Exploring the Context-Sensitivity of Collective Action Motivations and the Mobilizing Role of Social Media: A Comparative Interview Study With Activists in Germany and Turkey

Western scholarship has underlined the relevance of social identity, perceived efficacy, emotions, and cost–benefit assessments as central catalysts of collective action. Little has been done to understand the context-sensitivity of these catalysts by means of cross-culturally comparative designs. The current study explores their context-sensitivity. It aims to find out whether existing opportunity structures in a democratic, nonrepressive country like Germany produce catalysts of collective action different from those produced in an autocratic, repressive country like Turkey. It also aims to understand the role of social media in mobilizing people in these two contexts. Semistandardized interviews with activists were carried out in both countries (n = 18 in Germany and n = 15 in Turkey) and analyzed by means of a cross-culturally comparative inductive coding procedure including initial and focused coding. Results show that collective action is related to different configurations of collective-action catalysts in the two countries. Solidarity concerns at the face of existential risks are more pronounced in Turkey, whereas political-change concerns are more important in Germany. The role of social media accordingly differs, adhering to the different activist goals. Theoretical implications for the role of context in studying collective action are discussed.     

“Put a Little Love in Your Heart”: Acceptance of Paternalistic and Ally Political Discourses Both Predict Pro-Roma Solidarity Intentions Through Moral Inclusion

The way politicians talk about minorities institutes the normative context of intergroup relations. We investigated how endorsement of different political discourses predicts donation and collective action intentions by majority members toward the Roma in five European countries. The survey was conducted online using samples demographically similar to the populations of Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, France, and Ireland (N = 5,054). First, results showed that accepting paternalistic discourse versus discourse promoting allyship were not distinguishable; both promoted higher moral inclusion which in turn predicted higher prosocial intentions. Second, donations (i.e., immediate relief) and collective action (i.e., social change action) were driven by identical factors. Third, acceptance of openly hostile political discourse neither predicted moral exclusion, nor lower prosocial intentions. In summary, our research provides important evidence that when it comes to Roma—non-Roma relations, the previously established distinction between solidarity intentions that aim to solidify status relations versus bring about social change is completely blurred, presumably because of the social context in which any positive message communicates moral inclusion challenging the hostile status quo.     

Transfer effects from language processing to visual attention dynamics: The impact of orthographic transparency

The consistency between letters and sounds varies across languages. These differences have been proposed to be associated with different reading mechanisms (lexical vs. phonological), processing grain sizes (coarse vs. fine) and attentional windows (whole words vs. individual letters). This study aimed to extend this idea to writing to dictation. For that purpose, we evaluated whether the use of different types of processing has a differential impact on local windowing attention: phonological (local) processing in a transparent language (Spanish) and lexical (global) processing of an opaque language (English). Spanish and English monolinguals (Experiment 1) and Spanish–English bilinguals (Experiment 2) performed a writing to dictation task followed by a global–local task. The first key performance showed a critical dissociation between languages: the response times (RTs) from the Spanish writing to dictation task was modulated by word length, whereas the RTs from the English writing to dictation task was modulated by word frequency and age of acquisition, as evidence that language transparency biases processing towards phonological or lexical strategies. In addition, after a Spanish task, participants more efficiently processed local information, which resulted in both the benefit of global congruent information and the reduced cost of incongruent global information. Additionally, the results showed that bilinguals adapt their attentional processing depending on the orthographic transparency.     

Pain in the eye of the beholder: Variations in pain visual representations as a function of face ethnicity and culture

Pain experienced by Black individuals is systematically underestimated, and recent studies have shown that part of this bias is rooted in perceptual factors. We used Reverse Correlation to estimate visual representations of the pain expression in Black and White faces, in participants originating from both Western and African countries. Groups of raters were then asked to evaluate the presence of pain and other emotions in these representations. A second group of White raters then evaluated those same representations placed over a neutral background face (50% White; 50% Black). Image-based analyses show significant effects of culture and face ethnicity, but no interaction between the two factors. Western representations were more likely to be judged as expressing pain than African representations. For both cultural groups, raters also perceived more pain in White face representations than in Black face representations. However, when changing the background stimulus to the neutral background face, this effect of face ethnic profile disappeared. Overall, these results suggest that individuals have different expectations of how pain is expressed by Black and White individuals, and that cultural factors may explain a part of this phenomenon     

Visual influences on auditory pluck and bow judgments

In the McGurk effect, visual information specifying a speaker’s articulatory movements can influence auditory judgments of speech. In the present study, we attempted to find an analogue of the McGurk effect by using nonspeech stimuli—the discrepant audiovisual tokens of plucks and bows on a cello. The results of an initial experiment revealed that subjects’ auditory judgments were influenced significantly by the visual pluck and bow stimuli. However, a second experiment in which speech syllables were used demonstrated that the visual influence on consonants was significantly greater than the visual influence observed for pluck-bow stimuli. This result could be interpreted to suggest that the nonspeech visual influence was not a true McGurk effect. In a third experiment, visual stimuli consisting of the wordspluck andbow were found to have no influence over auditory pluck and bow judgments. This result could suggest that the nonspeech effects found in Experiment 1 were based on the audio and visual information’s having an ostensive lawful relation to the specified event. These results are discussed in terms of motor-theory, ecological, and FLMP approaches to speech perception.     

Influence of the intensity of NaCl solutions on adaptation degree and recovery time course

The degree of adaptation and the time course of recovery after adaptation to NaCl solutions of various intensities were examined by magnitude estimation and simple sensory reaction time using a test stimulus of constant intensity. The results show that the degree of adaptation increased with the adapting concentration following a negatively accelerated function. Similarly, all recovery curves were negatively accelerated functions of the recovery time. The relation between the recovery constant (time necessary to attain two-thirds of normal responsivity) and adapting concentration approximates with both criteria more or less a linear function. Thus the recovery constant is a positively accelerated function of the degree of adaptation. The relationship between concentration and degree of adaptation can be approximated by Beidler’s equation of taste stimulation, while the time course of recovery can be expressed by an exponential equation that can also be related to Beidler’s theory. The two criteria used showed similar deteriorating effects of taste adaptation, indicating that reaction time can also be a useful criterion of the level of sensory responsivity.     

Comprehension of nonlexical categories in agrammatism

The focus of the paper is a proposal advanced by Grodzinsky (1984, 1986, 1990) concerning a possible syntactic deficit in agrammatism with respect to nonlexical categories. Eight native speakers of Serbo-Croatian, who presented a clinical picture of Broca's aphasia with agrammatism, were tested. Subject's sensitivity to traces and their knowledge of the inflectional and determiner system was investigated using a grammaticality judgment paradigm. The processing load was further minimized by use of short sentences that unequivocally exemplified different syntactic violations. These steps led to significant improvement in the performance of agrammatic aphasics, a result that is incompatible with the claim that the content of nonlexical elements is lost in agrammatism.A partial account of the findings was presented at the 31 st Meeting of the Academy of Aphasia, October 24–26, 1993. Tucson, Arizona. The authors gratefully acknowledge help in data collection from Mile Vukovi, Faculty of Defectology, University of Belgrade, and from Jovanka Jezdimirovi and Veronika Ispanovi-Radojkovi, the Institute for Mental Health in Belgrade. This research was supported in part by a grant (HD-01994) to Haskins Laboratories from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.     

An alternative assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses

Methodological difficulties are identified in the assessment of children's comprehension of relative clauses (RCs) by means of the standard acting-out procedure. An alternative experimental task is proposed which attempts to minimize these difficulties while exploring the advantages of the acting-out technique. An experiment is reported in which Portuguese-speaking 3- to 6-year olds were tested by means of this alternative task. The results show children being affected by both the position and the focus of the RC in the same way adults have been reported to be and an error analysis suggests that most of children's difficulties can be ascribed to memory overload while RCs are processed as noun modifier sentences. These results contradict the view that there are developmental differences with regard to the way sentences with RCs are parsed and that processing load induces errors particularly manifested in right-branching subject focus sentences. Developmental changes taking place between the ages of 3 and 6 are considered and questions are raised concerning development from the age of 5.The research reported here was carried out while the author read for the PhD degree at the University of London. The writing up of this paper was financially supported by a postdoctoral grant from the Brazilian Research Council (CNPq: 302103-86.4).