Evaluative Connotations Research Articles

On the evaluative connotations of anthroponymic idioms in a contrastive perspective (based on English and Italian)

On the evaluative connotations of anthroponymic idioms in a contrastive perspective (based on English and Italian)

KONSULTACJE PRAWNICZE NA FORACH INTERNETOWYCH: PRZEKSZTAŁCENIE DYSKURSU PRAWNICZEGO W JĘZYK POTOCZNY

The author having examined the contents of several internet-forums tackles major means of legal discourse transformation in inter-personal communication, linking them with the peculiarities of mundane thinking and with characteristics of the categories “the addresser” and “the addressee”. Two basic vectors: subjectivity and concretization are regarded as most important in the adaptation of legal discourse for the demands of everyday life. Subjectivity is revealed in the presentation of a “me-focus” and “you-focus”, in the substitution of legal and special terms, bookish phrases by their substandard equivalents, as well as the usage of words with evaluative connotations to describe situations both in the whole and in the particular. Concretization is revealed in ascribing personal features to legal bodies and in the descriptive nominations of legal bodies by the means of spatial indexes.

Constructive feedback in cross-race interactions

In two experiments, White college students provided a local high-school student with feedback on her substandard college admissions essay, via electronic mail. Motivation to provide appropriate feedback was manipulated by alleging comparison to experts or novices. Experiment 1 compared feedback to White versus Black recipients, with the expectation that accountability would attenuate previously observed positivity biases in cross-race feedback. Experiment 2 manipulated concern about being prejudiced by providing false scores on an Implicit Associations Task (IAT)-type task; this experiment examined whether accountability plus attenuated concern about prejudice could encourage feedback to Blacks that was objectively helpful. Feedback characteristics included evaluative connotation, communication style, subjective feedback helpfulness and objective feedback quality. Findings generally supported these hypotheses. We discuss the implications of our findings for intergroup contact situations, including the potential pitfalls that face feedback-givers responding to superior performance.

The social face of emotion recognition: Evaluations versus stereotypes

The goal of the present paper was to demonstrate the influence of general evaluations and stereotype associations on emotion recognition. Earlier research has shown that evaluative connotations between social category members and emotional expression predict whether recognition of positive or negative emotional expressions will be facilitated (e.g. Hugenberg, 2005). In the current paper we tested the hypothesis that stereotype associations influence emotion recognition processes, especially when the difference between valences of emotional expressions does not come into play. In line with this notion, when participants in the present two studies were asked to classify positive versus negative emotional expressions (i.e. happy versus anger, or happy versus sadness), valence congruency effects were found. Importantly, however, in a comparative context without differences in valence in which participants were asked to classify two distinct negative emotions (i.e. anger versus sadness) we found that recognition facilitation occurred for stereotypically associated discrete emotional expressions. With this, the current results indicate that a distinction between general evaluative and cognitive routes can be made in emotion recognition processes.

A versus F: The effects of implicit letter priming on cognitive performance

It has been proposed that motivational responses outside people's conscious awareness can be primed to affect academic performance. The current research focused on the relationship between primed evaluative letters (A and F), explicit and implicit achievement motivation, and cognitive performance. Given the evaluative connotation associated with letter grades, we wanted to know if exposure to the letter A before a task could improve performance, and exposure to the letter F could impair performance. If such effects are found, we suspected that they may be rooted in implicit approach versus avoidance motivation, and occur without participants' awareness. The current research was conducted at a large research university in the USA. Twenty-three undergraduates participated in Expt 1, 32 graduate students in Expt 2, and 76 undergraduates in Expt 3. Expts 1 and 2 were conducted in classroom settings, and Expt 3 in a laboratory. In Expt 1, participants were randomly assigned to either the A or F condition. The letter manipulation came in the form of an ostensible Test Bank ID code on the cover of an analogy test, which participants were prompted to view and write on each page of their test. Expt 2 followed a similar procedure but included the neutral letter J as a third condition to serve as a control. In Expt 3, participants' letter condition was presented in the form of an ostensible Subject ID code prior to an anagram test. Expts 1-3 demonstrated that exposure to the letter A enhances performance relative to the exposure to the letter F, whereas exposure to the letter F prior to an achievement task can impair performance. This effect was demonstrated using two different types of samples (undergraduate and graduate students), in two different experimental settings (classroom and laboratory), using two different types of achievement tasks (analogy and anagram), and using two different types of letter presentation (Test Bank ID and Subject ID). Results from the funnelled debriefing, self-report goals, and word-stem completion support our position that the effect of letter on academic performance takes place outside the conscious awareness of participants. Our findings suggest that students are vulnerable to evaluative letters presented before a task, and support years of research highlighting the significant role that nonconscious processes play in achievement settings.

The role of valence in the perception of agency and communion

AbstractSocial judgments necessarily carry evaluative connotations that may mask other dimensions of interest. With reference to bi‐dimensional models of stereotype content, we analyzed the role of valence in the study of agency and communion. Because agency and communion are both positively evaluated dimensions, we hypothesize that valence may function as a “third variable” that obscures their obverse relation. In Study 1, investigating people's lay understanding of agency and communion, ratings of 130 adjectives revealed a positive correlation between the two dimensions, unless valence was controlled for, in which case the correlation became negative. In Study 2, exemplifying the role of valence in the case of gender stereotyping, a word frequency analysis of Italian language revealed that more agentic traits were more likely to occur in masculine and more communal traits in feminine form, but again this link emerged only after controlling for valence. This research highlights the importance of controlling for valence when studying the distinct roles of agency and communion in social perception. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

The deautomatization of accessible attitudes

The attitudinal effects of repeatedly encountering an object in a setting where an attitude was unneeded were investigated. In three experiments, participants repeatedly recognized words with strong evaluative connotations. A priming task was subsequently performed in which the repeatedly recognized words or control words served as primes. As expected, the attitudinal priming effects of the attitudes toward the repeated words were attenuated relative to the control words. This reduction in automatic attitude activation was observed even a day after the repeated recognition task, suggesting that attitudinal deautomatization is a relatively enduring effect that is not limited to the immediate context. The likelihood of automatic attitude activation was not diminished by the repeated evaluation of an object, indicating that the effect was not due to semantic satiation or fatigue of the attitude-object connection. A number of additional potential mediators of the deautomatization of attitudes were ruled out by the results. The findings highlight the functional nature of attitudes. Attitudes facilitate the appraisal of objects and the making of decisions. However, when the need to evaluate an object in a context decreases, the automatic activation of attitudes diminishes.

POSITIVE-NEGATIVE ASYMMETRY IN MENTAL STATE INFERENCE: REPLICATION AND EXTENSION

Our previous study (Ito & Ikegami, in press) hypothesized and confirmed that people would predominantly draw corresponding mental state inference (i.e., inferring mental states correspondent with behaviors in terms of evaluative connotations) from undesirable behavior, whereas they draw not just correspondent but non-correspondent mental state inference as well for desirable behavior. That study, however, used hypothetical behavioral events. Our present study examined whether this asymmetrical inference is evident in the case of inference from real-life behavioral episodes. Participants were asked to remember desirable and undesirable behavior performed by other persons, and to infer the actors’ mental states from their behaviors. The results supported the hypothesis, indicating that, while people’s inclinations to infer correspondent mental states from both behaviors were potent, inference of non-correspondent mental states from desirable behaviors were more frequent than inference from undesirable behaviors. The results also provided insight into the process of idea generation in mental state inference.

The evaluative connotation of processing fluency: Inherently positive or moderated by motivational context?

A fundamental question for evaluation research is whether cues can impact evaluative responses directly or only in combination with contextual information. Focusing on the experience of processing fluency, the current work tested whether manipulating this cue’s motivational context would moderate its evaluative impact. Because fluently processed stimuli can be assumed to communicate safety, owing to implicit signals of either familiarity (through processes monitoring perception–memory coordination), we reasoned that motivation to avoid negative events should heighten preferences for fluently processed stimuli. Following a motivation manipulation, prevention-focused, but not promotion-focused, participants preferred stimuli that they were able to process quickly (Experiment 2) and that were preceded by concordant primes (Experiment 1). These findings suggest that the value of fluent processing reflects its relation to contextual features, such as one’s current motivational state.

‘What is (mental) disease?’: an open letter to Christopher Boorse

This “open letter” to Christopher Boorse is a response to his influential naturalist (value-excluding) analysis of disease from the perspective of linguistic-analytic value theory. The key linguistic-analytic point against Boorse...

On inference theories and code theories: Corpus evidence for semantic schemas

This article illustrates a method of studying the evaluative connotations of words and phrases, by studying their most frequent collocates in large corpora. The semantic schemas which can be identified in this way are clusters of preferred lexis and syntax, which often have conventional pragmatic connotations. Examples of individual schemas are given. A broader research project is then proposed to study the connotations of words and phrases in a significant area of social meaning: the many category terms in English for talking about groups of people in terms of the human life cycle (e.g., infant, baby, child, adolescent, teenager, youth, adult, senior citizen). Such analyses contribute to the long-standing debate between ‘inference theories’ and ‘code theories’ of language comprehension, and suggest that more is conventionally encoded in language structure than has often been suggested in recent work. In addition, they explore a central issue of corpus semantics: the relation between stability and variation in textual units.

Creativity, Synesthesia, and Physiognomic Perception

Evidence suggests that creative individuals have access to primary process modes of thought. Because such thinking is associative, it is believed to enhance the likelihood of a creative insight. Synesthesia and physiognomic perception are aspects of primary process thinking. Synesthesia involves a unity between or among different sensory modalities. Physiognomic perception involves a fusion of affect and perception. We investigated the relation between creativity and synesthetic tendencies and physiognomic perception. The Remote Associates Test (S. A. Mednick & M. P. Mednick, 1967) was used to measure creative potential. Similarity judgments were made between auditory stimuli (pure tones and pure vowel sounds) and colors to measure synesthetic-like phenomena. Colors were rated using adjectives with emotional or evaluative connotations to measure physiognomic perception. More creative participants differed significantly from less creative participants on their ratings, with more creative participants exhibiting stronger associations between colors and pure tones, vowels, and emotional terms.

Self-Serving Bias in Attitude Judgments: The Use of Person Versus Issue Implicated Language

This study examines participants' perceptions of the appropriateness of judgmental language to describe own, similar, and dissimilar attitudes. The judgmental language consisted of pre-tested adjectives that varied in terms of their descriptive content, evaluative connotation and type of implication. Adjectives were classified as person implicated if they primarily implied an evaluation of person(s), and as issue implicated if their central focus was on an evaluation of the issue. Findings confirm the prediction of a differential positivity bias. Participants preferred positive person implication adjectives as compared to positive issue implication adjectives to describe their own and similar attitudes. When describing people with opposing attitudes participants preferred negative person implication adjectives over negative issue implication adjectives. This finding is related to other self-serving biases in the judgment of attitude positions and groups, and its application to different communicative contexts is discussed.

The Distinction between Art and Craft

We have become quite comfortable in the past century with the phrase and crafts.' We use to refer, for example, to the products and practices of painting, sculpture, and printmaking and to those of ceramics, weaving, and woodand metalwork. We also assume that the arts and the crafts are similar in important ways (or else why would we routinely group them together?) but also somehow different (or else why would we need two terms?). To get clear about these similarities and differences, though, is another story. Part of the problem is that has a positive evaluative connotation that lacks. Some critics, with good reason, claim that this difference in evaluative meaning reflects our culture's elitist values: what white European men make is dignified by the label while what everyone else makes counts only as craft. This sort of charge has become familiar by now; it underlies, for example, the recent claim that our literary canon is unfairly biased toward the works of white men. And although literature departments have been the primary targets of such criticism, art history and fine arts programs, no doubt, are next in line. But while it may be important to expand both literary and visual canons to include the works of neglected groups, we must also investigate the values, categories, or distinctions we use to justify such works' exclusion in the first place. Examining the distinction between art and craft is one place to start. For once classified as craft, a work has trouble counting not only as great art, but as any sort of art at all. Those who are suspicious of the art-craft distinction sometimes imply that this exclusion is arbitrary, resting on nothing but elitism; on this view, the only real distinction to be made may well be the one between the social status of those who become artists and those who

Judging risk behaviour and risk preference: The role of the evaluative connotation of risk terms

AbstractTwo experiments investigate the impact of the evaluative connotation of risk terms on the judgment of risk behaviour and on risk preference. In the first experiment we focus on (1) the evaluation congruence of the risk terms with a general risk norm and (2) with subjects' individual risk preference, and its effects on the extremity of judgments of risk behaviour. In the second experiment we address (3) the effects of evaluative connotation of risk terms on risk preference.In the first experiment subjects were presented with four decision problems, each with a risky and a cautious decision option, and were required to judge options. Results showed that the judged discrepancy between the risky and cautious option was larger on scales which were evaluatively congruent with the general risk norm for that specific decision problem or with subjects' individual preference. More specificly, in decision problems for which there was considerable consensus about the risk‐norm judgments were more extreme on scales which were congruent with the risk norm, in those problems lacking a clear‐cut risk‐norm judgments were more extreme on scales congruent with subjects' individual risk preference.In the second experiment we studied the reverse relation between the evaluative connotation of risk terms and risk preference. This experiment demonstrates that using evaluatively biased risk terms can affect risk preference. Using terms which imply a positive evaluation of risk‐taking and a negative evaluation of risk avoidance led to increased risk preference, and vice versa. Results are discussed in the context of accentuation theory.

Beyond Equity in the Delivery of Alcohol and Drug Abuse Treatment Services

Equity in service utilization has become an important policy goal of federally-, state-, and locally-funded alcohol and drug treatment programs. A number of conceptual and methodological issues surrounding equity, including its strengths and limitations as a policy goal, are addressed. Among the many issues discussed is the observation that inequity in service utilization carries evaluative connotations in that a service system is likely to be judged as unsatisfactory, inadequate, or inappropriate when the inequity is modest, and as morally reprehensible when the inequity is significant. Violation of the norm of equity is a prescription for institutional reform and political action. On the other hand, policies that would increase the equity in service utilization may be incompatible with the goal of “service on demand” and they may have no consequent effect of increasing service efficacy. Moreover, there are some arrangements in which maintaining or even increasing inequity would be cost-effective. Other methodological, conceptual and policy-related issues are addressed.

Dimensions of Marginality: Distinctions among those Who are Different

Master status individuals are persons whose physical appearance, behavior, or life circumstance is statistically unusual and centrally defining. In three studies, undergraduates indicated the dissimilarity among various master status groups (e.g., amputees, musical prodigies, criminals, royalty) and then rated them on semantic differential scales (e.g., good-bad, safe-dangerous, alluring-repelling). Multidimensional scaling revealed that few dimensions are needed to distinguish among these marginal individuals. The most common distinctions are evaluative connotation and visibility of the master status characteristic. It was also found that, as a group, those who are culturally stigmatized are far more differentiated than those who are culturally valued.

The Disintegration of American Sociology

What do I mean by disintegration? The term is used here in both an evaluative and a more technical sense. Its evaluative connotations are that American sociology is falling apart and losing organizational as well as intellectual coherence; and most importantly, it has lost its vision as a science of human organization. Indeed, like American economy in general, we are now consumers in a big market that imports more than it produces; and in fact, we accept almost any trendy idea from Europe as the latest thing, much like we buy overpriced European cars. True, we can generate quantitative techniques with best of them-the IBM of American sociology. But we have lost our vision of what sociology is, what it should produce, and what its goals are. American sociology is now big, disorganized, incoherent, and increasingly boring. When I was an undergraduate in first half of 1960s and a graduate student in latter part of 1960s, sociology was still exciting. There seemed to be real promise that theoretical unification could occur, that we would develop cumulative knowledge, and that we could take our place at table of science. This theoretical euphoria was accompanied by even more enthusiasm for methodological advances of field as it harnessed linear model to computer. Equally significant, all this scientism was accompanied by a profound sense of our relevance to real world. Indeed, there was a conviction that our scientific knowledge could be used to solve enduring problems and dilemmas of American society. Was I just naive, or was profession simply drunk on its growth and expansion in turbulent 1960s; and have we now sobered up morning after our big fling? If this is case, American sociology was far more interesting as a swaggering and confident drunk than it is as a contrite profession today. This is my argument in evaluative terms. Let me be a bit more sociological and state argument on disintegration more technically. In context of an intellectual (including scientific) enterprise, what would we mean by integra-

Self-Reference and Evaluative Biases in the Perception of Trait Information

Research on self-referent information processing indicates that material linked to the self-concept is especially salient and accessible. In this research, we examined the effects of self-reference on recognition thresholds for personality descriptors. Two studies confirmed that self-descriptive traits are recognized at briefer exposure levels than are nondescriptive traits. In the second study, it was also found that the facilitative effects of self-reference are limited entirely to traits with strong, personal evaluative connotations; these results join with other findings suggesting an interdependence of self-reference and affect in the retrieval of information from semantic memory.

Second-order classical conditioning of meaning in the Staats format

Five nonsense syllables were paired 18 times each with meaningful words. Two syllables (CS1) were paired systematically with words (UCS) of either positive or negative evaluative connotation, and the remaining syllables were paired with words without systematic evaluative connotation. Postexperimental ratings on semantic differential scales indicated that the syllable paired with positive words was evaluated more positively than the syllable paired with negative words (p <.001). This replicates Staats and Staats’ well known finding. Part 2 of the experiment had two conditions. In Condition 1, the positive CS1 from Part 1 was paired with one neutral CS2, and the negative CS1 was paired with another CS2. In Condition 2, the pairings of the positive and negative CS1s were reversed for the CS2s. Three noncritical pairs of nonsense syllables were also presented. A significant interaction (p <.05) in the rating of CS2s in the different conditions indicated that they had acquired the connotative meaning associated with CS1s. Results support the phenomenon of second-order classical conditioning of syllables.