Eskine, K. et al., “Stirring Images: Fear, Not Happiness or Arousal, Makes Art More Sublime,” Emotion (forthcoming).
Race in the ‘veil of darkness’
Given this country’s racial history, many people still assume — understandably — that racial profiling is the norm in law enforcement. In the case of a traffic stop, profiling based on a driver’s skin color requires that the officer see the driver’s skin color, so one way to test for profiling is to compare situations with different levels of driver visibility: daylight versus darkness. That’s exactly what one study did using data on traffic stops between 2006 and 2009 in Syracuse, N.Y. The analysis found that for that region and period, at least, there were no consistent differences between daylight and darkness in the likelihood of a black person being stopped.
Worden, R. et al., “Testing for Racial Profiling with the Veil-of-Darkness Method,” Police Quarterly (March 2012).
Be a man: double down
Casinos are constantly looking for new ways to encourage patrons to gamble. Based on new research from psychologists at the University of South Florida, one approach, in the case of men, might be to threaten their masculinity in public. When their manhood was threatened — by having to evaluate a scented hand lotion or by having to come up with a long list of their own manly behaviors — men reacted by placing higher bets and by being more impatient with money. However, their behavior changed only if they were being watched.
Weaver, J. et al., “Intrepid, Imprudent, or Impetuous?: The Effects of Gender Threats on Men’s Financial Decisions,” Psychology of Men & Masculinity (forthcoming).
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