Elaborating the Connection between Social Class and Classism in College

Scholarship has documented the challenges that face college students of marginalized economic backgrounds, an issue that is relevant for Community Psychology because of the field's commitment to social justice. Community psychologists are concerned with facilitating access to social resources such as education across the full range of social identities. The current study builds on recent research that has identified the key role of classism in students' struggles. We developed a new measure of college student financial stress in order to investigate the relationship between indices of social class (financial stress, subjective social status, and parental education) and indices of classism (institutional, interpersonal, and citational). We also explored whether race or immigration status moderated these relationships in a sample of diverse students (N = 278). Findings show that students' current financial stress has the strongest relationship with classism, and immigration status moderates the exposure to citational classism. Specifically, we found evidence for perpetuation of classism among U.S. born students higher on the social class ladder. Implications for future research include the importance of considering multiple domains of social class, studying social class in a context‐specific way, and differentiating dimensions of classism. Findings also suggest that financial stress is an important focus in the work to support marginalized students, and that classist narratives need to be addressed among students of higher social class.     

Effects of incidental positive emotion and cognitive reappraisal on affective responses to negative stimuli

Previous studies have identified two powerful ways to regulate emotional responses to a stressor: experiencing incidental positive emotions and using cognitive reappraisal to reframe the stressor. Several cognitive and motivational theories of positive emotion support the formulation that incidental positive emotions may facilitate cognitive reappraisal. To test the separate and interacting effects of positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal, we first adapted an established picture-based reappraisal paradigm by interspersing blocks of positive emotion inducing and neutral pictures. Across two pre-registered studies (Studies 1, 2), reappraisal effectively decreased self-reported negative emotions and increased self-reported positive emotions; however, experiencing incidental positive emotions did not facilitate reappraisal success. In another preregistered study (Study 3), we employed a more powerful positive emotion induction via virtual reality (VR), used a social stress anticipation task, and instructed participants to reappraise the anticipated stressor positively. Although there was a robust effect of the positive emotion induction (relative to the neutral induction) on feeling more positive emotions throughout stress anticipation, the results again indicated that incidental positive emotions did not facilitate cognitive reappraisal. We propose that incidental positive emotions and cognitive reappraisal may constitute separate pathways of influence when regulating one's responses to negative events.     

Moving from Rural to Urban China: How Urbanization Affects Women’s Housework

Sex Roles - The present study explores within-gender differences in domestic labor by studying housework variations across five different groups of women in contemporary China. We defined five...     

Contingency awareness in a symptom learning paradigm: necessary but not sufficient?

In previous studies, we found that bodily symptoms can be learned in a differential conditioning paradigm, using odors as conditioned stimuli (CSs) and CO2-enriched air as unconditioned stimulus (US). However, this only occurred when the odor CS had a negative valence (a selective conditioning effect), and tended to be more pronounced in persons scoring high for Negative Affectivity (NA). This paper considers the necessity and/or sufficiency of awareness of the CS-US contingency in three studies using this paradigm. The relation between contingency awareness and the selective conditioning effect, and between contingency awareness and NA was also considered. Both self reported symptoms and respiratory physiology served as dependent variables. A learning effect on symptoms was found only for participants aware of the CS-US contingency, but not all participants reporting contingency awareness showed a learning effect. No conditioning effects appeared on the physiological measures. Also contingency awareness did not account for the selective conditioning effect, and did not interact with NA. Overall, the necessity but insufficiency hypotheses can only be withhold for group data and not for individual data.     

Distinctive phonological features differ in relevance for both spoken and written word recognition

This paper discusses four experiments on Dutch which show that distinctive phonological features differ in their relevance for word recognition. The relevance of a feature for word recognition depends on its phonological stability, that is, the extent to which that feature is generally realized in accordance with its lexical specification in the relevant word position. If one feature value is uninformative, all values of that feature are less relevant for word recognition, with the least informative feature being the least relevant. Features differ in their relevance both in spoken and written word recognition, though the differences are more pronounced in auditory lexical decision than in self-paced reading.     

Introduction: a report on the National Multicultural Conference and Summit II

Multiculturalism, in its broadest terms, not only is defined by race and ethnicity but also involves topics of gender, sexual orientation, and disability. Underlying this notion is the assumption that there is no one way to conceptualize human behavior, no one theory that explains the realities and experiences of various forms of diversity, and no particular set of competencies that have been proven to be effective with every form of diversity. Yet, it is possible to seek and provide information that can move psychologists and other social scientists forward in the search for multicultural awareness, respect, and competence. The 2nd National Multicultural Conference and Summit, held in January 2001 in Santa Barbara, California, was designed to promote knowledge about multiculturalism in these broad terms. This introduction to the special section is designed to (a) provide an overview of the proceedings of the Summit, (b) identify themes that emerged throughout the Summit with a special focus on the major keynote addresses, and (c) recommend future directions for education, training, practice, and research in multicultural psychology.     

Behavioral assessment of public-speaking anxiety using a modified version of the Social Performance Rating Scale

The current study aimed to extend the evaluation of the utility of the Social Performance Rating Scale (SPRS) [Behav. Res. Ther. 36 (1998) 995]. We examined the utility of a modified SPRS for the behavioral assessment of public-speaking anxiety among patients with social phobia (n = 49). The videotaped performance of public-speaking fearful patients in a public-speaking task was rated using four of the five SPRS ratings and was compared to global ratings by patients and observers, as well as to self-report and clinician-administered measures of social anxiety. The pattern of correlations with criterion measures of social anxiety provided evidence for the convergent and divergent validity of this modified SPRS for the behavioral assessment of public-speaking anxiety.     

Cognitive and emotional dysfunction after central pontine myelinolysis

The case of a 67-year-old right-handed Chinese man with Central Pontine Myelinolysis [CPM] is described to illustrate the resulting cognitive and emotional disturbances. A comparison of the data in this report with that in published studies suggests that ethnicity does not seem to have much effect on the symptoms of CPM. Possible underlying neural-pathological mechanisms are discussed. This case further substantiates the speculation that the brainstem plays a role in higher cognitive processes and emotional regulation.     

<Emphasis Type="Italic">Xiang Yuan</Emphasis> (Village Worthies): The Appearance-only Hypocrite

This article seeks to interpret Mencius’ criticism of the village worthies (xiang yuan 鄉原) and shed light on the distinctive psychological phenomenon that Mencius has captured but not quite articulated. An attempt at filling out the Mencian view of the village worthies will help us better understand the content of the moral charges made against them and also deepen our analysis of the kind of psychology that early Confucians regard as crucial to moral agency. Following an introduction that overviews Mencius’ criticisms of the village worthies, the main discussion of this article is divided into three sections. Section 2 offers an interpretation of the psychology of the village worthy and articulates the way in which the village worthy can be regarded as a special kind of hypocrite, which I label as “appearance-only” hypocrite. Section 3 draws on the proposed interpretation to make sense of Mencius’ criticisms of the village worthy. I argue that while the village worthy can elude some common charges against hypocrisy, it is still problematic in the sense that it weakens an unstable system of morality from the inside and inflicts harm on the genuinely virtuous person. Section 4 delves deeper into analyzing the ethical implications for the self and for others.     

Brief bimanual force pulses: correlations between the hands in force and time.

Three experiments assessed coupling phenomena in the coordination of bimanual force pulses. Experiment 1 required symmetric force pulses (equal target forces and rise times for both hands) using the index finger of each hand. As the authors expected, on the basis of bimanual pointing movement results, this experiment revealed positive correlations between both the force rise times and the force amplitudes of the two hands. Experiments 2 and 3 included asymmetric conditions with different target force amplitudes (Experiment 2) or target rise times (Experiment 3). In Experiment 2 force amplitudes but not rise times were fully decoupled in the asymmetric condition. In the asymmetric condition of Experiment 3, however, neither rise times nor force amplitudes were fully decoupled. The results suggest a hierarchical control structure with temporal control dominating nontemporal control of bimanual force coordination.