Personal values and political activism: A cross‐national study

Using data from 28 countries in four continents, the present research addresses the question of how basic values may account for political activism. Study (N = 35,116) analyses data from representative samples in 20 countries that responded to the 21‐item version of the Portrait Values Questionnaire (PVQ‐21) in the European Social Survey. Study (N = 7,773) analyses data from adult samples in six of the same countries (Finland, Germany, Greece, Israel, Poland, and United Kingdom) and eight other countries (Australia, Brazil, Chile, Italy, Slovakia, Turkey, Ukraine, and United States) that completed the full 40‐item PVQ. Across both studies, political activism relates positively to self‐transcendence and openness to change values, especially to universalism and autonomy of thought, a subtype of self‐direction. Political activism relates negatively to conservation values, especially to conformity and personal security. National differences in the strength of the associations between individual values and political activism are linked to level of democratization.     

The effect of language on visual contrast sensitivity

Embodied cognition and perceptual symbol theories assume that higher cognition interacts with and is grounded in perception and action. Recent experiments have shown that language processing interacts with perceptual processing in various ways, indicating that linguistic representations have a strong perceptual character. In the present study, we have used signal detection theory to investigate whether the comprehension of written sentences, implying either horizontal or vertical orientation, could improve the participants' visual sensitivity for discriminating between horizontal or vertical square-wave gratings and noise. We tested this prediction by conducting one main and one follow-up experiment. Our results indicate that language can, indeed, affect perception at such a low level of the visual process and thus provide further support for the embodied theories of cognition.     

Maternal and paternal infant-directed speech to girls and boys: An exploratory study

ABSTRACT

We compared systematically the structure and the content of maternal and paternal speech to infant boys and girls while we also investigated the effect of infant’s age. Six girls and five boys were observed in the interaction with their mothers and their fathers (dyads came from the same families) at home from the second to the sixth month after birth at 15- day intervals. Detailed analysis of time revealed that fathers favour systematically the temporal structure of their speech to both girls and boys, while mothers favour boys in infant emotion/attention thematic sequences and girls in infant attention speech. Variations are counterbalanced in the way mothers and fathers respond sensitively to known marked changes in infant- parent communication over the first 6 months of life. These results are discussing in relation to the theory of innate intersubjectivity and the complementary company and care both parents give to developing infant girls and boys.