Frontiers in psychology
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2016
The Social Perception of Heroes and Murderers: Effects of Gender-Inclusive Language in Media Reports.
The way media depict women and men can reinforce or diminish gender stereotyping. Which part does language play in this context? Are roles perceived as more gender-balanced when feminine role nouns are used in addition to masculine ones? Research on gender-inclusive language shows that the use of feminine-masculine word pairs tends to increase the visibility of women in various social roles. For example, when speakers of German were asked to name their favorite "heroine or hero in a novel," they listed more female characters than when asked to name their favorite "hero in a novel." The research reported in this article examines how the use of gender-inclusive language in news reports affects readers' own usage of such forms as well as their mental representation of women and men in the respective roles. ⋯ A post-test suggested that this might be due to a higher accessibility of female exemplars in the category heroes than in the category murderers. Importantly, the influence of gender-inclusive language on the perceived percentage of women in a role was mediated by speakers' own usage of inclusive forms. This suggests that people who encounter gender-inclusive forms and are given an opportunity to use them, use them more themselves and in turn have more gender-balanced mental representations of social roles.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2016
Prosocial Personality Traits Differentially Predict Egalitarianism, Generosity, and Reciprocity in Economic Games.
Recent research has highlighted the role of prosocial personality traits-agreeableness and honesty-humility-in egalitarian distributions of wealth in the dictator game. Expanding on these findings, we ran two studies to examine individual differences in two other forms of prosociality-generosity and reciprocity-with respect to two major models of personality, the Big Five and the HEXACO. Participants (combined N = 560) completed a series of economic games in which allocations in the dictator game were compared with those in the generosity game, a non-constant-sum wealth distribution task where proposers with fixed payoffs selected the size of their partner's payoff ("generosity"). ⋯ HEXACO honesty-humility predicted dictator, but not generosity allocations, while traits capturing tendencies toward irritability and anger predicted lower generosity, but not dictator allocations. In contrast, the politeness-but not compassion-aspect of Big Five agreeableness was uniquely and broadly associated with prosociality across all games. These findings support the discriminant validity between related prosocial constructs, and have important implications for understanding the motives and mechanisms taking place within economic games.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Sub-optimal presentation of painful facial expressions enhances readiness for action and pain perception following electrocutaneous stimulation.
Observation of others' painful facial expressions has been shown to facilitate behavioral response tendencies and to increase pain perception in the observer. However, in previous studies, expressions were clearly visible to the observer and none of those studies investigated the effect of presence of peripheral stimulation on response tendencies. This study focuses on the effect of sub-optimal presentation of painful facial expressions in the presence and absence of an electrocutaneous stimulus. ⋯ Analysis showed that responses were faster to targets preceded by aversive stimulation than to targets not preceded by stimulation, especially following painful expressions. Painfulness ratings were higher following painful expressions than following happy expressions. These findings suggest that sub-optimally presented painful expressions can enhance readiness to act to neutral, non-pain-related targets after aversive stimulation and can increase pain perception.
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Frontiers in psychology · Jan 2015
Punctuation, Prosody, and Discourse: Afterthought Vs. Right Dislocation.
In a reading production experiment we investigate the impact of punctuation and discourse structure on the prosodic differentiation of right dislocation (RD) and afterthought (AT). Both discourse structure and punctuation are likely to affect the prosodic marking of these right-peripheral constructions, as certain prosodic markings are appropriate only in certain discourse structures, and punctuation is said to correlate with prosodic phrasing. With RD and AT clearly differing in discourse function (comment-topic structuring vs. disambiguation) and punctuation (comma vs. full stop), critical items in this study were manipulated with regard to the (mis-)match of these parameters. ⋯ Interestingly, for pitch range reduction no difference between RDs and ATs could be observed. Our results corroborate a language architecture model in which punctuation, prosody, syntax, and discourse-semantics are independent but interacting domains with correspondence constraints between them. Our findings suggest there are tight correspondence constraints between (i) punctuation (full stop and comma in particular) and syntax, (ii) prosody and syntax as well as (iii) prosody and discourse-semantics.
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Despite an increased scientific interest in musical hallucinations over the past 25 years, treatment protocols are still lacking. This may well be due to the fact that musical hallucinations have multiple causes, and that published cases are relatively rare. ⋯ Treatments for musical hallucinations tend to yield favorable results when they target the main etiological factor of these phenomena. There is a need to establish the natural course of musical hallucinations, their response to non-pharmacological treatments, and their effects on the patient's quality of life. There is also a need to standardize the assessment of treatment responses, and document long-term follow up.