Determinants of stress-related growth: Gender,stressfulness of the event,and coping strategies

The present study aimed to investigate the determinants of stress-related growth. For this aim the associations of gender, stressfulness of the event, and three coping strategies (problem-oriented, fatalistic, and helplessness) with stress-related growth were tested by multiple regression analysis. Participants were 132 undergraduate students. Results revealed that females reported higher levels of stress-related growth than males, and as expected, higher levels of the stressfulness of the event associated with more stress-related growth. Furthermore, frequent utilization of problem-oriented and fatalistic coping strategies was associated with higher stress-related growth. These findings were discussed in the light of relevant literature and culture-specific features. This work has been supported by the Turkish Academy of Sciences, in the framework of the Young Scientist Award Program (TG-TUBA-GEB>P/2002-l-l 1).     

Degree of Language Experience Modulates Visual Attention to Visible Speech and Iconic Gestures During Clear and Degraded Speech Comprehension

Visual information conveyed by iconic hand gestures and visible speech can enhance speech comprehension under adverse listening conditions for both native and non‐native listeners. However, how a listener allocates visual attention to these articulators during speech comprehension is unknown. We used eye‐tracking to investigate whether and how native and highly proficient non‐native listeners of Dutch allocated overt eye gaze to visible speech and gestures during clear and degraded speech comprehension. Participants watched video clips of an actress uttering a clear or degraded (6‐band noise‐vocoded) action verb while performing a gesture or not, and were asked to indicate the word they heard in a cued‐recall task. Gestural enhancement was the largest (i.e., a relative reduction in reaction time cost) when speech was degraded for all listeners, but it was stronger for native listeners. Both native and non‐native listeners mostly gazed at the face during comprehension, but non‐native listeners gazed more often at gestures than native listeners. However, only native but not non‐native listeners' gaze allocation to gestures predicted gestural benefit during degraded speech comprehension. We conclude that non‐native listeners might gaze at gesture more as it might be more challenging for non‐native listeners to resolve the degraded auditory cues and couple those cues to phonological information that is conveyed by visible speech. This diminished phonological knowledge might hinder the use of semantic information that is conveyed by gestures for non‐native compared to native listeners. Our results demonstrate that the degree of language experience impacts overt visual attention to visual articulators, resulting in different visual benefits for native versus non‐native listeners.     

Association of height and weight with second to fourth digit ratio (2D:4D) and sex differences

Sex difference in 2D:46 digit ratio was studied in 386 right-handed students. The lengths of index (2D) and ring (4D) fingers were measured using a caliper. Height and weight of participants were recorded. Body height correlated negatively with right- and left-hand digit ratios in the total sample (N = 386); correlations were significant for the left-hand digit ratio of men and for the right-hand digit ratio of women (no significant correlations with weight). Males had a significantly lower 2D:4D ratio than females. After controlling for height, sex differences in right- and left-hand digit ratios completely disappeared. The results suggest that height of adults reflecting prenatal hormone status may play a role in differences between men and women in 2D:4D digit ratio for right-handers.     

Making Human Rights Emotional: A Research Agenda to Recover Shame in “Naming and Shaming”

Shame is an emotion that is the cornerstone of International Relations (IR) human rights scholarship but remains undertheorized from an explicitly emotional perspective. Given the dubious and unsettled efficacy of human rights “naming and shaming” campaigns, in this article, we outline the theoretical and methodological contours of a research agenda designed (1) to uncover the emotional content of naming and shaming and (2) to pay greater attention to how nonstate actors, especially human rights nongovernmental organizations (NGOs), evoke and experience shame, thus engaging in “emotional diplomacy.” Drawing on theories of emotions in IR and political psychology, we present a thicker account of shame by highlighting the individual and social origins of shame, discussing different varieties of shame, and by distinguishing between emotions that are often conflated with shame. We end with a discussion of the methodological tools suitable for pursuing this agenda, using examples of prominent human rights NGOs.     

Development of cross-linguistic variation in speech and gesture: motion events in English and Turkish

The way adults express manner and path components of a motion event varies across typologically different languages both in speech and cospeech gestures, showing that language specificity in event encoding influences gesture. The authors tracked when and how this multimodal cross-linguistic variation develops in children learning Turkish and English, 2 typologically distinct languages. They found that children learn to speak in language-specific ways from age 3 onward (i.e., English speakers used 1 clause and Turkish speakers used 2 clauses to express manner and path). In contrast, English- and Turkish-speaking children's gestures looked similar at ages 3 and 5 (i.e., separate gestures for manner and path), differing from each other only at age 9 and in adulthood (i.e., English speakers used 1 gesture, but Turkish speakers used separate gestures for manner and path). The authors argue that this pattern of the development of cospeech gestures reflects a gradual shift to language-specific representations during speaking and shows that looking at speech alone may not be sufficient to understand the full process of language acquisition.     

Language-specific and universal influences in children's syntactic packaging of Manner and Path: a comparison of English, Japanese, and Turkish

Different languages map semantic elements of spatial relations onto different lexical and syntactic units. These crosslinguistic differences raise important questions for language development in terms of how this variation is learned by children. We investigated how Turkish-, English-, and Japanese-speaking children (mean age 3;8) package the semantic elements of Manner and Path onto syntactic units when both the Manner and the Path of the moving Figure occur simultaneously and are salient in the event depicted. Both universal and language-specific patterns were evident in our data. Children used the semantic-syntactic mappings preferred by adult speakers of their own languages, and even expressed subtle syntactic differences that encode different relations between Manner and Path in the same way as their adult counterparts (i.e., Manner causing vs. incidental to Path). However, not all types of semantics-syntax mappings were easy for children to learn (e.g., expressing Manner and Path elements in two verbal clauses). In such cases, Turkish- and Japanese-speaking children frequently used syntactic patterns that were not typical in the target language but were similar to patterns used by English-speaking children, suggesting some universal influence. Thus, both language-specific and universal tendencies guide the development of complex spatial expressions.     

Alignment in Multimodal Interaction: An Integrative Framework

When people are engaged in social interaction, they can repeat aspects of each other’s communicative behavior, such as words or gestures. This kind of behavioral alignment has been studied across a wide range of disciplines and has been accounted for by diverging theories. In this paper, we review various operationalizations of lexical and gestural alignment. We reveal that scholars have fundamentally different takes on when and how behavior is considered to be aligned, which makes it difficult to compare findings and draw uniform conclusions. Furthermore, we show that scholars tend to focus on one particular dimension of alignment (traditionally, whether two instances of behavior overlap in form), while other dimensions remain understudied. This hampers theory testing and building, which requires a well-defined account of the factors that are central to or might enhance alignment. To capture the complex nature of alignment, we identify five key dimensions to formalize the relationship between any pair of behavior: time, sequence, meaning, form, and modality. We show how assumptions regarding the underlying mechanism of alignment (placed along the continuum of priming vs. grounding) pattern together with operationalizations in terms of the five dimensions. This integrative framework can help researchers in the field of alignment and related phenomena (including behavior matching, mimicry, entrainment, and accommodation) to formulate their hypotheses and operationalizations in a more transparent and systematic manner. The framework also enables us to discover unexplored research avenues and derive new hypotheses regarding alignment.