Psychology Commons^™

Communalism Predicts Prenatal Affect, Stress, And Physiology Better Than Ethnicity And Socioeconomic Status, Cleopatra M. Abdou, Christine Dunkel Schetter, Belinda Campos, Clayton J. Hilmert, Tyan Parker Dominguez, Calvin J. Hobel, Laura M. Glynn, Curt A. Sandman

Psychology Faculty Articles and Research

The authors examined the relevance of communalism, operationalized as a cultural orientation emphasizing interdependence, to maternal prenatal emotional health and physiology and distinguished its effects from those of ethnicity and childhood and adult socioeconomic status (SES). African American and European American women (N = 297) were recruited early in pregnancy and followed through 32 weeks gestation using interviews and medical chart review. Overall, African American women and women of lower socioeconomic backgrounds had higher levels of negative affect, stress, and blood pressure, but these ethnic and socioeconomic disparities were not observed among women higher in communalism. Hierarchical multivariate regression analyses …

Lifting Without Seeing: The Role Of Vision In Perceiving And Acting Upon The Size Weight Illusion, Gavin Buckingham, Melvyn Goodale

Gavin Buckingham

BACKGROUND: Our expectations of an object's heaviness not only drive our fingertip forces, but also our perception of heaviness. This effect is highlighted by the classic size-weight illusion (SWI), where different-sized objects of identical mass feel different weights. Here, we examined whether these expectations are sufficient to induce the SWI in a single wooden cube when lifted without visual feedback, by varying the size of the object seen prior to the lift.

METHODOLOGY/PRINCIPAL FINDINGS: Participants, who believed that they were lifting the same object that they had just seen, reported that the weight of the single, standard-sized cube that they …