Social Psychology

Image Bite Politics is the first book to systematically assess the visual presentation of presidential candidates in network news coverage of elections and to connect these visual images with shifts in public opinion. Presenting the results of a comprehensive visual analysis of general election news from 1992-2004, encompassing four presidential campaigns, the authors highlight the remarkably potent influence of television images when it comes to evaluating leaders. The book draws from a variety of disciplines, including political science, behavioral biology, cognitive neuroscience, and media studies in order to investigate the visual framing of elections in an interdisciplinary fashion. Moreover, the book presents findings that are counterintuitive and which challenge widely held assumptions; yet are supported by systematic data. For example, Republicans receive consistently more favorable visual treatment than Democrats, countering the conventional wisdom of a “liberal media bias”; and image bites are more prevalent, and in some elections more potent, in shaping voter opinions of candidates than sound bites. Finally, the authors provide a foundation for promoting visual literacy among news audiences and bring the importance of visual analysis to the forefront of research.

The present book engages with the phenomenon of protracted occupation, which it perceives as both attention-grabbing and puzzling in the 21st century, an era in which it has become an exceptional and very rare phenomenon. The analysis begins with a view which suggests that occupation, by its very nature, has in most cases acquired a negative connotation because in the great majority of cases it is carried out coercively, against the will of the occupied population. In the discourse on this phenomenon, therefore, the focus of the interest is frequently on the occupied society, became it bears the very heavy tangible and intangible burdens of the occupation. Indeed there is growing literature on this issue. It is consequently requisite upon us also to analyze the relatively neglected effects of the occupation on the occupying society, effects that are not always explicit and easily observed. The present book focuses on a particular case of prolonged occupation – that of the West Bank and Gaza Strip by Israel following the Six Day War in 1967. Of importance for us is the fact that since 1967 Israel has been occupying Palestinian territories and the Palestinian population has been living for over four decades under this occupation. We focus on the relative gap in the interactive analysis in the context of occupation – the effects of the Israeli occupation of the West Bank and Gaza Strip and of the Palestinian people, on the State of Israel and its society. The consequences of the occupation are felt in wide range of aspects of life from political, societal, legal and economic to cultural and psychological.

This chapter provides an overview of the history of research on implicit motives. Six common principles of implicit motive research are laid out: (1) Implicit motives are nonconscious, (2) motive arousal is associated with characteristic changes in thought content and behavior, (3) motives act as affect amplifiers, (4) motives interact with situational incentives to shape behavior, (5) motives affect multiple levels of psychological functioning, and (6) the number of implicit motives is biologically constrained. The chapter also provides an overview of the structure and topics of the book.

Sudhir Kakar, a prominent psychoanalyst and eminent author, is considered one of India’s leading intellectuals. A mechanical engineer, Kakar did his doctorate in economics before beginning his training in psychoanalysis at the Sigmund-Freud Institute in Frankfurt, Germany in 1971. For someone trained as an engineer and later as an economist, he continues to cross disciplinary boundaries and capture the imagination of readers and everyone interested in the world of ideas. Based on interviews of Kakar by Iranian philosopher Ramin Jahanbegloo, this book is a journey into Kakar’s mind — his fertile and unpredictable ways of thinking, and the essential humanism which all his writings signify — recounting the life and ideas of Kakar in his own words. In the process, the book affords readers rare insights into the psychological make-up of the modern Indian. Flowing effortlessly from Kakar’s descriptions of his early life in undivided India to discussions of the Indian psyche and sexuality, the book also presents his views on secularism and modern Indian leaders like Mahatma Gandhi and Jawaharlal Nehru. Kakar brings to bear his intellect on a wide range of issues from philosophy to democracy, Indian culture and tradition, and the Partition, and the conversational style of the interviews helps demystify many of his complex ideas.

Modern mankind forages in a world awash in information, of our own creation, which can be transformed into knowledge that shapes and powers our engagement with nature. We produce a staggering volume of content that can be transmitted at the speed of light. This wealth of information provides resources for adapting to the problems posed by our increasingly complex world. However, this information environment poses its own complex problems that require adaptive strategies for information foraging. This book is about Information Foraging Theory, which aims to explain and predict how people will best shape themselves to their information environments, and how information environments can best be shaped to people. This book presents the details of empirical investigations of its predictions, and applications of the theory to the engineering and design of user interfaces. The theory and methodology have been developed by drawing upon work on the rational analysis of cognition, computational cognitive modeling, behavioral ecology, and microeconomics. Empirical research that has shaped Information Foraging Theory has included the study of application problems in human—information interaction, which is emerging as a new branch in the field traditionally known as human—computer interaction. The insights and results are intended to be relevant to the practitioner interested in a deeper understanding of information-seeking behavior and guidance on new user interface designs.

Feelings, impulses, wishes, and fantasies—the dynamic content of the inner world—occupy the deepest recesses of the psyche. It is through introspection and empathy, essential to psychotherapy, that the outside observer can grasp the meaning of the inner world of an individual. First published in 1978 and hailed by critics globally as the best application of psychoanalysis to Indian culture, The Inner World is an inquiry into the development of Indian identity. It examines the network of social roles, traditional values, and customs with which the threads of Indian psychological development are interwoven and, in doing so, reveals important aspects of Indian society, myths, rituals, fables, and arts.

This book draws together the latest work from scholars around the world using subjective well-being data to understand and compare well-being across countries and cultures. Starting from many different vantage points, the book reaches a consensus that many measures of subjective well-being, ranging from life evaluations through emotional states, based on memories and current evaluations, merit broader collection and analysis. Using data from the Gallup World Poll, the World Values Survey, and other internationally comparable surveys, the chapters document wide divergences among countries in all measures of subjective well-being. The international differences are greater for life evaluations than for emotions. Despite the well-documented differences in the ways in which subjective evaluations change through time and across cultures, the bulk of the very large international differences in life evaluations are due to differences in life circumstances rather than differences in the way these differences are evaluated.

Springing from an unprecedented meeting between the sons and daughters of the Holocaust and the children of Nazis, this book examines the psychology of hatred and ethnic resentments passed from generation to generation. The book argues that justice is quite naturally shaped by emotional responses. In the face of unjust treatment, the natural response is resentment and deep anger—and a desire for revenge. While legal systems offer a structured means for redressing injustice, they often do not redress the emotional pain, which, left unresolved, is then passed along to the next generation—leading to entrenched ethnic tension and group conflict. The legacy of the Holocaust and the burden of confronting unresolved injustices, were passed to another generation, as, clearly, there has been no reconciliation between Nazis and survivors. Thus, coming to terms with their parents' past shaped the lives of Nazis' children and survivors' children. Could children of survivors and Nazis talk to each other about the Holocaust and World War II and understand the anxieties of each about the other as a gateway to re-establishing a relationship? Although more than half a century has passed, recollections of the Holocaust and World War II still sear the lives of survivors, their children, and grandchildren. Central to preventing the cycle of ethnic and religious strife from continuing is story-telling, with each side recounting the injustice it suffered and the valour shown by avenging its own group. This book describes how these stories or “legacies” transmit moral values, beliefs, and emotions and thus preserve the past, and thus, based on the microcosm of their parents' personal experiences, each group maintains an understanding of themselves as the legitimate victims. Ultimately, the book argues that coming to terms with their parents' past requires both parties not just to agree to talk, but to agree to moderate their emotions and dispense with the notion that they are the most aggrieved.

Deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals develop their identities within environments that convey and reinforce preconceived assumptions of what it means to hear or see the world differently. These assumptions ultimately influence identity evolution and psychological well-being. A Lens on Deaf Identities explores multiple factors, both past and present, with significance for deaf/hard-of-hearing identities. These factors include explanatory paradigms of how deaf and hard-of-hearing people are understood within the context of disability and sociolinguistics; the formal recognition of a Deaf culture and the emergence of bicultural frames of reference; the appearance of deaf identity theories in the psychological literature; the influence of families and schools, and historical and social contexts; the acknowledgment of diversity in this population; and the technology that affects the identity of deaf people in different ways (e.g., cochlear implants as bionic ears, telecommunications that bring deaf people together with each other as well as with hearing people, and advances in genetics that counter the acceptability of hearing differences). Personal experiences, theoretical formulations, and research data are used to examine interfaces within and between each of these areas and how the tensions emerging at these junctures influence deaf and hard-of-hearing identity formation in complex, multifaceted ways that defy pervasive stereotypes of deaf and hard-of-hearing persons. This book will appeal to readers interested in d/Deaf/hard-of-hearing lives, Deaf studies and deaf education, and those interested in identity formation in the presence of “disability”.