RELATIONSHIP SATISFACTION, AFFECTIVITY, AND GAY-SPECIFIC STRESSORS IN SAME-SEX COUPLES JOINED IN CIVIL UNIONS

Relationship satisfaction, affect, and stress were examined in 313 same-sex couples who had had civil unions in Vermont during the first year of this legislation. Similarity between partners on age and on positive/negative affectivity was related to relationship satisfaction whereas there was no association with similarity in income, education, and outness. Lesbian couples ( n = 199), compared to gay male couples, reported experiencing more stress related to family reaction to their sexuality, whereas gay male couples ( n = 114) reported more stress surrounding the issues of HIV/AIDS and violence/harassment than did lesbian couples. This study is the first to examine within-couple factors among same-sex couples with legalized relationships.     

The Urge to Splurge: A Terror Management Account of Materialism and Consumer Behavior

This article presents terror management theory (TMT) as a way to understand how the human awareness of death affects materialism, conspicuous consumption, and consumer decisions. The pursuit of wealth and culturally desired commodities are hypothesized to reinforce those beliefs that function to protect people from existential anxieties. Following a brief overview of TMT and research, evidence is reviewed that explicates how intimations of mortality increase materialism as a way to enhance self‐esteem and affects consumer decisions that support one's cultural worldview. Adverse consequences of materialistic and consumeristic worldviews are described and the challenges for future research to discover ways to alleviate them are considered.     

Can empathy close the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support?

Public opinion data indicate that the majority of US respondents support the death penalty. Research has consistently indicated, however, that Blacks and females are significantly less likely to support capital punishment than their White and male counterparts. Past research efforts attempting to account for these differences have, at best, only partially accounted for them: the racial divide and gender gap in death penalty support, while narrowed, remained evident. This study proposes that empathy, particularly ethnocultural empathy, may be a key explanatory correlate of death penalty support and that racial and gender differences in empathy may fully explain the observed racial and gender differences in death penalty support. This study uses three forms of empathy measures (cognitive, affective, and ethnocultural) to test this hypothesis using survey data from a sample of undergraduate students. Our results show that neither a variety of other “known correlates” of death penalty support nor cognitive or affective empathy scales were able to fully account for the observed racial difference in death penalty support. Ethnocultural empathy, however, was successful in reducing the effect of race on death penalty support to nonsignificance. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to have done so.     

Psychological validation of the Rosenberg Self-Esteem Scale (RSES) in South Africa: Method effects and dimensionality in black African and white university students

The study examined the factor structure and cross-cultural validity of the Rosenberg Self-esteem Scale (RSES) in a sample of South African students (N = 862; black African = 67%, female = 71.5%). Alternative a priori CFA models (unidimensional, bi-dimensional and unidimensional models comprising either latent method factor or correlated residuals) were evaluated. Results indicated that the RSES in black and white South African university students is represented by a unidimensional model with correlated residuals of negatively and positively phrased items. Findings also suggested method effects on black African students to be significantly associated with negatively worded items compared to white students. Method bias effects appear to show for some RSES items and this may have important implications for the cross-cultural utility of the RSES in South Africa.     

Auditory event perception: the source-perception loop for posture in human gait

There is a small but growing literature on the perception of natural acoustic events, but few attempts have been made to investigate complex sounds not systematically controlled within a laboratory setting. The present study investigates listeners' ability to make judgments about the posture (upright-stooped) of the walker who generated acoustic stimuli contrasted on each trial. We use a comprehensive three-stage approach to event perception, in which we develop a solid understanding of the source event and its sound properties, as well as the relationships between these two event stages. Developing this understanding helps both to identify the limitations of common statistical procedures and to develop effective new procedures for investigating not only the two information stages above, but also the decision strategies employed by listeners in making source judgments from sound. The result is a comprehensive, ultimately logical, but not necessarily expected picture of both the source-sound-perception loop and the utility of alternative research tools.     

The undesired self: Deadly connotations

Two studies were conducted to examine the hypothesis derived from a juxtaposition of the undesired self and terror management theories that making aspects of the undesired self salient produces effects comparable to those obtained in response to making mortality salient. In Study 1, participants reminded of either death or aspects of their undesired self were more supportive of President George W. Bush and his policies in Iraq, relative to participants in exam salient or desired self salient control conditions. In Study 2, participants reminded of death or aspects of their undesired self showed greater accessibility of implicit death thoughts, relative to participants in pain salient or desired self salient control conditions. Implications of these findings for future theory and research are considered.     

Interpersonal politics: the role of terror management and attachment processes in shaping political preferences

Research on terror management theory (TMT) indicates that reminders of death affect political attitudes, but political orientation only sometimes moderates these effects. We propose that secure relationships are associated with values of tolerance and compassion, thus orienting people toward liberalism; insecure attachments are associated with more rigid and absolutist values that orient people toward conservatism. Given that attachment relationships become especially active when security needs are heightened, we predicted that mortality salience would be an important factor in understanding the relationship between attachment processes and political orientation. Supporting these ideas, Study 1 showed that after a mortality-salience manipulation, securely attached participants increased their support for a liberal presidential candidate, and less securely attached participants increased their support for a conservative presidential candidate. In Study 2, a secure-relationship prime following a mortality-salience manipulation engendered a less violent approach to the problem of terrorism than did a neutral-relationship prime. We discuss the interaction of TMT processes and individual differences in attachment in shaping political preferences.     

Birth,kind and naïve biology

Much recent debate concerning the acquisition of naïve theories of biology and of race has turned on the claim that even preschoolers understand biological inheritance. At issue is what is implied by the belief that offspring will have the characteristic features of their kind. The present paper argues that such an essentialist belief in innate potential need not indicate a domain‐specific understanding of the biological inheritance of human kinds (or race). In Study 1, preschoolers in a Switched‐at‐birth task were found to be as likely to judge an adopted girl to resemble her birth parents on the color of their shirts as on their race. In Study 2, a variant on the task, 4‐year‐olds were found to be more likely to judge the girl to resemble her adoptive parents, suggesting that the concept of birth origin was not central to their reasoning. Though the results are consistent with the claim that preschoolers reason about human kinds in an essentialist manner, they undermine the broader claim that such reasoning is anchored by a naïve theory of biology. The finding is of cultural as well as cognitive consequence.