Psychology
In their research “The emotional roots of conspiratorial perceptions, system justification, and belief in the paranormal”, Whitson, Galinsky and Kay (2014) addressed human emotions that are linked with the uncertainty of the world. They suggest a hypothesis that these emotions (such as fear, surprise, hope, etc.) should promote the need to endow the world with structure and order using a variety of compensatory measures.
The reason to conduct the experiments described in the article was a desire to prove that the certainty of the emotions plays a greater role than its valence in the process of activating compensatory control. Moreover, the experiments resolved an important question whether the “uncertainty about the world certainty about the world produce the same effects as lacking control” (Whitson, Galinsky& Kay, 2014.)
The study has found, that emotions coming from uncertainty about the world activate structure-seeking in a certain way - they triggered the compensatory mechanisms - boosted government defense; increased the belief in conspiracies and the paranormal. According to the authors, self-affirmation (thinking of and affirming the important values) eliminated the uncertainty effects on compensatory control. Despite variety of emotions studied, the uncertainty itself affected compensatory control but not the type and valence of the emotions.
In their research “Emotional expressions as social signals of rejection and acceptance: Evidence from the Affect Misattribution Paradigm”, the authors (Heerdink, van Kleef, Homan, & Fischer, 2014) study emotional expressions of people in a linkage with acceptance and rejection in terms of social groups. According to the main hypothesis, happy facial expressions mean acceptance for an observer while expressions of anger mean rejection.
This study addresses emotions that play a key role in the social life regulation. The understanding how individuals use various emotional expressions of their peers to recognize the signals of acceptance or rejections gives the scholars a key to understanding the social consequences of emotions in a variety of contexts and also the people’s perception of social categorization.
As the study’s findings have shown, the primary hypotheses, developed by the authors, were confirmed – the study participants strongly associated happy facial expressions with the social acceptance. At the same time, expressed anger was strongly related to rejection, even more than other negative emotions. No matter how the acceptance vs. rejection vector was represented, this interconnection took place. The results mean that people capture facial expressions “as immediate social signals regarding their own standing in the group” (Heerdink et.al, 2014.)
In the article “Objects become her: The role of mortality salience on men's attraction to literally objectified women”, Morris and Goldenberg (2014) address the function of literal objectification of women – an associating the women with various material non-mortal objects, and also merging women and objects; this technique is frequently used in commercial advertising and proved to be extremely effective while tested on men audience. This time, the researchers address objectification of the human body from the perspective of terror management theory and try to examine whether the objectification helps to decrease the threat related to men's attraction to women’s body under mortality salience conditions.
Before this scientific work, no other research addressed the topic whether the literal objectification of women’s body can help to reduce the threat imposed by men’s attraction and whether this objectification can be used as an instrument of threat management.
With the mortality in the mind of the percipient, there’s a threat linked to men’s attraction to women as sexual objects. As the study’s finding proved, literal objectification with nonliving, thus, immortal things neutralizes the existential threat of bodies of women. Also, under mortality reminder condition, the men reported the women less attractive whether they were objectivized or not. But the men primed with mortality salience found the objectivized women (merged with the object) even more attractive. So, mortality reminder draws people, especially men, to the esthetic of body and sexuality. The general outcome of the study is that it reveals the conditions that lead “objects to become her” (Morris & Goldenberg, 2014), especially conditions of mortality salience.
In their research named “Win–win: Female and male athletes from more gender equal nations perform better in international sports competitions”, Berdahl, Uhlmann and Bai (2014) address the topic of influence of gender equality on releasing the potential of both genders in sports and also on the general nations performance. This study is the first evidence of gender equality as a social process releasing the human potential of both women and men.
There were a lot of studies researching how and to what extent the increased gender opportunities for women helped to release their human potential, resulting in increasing economic gains, scientific outcomes, growing value of human capital. But this study promotes gender equality looking from the different point of view. The authors emphasize equal opportunities to both genders as a powerful social force helping not only women but also men to benefit from gender equality and to contribute to performance of their nation as a whole.
The researchers operated in the context setting of the Olympic Games and studied the teams from 121 different countries, varying in the terms of gender gap, from the point of view of performance of their men and women athletes. The gender gap was assessed basing on political, economic, educational and health opportunities available to both genders in a given country. Also, latitude, population and GDP data were taken as variables. The number of Olympic medals won by men and women was a measure of sports excellence.
The study derived several predictors of Olympic Games performance in terms of number of medals – GDP, population, income inequality. It means that larger countries with the population, wealthy in general but with unequal strata in terms of income, gain more medals. The other important outcome of the study was that gender equality, especially equal educational opportunities, also predicts more medals. So, the study provides evidence to the point of view that genders don’t compete in terms of equality and performance. Both genders benefit from equal opportunities – men and women, releasing their full potential in various aspects of social and economic life.
