To Love or Hate Thy Neighbor: The Role of Authoritarianism and Traditionalism in Explaining the Link Between Fundamentalism and Racial Prejudice

Fundamentalism is consistently related to racial prejudice (Hall, Matz, & Wood, 2010), yet the mechanisms for this relationship are unclear. We identify two core values of fundamentalism, authoritarianism and traditionalism, that independently contribute to the fundamentalism‐racial prejudice relationship. We also contextualize the fundamentalism‐racial prejudice relationship by suggesting that fundamentalists may show prejudice based on conceptions of African Americans as violating values but show tolerance when prejudice is less justifiable. These ideas are tested and confirmed using three data sets from the American National Election Studies. Across all three samples, fundamentalism is related to increases in symbolic racism but decreases in negative affect towards African Americans, and these relationships are mediated by both authoritarianism and traditionalism.     

Simulating Personal Wealth in the Laboratory

During laboratory gambling tasks participants are not typically allowed to wager their personal wealth. Instead, wealth is simulated by telling participants they have been endowed with game tokens that will be later exchanged for money. Past research indicates that participants undervalue game tokens following this procedure, which leads to elevated risk taking compared to procedures that add saliency or realism to the monetary payoff. A between-subjects experiment tested whether showing a picture of money during the endowment instructions and repeating token-money exchange information during the session influenced participants' preference for risky and riskless options. The results showed no effect of the money picture. However, repeated token-money exchange information significantly decreased risk taking. Together with past studies, this finding suggests that endowment procedures might establish greater value in game tokens, and therefore better simulate personal wealth, when the eventual exchange between game tokens and money is made more salient to participants.     

A Heterogeneous Growth Curve Model for Nonnormal Data

The heterogeneous growth curve model (HGM; Klein &; Muthén, 2006 Klein, A.G., &; Muthén, B.O. (2006). Modeling heterogeneity of latent growth depending on initial status. Journal of Educational and Behavioral Statistics, 31, 357–375. doi: 10.3102/10769986031004357[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) is a method for modeling heterogeneity of growth rates with a heteroscedastic residual structure for the slope factor. It has been developed as an extension of a conventional growth curve model and a complementary tool to growth curve mixture models. In this article, a robust version of the heterogeneous growth curve model (HGM-R) is presented that extends the original HGM with a mixture model to allow for an unbiased parameter estimation under the condition of nonnormal data. In two simulation studies, the performance of the method is examined under the condition of nonnormality and a misspecified heteroscedastic residual structure. The results of the simulation studies suggest an unbiased estimation of the heterogeneity by the HGM-R when sample size was large enough and a good approximation of the heteroscedastic residual structure even when the functional form of the heteroscedasticity was misspecified. The practical application of the approach is demonstrated for a data set from HIV-infected patients.     

ARABIC JOURNALISM AS A VEHICLE FOR ENLIGHTENMENT

Jews were nowhere as open to participation in the wider Arab culture and at home in standard literary Arabic as in Iraq in the twentieth century. There was a strong connection between the Iraqi Jews’ involvement in the canonical Arab culture and their participation in Iraqi press and journalism. Trying to integrate into the local society, Iraqi Jews founded their own Arabic newspapers and served as editors and journalists in many other Iraqi periodicals. However, due to the gradual demise of Arab‐Jewish culture because of the conflict in the Middle East, the involvement of Jews in Arabic press and journalism is coming to an end. The distinguishing feature of the Muslim‐Jewish symbiosis was that the great majority of Jews under Islamic rule adopted Arabic as their language. This symbiosis does not exist in our time because Arabic is gradually disappearing as a mother tongue mastered by Jews.     

Apparent causality affects perceived simultaneity

The present research addresses the question of how visual predictive information and implied causality affect audio–visual synchrony perception. Previous research has shown a systematic shift in the likelihood of observers to accept audio-leading stimulus pairs as being apparently simultaneous in variants of audio–visual stimulus pairs that differ in (1) the amount of visual predictive information available and (2) the apparent causal relation between the auditory and visual components. An experiment was designed to separate the predictability and causality explanations, and the results indicated that shifts in subjective simultaneity were explained completely by changes in the implied causal relations in the stimuli and that predictability had no added value. Together with earlier findings, these results further indicate that the observed shifts in subjective simultaneity due to causal relations among auditory and visual events do not reflect a mere change in response strategy, but rather result from early multimodal integration processes in event perception.     

Foreground and background in dynamic spatial orientation

The dependency of visually induced self-motion sensation upon the density of moving contrasts as well as upon additional stationary contrasts in the foreground or background was investigated. Using two different optokinetic stimuli, a disk rotating in the frontoparallel plane, and the projection of horizontally moving stripes onto a cylindrical screen, it was found that: (1) visually induced self-motion depends upon the density of moving contrasts randomly distributed within the visual field and, with a single contrast area of 1/4 %, is saturated when about 30% of the visual field is moving; (2) additional stationary contrasts inhibit visually induced serf-motion, proportional to their density; and (3) the location in depth of the stationary contrasts has a significant effect upon this inhibition. Their effect is considerable when located in the background of the moving stimuli but weak when appearing in the foreground. It is concluded that dynamic visual spatial orientation relies mainly on information from the seen periphery, both retinal and depth.