found at those events; (2) location nouns prime people/animals (hospital-doctor) and objects (barn-hay) commonly found at those locations; and (3) instrument nouns prime things on which those instruments are commonly used (key-door), but not the types of people who tend to use them (hose-gardener). The priming effects are not due to normative word association. On our account, facilitation results from event knowledge relating primes and targets. This has much in common with computational models like LSA or BEAGLE in which one word primes another if they frequently occur in similar contexts. LSA predicts priming for all six experiments, whereas BEAGLE correctly predicted that priming should not occur for the instrument-people relation but should occur for the other five. We conclude that event-based relations are encoded in semantic memory and computed as part of word meaning, and have a strong influence on language comprehension.     

Repetition blindness: an emergent property of inter-item competition

Repeating an item in a brief or rapid display usually produces faster or more accurate identification of the item (repetition priming), but sometimes produces the opposite effect (repetition blindness). We present a theory of short-term repetition effects, the competition hypothesis, which explains these paradoxical outcomes. The central tenet of the theory is that repetition produces a representation with a higher signal-to-noise ratio but also produces a disadvantage in the representation’s ability to compete with other items for access to awareness. A computational implementation of the competition hypothesis was developed to simulate standard findings in the RB literature and to generate novel predictions which were then tested in three experiments. Results from these experiments suggest that repetition effects emerge from competitive interactions between items and that these influences extend to adjacent, nonrepeated items in the display. The results also present challenges to existing theories of short-term repetition effects.     

An investigation of the psychometric evidence of CBM-R passage equivalence: Utility of readability statistics and equating for alternate forms

Claims have been made that grade appropriate curriculum-based measurement of reading (CBM-R) passages are of comparable difficulty and can be used interchangeably to monitor student progress. Empirical evidence to support claims of equivalence has been lacking. This research investigated the basis for making claims of equivalence. The use of readability statistics to justify passage equivalence was found to be lacking. Using a general measurement model for congeneric tests, CBM-R passages were found to measure a single latent factor with a high degree of reliability. However, evidence indicated that the raw scores, words read correctly per minute, across passages did not provide equivalent measurements. Statistical equating was investigated as an approach to overcome the lack of equivalence with promising results.     

Mediating and Moderating Processes in the Relation between Maltreatment and Psychopathology: Mother-Child Relationship Quality and Emotion Regulation

The present study investigated underlying processes of the effect of maltreatment on psychopathology (i.e., internalizing and externalizing problems) in a group of 111 maltreated and 110 nonmaltreated 7–10 year-old children (60% boys). We tested the moderating and/or mediating roles of emotion regulation and the mother-child relationship quality (pattern of relatedness) using Structural Equation Modeling. Emotion regulation, but not the pattern of relatedness, mediated the relation between maltreatment and psychopathology. This mediation was moderated by the pattern of relatedness: For the group of children with an insecure pattern of relatedness, maltreatment was related to lower levels of emotion regulation, which was predictive of higher levels of internalizing and externalizing symptomatology. In contrast, for the secure relatedness group, there was no mediation by emotion regulation since the impact of maltreatment on emotion regulation was not significant. Implications of the mediating role of emotion regulation and the buffering role of the mother-child relationship quality were discussed.

Typification in Society and Social Science: The Continuing Relevance of Schutz’s Social Phenomenology

This paper examines Alfred Schutz’s insights on types and typification. Beginning with a brief overview of the history and meaning of typification in interpretive sociology, the paper further addresses both the ubiquity and the necessity of typification in social life and scientific method. Schutz’s contribution itself is lacking in empirical application and grounding, but examples are provided of ongoing empirical research which advances the understanding of types and typification. As is suggested by illustrations from scholarship in the social studies of social science, studies of social identity associated with membership categorization analysis, and constructionist social problems theory, typification can be found to be central to social research whether it is taken up as a largely unacknowledged resource or whether it is addressed by different names. The overview and illustrations suggest the continuing, widespread, and indeed foundational relevance of Schutz’s insights into types and typification.     

Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability: Paths to college student risk-taking

This study examines the roles of sensation seeking and invulnerability as predictors of health compromising behaviors in a multiethnic sample of 1690 emerging adult college students (mean age = 19.8, range 18–25 years) from nine US colleges and universities. Participants completed the Arnett Sensation Seeking Inventory and the Adolescent Invulnerability Scale; and reported how often they had participated in a set of health compromising risk behaviors (i.e., substance use, impaired driving, and sexual behaviors) in the 30 days prior to assessment. Sensation seeking and danger invulnerability scores were moderately correlated (r = .30). Findings from a series of multivariate Poisson regression analyses suggest that when considered simultaneously as predictors, sensation seeking appears to be a general risk factor associated with engagement in a variety of risk behaviors, whereas danger invulnerability is primarily a factor in those risk behaviors that are less common among peers (e.g., hard drug use, casual sex, and driving while intoxicated).