Consequences of Economic Inequality for the Social and Political Vitality of Society: A Social Identity Analysis

Economic inequality has been found to have pernicious effects, reducing mental and physical health, decreasing societal cohesion, and fueling support for nativist parties and illiberal autocratic leaders. We start this review with an outline of what social identity theorizing offers to the study of inequality. We then articulate four hypotheses that can be derived from the social identity approach: the fit hypothesis, the wealth-categorization hypothesis, the wealth-stereotype hypothesis, and the sociostructural hypothesis. We review the empirical literature that tests these hypotheses by exploring the effect of economic inequality, measured objectively by metrics such as the Gini coefficient as well as subjectively in terms of perceptions of economic inequality, on wealth categorization (of others and the self), the desire for more wealth and status, intergroup hostility, attitudes towards immigrants, prosocial behavior, stereotyping, the wish for a strong leader, the endorsement of conspiracy theories, and collective action intentions. As we will show, this research suggests that economic inequality may have even more far-reaching consequences than commonly believed. Indeed, investigating the effects of economic inequality on citizens' sociopolitical behaviors may be increasingly important in today's turbulent political and social landscape.     

Krankheitsbelastung bei chronisch entzündlichen Darmerkrankungen

Background

Psychosocial distress is considerable in inflammatory bowel disease (IBD). The aim of this study was to assess the association of illness perceptions with disease-specific distress in patients with IBD in the context of various medical and psychological parameters.

Method

A total of 62 patients suffering from IBD were examined for illness perceptions using the illness perception questionnaire revised (IPQ-R), medical parameters and affective parameters using the hospital anxiety and depression scale (HADS) in a cross-sectional study. Associations with disease-specific distress were assessed.

Results

In multiple regression analyses illness perceptions and also physical well-being were identified as significant predictors of disease-specific distress and showed significant effects on the explanation for the amount of variance (R²=0.70).

Conclusion

Even in the context of various medical and psychological parameters illness perceptions showed significant associations with disease-specific distress in patients with IBD.     

The development of emotional face and eye gaze processing

Recent research has demonstrated that infants' attention towards novel objects is affected by an adult's emotional expression and eye gaze toward the object. The current event-related potential (ERP) study investigated how infants at 3, 6, and 9 months of age process fearful compared to neutral faces looking toward objects or averting gaze away from objects. Furthermore, we examined how the processing of novel objects is affected by gaze direction and emotional expression. We hypothesized that an adult's fearful expression should be particularly salient when it is directed toward a referent in the environment. Furthermore, responses to objects should be increased if the face previously expressed fear toward the object. Three-month-olds did not show differential neural responses to fearful vs. neutral faces regardless of gaze direction. Six-month-olds showed an enhanced negative central (Nc) component for fearful relative to neutral faces looking toward objects, but not when eye gaze was averted away from the objects. Furthermore, 6-month-olds showed an enhanced Nc for objects that had been gaze-cued by a fearful compared to a neutral face. Nine-month-olds showed an enhanced Nc for fearful relative to neutral faces in both eye gaze conditions and showed an enhanced Nc for objects that had been gaze-cued by a neutral face. The findings are discussed in the context of social cognitive and brain development.     

Expression intensity, gender and facial emotion recognition: Women recognize only subtle facial emotions better than men

Two experiments were conducted in order to investigate the effect of expression intensity on gender differences in the recognition of facial emotions. The first experiment compared recognition accuracy between female and male participants when emotional faces were shown with full-blown (100% emotional content) or subtle expressiveness (50%). In a second experiment more finely grained analyses were applied in order to measure recognition accuracy as a function of expression intensity (40%-100%). The results show that although women were more accurate than men in recognizing subtle facial displays of emotion, there was no difference between male and female participants when recognizing highly expressive stimuli.     

The Femme Fatale Effect: Attractiveness is a Liability for Businesswomen’s Perceived Truthfulness,Trust, and Deservingness of Termination

Sex Roles - In what we label the “femme fatale” effect, we proposed and found support for the notion that attractive businesswomen are judged as being less truthful than less attractive...     

Priming and timing: a test of two perspectives

Supporting a ‘stage’ perspective of assimilation and contrast effects, and in contrast to an ‘extremity’ conceptualization, this study demonstrated that priming moderate person exemplars before the behaviour of an ambiguous target person had been encoded results in assimilation, whereas priming such exemplars after encoding results in a small contrast effect. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Winning or Losing Against an Opposite-Sex Peer on a Gender-Based Competitive Task

Two studies with heterosexual female and malecollege students explored the effects on mood and bodyimage resulting from a negative versus a positiveoutcome in a competitive interaction. In study 1,participants either succeeded or failed in comparison to anopposite-sex confederate on a gender-neutral task ofanagram solution. Study 2 added the dimension of thegender stereotypicality of the task by creatingempirically derived feminine (beauty aid knowledge) andmasculine (tool construction knowledge) conditions. Theresults indicated that women's anger significantlyincreased following the masculine task, regardless of the outcome. A marginally significantthree-way interaction resulted for the depressionmeasure: Females who won at the masculine task hadhigher levels of depression than males in thiscondition, and higher levels than both males and females inthe masculine-lose condition. In contrast, males who“won” on the feminine task had higher levelsof depression than females in this condition, and higher levels than both males and females who lost onthe feminine task. Discussion centers on the potentialusefulness of the gender-stereotypicality measure forfuture research and the need for followup work to replicate the current findings.     

Which kind of attention is captured by cues with the relative target colour?

Most theories of visual search maintain that attention is selectively tuned to the attributes of the search target (e.g., orange). Conversely, according to the relational account, attention is biased to the relative feature of the target (e.g., redder). However, previous studies that supported the relational account mainly measured mean response times. Hence, the results might not reflect early, perceptual mechanisms (e.g., signal enhancement) but later, decision-based mechanisms (channel selection). The current study tested the relational account against feature-specific theories in a spatial cueing task, in which the targets were backward-masked, and target identification accuracy was measured. The first experiment corroborated earlier results, demonstrating that relational effects are due to signal enhancement. In the second experiment, we chose highly discriminable colours along the blue–red continuum, and obtained results that were more consistent with broad feature-specific rather than relational tuning. The implications of these findings for current theories of attention are discussed.