Descriptions Of People Research Articles

Beyond Anecdotes: An Empirical Study of "Anthropomorphism"

AbstractThe status of "anthropomorphic" descriptions of animals in terms of intentions and emotions has been generally regarded as a prescriptive methodological concern. In contrast, in the study of human social psychology the nature of psychological descriptions of other people has been approached as a substantive empirical issue. Following this lead, the present study investigated the nature of people's descriptions of short videotaped episodes of animal behavior. The descriptions obtained were predominantly anthropomorphic and structured according to a limited set of "event units" whose psychological meaning was highly consistent across the observers. In common with many social psychologists we conclude that consistency of anthropomorphic description suggests that meaning is specified within the structure of behavior.

Friends of the Future: A Conversation with Peter Smithson

Colomina:... so we are going to have to put our heads on. Tell me something about the Independent Group. Smithson: To be honest, my memories of it are fragmentary, in fragments. When I read descriptions of it I don't recognize other people's descriptions of what it was about, I simply don't recognize them. I suppose I regarded it as an arena to celebrate friendship with Eduardo Paolozzi and Nigel Henderson. At that stage of friendship, everything was amusing. You know, it is like a love affair. And consequently, the meetings were regarded as an opportunity to show off, really. Colomina: So it is more as a personal relationship that you remember it? Smithson: Yes. Of course, you know there was this so-called legendary first bravado

Beyond Anecdotes: An Empirical Study of "Anthropomorphism"

AbstractThe status of "anthropomorphic" descriptions of animals in terms of intentions and emotions has been generally regarded as a prescriptive methodological concern. In contrast, in the study of human social psychology the nature of psychological descriptions of other people has been approached as a substantive empirical issue. Following this lead, the present study investigated the nature of people's descriptions of short videotaped episodes of animal behavior. The descriptions obtained were predominantly anthropomorphic and structured according to a limited set of "event units" whose psychological meaning was highly consistent across the observers. In common with many social psychologists we conclude that consistency of anthropomorphic description suggests that meaning is specified within the structure of behavior.

Measuring Presence: A Response to the Witmer and Singer Presence Questionnaire

Witmer and Singer recently published a questionnaire for eliciting presence in virtual environments together with a questionnaire for measuring a person’s immersive tendencies (Witmer & Singer, 1998). The authors mentioned that they did not agree with my notion of immersion: ‘Though the VE equipment is instrumental in enabling immersion, we do not agree with Slater’s view that immersion is an objective description of the VE technology’. On first reading I was happy to take this as simply a difference of terminology which is what it is. I had defined the term immersion to mean the extent to which the actual system delivers a surrounding environment, one which shuts out sensations from the ‘real world’, which accommodates many sensory modalities, has rich representational capability, and so on (described, for example, in Slater & Wilbur, 1997). These are obviously measurable aspects of a VE system. For example, given two VE systems, and other things being equal, if one allows the participant to turn their head in any direction at all and still receive visual information only from within the VE then this is called (in my definition) a more ‘immersive’ system than one where the participant can only see VE visual signals along one fixed direction. Given two systems, if one has a larger field of view than the other, then the first is (in my definition) more immersive than the second. As a last example, if one generates shadows in realtime and the other does not, then again, the first is called (by me) more immersive. These are examples of what I mean by more or less ‘immersion’. Clearly for all of these types of things metrics can be established which are descriptions of the system, and not descriptions of people’s responses to the system. Witmer and Singer, however, define immersion as the person’s response to the VE system. This difference in terminology is unfortunate, but not a matter of any great concern. In order to

‘With a little bit of luck…’ Coping with adjustment in urban Ghana, 1975–90

AbstractUsing largely anecdotal evidence from field notes, the article traces Ghana's formal economic decline through the 1970s. Perceptions of striving for survival and success are sketched out during this overwhelmingly pessimistic period. There follows a description of people's views about survival and ‘the state of play’ in Ghana's economic progress in the late 1980s and early 1990s. These discursive comments are followed by some simple quantitative material about work, the availability of jobs and the structure of the labour market at the time. What becomes obvious, given that Ghanaians are actually continuing their lives much as they have in the past, is that the IMF's and World Bank's policy prescriptions and strategies for the development of manufacturing industry, for attracting the ‘world market factories’ of the multinationals, are not being achieved. Instead, Ghanaians have focused (as they always have) on strategies for networking and getting a break: striking it ‘lucky’, in fact. The relatively newly discovered volatile element in the World Bank's calculations has long been a (if not the) core factor in the plans of many small enterprises. Meanwhile Ghanaians are trying, hoping for some ‘luck’, to survive and even prosper into the next millennium.

‘Compared to what?’: comparison choice in an internation context

A survey was conducted to assess the prevalence of spontaneous social comparisons in people's ingroup descriptions and to investigate factors involved in the choice of an outgroup comparator. The intergroup context was that of different countries within the European Community (EC). Two hundred and ninety-three respondents from six countries provided open-ended descriptions of their own country, rank ordered the twelve EC countries, and selected two other countries for comparison purposes. Social comparisons were made spontaneously by 20% of the sample; temporal comparisons less frequently (11%). There was a general tendency for respondents to choose higher-status comparators. These were still generally somewhat similar to own country except in the case of the two lowest-status countries where the preference was for dissimilar (and superior) outgroups. Regression analysis revealed that threat to national identity was also correlated with comparison choice. The findings are related to classic and contemporary theories of social comparison process. Copyright © 1999 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The discourse of difference in Reisbrieven uit Afrika en Azië [1913] by Dr Aletta Jacobs: A dutch feminist's perspective on South Africa and the Dutch East Indies*

Summary The sections on Southern Africa and Indonesia in Dr Aletta Jacobs's travel journal, Reisbrieven uit Afrika en Azië (1913), are discussed with reference to conventions of travel literature and to the feminine voice in colonial discourse. The journal was written during a world tour (1911–1912) which Dr Jacobs and Ms Carrie Chapman Catt undertook with the aim of furthering the cause of women's suffrage. According to Dr Jacobs's travel journal they made hardly any attempt to include black and Asian women in their awareness campaign in these two countries and the article puts forward the contention that this can be partially explained by Aletta Jacobs's allegiance to colonialist discourse. This becomes especially apparent in her descriptions of people of mixed race in Southern Africa and of the Indonesian landscape.

Acquisition of prototype-based information about social groups in adulthood.

Two experiments examined adult age differences in the ability to acquire prototype-based information about a fictitious social group. Young and older adults were presented with 60 descriptions of people who varied in their similarity to a prototypical group member along 12 (Experiment 1) or 10 (Experiment 2) feature dimensions. The prototype represented either an arbitrary combination of features or a coherent set of features based on evaluative content. Younger adults generally performed better than the older adults in learning the arbitrary prototype, whereas age differences were absent or in favor of the older adults when the prototype consisted of evaluatively consistent features. The authors argue that the results can be explained by the age-related variations in the reliance on automatic processing mechanisms and the congruence of these processes with the demands of the task across prototype conditions.

Environmental Education Education and Self-concept: A Focus on Deaf Students (E.E. and the Deaf Self-concept)

To date there is a lack of research literature which indicates how environmental education is best implemented for people with a hearing loss and the contributions environmental education can make to their education and personal development. This research study focuses on environmental education for deaf students, taking into account low self-concept experienced by deaf individuals.It should be noted that the terms ‘deaf’ and/or ‘hearing-impaired’ are used by authors for their descriptions of people with a hearing loss. These terms may be distinguished as follows: The generic term hearing impairment can be used to define a hearing loss at any level and the term deaf, on the other hand, is restricted to hearing loss that renders reception of speech nonfunctional (Simeonsson 1986, p. 196).

Análisis de la credibilidad de recuerdos percibidos e imaginados

The characteristics of witnesses' descriptions of'a complex event were varied by manipulating the statement preparation in which they engaged before they "described the events, Descriptions were more likely to be attributed by judges to perception than to imagination if descriptions contained. moderate levels of sensorial and contextual details than if they contained high or low levels of sensorial and contextual details. Also, it seems that preparation affects how people describe complex events ánd that people use some of the same cues to judge the source of other people's memory descriptions as they use in making altributions about the source of their own memories.

Questioning the concept of the ‘user’

This article is a critique of the word ‘user’ as a description of people in the person-environment relationship. By calling the person a user, researchers and designers place themselves inside a utilitarian world view which sees everything and ultimately everyone as simply a resource to be exploited. At first intended by environmental psychologists to refute the idea of the person as a passive stimulus recipient, the word user has come to stand for a complicated grouping of attributes which have been added to the user while ignoring or forgetting its limited definition. The field of environmental psychology is challenged to rethink the naming of people as users and to create a term which better describes the person-environment relationship.

"But What Else Could I Do?" Choice, Identity and a Cognitive-Perceptual Theory of Ethical Political Behavior

What causes ethical political behavior? Traditional political explanations stress cost-benefit calculus, utility maximization, reason's dominance of baser passions, or the conscious adoption of and adherence to certain moral values. In this article, I consider detailed narrative evidence that is not easily explained by any of these political theories or by analogous psychological theories concerned with ethics as a developmental process. This evidence comes from people's descriptions of their actions toward Jews during World War II and includes testimony from both those who helped and those who did not help Jews.

Pschemas, Psychopathology, and Psychotherapy Research

This paper examines the concept of a schema as a theoretical construct that is relevant to the goals of psychotherapy researchers. It first differentiates between the terms identity diffusion and identity confusion, phenomena that have been portrayed by artists but have not been accessible to empirical research. A schema is defined as a collection of interassociated mental representations that function together as a unit. Implications of the concept are illustrated with results from the literature on depression. Then the concept is applied to people's descriptions of the self and other people. Identity diffusion seems to involve a vague schema, whereas identity confusion seems to involve a shifting between contrasting schemas. A study is described in which an attachment in terview was administered to grief-stricken adults, who were then classified as autonomous, detached, or enmeshed. People with a detached attachment style generally avoid intimate engagement, so their descriptions of themselves and other people should be vague with weakly interassociated elements. People with an enmeshed style have acquired contrasting or contradictory schemas of themselves and other people, so their descriptions should contain contrasting schemas. Data are presented to support these hypotheses.

Impressions of babyfaced individuals across the life span.

Four questions were addressed concerning perceptions of babyfaced individuals from infancy to older adulthood: (a) Do perceivers make reliable babyface judgments at each age; (b) does a babyface have the same effects on trait impressions at each age; (c) are the effects of a babyface independent of the effects of attractiveness; and (d) what facial maturity features are associated with babyface ratings, and do these features predict trait impressions? Ratings of portrait photographs revealed that perceivers reliably detect variations in babyfaceness across the life span. Facial measurements revealed that large eyes, a round face, thin eyebrows, and a small nose bridge characterized a babyface. Trait impressions showed a babyface overgeneralization effect at each age: Babyfaced individuals were perceived to have more childlike traits than their maturefaced peers, and this effect was independent of attractiveness. Considerable evidence indicates that appearance has a significant impact on social perceptions and social interactions, which may have important implications for personality development. Not only is appearance one of the initial qualities that children and adults mention in their descriptions of people (Fiske & Cox, 1979; Livesley & Bromley, 1973), but it also influences the traits they ascribe to others (see Alley, 1988; Bull &

Moving Beyond the Clinical Description of People With Developmental Disabilities

Moving Beyond the Clinical Description of People With Developmental Disabilities

Style of life and the salience of health: an exploratory study of health related practices in households from differing socio‐economic circumstances

AbstractThis paper describes results from a small scale study, using qualitative interview methods, which attempts to explain variations in health‐related practices between households living in contrasting social and economic circumstances. The approach and methodology adopted put an emphasis on spontaneous, unprompted discourse, in an attempt to discover how ideas about matters of health and health‐related practices are integrated into routine daily life, and how this routine daily life is shaped by social and economic circumstances. The evidence from this study shows that irrespective of social and economic circumstances, matters of health rarely surfaced in people's descriptions of their lives and neither did health concerns in the context of behaviour. The implications of these and other findings are discussed in an attempt to explain the link between social structure and behaviour.

An analysis of the representation of people with mental handicaps in a British newspaper

ABSTRACTArticles from a British newspaper were analysed in terms of: the roles into which they cast the people with mental handicaps to whom they referred; and the frequency of their juxtaposition with other devalued groups. Results suggested that the articles were not representative in their description of people with mental handicaps, describing them as being children and patients more frequently than would be expected. Juxtapositions, particularly with people having mental health problems, occurred in about a third of the articles. Comparative analysis of the articles written by staff reporters and those written by non‐staff suggested that the newspaper's own reporters were more likely to misrepresent the population of people with mental handicaps than other writers.

Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South (review)

68Southeastern Geographer raphy the wealth ofmaterial that awaits in libraries and archives, and he has provided a primer on how it might be interpreted. Karl B. Raitz, Department ofGeography, University ofKentucky, Lexington, KY 40506. Cracker Culture: Celtic Ways in the Old South. Grady McWhiney. Tuscaloosa, AL: The University of Alabama Press, 1988. xliii and 290 pp., illustrations, appendix, and index. $29.95 cloth (ISBN 0-81730328 -6) Grady McWhiney's new book on Cracker culture is yet another historian 's attempt to account for the differences between plain folk of the South and their Northern neighbors. Contemporary observation based on travelers' accounts, primarily their journals and letters, is used to support the regional/cultural distinctiveness of the South. The approach in and of itself is not controversial. The author does, however, take a bold and definite stand that the source of the South's regional distinctiveness lies in the Celtic heritage of its early settlers. The author's insistence upon the pervasiveness of Celtic influence is controversial among historians and is likely to spark debate between cultural geographers and historians as to the validity of the hypothesis. Professor McWhiney has accumulated an impressive collection of primary source material to support his contention that Celtic traditions, not English, form the cultural foundation of the Old South. Geographers of many persuasions have written for some time about the cultural and regional distinctiveness of the South. McWhiney has been at this topic for many years as well. He makes it clear from the outset that the term "Cracker" has been misinterpreted over the years as referring to an economic condition, but in reality it defines a culture. The principal actors in the drama of rapid and extensive settlement across the antebellum South were migrants from the Celtic regions of the British Isles—from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and Cornwall. These migrants not only implanted their tradition across a broad swath of frontier territory, but they survived and even prevailed as the dominant population element by the time of the Civil War. Vol. XXIX, No. 1 69 The poor white economic stereotype associated with Cracker culture is biased because Crackers were not a particularly learned group of people. A weak writing tradition has resulted in their history and image being formed largely by writers who were "passing through" on the way to other, more desirable destinations. In spite of the somewhat misleading stereotype of poor whites, McWhiney confirms that the various culture traits contained in the description of Crackers by these same travelers does define the ideal standard; it is not an attractive caricature. The Southern Cracker was courageous, lazy, lustful, quarrelsome, violent , ignorant, and superstitious, as well as a drunkard, gambler, and livestock thief. Every Cracker need not possess all of the essential attributes , but any significant deviation is assumed to be an indication of cultural dilution. If your heritage is rural white Southern, the book is both thoughtprovoking and aggravating. One gets the uneasy sense that the author is indeed onto something, and one can even begin to put family names to some ofthe descriptions ofpeople and places. At the same time, the text is so full of scurrilous accounts of no-count, low-down, white trash that the reader either begins to wonder if it was possible to have so much depraved humanity firmly ensconced across a region as large as the South and the region still be able to survive into the 20th century or to dismiss the thesis as overkill. I found the book interesting initially but tedious as it progressed; perhaps as a native white Southerner with a rural heritage, I became anesthetized to the depravity of my ancestral stock. The author has approached his subject topically rather than chronologically and includes chapters on settlement, heritage, herding, hospitality , pleasures, violence, morals, education, progress, worth, and collision . McWhiney's long-time collaborator and research colleague, Forrest McDonald, has written a lengthy prologue. A major weakness of the text is the failure of the author to offer any synthesis of his copious data. Rather, the reader must labor through strings of repetitious descriptive material, each chapter bleeding into the next, with a mere cursory summary of each chapter's thesis. Interspersed...

Social networks and gender differences in the life space of opportunity: Introduction

Two basic concepts underlie the articles in this special issue- gender and the social network. The social network construct has been discussed extensively and several definitions of social networks exist (Bott, 1971; Cochran & Brassard, 1979; Leinhart, 1977; Lewis & Feiring, 1978). One aspect common to all definitions is the reference to the linkages between social units, both persons and groups, with which an individual has contact. The social network framework conceptualizes social relations, social opportunities, and social constraints by providing a schematic representation of how significant others and less central social contacts can be characterized, are organized, and can be interrelated. At any given point of an individual's life, a description of the person's network may be viewed as an index of the person's social world or life space. This includes descriptions of people in the network and the types of activities in which they are engaged. The infant is born into a social network, the most immediate and important of which is the family. Initially, through its parents and later on its own initiative as well, the child's network will in

Common and distinctive features of verbal and pictorial stimuli as determinants of psychophysiological responsivity.

The present study focuses on the relation between stimulus features and psychophysiological responsivity by using a modified version of the information detection paradigm. Compound pictorial and verbal stimuli (schematic faces with beard, glasses, and hat, and descriptions of people in terms of occupation, city of residence, a hobby, and a personality trait) were used as the relevant stimuli that subjects were instructed to memorize. Skin conductance responses were measured during the subsequent presentation of a sequence of test stimuli. Each sequence included a critical stimulus that shared from one to four common components with the relevant stimulus in each of two pictorial and two verbal experiments. We hypothesized that the electrodermal responsivity to the critical stimulus would reflect the degree it matches the relevant one. The results indicated that when the critical stimulus was identical to the relevant stimulus, responsivity was maximal. Neutral stimuli (i.e., those that shared no components with the relevant stimulus) produced minimal responsivity, and critical stimuli that only partially matched the relevant one produced intermediate levels of responsivity (in spite of the subjects' awareness of the differences between the critical and the relevant stimuli). The monotonic relation between the degree of match and responsivity supports the proposed model, which assumes that each stimulus in the sequence is being compared with the relevant stimulus by a feature-matching process, and electrodermal responsivity is related to the outcome of this process. In a fifth experiment, we compared geometric and contrast models for similarity and found that the pattern of responsivity violated the minimality and symmetry assumptions of the geometric model. The relation between cognitive processes and psychophysiological responsivity is discussed, as are implications for the application of the guilty knowledge technique for detecting information.