Political ideology, exploration of novel stimuli, and attitude formation

In this study, the relations among political ideology, exploratory behavior, and the formation of attitudes toward novel stimuli were explored. Participants played a computer game that required learning whether these stimuli produced positive or negative outcomes. Learning was dependent on participants’ decisions to sample novel stimuli and discover the associated valence. Political ideology correlated with exploration during the game, with conservatives sampling fewer targets than liberals. Moreover, more conservative individuals exhibited a stronger learning asymmetry, such that they learned negative stimuli better than positive. Mediational analyses revealed that the differences in learning were due to the extent of exploratory behavior during the game. Relative to liberals, politically conservative individuals pursued a more avoidant strategy to the game, which led to their development of a more pronounced valence asymmetry in learning and attitude formation.     

The effects of perceived competence and sociability on electoral outcomes

Previous research demonstrated that inferences of competence from the face are good predictors of electoral outcomes [Todorov, A., Mandisoza, A. N., Gore, A., & Hall, C. C. (2005). Inferences of competence from faces predict election outcomes. Science, 308, 1623-1626]. In the current work we examined the role of another key dimension in social perception, namely perceived sociability. Results showed that people considered both competence and sociability, as inferred from the face, as related to higher chances of winning the elections. A different pattern emerged in relation to the actual electoral outcomes. Indeed, perceived competence was related to higher chances of winning, whereas perceived sociability was negatively related to electoral success. It is thus shown that these two fundamental dimensions in social perception exert opposite effects on voting behaviors.     

Endorsing Obama licenses favoring Whites

Three studies tested whether the opportunity to endorse Barack Obama made individuals subsequently more likely to favor Whites over Blacks. In Study 1, participants were more willing to describe a job as better suited for Whites than for Blacks after expressing support for Obama. Study 2 replicated this effect and ruled out alternative explanations: participants favored Whites for the job after endorsing Obama, but not after endorsing a White Democrat, nor after seeing Obama’s photo without having an opportunity to endorse him. Study 3 demonstrated that racial attitudes moderated this effect: endorsing Obama increased the amount of money allocated to an organization serving Whites at the expense of an organization serving Blacks only for participants high in a measure of racial prejudice. These three studies suggest that expressing support for Obama grants people moral credentials [Monin, B., & Miller, D. T. (2001). Moral credentials and the expression of prejudice. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81, 33-43], thus reducing their concern with appearing prejudiced.     

The Peer Attitudes Toward Children who Stutter scale: Reliability, known groups validity, and negativity of elementary school-age children's attitudes

Psychometric properties of the Peer Attitudes Toward Children who Stutter (PATCS) scale (Langevin, M., & Hagler, P. (2004). Development of a scale to measure peer attitudes toward children who stutter. In A.K. Bothe (Ed.), Evidence-based treatment of stuttering: empirical bases and clinical applications (pp. 139–171). Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.) and the extent to which peer attitudes are negative were re-examined. Results show that internal consistency was .97 and test–retest reliability was .85. In a known groups analysis participants who had contact with someone who stutters had statistically significant higher mean scores (more positive attitudes) than those who had not had contact. Nonsignificant findings for gender and grade call into question the usefulness of these variables as discriminators in future tests of known groups validity of peer attitudes toward children who stutter. Approximately one-fifth of participants had PATCS scores that were somewhat to very negative. These findings support calls for school-based education about stuttering.

Educational objectives

The reader will be able to: (1) summarize the social impacts of stuttering on school-age children who stutter, (2) describe the known groups method to test construct validity, (3) evaluate the psychometric properties of the Peer Attitudes Toward Children who Stutter scale, and (4) provide information about the proportion of students who appear to hold negative attitudes toward children who stutter.     

Presidential speechmaking style: Emotional response to micro-expressions of facial affect

Research considering the effect of Presidential speech making style shows individuals are likely to attend to and be emotionally affected by the facial expressions of leaders, especially those that are inappropriate for the context. In this study we tested how rapid and subtle expressions of facial affect (i.e., expressions of less than one-second, often termed micro-expressions) in speeches by a political leader impacts participants’ emotional state. We do this by removing seven brief expressions (less than one-second) from a nearly twelve minute televised speech by President George H. W. Bush concerning the 1990 commitment of US military in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait. FACS coding identified all these expressions as containing a component of smiling (lip corner puller: AU12), in some cases with the addition of other facial movements (sometimes associated with anger and/or disgust). Experiments carried out on 206 university undergraduates showed emotional state was altered as a result of these micro-expressions when the control (unaltered speech) and experimental group (micro-expressions removed from speech) were compared. Specifically, participants who viewed the micro-expressions felt less threatened and less angry. Thus, facial expression (even very brief micro-expressions) can have a significant impact on the receiver of a political speech.

Theorizing Politics After Camus

Theorizing has been conceived historically in illuminative and ocular metaphors, and as an activity that occurs in a fixed and privileged relation to political society that permits a panoramic perspective. These elements of light, sight, and distance, are supportable existentially and ethically in post-war, post-Holocaust world. One of the first to explore the challenges to theorizing in this era was Albert Camus. He provided phenomenological and existential investigations of the obstacles to theorizing politics in his literary works, particularly his trilogy of novels: The Stranger, The Plague, and The Fall. In this paper, I offer a reading of these novels that isolates theorizing as an activity performed not from a transcendent perceptual vantage of perfect light and vision, but from the immanent perspectives achieved in the city, among friends, or by exile.     

I Don't Like You Because You're Hard to Understand: The Role of Processing Fluency in the Language Attitudes Process

Two experiments examined the effects of processing fluency—that is, the ease with which speech is processed—on language attitudes toward native‐ and foreign‐accented speech. Participants listened to an audio recording of a story read in either a Standard American English (SAE) or Punjabi English (PE) accent. They heard the recording either free of noise or mixed with background white noise of various intensity levels. Listeners attributed more solidarity (but equal status) to the SAE than the PE accent. Compared to quieter listening conditions, noisier conditions reduced processing fluency, elicited a more negative affective reaction, and resulted in more negative language attitudes. Processing fluency and affect mediated the effects of noise on language attitudes. Theoretical, methodological, and practical implications are discussed.     

Intergroup contact buffers against the intergenerational transmission of authoritarianism and racial prejudice

The present study focused on the buffering role of positive intergroup contact in the intergenerational transmission of authoritarianism and racial prejudice in a sample of adolescents and one of their parents. In accordance with our expectations, adolescents’ intergroup contact experiences moderated the mediated relationships between parental authoritarianism and adolescents’ prejudice, both via adolescents’ authoritarianism and via parental prejudice. These relationships were stronger among adolescents with lower, rather than higher, levels of intergroup contact. We conclude that intergroup contact buffers the indirect relationship between parents’ authoritarianism and adolescents’ racial prejudice and therefore constitutes a promising means of reducing the intergenerational transmission of prejudice.     

The persuasive “power” of stigma?

We predicted that able-bodied individuals and White Americans would have a difficult time saying no to persuasive appeals offered by disabled individuals and Black Americans, due to their desire to make such interactions proceed smoothly. In two experiments, we show that members of stigmatized groups have a peculiar kind of persuasive “power” in face-to-face interactions with non-stigmatized individuals. In Experiment 1, wheelchair-bound confederates were more effective in publicly soliciting donations to a range of charities than confederates seated in a regular chair. In Experiment 2, Whites changed their private attitudes more following face-to-face appeals from Black than White confederates, an effect mediated by their increased efforts to appear agreeable by nodding and expressing agreement. This difference was eliminated when impression management concerns were minimized – when participants viewed the appeals on video.