Social exclusion affects aggressive driving behaviour: The mediating effect of prosocial tendencies and driving anger

Social exclusion—being rejected or ignored by individuals or groups—is a common and adverse experience in social life. As a social activity, driving behaviour can be influenced by many factors. Whether social exclusion is one of these factors is an open question. Therefore, the aim of this study is to explore the impact of the social exclusion experience on individuals and their driving behaviours and the mediating effect of prosocial tendencies and driving anger. A total of 240 (104 males and 136 females) participants from China completed a questionnaire including the Ostracism Experiences Scale (OES), the prosocial tendencies measure (PTM), the Driving Anger Scale (DAS) and the Driver Behaviour Questionnaire (DBQ). The hierarchical multiple regression analysis and pathway analysis results showed that social exclusion experience and driving anger positively predicted aberrant driving behaviours (including aggressive violations, ordinary violations, lapses and errors), while prosocial tendencies had a negative impact on aberrant driving behaviour. Moreover, prosocial tendencies and driving anger mediated the relationship between social exclusion and driver behaviour, accounting for 11.18% and 46.71% of the total effect, respectively. The chain-mediated effect of prosocial tendencies and driving anger was also significant, accounting for 5.26% of the total effect of social exclusion on driver behaviour. This study examines the mechanisms underlying social exclusion experiences that positively predict individuals' unsafe driving behaviours, thereby filling a gap in social exclusion research and suggesting new avenues of exploration into the personal and social influences that affect driving behaviours.     

A robot’s sense-making of fallacies and rhetorical tropes. Creating ontologies of what humans try to say

In the design of user-friendly robots, human communication should be understood by the system beyond mere logics and literal meaning. Robot communication-design has long ignored the importance of communication and politeness rules that are ‘forgiving’ and ‘suspending disbelief’ and cannot handle the basically metaphorical way humans design their utterances. Through analysis of the psychological causes of illogical and non-literal statements, signal detection, fundamental attribution errors, and anthropomorphism, we developed a fail-safe protocol for fallacies and tropes that makes use of Frege’s distinction between reference and sense, Beth’s tableau analytics, Grice’s maxim of quality, and epistemic considerations to have the robot politely make sense of a user’s sometimes unintelligible demands.     

Extending affective capabilities for medical assistive robots

In this work, we discuss methodologies and implementation choices to enable a humanoid robot to estimate patients’ mood and emotions during postoperative home rehabilitation. The approach is modular and it has been implemented into a SoftBank Pepper robotic architecture; however, the approach is general and it can be easily adapted to other robotic platforms. A sample of an interactive session for the detection of the patient’s affective state is also reported.     

Identity leadership and social identification within sport teams over a season: A social network analysis

ObjectivesThis study explored the relationships between identity leadership and social identification in sport teams over the course of a season using social network analysis.MethodsParticipants from 23 competitive sport teams (N = 388, M_age = 20.7 years) indicated the extent to which each of their teammates displayed various forms of identity leadership (i.e., identity prototypicality, identity advancement, identity entrepreneurship, identity impresarioship) and the extent to which these same teammates were seen to identify with the team (assessed by ingroup ties, cognitive centrality, ingroup affect) early and later in a season. Quadratic assignment procedure correlations and multiple quadratic assignment procedure regressions examined the relationships between the different types of networks for each team across time.ResultsAthletes who perceived team members to show greater identity leadership perceived those same teammates to identify more strongly with the team both early (rs_average > .46) and later (rs_average > 0.48) in the season. Averaged across teams, identity entrepreneurship early in the season was most strongly associated with both perceived ingroup ties (β_average = .24) and ingroup affect (β_average = 0.13) later in the season, while identity impresarioship was most strongly associated with cognitive centrality (β_average = .16). In the reversed direction, perceptions of ingroup ties early in the season were most strongly associated with all identity leadership dimensions later in the season (.28 < β_average < 0.38).ConclusionsCollectively, these findings provide evidence of a mutually reinforcing bidirectional link such that teammates who are seen as actively contributing to promote a sense of ‘us’ among team members are also more likely to be seen as identifying strongly with the team.     

The prefigurative politics of place-making: Analysis of a neighbourhood-based campaign for a social centre

This article analyses the production of meaning embedded in places through prefigurative practices. Although the use of space by activist groups is widely studied in the sociology of social movements and urban geography, this article extends the body of literature on place-making by analysing the prefigurative dimension between militant practices and living spaces. Drawing on walking interviews with Montreal's activists that campaigned for a social centre in Canada, this article argues that the strategies inform place-making of local grassroots mobilisations that aimed to develop urban alternatives, and that the meaning attributed to places depends on the individual and collective experience of activists engaging in prefigurative politics. In this sense, place-making derives from the lived collective experience therein and the individual's treatment of these spaces. The results show that the repetition of the action, as well as its emotional and symbolic intensity, are factors that favour the contribution of prefigurative practices to the place-making process.     

Facebook as a platform for collecting women's birth stories: Supporting emotional connections between researchers and participants

This paper extends debate on the use of social networking sites in social science research, specifically focusing on their role in creating ‘emotionally connected’ research spaces. Drawing on the authors' experiences of using a closed Facebook group as a platform for collecting women's ‘birth stories’, we explore to potential of Facebook to support the transcendence of traditional researcher/participant relations and empower participants through creating something akin to a ‘Community of Practice’. The project also contributed to a process of inter and intra-personal self-care, which, as a research team, we recognise as an important driver of our research agendas. We acknowledge that the virtual cannot be all-inclusive but conclude that this methodological approach has generated both a rich dataset and a series of emotions for researchers and participants that added value to the research process. We also argue that this approach captured a greater depth of experience and diversity of voice than would have been the case if we had chosen to use traditional face-to-face methods. We call for future research to focus on better understanding some of the challenges related to the appropriateness of Facebook as a platform for hearing the voices of particular socio-cultural groups.     

An Empirical Examination of Women’s Empowerment and Transformative Change in the Context of International Development

This paper responds to calls from social scientists in the area of globalization and women’s empowerment to test a model that investigates both structural and individual components of women’s empowerment in the context of globalization. The investigation uses a liberation psychology framework by taking into account the effects of globalization, human rights discourse, and women’s activism within social movements to identify how structural inequities may be related to empowerment. Surveys conducted in rural Nicaragua revealed that land ownership and organizational participation among women were related to more progressive gender ideology, and in turn, women’s power and control within the marital relationship, individual levels of agency, and subjective well-being. The study demonstrates that psychology can bridge the theoretical arguments surrounding human rights with the practical implementation of development interventions, and provide empirical support that has yet to be demonstrated elsewhere. The findings have important implications for strategies and interventions that can improve conditions for women and contribute to the aims of social justice articulated in the Beijing Platform for Action.     

Disentangling within-person changes and individual differences among fundamental need satisfaction, attainment of acquisitive desires, and psychological health

We explored within-person and individual difference associations among basic psychological need satisfaction (autonomy, competence, and relatedness), attainment of acquisitive desires (wealth and popularity) and indicators of well- and ill-being. Participants were 198 undergraduates (51% male) who completed an inventory multiple times over a university semester. Analyses revealed that increased satisfaction of all the needs and desires beyond participants’ normal levels, with the exception of relatedness, were associated with greater psychological welfare. Nonetheless, individual differences in well-being were only predicted by psychological need satisfaction, and not by the attainment of acquisitive desires. Hence, the realization of acquisitive desires may elicit within-person increases in psychological welfare; however, satisfying innate needs may be a better bet for long term psychological health.     

Emotion regulation and peer-rated social functioning: A 4-year longitudinal study

Different emotion regulation strategies have been linked to distinct social outcomes, but only concurrently or in the short-term. The present research employed a 4-year longitudinal design with peer-reported measures of social functioning to examine the long-term social effects of emotion regulation. Individual differences in suppression before entering college predicted weaker social connections (e.g., less close relationships) at the end of college, whereas reappraisal predicted stronger social connections and more favorable sociometric standing (e.g., higher social status). These effects of emotion regulation remained intact even when controlling for baseline social functioning and Big Five personality traits. These findings suggest that individual differences in the use of particular emotion regulation strategies have an enduring impact, shaping the individual’s social environment over time.