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Digital technology has long provided new ways of initiating romantic relationships as people communicate through text messages, social media, and dating applications. Emojis have been widely adopted as a means of conveying nonverbal cues in digital communication. However, what role do platform‐provided social cues, such as emojis, play in fostering or impeding clear communication and shared romantic expectations from a flirtatious text message conversation? In this study, 713 college students were randomly assigned to read a Snapchat conversation with or without emojis and, they were subsequently asked to infer the characters' thoughts and feelings, clarity of the characters' intentions, and indicate their own discomfort with receiving a similar Snapchat message. The results showed that emojis increase the clarity of the main character's intentions. Moreover, the participants' cognitive efforts, the extent to which they were emotionally affected by the conversation, and the presence of emojis reduced comfort level with receiving a similar Snapchat message. These findings suggest that emojis provide clarity to romantic conversations, which can amplify the interpersonal discomfort of receiving text‐based sexual overtures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social movements pushed to reconceptualize intimate partner violence (IPV) as a social problem deserving of intervention rather than a private family matter. However, little work has examined which interventions the public is likely to support. How and where do personal politics affect perceptions of and responses to a social problem? To address these questions, 739 participants read a victim's narrative from a court case and indicated their concern for the victim and support for issuing a protection order, prohibiting the abuser from owning a gun, or the victim owning a gun to protect herself. Concern for the victim and support for issuing a protection order was widespread, regardless of political leaning, with minor variations driven by role-taking and attitudes towards IPV. Similarly, support for the victim receiving a protection order was high, with political ideology and political affiliation having no direct effects. While concern increased support for each intervention, it held less explanatory power for gun-related interventions. Instead, political ideology and affiliation shaped support for disarming the abuser or arming the victim. Support for these interventions seemed to filter through a political lens. Thus, one's personal politics drive divergent intervention attitudes, even when concern for a social problem is shared. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The emotional and psychological consequences associated with providing services to traumatized others have been well established with extant scholarship highlighting these workers' susceptibility to vicarious trauma and secondary traumatic stress. But less is known about the underlying interactional processes by which symptoms of secondary trauma emerge. This research investigates the consequences of taking the role of a person who is victimized and experiencing emotional turmoil by analyzing interviews with workers who serve victims seeking legal services. Role-taking is the process of mentally and affectively placing the self in the position of another, understanding another's perspective. Workers described listening to victims' experiences or coworkers' accounts of difficult cases as being "slimed." Those engaging in both cognitive and empathic role-taking often struggled to "shake" this content and became susceptible to mirroring the distress of the traumatized clients and coworkers. In response to this exposure, workers often shared troubling intakes or cases with coworkers as a type of interpersonal emotion management. Workers who provided emotional support to colleagues often experienced indirect exposure to trauma on two fronts: in the service of clients who had experienced intimate partner violence and from coworkers. Thus, those best able to role-take with victims or coworkers are most likely to experience greater secondary trauma exposure and its potential toll. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experience of "burnout" is characterized by emotional fatigue and detachment associated with intensive stress. Burnout is prevalent across personal and professional spheres, with increasing cultural salience. Multiple factors can contribute to burnout. Here, we focus on one: exposure to others' trauma. This circumstance spans domains from social service professions to social media newsfeeds, with potentially deleterious effects on the self. To understand the conditions under which trauma exposure results in burnout, we propose and test a role–taking model. We do so by presenting study participants (N = 723) with a first–person account of intimate partner violence, stimulating an acute instance of trauma exposure. Findings show that higher levels of role–taking increase burnout, with antecedents and outcomes tied to role-taking's cognitive and affective components. This study clarifies how burnout occurs within the scope of trauma exposure while expanding role–taking research beyond the interpersonal benefits that have monopolized scholarly attention to date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Domestic violence protective orders are the most widely used intimate partner violence-related legal intervention in the United States, yet many victims later ask to have these orders dismissed. This article uses a mixed-methods approach to examine the conditions that help explain why victims of intimate partner violence dismiss their protection orders. Quantitative findings from 841 civil protection order cases show that victims who need protection the most are the most likely to seek dismissals. Victims who experienced recent or physical abuse were significantly more likely to dismiss their protection orders. Qualitative findings from 200 dismissal requests reveal that victims reference common themes of loving the abuser, that the abuser is a good parent, that the abuser is seeking treatment, or that they desire to save the relationship. Victims draw from broad romantic rationalizations when describing their decision to drop a protection order from the court. Building upon insights from constructs of romantic love, this study highlights how the rationalizations victims invoke in their dismissal requests are also associated with their experiences of abuse. A mixed methodological approach reveals a significant contrast between the language in victims' petitions and their dismissal requests. Victims voiced fear and violence in their petitions for protection orders, then employed meanings of romantic love, reconciliation, and change when requesting that these temporary protection orders be dropped. This contrast reflects the cyclical nature of abuse and suggests that greater attention must be paid to ensuring court officials have a strong understanding of the complexities of victim attrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The #MeToo movement has brought greater visibility to the topic of sexual assault in public discourse. We analyzed a dataset of 1,070 Twitter #MeToo self-disclosures to examine the relationship between online visibility (retweets and favorites) and the content of victim-survivors’ self-disclosures such as victim's gender, relationship to the perpetrator, and the emotions expressed in the tweet. The visibility of sexual assault self-disclosures was shaped by the extent to which they align with stereotypical misconceptions of victimization. These findings carry significant implications for understanding patterns of victimization, and for identifying whose voices are being amplified or not on Twitter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At a moment when college sexual assault is described as an epidemic, it is important to understand college students' implicit meanings of consent. Through 83 interviews, we examine students' interpretations of a vignette in which neither character asked nor gave consent to sex. Gendered expectations significantly shaped whether students interpreted the male or female character as giving consent. When considering how students indicate interest in kissing or having sex, students interpreted acts such as leaving a party as indications of a man's sexual interest and a woman's willingness. That is, college students "expected" and employed implicit, gendered readings of actions that inform their understandings of implicit consent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Civil protection orders are one of the most widely used legal interventions for intimate partner violence. Every American state has legislation that allows victims to seek legal remedies through protection orders such as preventing abusers from contacting them, requiring perpetrators to stay away from specific locations, and ordering removal of firearms. However, judges do not grant every petition for a protection order. This study analyzed over 1000 civil protection order cases from Nebraska to identify how factors not prescribed in the legal statute contribute to a determination of whether victims receive protection. The results suggest that victims' gender and the counties in which they file influence victims' chances of obtaining a protection order. Male victims, victims with children with their abuser, and married victims are significantly less likely to receive protection orders, even after controlling for the severity, recency, and type of abuse. Both male and female victims who file their cases in metropolitan counties are more likely to receive protection orders than their nonmetropolitan counterparts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Race, gender, and physical attractiveness strongly affect perceptions of trustworthiness and subsequent face-to-face interactions. This study examines how social media users' perceived gender, race, and physical attractiveness can impact their standing online. We test these broad hypotheses by having Amazon Mechanical Turk (MTurk) workers evaluate a sample of 816 Twitter accounts. Our results show a 'beauty premium,' where MTurk workers say they are more likely to follow Twitter accounts with attractive profile photos, and attractive photos are positively associated with evaluations of trust. However, very attractive Black male and female Twitter accounts are associated with lower evaluations of trust compared to their White counterparts. These findings suggest that social media users' social characteristics, perceived from their username or profile image, can replicate offline inequality online. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

• Participants ascribe role-taking capacities to both humans and robots. • Perceptions of role-taking accuracy vary between humanoid vs non-humanoid robots. • Interpersonal factors, rather than robotic form, affect social bonding and relationship endurance. • Findings seed future research about the pathways from robotic form, through role-taking, towards socio-emotional outcomes. Human-robot interaction (HRI) spans many and diverse contexts, each varying in the preferred degree of social connection fostered therein. The design of robotic systems and selection of which robotic forms to use will thus benefit from an understanding of the factors by which social connection is enhanced or diminished. We address this fundamental problem through an exploratory study of role-taking , a core construct from structural social psychology. Through a laboratory experiment (N = 86) in which participants interact with either human, humanoid robot, or non-humanoid robot partners, we examine variation in perceived role-taking accuracy, affection for the partner, and desire for continued interaction. Findings show that participants evaluate human interaction partners as more accurate role-takers than robots, but with variation between robotic types (humanoid vs non-humanoid) in relation to personality versus emotion. Sense of affection and desire for continued interaction are predicted by interpersonal factors rather than partner type or robotic form. We discuss possible reasons behind these preliminary findings and draw on them to formulate subsequent research questions. More broadly, we call for continued study at the intersection of HRI and structural social psychology, advancing both fields through the pairing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]