The Perceptual Basis of Vast Space

“Vast” is a word often applied to environmental terrain that is perceived to have large spatial extent. This judgment is made even at viewing distances where traditional metric depth cues are not useful. This paper explores the perceptual basis of vast experience, including reliability and visual precursors. Experiment 1 demonstrated strong agreement in ratings of the spatial extent of two-dimensional (2D) scene images by participants in two countries under very different viewing conditions. Image categories labeled “vast” often exemplified scene attributes of ruggedness and openness (Oliva & Torralba, 2001). Experiment 2 quantitatively assessed whether these properties predict vastness. High vastness ratings were associated with highly open, or moderately open but rugged, scenes. Experiment 3 provided evidence, consistent with theory, that metric distance perception does not directly mediate the observed vastness ratings. The question remains as to how people perceive vast space when information about environmental scale is unavailable from metric depth cues or associated scene properties. We consider possible answers, including contribution from strong cues to relative depth.     

Subjective Social Standing and Conflict Tactics Among Young Kenyan Men

Efforts to reduce intimate partner violence in sub‐Saharan Africa generally approach the issue through the lens of women's empowerment. These efforts include foci on women's relative power in the relationship, educational background, and earning potential. The social status of men has largely been ignored, reducing the potential to involve them in efforts to demote intimate partner violence. In this study we consider whether a man's perceived social status predicts conflict tactics, and whether these tactics are mediated by loneliness and collective self‐esteem from a community‐based sample in semi‐rural Kenya (n = 263). We find that men who reported lower perceived social status also reported significantly more frequent violent conflicts with their intimate partners. This association was significantly, and completely, mediated by lower collective self‐esteem and higher loneliness. There was no direct association between subjective social status and negotiation‐based conflict tactics, although there was an indirect association. Men with higher perceived social status reported higher collective self‐esteem, and men with higher collective self‐esteem reported more negotiation‐based conflict tactics. These findings inform efforts to reduce intimate partner violence by involving men, showing potential to reduce violence by building self‐esteem among men—particularly those with lower perceived social status.     

The just world hypothesis as an argumentative resource in debates about unemployment benefits

The concept of the “just world” is established as a key explanation for how people make sense of inequality so that those deemed to score high in belief in a just world are more likely to hold prejudicial beliefs and to blame people in poverty for their situations. However, this is an inadequate explanation for such complicated and controversial issues. To better understand talk about the just world and the controversial issue of the distribution of unemployment benefits (an issue of inequality), a discursive psychological approach to the just world is used. Therefore, a discourse analysis focusses on 2 feature length British televised discussions about benefit claimants called “The Big Benefit Row: Live” (Channel 5 3/2/2014) and “Benefits Britain: the Debate” (Channel 4 17/2/2014). The analysis demonstrates that people draw on both just and unjust world arguments simultaneously and also topicalise what counts as just so as to support their positions on unemployment benefits, rather than in the consistent way that just world theory would predict. It is therefore argued that the just world should be recast as a cultural value that facilitates arguments about benefits, rather than an internally held belief.     

Coercion in Intimate Partner Violence: Toward a New Conceptualization

For decades, battered women’s advocates have placed coercive control squarely at the center of their analysis of intimate partner violence. Yet, little work has been done to conceptualize and measure the key construct of coercive control. In this article, we apply French and Raven’s social power model to a conceptualization of coercive control in intimate partner violence relationships. Central elements of the model include: social ecology; setting the stage; coercion involving a demand and a credible threat for noncompliance; surveillance; delivery of threatened consequences; and the victim’s behavioral and emotional response to coercion. These elements occur in spiraling and overlapping sequences to establish an overall situation of coercive control. The implications of this model for theory and practice are discussed.     

Reform of statistical inference in psychology: the case of memory & cognition.

Geoffrey Loftus, Editor of Memory & Cognition from 1994 to 1997, strongly encouraged presentation of figures with error bars and avoidance of null hypothesis significance testing (NHST). The authors examined 696 Memory & Cognition articles published before, during, and after the Loftus editorship. Use of figures with bars increased to 47% under Loftus's editorship and then declined. Bars were rarely used for interpretation, and NHST remained almost universal. Analysis of 309 articles in other psychology journals confirmed that Loftus's influence was most evident in the articles he accepted for publication, but was otherwise limited. An e-mail survey of authors of papers accepted by Loftus revealed some support for his policy, but allegiance to traditional practices as well. Reform of psychologists' statistical practices would require more than editorial encouragement.     

The Effects of Estradiol on Avoidance Learning in Ovariectomized Adult Rats

The present study examined the effects of ovariectomy and subsequent estradiol replacement on learning in young adult rats using a set of instrumental avoidance paradigms differing in the nature and extent of prior experience in the learning context. Thus, one group of animals was placed directly into avoidance learning (AV). A second group was trained on an appetitive task first, and then transferred into the aversive context (AP-AV). The third group was exposed to the training context without any specific appetitive response requirement, and then required to learn an active avoidance response (Context-AV). We found that estradiol (OVX+E) impaired avoidance acquisition in all cases relative ovariectomized controls (OVX). In contrast, while avoidance learning is improved following appetitive training or context exposure in both OVX+E and OVX animals, the OVX+E animals profit to a greater extent from the appetitive or context experience than do the OVX controls. We suggest that this difference may be due to enhanced attentional processes or improved hippocampal processing of contextual factors. Thus, estradiol negatively influences simple associative avoidance learning in ovariectomized rats, but appears to promote positive transfer.     

An image is worth a thousand words: why nouns tend to dominate verbs in early word learning

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g., Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek, & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage nouns have is not a function of grammatical form class but rather related to a word's imageability. Here, word imageability ratings and form class (nouns and verbs) were correlated with age of acquisition according to the MacArthur-Bates Communicative Development Inventory (CDI) (Fenson et al., 1994). CDI age of acquisition was negatively correlated with words' imageability ratings. Further, a word's imageability contributes to the variance of the word's age of acquisition above and beyond form class, suggesting that at the beginning of word learning, imageability might be a driving factor.     

Irrelevant visual faces influence haptic identification of facial expressions of emotion

This study demonstrates that when people attempt to identify a facial expression of emotion (FEE) by haptically exploring a 3D facemask, they are affected by viewing a simultaneous, task-irrelevant visual FEE portrayed by another person. In comparison to a control condition, where visual noise was presented, the visual FEE facilitated haptic identification when congruent (visual and haptic FEEs same category). When the visual and haptic FEEs were incongruent, haptic identification was impaired, and error responses shifted toward the visually depicted emotion. In contrast, visual emotion labels that matched or mismatched the haptic FEE category produced no such effects. The findings indicate that vision and touch interact in FEE recognition at a level where featural invariants of the emotional category (cf. precise facial geometry or general concepts) are processed, even when the visual and haptic FEEs are not attributable to a common source. Processing mechanisms behind these effects are considered.