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Why is America a land of low-calorie food claims yet high-calorie food intake? Four studies show that people are more likely to underestimate the caloric content of main dishes and to choose higher-calorie side dishes, drinks, or desserts when fast-food restaurants claim to be healthy (e.g., Subway) compared to when they do not (e.g., McDonald's). We also find that the effect of these health halos can be eliminated by simply asking people to consider whether the opposite of such health claims may be true. These studies help explain why the success of fast-food restaurants serving lower-calorie foods has not led to the expected reduction in total calorie intake and in obesity rates. They also suggest innovative strategies for consumers, marketers, and policy makers searching for ways to fight obesity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research using symbolic racism has provided evidence that racial bias has widespread social and political impact in the United States, influencing phenomena such as opposition to policies designed to help blacks, disapproval of Barack Obama, and membership in the Tea Party. However, symbolic racism has a racial component and a conservative component, so many researchers have attempted to isolate the racial component of symbolic racism with statistical control; however, the literature lacks guidelines about the effectiveness of such statistical control. To address this shortcoming, I report results from two studies using the 2012 ANES Time Series Study. Study 1 provides guidelines for the effect size necessary to support an inference that variation in a dependent variable is influenced by the racial component of symbolic racism. The nature of this racial component has been inconsistently described in the literature, so Study 2 reports evidence that symbolic racism sometimes predicts black opposition to policies designed to help blacks, which suggests that the characterization of the residual effect of symbolic racism as racial animosity is stronger than warranted by the data. Together, these studies can help researchers better identify when racial bias is an influence and better understand what this influence represents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Turning to religion to seek its social benefits has been associated with poor psychological well-being. Researchers have concluded that endorsing this extrinsic and social orientation toward religion is inauthentic and unhealthy. However, few studies have focused on extrinsic-social religious orientation's negative relationship with well-being, leaving open the possibility that their relationship is spurious. The present study argues that people endorsing an extrinsic-social religious orientation also perceive lower levels of social support in their lives, thus their turning to religion to fill this social void. As social support is important for healthy psychological functioning, perceived social support may be the critical third variable explaining why extrinsic-social religious orientation appears to have psychological costs. This study supported our expectations among undergraduates in two countries: the United States ( N = 156) and the Republic of Ireland ( N = 255). There were negative bivariate associations between extrinsic-social religious orientation and both perceived social support and emotional well-being. Accounting for the effects of perceived social support, however, reduced the association between the extrinsic-social religious orientation and well-being to non-significance. Thus, people endorsing an extrinsic and social orientation toward religion tend to have poor well-being because they perceive less supportive relationships in their lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In emerging adulthood, when many young people are away from their families for the first time, mobile phones become an important conduit for maintaining relationships with parents. Yet, objective assessment of the content and frequency of text messaging between emerging adults and their parents is lacking in much of the research to date. We collected two weeks of text messages exchanged between U.S. college students (N = 238) and their parents, which yielded nearly 30,000 parent-emerging adult text messages. We coded these text message exchanges for traditional features of parent-emerging adult communication indexing positive connection, monitoring and disclosures. Emerging adults texted more with mothers than with fathers and many messages constitute parental check-ins and emerging adult sharing regarding youth behavior and well-being. Findings highlight that both the frequency and content of parent-emerging adult text messages can be linked with positive (perceived text message support) and negative (perceived digital pressure) aspects of the parent-emerging adult relationship. The content of parent-emerging adult text messages offers a valuable, objective window into the nature of the parent-emerging adult relationships in the digital age of the 21st century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Conventional wisdom holds that friends protect against depression through the social support they provide; however, depression likely has a role in structuring friendship networks. In particular, we investigate friend selection mechanisms responsible for similarity in depression among friends (i.e., homophily). Preference is one explanation, yet several correlates of depression make homophilous selection among depressed individuals unlikely. We propose two alternative mechanisms—avoidance and withdrawal—that can produce depression homophily in the absence of preference. These alternative mechanisms create homophily indirectly by limiting friendship partners available to depressed individuals. We test the preference, avoidance, and withdrawal mechanisms using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and a dynamic network model. Results provide support for the withdrawal mechanism. These findings help explain how depression affects friend selection and have broader implications for understanding selection mechanisms responsible for network patterns such as homophily. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

This research examines the applicability of cognitive dissonance theory to explain a judge’s decision to author or join a separate opinion. The author proposes that, when a judge casts a counterattitudinal vote, that judge will endeavor to reduce the aversive consequences of being viewed as an inconsistent decision maker by justifying his or her attitudinally incongruent vote choice to the public in a separate opinion. The author tests this possibility by examining U.S. Supreme Court justices’ decisions to author or join concurring and dissenting opinions during the 1946 to 2001 terms. The empirical results provide qualified support for the use of separate opinions as dissonance reduction mechanisms, suggesting that dissonance theory both is applicable to the actions of elite decision makers and enjoys validity outside of a laboratory setting. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

We suggest that moral panics exert spillover effects through stigma by mere association. Individuals are harmed even if their ties to stigmatized affiliates are heterophilous, and high-status individuals can also suffer. This creates a broadcast effect that increases the scale of the moral panic. Analyzing the U.S. film industry from 1945 to 1960, we examine how artists’ employment in feature films was influenced by their associations with co-workers who were blacklisted as communists after working with the focal artist. Mere association reduces an artist’s chances of working again, and one exposure is enough to impair work prospects. Furthermore, actors’ careers are impaired when writers with whom they worked are blacklisted. Moreover, the negative effects of stigma by mere association hold even when the focal artist has received public acclaim. These findings have broad implications. When a few individuals or organizations are engaged in wrongdoing and publicly targeted, stigma by association can lead to false positives and harm many innocents. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Electoral campaigns are the foundation of democratic governance; yet scholarship on the content of campaign communications remains underdeveloped. In this paper, we advance research on U.S. congressional campaigns by integrating and extending extant theories of campaign communication. We test the resulting predictions with a novel dataset based on candidate Web sites over three election cycles Unlike television advertisements or newspaper coverage, Web sites provide an unmediated, holistic, and representative portrait of campaigns We find that incumbents and challengers differ across a broad range of behavior that reflects varying attitudes toward risk, that incumbents' strategies depend on the competitiveness of the race, and that candidates link negative campaigning to other aspects of their rhetorical strategies Our efforts provide researchers with a basis for moving toward a more complete understanding of congressional campaigns [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective. Studies of attitudes and values can make important contributions to emerging multi-level, interdisciplinary approaches to environmental problems. We test a multi-level model using data from a 19-state study on public thoughts toward wildlife in the western United States. Methods. Data were collected via mail survey administered to residents in each state. Results. Data support (1) a micro model that proposes values are oriented by two contrasting ideologies--domination versus mutualism--and that these different value orientations lead to different attitudes and behaviors toward wildlife; and (2) a macro model that links forces of modernization (income, education, urbanization) to a population-level shift from domination to mutualism value orientations. Conclusions. Such a shift would stimulate behavioral, ecological, and institutional effects that are critical in shaping society-environment interactions. Findings suggest that examining human thought processes in relation to broader social and environmental factors holds great promise in extending the application of the social sciences. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although virtually every person in the United States will purchase or consume a funeral-related product or service, relatively little is understood about the processes a consumer undertakes in making these expensive decisions in stressful circumstances. Regulation of the industry has been contentious from the outset, and there have been numerous questions as to regulatory effectiveness. This article outlines and discusses issues related to the death care industry with particular attention to consumer interests. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A theoretical framework centering on four classes of self-referent constructs is offered as a device for integrating the diverse areas constituting medical sociology. Guidance by this framework sensitizes the researcher to the occurrence of parallel processes in adjacent disciplines, facilitates recognition of the etiological significance of findings from other disciplines for explaining medical sociological phenomena, and encourages transactions between sociology and medical sociology whereby each informs and is informed by the other. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perhaps paradoxically, events can have effects despite having been "forgotten." Events have, in Erving Goffman's (1981:46) phrase, a referential afterlife, the period in which events can be referred to with the expectation that audiences will understand their relevance and symbolic meaning. When an event has passed this period of shared recollection it still may leave traces, especially if responses to the event have been institutionalized. We examine the dynamics by which events serve as memory templates for subsequent events. We distinguish templates into two subtypes: interpretative templates and action templates, those that contribute to how the public recalls the past and those that provide strategies for action. To examine the power of templates, we analyze the forgetting of the brown scare of the early 1940s, and specifically the largest sedition case in American history, United States v. McWilliams. Attacks on the right contributed to the development of the national security state and courtroom tactics in political trials, but the public rarely remembers them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No government can announce a tax system and then rely on taxpayers' sense of duty to remit what is owed. Some dutiful people will undoubtedly pay what they owe, but many others will not. Over time the ranks of the dutiful will shrink, as they see how they are being taken advantage of by the others. Thus, paying taxes must be made a legal responsibility of citizens, with penalties attendant on noncompliance. But even in the face of those penalties, substantial tax evasion exists. Tax evasion is widespread, always has been, and probably always will be. This essay reviews what is known about the magnitude, nature, and determinants of tax evasion, with an emphasis on the U.S. income tax. It then places this information into a conceptual context, examining various models and theories, and considers policy implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Trends in reporting of same-gender sex are assessed using data from the 1998-2002 General Social Surveys (Ns = 9,487 males and 12,336 females). Analyses indicate that the reported prevalence of female-female sexual contact increased substantially and monotonically across twentieth-century birth cohorts, rising from 1.6 percent (Standard error [SE] = 0.60) for the cohort of U.S. women born prior to 1920 to 6.9 percent (SE = 0.81) for women born in 1970 and afterward. Increases in the reported prevalence of female-female contacts also occurred within the 1990s. These trends persist when statistical controls are introduced for changes in attitudes toward same-gender sexual behavior. No parallel trend is observed in the reporting of male-male sexual contacts during adulthood, although the proportion of U.S. men reporting such contacts in the past year and in the past five years increased during the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a cross-cultural examination of social identity theory for intergroup comparison versus intragroup relationships in North American and East Asian cultural contexts. The article states that social identity theory does not account well for collectivistic behaviors among East Asians. It is hypothesize that the central theme of East Asian group behavior is cooperation within a group. This is represented cognitively as an interpersonal network among the members, with the emphasis on the relational self Results of a survey of 122 Japanese and 126 American respondents largely supported this hypothesis. For the people of the United States, in-group loyalty and identity with their small and large in-groups were correlated positively with perceived in-group homogeneity and in-group status. No such correlation was found for Japanese respondents, however Instead, Japanese in-group loyalty and identity were predicted by respondents' knowledge of the relational structure within the group and knowledge of the individual differences between members of the group.

Expresses the ambivalence about the use of the term evil in analyses of terrors in light of the association of the two in speeches intended to justify the United States' war on terrorism. Manner of regarding terrorism as evil; Multiplicity of evils comparable to terrorism; Efforts of the U.S. to secure a position of leadership in what it portrays by implication as a just war.

The article reviews the journal of economic literature related to time discounting and time preference in the U.S. It defines intertemporal choices as decisions involving tradeoffs among costs and benefits occurring at different times. In this article, the authors review empirical research on intertemporal choice, and present an overview of recent theoretical formulations. In section 2, the authors review the perspectives on intertemporal choice of John Rae and nineteenth- and early twentieth-century economists, and describe how these early perspectives interpreted intertemporal choice as the joint product of many conflicting psychological motives. In section 3, they examine the various assumptions underlying the discounted-utility (DU) model. The remaining sections reviews DU anomalies, the numerous alternative theoretical models and reviews attempts to estimate discount rates.

In this study we explore individual's experiences of identity integration between their sexual orientation and religious beliefs. Using both qualitative and quantitative research methods, we examined identity integration in forty members and participants of the Metropolitan community church of New York (MCC/NY), a gay-positive church located in Mid-town Manhattan. The survey and interview data collected showed that: (1) a majority of the research participants reported that they had successfully integrated their homosexual and religious identities, (2) being integrated was related to higher role involvement at MCC/NY, being a member of the church, attending more MCC/NY worship services and activities/ministries, and attending MCC/NY for more years, (3) lesbians were less likely than gay men to report past conflict between their identities, and more likely to report being fully integrated, and (4) MCC/NY played an important role in helping these participants achieve integration between their homosexual and religious identities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

American presidential candidates and presidents have enjoyed increasing status and increasing intimacy with the public-both "within presidents" front nomination to inauguration and "across presidents" during this century, according to commentators. Impression management theory suggests that this changing president-public relationship should be marked by increases in the Familiarity of presidents' public statements-the degree to which they are presumptuous, directive and informative, as opposed to unassuming. acquiescent and attentive. An index of Familiarity, based on an utterance-by-utterance coding according to a taxonomy of verbal response modes was computed for thirty-two nomination acceptance speeches (1920-1 980) and sixteen inaugural addresses (1921-1981). As hypothesized, Familiarity increased from nomination acceptance to inauguration and was positively correlated with the year of delivery in each set of speeches. Candidates and presidents may regulate their verbal behavior to accord with a shared sense of their relative status and degree of intimacy with the public, as these vary across historical periods. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]