“Leave Your Comment Below”: Can Biased Online Comments Influence Our Own Prejudicial Attitudes and Behaviors?

Increased use of online communication in everyday life presents a growing need to understand how people are influenced by others in such settings. In this study, online comments established social norms that directly influenced readers' expressions of prejudice both consciously and unconsciously. Participants read an online article and were then exposed to antiprejudiced or prejudiced comments allegedly posted by other users. Results revealed that exposure to prejudiced (relative to antiprejudiced) comments influenced respondents to post more prejudiced comments themselves. In addition, these effects generalized to participants' unconscious and conscious attitudes toward the target group once offline. These findings suggest that simple exposure to social information can impact our attitudes and behavior, suggesting potential avenues for social change in online environments.     

Thinking Woman-to-Woman Rape: A Critique of Marcus’s “Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention”

This article uses the empirical fact of woman-to-woman rape as a lens to critique Sharon Marcus’s “Fighting Bodies, Fighting Words: A Theory and Politics of Rape Prevention.” To the extent that any theory forecloses this fact, we can assume it is erroneous. While Marcus’s work is promising in its intention to deconstruct binary views of gender, it largely reiterates the very dualism it seeks to destabilize. I explore two different deconstructive arguments that can be drawn from the piece, each of which has been adopted by some thinkers. The first forecloses woman-to-woman rape while the second makes theoretical room for it. The second argument has the potential to deconstruct the first. Following the logic of Judith Butler’s thoughts on gender transgression, I suggest a synthesis of these two arguments. Finally, I explore ways the self-defense strategies Marcus promotes can be made to accommodate survivors of gender transgressive assaults.     

Investigating the structure of autobiographical memory using reaction times

The study investigated the structure of autobiographical memory using reaction time measures. A total of 18 participants took photographs over their summer holidays and then reacted to pairs of these photographs displayed via a computer. They also subsequently sorted their photographs according to the autobiographical themes and events with which they were associated. When photographic sequence and the physical similarities in the photographs were controlled for by considering the results of “stranger” participants who were unfamiliar with the photographs, reaction times were significantly faster to pairs of photographs from the same theme or event. The results are consistent with currently held assumptions about the structure of autobiographical memory. Furthermore, the results suggest that reaction time measures may provide a valuable means by which aspects of autobiographical memory can be explored.     

The effects of emotional stimuli on target detection: indirect and direct resource costs

The present study was designed to explore the performance costs of negative emotional stimuli in a vigilance task. Forty participants (20 women) performed a vigilance task in two conditions: one with task-irrelevant negative-arousing pictures and one with task-irrelevant neutral pictures. In addition to performance, we measured subjective state (energetic arousal, tense arousal, task-related and task-unrelated thoughts) and frontal cerebral activity with near infrared spectroscopy. Overall performance in the negative picture condition was lower than in the neutral picture condition and the negative picture condition had elevated levels of energetic arousal, tense arousal and task-related thoughts. Moreover, there was a significant relationship between the impact of the negative pictures on tense arousal and task-related thoughts and the impact of the negative pictures on performance (in comparison to the neutral picture stimuli task). These results provide support for indirect cost models of negative emotional stimuli on target detection performance.