Does “Violent” Mean “Bad”? Individual Definitions of Violence

People use the word “violent” to describe a wide range of behaviors. When referring to acts of force, however, past research indicates that people often reserve the word “violent” to refer to acts of force that they define as “bad.” In the current study we use vignettes to explore variation in people’s definitions of a particular instance of the use of force. The findings indicate support for the idea that people reserve the word “violent” to refer to acts of force they view as “bad.” Findings indicate there is variation in perceptions of the level of violence, and whether the incident was even violent. Characteristics of the incident as well as the gender of those involved account for the majority of the variance explained.     

The American Girl: Playing with the Wrong Dollie?

This essay explores the American Girl Just Like You doll through a variety of feminist lenses. It was inspired by my experiences chaperoning my friend Grace (aged eleven) to the American Girl Store in New York City, and returning to the store to shop for my own doll. I returned to the store because I was not sure why I was so extremely disturbed by this doll. The doll is not emaciated, not overtly sexy, and marketed along with outfits that supposedly send girls the message that they can achieve their goals. She comes in a variety of skin, eye, and hair colors, and the line is therefore marketed as racially and ethnically sensitive. I argue that although the Just Like You line appears to be empowering and racially sensitive on a superficial level, an in‐depth feminist analysis indicates that it is not. In fact, the Just Like You line is highly problematic from a feminist perspective.     

Unveiling the link between facets of positive nonverbal communication and perceived leader effectiveness: A moderated mediation model

Previous experimental research has examined the important role of combined facets of kinesics and paralanguage in engendering perceived leader effectiveness. However, little is known about the distinct impact of these overarching forms of nonverbal communication and the underlying mechanisms that account for this relationship. Hence, conducting a scenario and a survey, we examined the affect of leader positive kinesics and paralanguage on perceived leader effectiveness through trust in leader. Furthermore, we investigated if these indirect effects are contingent on a novel personality trait--namely, suspicion. The present results demonstrated that suspicion moderated the mediating effect of trust in leader on the relationship between both kinesics and paralanguage and perceived leader effectiveness. Implications and future research are also discussed.     

Perceptual grouping and distance estimates in typical and atypical development: comparing performance across perception, drawing and construction tasks

Perceptual grouping is a pre-attentive process which serves to group local elements into global wholes, based on shared properties. One effect of perceptual grouping is to distort the ability to estimate the distance between two elements. In this study, biases in distance estimates, caused by four types of perceptual grouping, were measured across three tasks, a perception, a drawing and a construction task in both typical development (TD: Experiment 1) and in individuals with Williams syndrome (WS: Experiment 2). In Experiment 1, perceptual grouping distorted distance estimates across all three tasks. Interestingly, the effect of grouping by luminance was in the opposite direction to the effects of the remaining grouping types. We relate this to differences in the ability to inhibit perceptual grouping effects on distance estimates. Additive distorting influences were also observed in the drawing and the construction task, which are explained in terms of the points of reference employed in each task. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the above distortion effects are also observed in WS. Given the known deficit in the ability to use perceptual grouping in WS, this suggests a dissociation between the pre-attentive influence of and the attentive deployment of perceptual grouping in WS. The typical distortion in relation to drawing and construction points towards the presence of some typical location coding strategies in WS. The performance of the WS group differed from the TD participants on two counts. First, the pattern of overall distance estimates (averaged across interior and exterior distances) across the four perceptual grouping types, differed between groups. Second, the distorting influence of perceptual grouping was strongest for grouping by shape similarity in WS, which contrasts to a strength in grouping by proximity observed in the TD participants.     

Nine-months-old infants do not need to know what the agent prefers in order to reason about its goals: on the role of preference and persistence in infants' goal-attribution

Human infants readily interpret others' actions as goal-directed and their understanding of previous goals shapes their expectations about an agent's future goal-directed behavior in a changed situation. According to a recent proposal (Luo & Baillargeon, 2005), infants' goal-attributions are not sufficient to support such expectations if the situational change involves broadening the set of choice-options available to the agent, and the agent's preferences among this broadened set are not known. The present study falsifies this claim by showing that 9-month-olds expect the agent to continue acting towards the previous goal even if additional choice-options become available for which there is no preference-related evidence. We conclude that infants do not need to know about the agent's preferences in order to form expectations about its goal-directed actions. Implications for the role of action persistency and action selectivity are discussed.