Religion and the Human Rights Idea

Three recent books focus, in different ways, on the idea of human rights and its relation to religion and religious ethics. All three books discussed here address criticisms of the human rights idea and seek to establish the relationship of religion and human rights with regard to the field of policy. The present discussion begins with an overview that places these three books in the larger context of the development of the human rights idea and its historical relationship with religion. It then turns to Little's book, next to the collection of essays edited by Twiss, Simion, and Petersen, which is described internally as a Festschrift for Little, and then to Hogan's book, and in the final section it explores comparisons among the books.     

A general model for the analysis of multilevel data

A general model is developed for the analysis of multivariate multilevel data structures. Special cases of the model include repeated measures designs, multiple matrix samples, multilevel latent variable models, multiple time series, and variance and covariance component models.We would like to acknowledge the helpful comments of Ruth Silver. We also wish to thank the referees for helping to clarify the paper. This work was partly carried out with research funds provided by the Economic and Social Research Council (U.K.).     

Declines in Major League Batting Performance as a Function of Game Pressure: A Drive Theory Analysis1

Zajonc's (1965) drive theory explanation argues that greater arousal tends to impair performance on difficult tasks. The hypothesis that arousal generated by “pressure situations” during major league baseball games would hinder batting performance—a difficult task—was tested by examining such performance during the 1989 season. Six “pressure situations” were identified, some occurring during the late innings of close games and others occurring throughout the game when there were two outs. Two measures of batting performance (batting average and slugging average) were employed. Results indicated broad support for the hypothesis. Reasons for this pattern are discussed, as are possible alternative explanations for these findings.     

Word-finding abilities of three types of aphasic subjects

Word-finding difficulties are often observed among different types of aphasic patients. This investigation analyzed the word-finding abilities of 30 aphasic subjects (10 Broca's, 10 Wernicke's, and 10 anomic). Forty nouns counterbalanced according to word length and frequency of occurrence in English language usage were used as stimuli and presented through four modalities (oral expression, writing, auditory comprehension, and reading comprehension). It was expected that patterns of word finding abilities would help in the classification of the different types of aphasia. In addition, long words and less frequently occurring words in English language usage should prove more difficult in word-finding ability, regardless of modality. The results of this study found long words and less frequent words were more difficult for aphasic subjects. Among the modalities, long words were significantly harder than short words for the writing modality only. It was also found that semantic errors were the most common errors for all types of aphasic subjects. Broca's subjects produced significantly moreno response errors in oral expression; Wernicke's subjects produced significantly more semantic and phonemic errors in reading comprehension; and, Wernicke's subjects produced significantly more unrelated errors in both oral expression and reading comprehension. Clinical implications were also discussed.The present study was based on a doctoral dissertation completed at the City University of New York in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the doctoral degree in Speech and Hearing Sciences by the first author under the direction of the second author. The authors wish to thank Dr. Louis J. Gerstman for his assistance with the statistical analysis of this research and Dr. Robert Goldfarb for all his helpful suggestions and editorial comments.     

Context-dependent variation in social stereotyping 1: The effects of intergroup relations as mediated by social change and frame of reference

During the 1990-1991 Persian Gulf conflict an experiment was conducted with Australian university students (N = 200) to investigate whether the social stereotyping of Americans varied with social contextual manipulations related to the hostilities. The study, conducted in two phases at the start and end of the conflict, examined how the assignment of standard stereotypical traits to Americans was affected (a) by the large-scale social change constituted by the war and (b) by variation in the frame of reference provided by relevant comparison groups. The elicited stereotypes were sensitive to both of these contextual variables, demonstrating significant variation and fluidity. Overall, stereotypes of Americans were relatively negative. They were significantly more negative (a) at the end of the war than at the beginning in the restricted frame (when Australia and Britain were comparison groups) and (b) in the first phase of the conflict when the frame was extended to include Iraq as a comparison group. The findings were in line with expectations derived from self-categorization theory (Turner, 1985) that the social categorization of self and other into ingroup and outgroup is inherently variable, comparative and context-dependent. They question the long-held view of stereotypes as fixed, rigid and resistant to change.     

Context-dependent variation in social stereotyping 2: The relationship between frame of reference,self-categorization and accentuation

This paper examines the hypothesis that patterns of stereotypic accentuation reflect the degree to which judged stimuli share the same social category membership as the stereotyper, Following self-categorization theory, the degree of this shared identity is operationalized in terms of the meta-contrast ratio as a function of the positions of (a) stereotyper and (b) stereotyped target relative to (c) the stereotyper's frame of reference. Three experiments are reported which sought to manipulate shared category membership either by extension of subjects' frame of reference or by extremitization of target and subject with respect to that frame. As predicted, greater shared identity was associated with stronger assimilation of the target to subjects' own position and with change in stereotype content. Findings are discussed in relation to theories of personality, social judgement and social cognition. Like the accentuation processes which underpin them, it is proposed that stereotypes are sensitive to comparative context and that they reflect veridically the social self-categorical properties of stimuli.     

Spatial frequencies and the cerebral hemispheres: contrast sensitivity, visible persistence, and letter classification

The hypothesis that the two cerebral hemispheres are specialized for processing different visual spatial frequencies was investigated in three experiments. No differences between the left and right visual fields were found for: (1) contrast-sensitivity functions measured binocularly with vertical gratings ranging from 0.5 to 12 cycles per degree (cpd); (2) visible persistence durations for 1- and 10-cpd gratings measured with a stimulus alternation method; and (3) accuracy (d') and reaction times to correctly identify digitally filtered letters as targets (L or H) or nontargets (T or F). One significant difference, however, was found: In Experiment 3, a higher decision criterion (beta) was used when filtered letters were identified in the right visual field than when they were identified in the left. The letters were filtered with annular, 1-octave band-pass filters with center spatial frequencies of 1, 2, 4, 8, and 16 cpd. Combining four center frequencies with three letter sizes (0.5 degrees, 1 degree, and 2 degrees high) made some stimuli equivalent in distal spatial frequency (cycles per object) and some equivalent in proximal spatial frequency (cycles per degree). The effective stimulus in the third experiment seemed to be proximal spatial frequency (cycles per degree) not distal (cycles per object). We conclude that each cerebral hemisphere processes visual spatial frequency information with equal accuracy but that different decision rules are used.     

The social phobia and anxiety inventory: Construct validity

The Social Phobia and Anxiety Inventory (SPAI) is a new instrument composed of social phobia and agoraphobia subscales. The latter scale is used to detect social anxiety that may result from agoraphobia. The SPAI's construct validity was assessed through several procedures. First, confirmatory factor analyses were conducted to validate the existence of the two subscales. Second, exploratory factor analyses examined the underlying structure of the social phobia subscale. Third, a Q factor procedure determined if different anxiety diagnostic groups could be differentiated by their SPAI response pattern. The results confirmed the utility of the two SPAI subscales and identified a number of dimensions contained within the social phobia subscale which differed depending upon the specific subject sample. In addition, the complaints of social phobies appeared more homogeneous than those of an agoraphobic comparison group. The results are discussed in terms of construct validity and the sensitivity of the SPAI to various dimensions of social phobia fears.This study was supported in part by NIMH Grants 41852, 30915, 18269, and 16884.