Promoting Safety Belt Use on a University Campus: An Integration of Commitment and Incentive Strategies1

Safety belt use on a university campus was substantially increased by offering faculty/ staff and students who signed and returned “buckle up” pledge cards the opportunity to win prizes donated by community merchants. The 28,000 pledge cards, committing signers to buckle up for an academic quarter, were distributed during the spring and fall of 1985. One portion of the card was designed to be hung from a vehicle's rearview mirror as a reminder of the pledge to buckle up. The other portion served as a sweepstakes ticket and was deposited in boxes located throughout the campus community. Each quarter, winners were drawn from the returned pledge cards during three consecutive weeks. Although a relatively small proportion of the pledge cards were signed and turned in (i.e., 11.9% during spring and 9.4% during fall), those who signed and returned a pledge card (n = 3117) increased their safety belt use significantly. Across both quarters, faculty/ staff pledgers went from a high pre-pledge belt use level of 32.2% to a post-pledge level of 46.7%, and students increased their belt use from a pre-pledge use of 21.4% to a post-pledge level of 36.6%.     

‘Dear Hindu Friends’: official Diwali greetings as a medium for diplomatic dialogue

ABSTRACT

This article discusses greeting messages as a genre of interreligious communication. Greeting messages are defined as official communication issued by religious institutions and addressed to the members of another religious community on the occasion of specific feast days or anniversaries. Drawing on the insights of politolinguistic analysis, this article treats these messages primarily as a form of public diplomacy. The case study analyses the messages issued on the occasion of the Hindu festival Diwali/Deepavali by the Pontifical Council for Interreligious Dialogue and World Council of Churches between 2015 and 2017. Distributed through the social media and posted on the institutional websites, the Diwali messages seek to speak as a Christian voice to all Hindus. Beyond the official addressee, the messages also potentially face the scrutiny of the global public sphere, especially an internal Christian readership. This article analyses what language strategies are used to deal with these varied demands.     

Protective buffering and emotional desynchrony among spousal caregivers of cancer patients.

OBJECTIVE: To examine protective buffering and emotional desynchrony among spousal caregivers of cancer survivors. DESIGN: Repeated measures; 42 caregivers engaged in 2 videotaped, oral emotional expression exercises: 1 in the presence of their patient and 1 in the absence of their patient. MAIN OUTCOME MEASURES: Felt emotion (self-report) and expressed emotion (lexical expression or words uttered and coder-derived facial expression). Other measures assessed mental and physical health, dyadic satisfaction, and dispositional emotional inhibition. RESULTS: Protective buffering differed by communicative channel (lexical vs. facial). Caregivers' facial expressions were more positive when the patient was present versus absent. In contrast, the valence of caregivers' words did not differ per patient presence. Facial protective buffering was unrelated to health and dyadic outcomes. Lexical protective buffering was inversely related to both caregiver and patient marital satisfaction. Dispositional emotional inhibition was inversely related to caregiver mental health and marital satisfaction. Desynchrony occurred when the patient was present but was counter to prediction; felt emotion was more positive than expressed emotion. CONCLUSION: Results provide behavioral evidence of facial protective buffering. To the extent that lexical buffering occurs, it poses a dyadic risk, and chronic inhibition poses both psychological and dyadic risks. Future research is needed to refine the operational definition of desynchrony and to examine the biopsychosocial sequelae of buffering.     

Catching up with wonderful women: The women‐are‐wonderful effect is smaller in more gender egalitarian societies

Inequalities between men and women are common and well‐documented. Objective indexes show that men are better positioned than women in societal hierarchies—there is no single country in the world without a gender gap. In contrast, researchers have found that the women‐are‐wonderful effect—that women are evaluated more positively than men overall—is also common. Cross‐cultural studies on gender equality reveal that the more gender egalitarian the society is, the less prevalent explicit gender stereotypes are. Yet, because self‐reported gender stereotypes may differ from implicit attitudes towards each gender, we reanalysed data collected across 44 cultures, and (a) confirmed that societal gender egalitarianism reduces the women‐are‐wonderful effect when it is measured more implicitly (i.e. rating the personality of men and women presented in images) and (b) documented that the social perception of men benefits more from gender egalitarianism than that of women.     

Just between us: Exclusive communications in online social networks

Social media websites such as Facebook are used for relationship development and maintenance often through self-disclosure and sharing of personal information. However, not all forms of social media communication may be equally suitable for this task. This paper explores users’ norms about the appropriateness of using private vs. public Facebook messages to communicate different kinds of personal information, and the effectiveness of these types of communication in building relationships. Study 1, a survey, revealed that users endorse conflicting expectations about preferences for receiving information publicly or privately. Study 2, a field experiment testing the effects of private versus public Facebook communications on actual relationship development using participants’ own Facebook pages, suggested that private messages lead to greater closeness.