Implicit Threat Research Articles

A double standard in evaluating implicit threats

ABSTRACT The perceived acceptability of implicit threats, as a function of messenger type, was examined. Across two experiments, participants (79 undergraduates and 160 community members) read a news article about how a police officer or gang member used an implicit threat to obtain an admission of wrongdoing from a store owner. Participants then provided their opinions about the implied messages, the messenger, and the admissibility of the confession evidence, and were asked to render a verdict. Results showed that the implied threats were viewed more negatively when uttered by a gang member. Ratings of admissibility of the confession evidence were high in both groups and varied little between the groups. Our findings are indicative of a double standard in the justice system whereby the same implicit message is viewed differently depending on who utters the message. The potential implications of these findings on legal decision-making and future research are discussed.

Речевой жанр криминальной угрозы в интернет-коммуникации

The author attempts to explore the threat as a speech genre of verbal aggression. It is argued that the threat is most often found in the texts of modern online-communication, the characteristics of which are close to a synthetic oral-written form of communication and the colloquial genre. It is emphasized that in modern studies the threat is researched from a legal and linguistic point of view. The author proves the idea that there are two main types of threat statements – a threat-warning, including a causal action, and a threatpunishment. A specific sub-genre of threat is a blackmail, which includes manipulation by means of information compromising the addressee. Semantically, the threat can be explicit, clearly expressed, and implicit, whose interpretation requires an appeal to the logics of the statement. Implicit threat in online-communication is the most difficult type to research, since its interpretation involves analyzing the logic of constructing a statement by identifying linguistic techniques presented in the text – the use of euphemisms, idioms, semantic convolution, metaphors, sarcasm, precedent case reference and non-verbal components of communication (images, emoji. Implicit threat is studied using data from various explanatory linguistic dictionaries and fragments of texts submitted for forensic linguistic examination. It is reported that the genre of a criminal threat should be distinguished from other genres such as promises, orders, warnings, verbally expressed suicidal intentions, malevolence, a threat in a broad sense, and calls to a violent action.

Using drugs alone in single room occupancy housing: Understanding environmental drivers of overdose risk

BackgroundAcross North America most overdose deaths occur in housing, largely due to individuals using drugs alone. In cities, fatalities are disproportionately concentrated in low-income housing, including single room occupancy (SRO) housing. While research has highlighted how SROs operate as risk environments for various poor outcomes, there has been little attention to specific drug use practices (i.e., using alone) associated with overdose vulnerability in these spaces. This study explores how environmental contexts of SROs shape overdose risks, with specific attention to practices of using drugs alone. MethodsIn-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted with 30 people who use drugs (PWUD) living in Vancouver SROs. Interviews covered topics such as social-structural environments of housing, drug use practices, and housing-based harm reduction. Thematic analysis drew on the intersectional risk environment framework. ResultsNarratives positioned SROs as extensions of public space, with similar expectations of risks and behaviours as in public spaces. For some participants, using alone in their room was characterized as a practice in claiming privacy within the context of a public existence. Participants highlighted how certain features of SRO's social-structural environments were routinely leveraged against them (e.g., security cameras, staff surveillance), suggesting using alone as a tactic to minimize risks of hyper-surveillance and punitive policies. Further, participants discussed using alone as “safer,” describing how this practice mitigated place-based risks of social-structural harms (e.g., violence, criminalization) in ways that eclipsed overdose risk. ConclusionUsing drugs alone may be understood as a spatial negotiation of vulnerability to diverse harms produced by environmental contexts of SROs. Interventions accounting for broader contextual factors (e.g., improvements housing quality/quantity, providing a safer supply of drugs) that render using alone as instrumental to survival, and that reduce the implicit threat of punishment from intensive surveillance and control practices are critical to reduce vulnerability to overdose and other harms.

Moral and ethical values in structural patterns of coercive acts in Hebrew Bible narrative

There are many biblical episodes in which people are compelled by an explicit or implicit threat of force, which is one definition of coercion, yet the issue of coercion has not yet been systematically explored for Hebrew Bible narrative. Examining the phenomenon of coercion across biblical narrative, this study asks how coercion is viewed and valued in the Hebrew Bible, what determines whether coercion is punished or rewarded, and what the theological significance is of this judgment.

Implicit threat learning involves the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum

Background/ObjectiveMost studies investigating the neural correlates of threat learning were carried out using an explicit Pavlovian conditioning paradigm where declarative knowledge on contingencies between conditioned (CS) and unconditioned stimuli (US) is acquired. The current study aimed at understanding the neural correlates of threat conditioning when contingency awareness is limited or even absent. MethodWe conducted an fMRI report of threat learning in an implicit associative learning paradigm called multi-CS conditioning, in which a number of faces were associated with aversive screams (US) such that participants could not report contingencies between the faces and the screams. ResultsThe univariate results showed support for the recruitment of threat-related regions including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) and the cerebellum during acquisition. Further analyses by the multivariate representational similarity technique identified learning-dependent changes in the bilateral dlPFC. ConclusionOur findings support the involvement of the dlPFC and the cerebellum in threat conditioning that occurs with highly limited or even absent contingency awareness.

A novel feature integration and entity boundary detection for named entity recognition in cybersecurity

Owing to continuous cyberattacks, a large amount of threat intelligence is generated online every day. However, threat intelligence is mostly unstructured and multisource heterogeneous text. It is difficult for security analysts to understand the implicit threat in time. Knowledge Graph (KG) is an important research topic in recent years, which can perform automated and real-time analysis of threat intelligence in cybersecurity. As one of the critical technologies of KG, named entity recognition (NER) can identify cyberattack-related entities. It has been proved that long-distance structured information captured by dependency trees provides a rich semantic expression for the neural network. However, existing research works are more focused on the simple linear stack of neural networks when utilizing structured features. The interaction between different types of neural networks is vague. In addition, the existing models are insensitive to the boundaries of complex entity terms in cybersecurity. In this study, we propose a new feature integration and entity boundary detection (FIEBD) model. In our model, a new pretrained language model, PERT, is applied to obtain word embedding of cyber texts. Moreover, a novel neural network cell, namely GARU, is developed to incorporate different types of features extracted from graph neural networks and recurrent neural networks. It combines the graph encoder with the gate mechanism, aiming to obtain better hidden representation by explicit interaction. Furthermore, considering a large number of complex entities in cybersecurity, we contribute an entity boundary detection module to perform entity head and tail prediction as an augmentation task. We conduct extensive experiments on cybersecurity datasets. The results demonstrate that the proposed model achieves better performance than existing baseline methods.

‘And now you love me, and there is no way out of it’: marital engagement, misogyny and violence in the Victorian fin-de-siècle gothic short story

ABSTRACT This article will examine the gendered nature of monstrosity in the fin-de-siècle gothic short story, using the phenomenon of marital engagement as a lens on how ‘correct’ and transgressive sexual behaviour on the part of both women and men were defined and distinguished from each other in the 1880s and 1890s. Framing this fiction in the wider context of the discourse concerning the ‘Woman Question’ and the inter-connected so-called ‘crisis of masculinity’, seven gothic texts will be examined that reveal both how betrothal functioned in the late-Victorian period, and how the cultural elements of engagement, sexual, spiritual, and mercantile, combined to form a potent inspiration for the horror narrative. The first part of the article will consider four ‘monstrous’ females who all displayed aggressive sexual appetites, and in general advanced their own interests in ways considered fundamentally masculine. The second part will discuss three ‘monstrous’ men who transgressed accepted forms of masculine behaviour, failing to observe the approved demarcation between private and public male sexuality. Ultimately, the gendered violence apparent in all of these stories reveals the implicit threat of physical force and legal subjugation underpinning the Victorian marital ritual, including in betrothal.

Fear of negative evaluation modulates the processing of social evaluative feedback with different valence and contexts.

Fear of negative evaluation (FNE) is a susceptible and maintaining factor of social anxiety disorders. However, the question, how people process negative evaluation is influenced by individual differences in FNE, is poorly understood. To clarify the habitual processing characteristics of individuals with different levels of FNE, electroencephalography was recorded when two groups of participants with high FNE (hFNE) and low FNE (lFNE) performed a social evaluation perception task in which the feedback context/source (human vs. a computer) and valence (thumb-up/like vs. thumb-down/dislike) were manipulated. We found effects of feedback source and valence on N1, P2, and P3, which reflect early attention, integrated perception, and elaborative processing, respectively, as well as general reward effects on reward positivity (RewP) across contexts. Importantly, compared to the lFNE group, the hFNE group showed larger midfrontal N1 and theta oscillation in response to negative feedback indicating dislike (vs. like), and also showed larger P3. These findings suggest that individuals with hFNE are more attentional vigilance to negative (vs. positive) social feedback, implying that individuals with different levels of FNE assign different implicit threat values to social-evaluation threat stimuli.

The Weathersfield Affair

The Weathersfield Affair

An Application of Psychological Reactance Theory to College Student Voter Registration and Mobilization

ABSTRACT The purpose of this study was to test political engagement messages (voter registration and voter mobilization) effectiveness with younger adults using psychological reactance theory as a guiding framework. Two online survey experiments using a 2 (message frame: gain- vs. loss-frame) X 2 (social norm: positive vs. negative) factorial design found that in the context of voter registration, consistent with prior research, both a loss-framed message and a positive norm message elicited greater freedom threat and reactance. However, these findings were not replicated in the context of voter mobilization. Across both topics, the arousal of reactance was associated with diminished behavioral intention (either for registering to vote or for voting). While the social norms approach has been found effective in mobilization campaigns, findings from this study demonstrate that an implicit threat to one’s freedom (in the form of a positive social norms message) can elicit reactance among non-registered voters. This research suggests that political marketers should be aware of the potential for reactance to messages promoting voter registration among non-registered voters and be aware of potential backlash effects of loss-framed and positive norm-based messages in voter registration communication.

Factors associated with sexual violence among waitresses working in Bahir Dar City, Ethiopia: a mixed-method study

BackgroundWhen a worker is abused, threatened, or assaulted while at work, it poses an explicit or implicit threat to his/her safety, well-being, or health. However, the magnitude and understanding of the problem and its associated factors have received little attention in low and middle-income countries, including Ethiopia. Thus, this study aimed to ascertain the magnitude, perceptions, and associated factors of workplace sexual violence among waitresses in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia.MethodsParallel sampling was used in a facility-based convergent mixed-methods study. A multistage sampling technique was used to select study participants. Four hundred six waitresses provided quantitative information. To collect data, a pretested structured interview administered questionnaire was used. Qualitative data from ten in-depth interviews and six focus group discussions were also collected using a semi-structured questionnaire. The data were cleaned before being entered into Epidata version 7 and exported to STATA version 15 for analysis. Using odds ratios with a 95% confidence interval and a P value of less than 0.05, binary logistic regression was used to identify independent predictors. Thematic analysis was performed using ATLAS ti version 8.4.25 after the recorded audios were transcribed.ResultsThe overall prevalence of workplace sexual violence was 45.9% (95% CI 41, 50.8). Waitresses who had heard about sexual violence and workplace sexual violence, had witnessed family violence as a child, had a family who valued their honor over their children’s safety and health, and lacked employment opportunities were more likely to experience workplace sexual violence. Waitresses who worked in emotionally supportive work environments and were educated were less likely to experience workplace sexual violence.ConclusionsMany of the waitresses in this study had experienced workplace sexual violence. Its awareness, witnessing family violence as a child, growing up in a family that prioritized their honor over their children’s safety and health, and lack of employment opportunities exacerbated it. In contrast, emotionally supportive work environments and education have protected them. This implies that organizations, both governmental and non-governmental, civic organizations, and other responsible bodies must pay attention to the identified factors. Additionally, Ethiopian hospitality workplaces should develop policies to protect women.

Sleep Deprivation During Memory Consolidation, but Not Before Memory Retrieval, Widens Threat Generalization to New Stimuli.

Past aversive experiences shape our ability to deal with future dangers, through the encoding of implicit and explicit memory traces and through the ability to generalize defensive reactions to new stimuli resembling learned threats. Numerous evidence demonstrate that sleep is important for the consolidation of memories related to threatening events. However, there is a lack of studies examining the effects of sleep deprivation on the retrieval of consolidated threat memories, and previous studies on the role of sleep in threat generalization have produced mixed results. To address these issues, here we adopted a differential threat conditioning and a delayed (second half of the night) sleep deprivation during the first or the seventh night after learning. We found no effects of sleep deprivation on either implicit or explicit threat memories, regardless of its occurrence timing. Conversely, implicit but not explicit responses to novel cues similar to a learned threat displayed a widened generalization pattern, but only if sleep deprivation took place during the first night after conditioning and not if it occurred during the seventh night after conditioning. Therefore, we propose that sleeping after exposure to danger may support optimal implicit discrimination processes to evaluate new signals in the future and that even a brief period of sleeplessness may widen threat generalization to new stimuli, which is a hallmark of several threat-related disorders.

Gender stereotypes: implicit threat to performance or boost for motivational aspects in primary school?

Based on stereotype threat and stereotype lift theory, this study explores implicit stereotype threat effects of gender stereotypes on the performance of primary school children in mathematics. Moreover, effects of implicit gender stereotypical cues (gender-specific task material) on motivational aspects were explored, which have revealed mixed results in stereotype threat research in the past. N = 151 German primary school children (47.7% female; mean age: M = 9.81, SD = 0.60) calculated either stereotypical or neutral mathematical text problems before motivational aspects were assessed. Contradicting our expectations, results neither revealed a stereotype threat effect on girls’ performance nor a lift effect on the boys. Instead, girls calculating stereotypical tasks outperformed girls in the control group, whereas boys’ performance did not significantly differ compared to the control group. Regarding motivational aspects, only traditional gender differences emerged as girls reported significantly more pressure and tension calculating the mathematical tasks. The discussion focuses on the way in which stereotypes can affect children’s cognitive performance and in turn, their mathematical performance.

University students’ experiences of recreational class a drug taking and perspectives on personal, social and health education (PSHE) drug education

PurposeResearch suggests that student drug use is substantially higher than that of the general population and while the UK Government’s current Drug Strategy emphasises the importance of PSHE in preventing young people from becoming drug users, there is a lack of research investigating the longer-term effectiveness of drug prevention education, and students’ views using qualitative methods. The purpose of this paper is to gain a holistic understanding into university students’ lived experiences of recreational class A drug taking and the drug education taught in English secondary schools.Design/methodology/approachFive interviews with university students were undertaken and thematically analysed using an ideographic case study approach alongside a qualitative content analysis of publicly available drug education resources and policy documents.FindingsThe normalisation of drug taking at university and social micro-pressures to assimilate group norms were key contributing factors to participants’ drug use. While the content of drug education in PSHE is grounded in theory, its implementation is not.Originality/valueThis study extends upon existing theories of normalisation of drug use at university through the concept of micro-pressures to offer an explanation of the process by which students assimilate group norms through the implicit threat of not fitting in.

White civilians\u2019 implicit danger evaluation of police officers underlies explicit perception of police

The role of implicit processes during police-civilian encounters is well studied from the perspective of the police. Decades of research on the “shooter bias” suggests that implicit Black-danger associations potentiate the perception of threat of Black individuals, leading to a racial bias in the decision to use lethal force. Left understudied are civilians’ possible associations of police with danger and how such associations pervade behavior and explicit views of the police. The current work begins to address this gap. In two within-subjects studies, we separately assess police-threat (i.e., safety/danger) and police-valence (i.e., good/bad) associations as well as their relative influences on explicit perceptions of police. Study 1 revealed that implicit threat evaluations (police-danger associations) more strongly predicted negative explicit views of the police compared to implicit valence evaluations (police-negative associations). Study 2 replicated these findings and suggests that individuals evaluate the police as more dangerous versus negative when each response is pitted against each other within single misattribution procedure trials. The possible implications for explicit attitudes toward police reform and behavior during police-civilian encounters are discussed.

An amygdala-centered hyper-connectivity signature of threatening face processing predicts anxiety in youths with autism spectrum conditions.

Anxiety is exceedingly prevalent among individuals with an autism spectrum condition (ASC). While recent literature postulates anxiety as a mechanism encompassing an underlying amygdala-related elevated baseline level of arousal even to nonthreatening cues, whether this same mechanism contributes to anxiety in those with an ASC and supports the transdiagnostic nature of anxiety remains elusive. In this case-control study of 51 youths (26 ASC), we assessed autism and anxiety via the Autism-Spectrum Quotient and the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory, respectively. Hemodynamic responses, including amygdala reactivity, to explicit and implicit (backwardly masked) perception of threatening faces were acquired using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI). For explicit fear, ASC individuals showed significantly greater negative correlations between the amygdala and the attentional deployment-parietal network. For implicit fear, ASC individuals showed significantly stronger correlations of the amygdala with the prefrontal networks, temporal pole, and hippocampus. Additionally, an fMRI-based neurologic signature for anxiety in ASCs was identified via the LibSVM machine learning model using amygdala-centered functional connectivity during the emotional processing of explicit and implicit stimuli. Hypervigilance to implicit threat in ASCs comorbid with anxiety might exacerbate explicit threat reactivity; hence the use of attentional avoidance patterns to restrict affective hyperarousal for explicitly perceived socioemotional stimuli. Consequently, developing an attention-independent behavioral/neural marker identifying anxiety in ASCs is highly warranted. LAY SUMMARY: This study identifies a dissociation of amygdala reactivity dependent on explicit and implicit threat processing. Implicit anxiety in individuals with an autism spectrum condition (ASC) could outweigh explicitly induced threat. When explicitly perceiving socioemotional stimuli, ASC individuals with anxiety might use attentional avoidance patterns to restrict affective hyperarousal.

The specificity of Russia’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2021–2023

The subject of this research is the policy of the Russian Federation in the Arctic. The object is Russia’s chairmanship of the Arctic Council in 2021–2023. The author meticulously analyzes the positions of the state, taking into account national interests and peculiarities of the current international situation in the region. The article examines the domestic legislative acts adopted for regulation of the Arctic Region, as well as international documents aimed at sustainable development of the North. The conditions of collective security dictate moderate and clearly defined policy in the Arctic, which is the central arena for political action with the leading role of the Russian Federation until 2023. The conclusion is drawn that the Arctic Region is currently the most relevant vector of the policy of northern states. Chairmanship of the Russian Federation imposes enormous responsibility on the country, as despite the overall state of security in the region, there remains a range of unresolved issues. The attempts of institutionalization of the Arctic Council may become an implicit threat for the Russian Federation; this is why the systematization of domestic legislation and foreign policy actions on maintaining the health of ecosystem, cultural heritage, and environmental policy have become the priority vectors in the first year of Russia’s chairmanship. The overall responsibility of the leading actor the Arctic does not exclude the existence of classic threats to the security of state’s sovereignty, which requires accurate planning in subsequent years of the chairmanship.

Environmental agenda in the context of self-determination of the indigenous population in the Arctic

This article is dedicated to the examination of identity of the indigenous small-numbered peoples of the Arctic in the context of environmental interdependence. The author reviews the current situation in the Arctic as a symbiosis of domestic and foreign policy of the Russian Federation being northern country. The transformation of identity is an implicit challenge for sustainable development in the region. The subject of this research is the phenomenon of self-determination of the indigenous population in the context of environmental agenda. The author dwells on the existing theoretical approaches towards studying the phenomenon of interdependence. The article aims to prove that the problematic of the identity of indigenous population may become a serious challenge for the foreign policy of the Russian Federation in the region. The novelty of this research consists on the fact that due to the Russian Chairmanship in the Arctic Council (2021 – 2023), the problem of self-determination of the indigenous small-numbered population remains unresolved, which generates an implicit threat to sustainable development of the region from the perspective of foreign policy discourse of the country. The conclusion is drawn that the existing environmental support initiatives through the international organizations and government structures of the Russian Federation and the Nordic countries do not imply direct representatives from the indigenous small-numbered population. The absence of a permanent dialogue results in the unconscious shift towards dependence.

The M&A Rumor Productivity Dip

M&A rumors cause anxiety, distraction, and reduced employee morale due to the implicit threat of job loss. Using an international sample of M&A rumors that do not materialize, we show that firm productivity temporarily declines after rumors surface. This productivity dip is more pronounced for target firms and for firms in countries with less employment protection, collective bargaining, and long-term orientation. Stock returns mirror these results, suggesting that rumors destroy shareholder value. The evidence fosters our understanding of the implications of a common phenomenon in financial markets, i.e., rumors, and the dark side of the market for corporate control.

Sustainable debt

We show that debt is sustainable at a competitive equilibrium based solely on the reputation for repayment; that is, even without collateral or legal sanctions available to creditors. In an incomplete asset market, when the rate of interest falls recurrently below the rate of growth of the economy, self‐insurance is more costly than borrowing, and repayments on loans are enforced by the implicit threat of loss of the risk‐sharing advantages of debt contracts. Private debt credibly circulates as a form of inside money, and it is not valued as a speculative bubble. Competitive equilibria with self‐enforcing debt exist under a suitable hypothesis of gains from trade.