Reflecting emotions: The movement-mirroring test

This study tests the ability to mirror emotions by having second-year social work students and first-and second-year dance therapy students duplicate a videotape of a person expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. The ability to mirror is then compared to imaginative, expressive, and observational skills. Movement mirroring was found to correlate positively with, and was predictive of, observational skills. Mirroring was found not to be related to expressivity and the relationship between mirroring and imagination was unclear. Dance therapy students performed significantly better than social work students on the Movement-Mirroring Test, however, training did not improve their scores.     

Autopoiesis and socialization: on Luhmann's reconceptualization of communication and socialization

In 1984, Niklas Luhmann published Soziale Systeme in which he applies the idea of autopoiesis (= self-production) to social systems. Abstracted from its biological connotations, the concept of autopoiesis leads to a sharp distinction between different kinds of autopoietic organization, i.e. between life, consciousness and communication. According to Luhmann, the relationship between social systems and human beings cannot be adequately analysed except by taking into account that they are environments for one another. If this theoretical background is accepted, the concepts and theory of socialization need to be revised. Luhmann takes issues with classical notions such as internalization, inculcation, or 'socialization to the grounds of consensus' (Talcott Parsons). After a historical overview of social systems research and general systems theory, it is indicated how communications trigger further communications and realize the autopoiesis of social systems. In the second part of the article, the distinction between social systems and psychic systems is used to discuss issues crucial to socialization theory. Both a revision of the concept of socialization, and lines for an empirical research programme are proposed in accordance with Luhmann's theory of social systems.     

The identification of emotions from gait information

The present study examined the potential for information provided in a person's style of walking to reveal certain emotions. Ten subjects observed five walkers expressing four different emotions and made emotion identifications as well as judgments about specific gait characteristics. Results revealed that subjects were able to identify sadness, anger, happiness, and pride from gait information at better than chance levels; however, identifications of pride were significantly less accurate than were identifications of sadness and anger. In addition, subjects' acuracy varied across the five walkers. Results also revealed that gait characteristics such as the amount of arm swing, stride length, heavyfootedness, and walking speed differentiated the emotions expressed by walkers.Portions of this paper were presented at the 26th meeting of the New England Psychological Association, Boston, MA, November, 1986.Joann M. Montepare received a Ph.D. in Social-Developmental Psychology from Brandeis University. She is presently a postdoctoral research fellow at the Center for Research On Women, Wellesley College, Wellesley MA, 02181. Her research interests include the development of subjective perceptions of age and the impact of nonverbal information on social stereotypes of age. Sabra Goldstein and Annmarie Clausen hold B.A. degrees in Psychology from Wellesley College. Please address reprint requests to the first author.     

Historical and cultural perspectives on socialization

The article examines how infants are first permeated by culture. Building on Thibault (2000), semiogenesis is traced to the joint activity of primary intersubjectivity. Using an African example, analysis shows how--at 14 weeks--an infant already uses culturally specific indicators of "what a caregiver wants." Human predispositions and the mother's enactment of cultural processes enable the child to give joint activity a specific "sense." Developmentally, the child prods the caregiver to shaping his or her actions around social norms that transform the infant's world. This nascent lopsided relation is probably necessary for learning to talk. Acting with its mother, the baby's full-bodied activity uses adult "understanding" in ways that are cultural, contingent, and indexical. Infant activity is already semiotic.     

The graduate student's double bind: A professional socialization problem in sociology

The problem some graduate students have developing a confident professional self is argued to be at least partially a result of a double bind structured into the graduate sociology program. The double bind consists of two contradictory communications: the communication of shapeless complexity and the communication of closure, the first pointing to an infinitely complex and shapeless knowledge pool and the second to finality and comprehensiveness. After elucidating the double bind and its communicators, its variability is examined in terms of 13 working hypotheses. Finally, some solutions to the double bind are suggested. The paper's goals are twofold: to provoke thought on this particular professional socialization problem and to expose and alleviate one harmful dimension of our professional socialization process.     

The identity career of the graduate student: Professional socialization to academic sociology

The pathway through graduate school is challenging and difficult. Nearly everyone, at one point or another, confronts the existential question of whether they want to drop out or to continue. Several challenges emerge as key to graduate students’ success in progressing through their programs. p]The first is moving from the secure but sometimes suffocating structure of a core graduate cohort into the role of independent student. This requires navigating an individual pathway into areas of specialization and a mentor. Programs can do no more than make faculty and courses available; from there, students must make connections and decisions on their own. The second critical transition involves moving from absorbing to creating knowledge. Accomplishing this requires that students grasp the conceptual foundation of the perspective (the “sociological eye”), learn how to gather data, to master the challenge of moving from immersion in the specificity of their research to contribute to more abstract theory, and to understand the conventions through which they must present their scholarly work. Along the way there are myriad interpersonal challenges for them to negotiate. Allegiances that they forge are then relinquished to make way for new, more stage-relevant ones. Students often undergo radical changes in their values and consciousness as they progress through their programs. They are bonded into an equalitarian model of evaluation and support in their cohesive, early years in the cohort. But as they forge scholarly accomplishments and turn their eyes increasingly toward the discipline, they recognize that their democratic ideals must yield to the meritocratic reality of the profession.     

Essential emotions: The place of passion in a feminist network

Using a case study, the authors argue that emotions play a highly significant part in voluntary organizations, and that present significant part in voluntary organizations, and that present academic approaches to emotions are unhelpful, both theoretically and practically. The distinction between emotional work and emotional labor is unclear in nonprofit organizations using volunteers. More research is needed in this area.     

Adolescent emotion regulation trajectories: The influence of parent and friend emotion socialization

With mounting evidence demonstrating the link between child emotion regulation (ER) and emotion socialization, we conducted a longitudinal study to understand (a) emotion-specific trajectories of adolescent ER and (b) how specific parent and friend emotion socialization strategies impact ER over 4 years. Participants were 209 adolescents (52.5% girls; M_age = 12.66 years; 75.7% White) and their parents. Latent growth curve models identified unique trajectories for anger and sadness/worry regulation. Anger regulation increased across time, whereas sadness/worry regulation remained highly stable longitudinally, lacking variance for growth modeling. Friend emotion socialization emerged as a more salient predictor of anger regulation than parent emotion socialization. Friend reward, override, and punish responses predicted initial levels. Friend punish and parent magnify responses predicted the slope.     

Dealing with the transsituational demands of professional socialization

Insofar as studies of professional socialization have been concerned with the subjective experience of students they have concentrated on students’experience within the confines of their training course. The present paper examines that parallel but often neglected strand in professional socialization: what becoming a professional entails for students within the context of their private lives. An in-depth participant observation study of one cohort of social work students revealed that assuming a professional identity had important consequences for both the self-concept and social lives of students. They were faced with‘transsituational demands’- i.e. expectations that they would behave m situations where they were not functioning as social workers in a manner which was nevertheless congruent with their claims to this title. Such reorganization of students’personal hierarchies was both evidenced and accomplished by the‘frame work’in which students engaged. Goffman's frame analysis is expanded to include the concept of‘cross-framing’in order to explain students’responses to the encroachment of the social-work frame on their everyday world. Although social work as a profession does make extensive demands on the private space of the recruit, it is argued that the analysis developed here can be used to study empirically the internalization of the beliefs associated with any occupational role.     

The impact of emotions and predominant emotion regulation technique on driving performance

Emotion-provoking stimuli abound on modern roadways. Driving measures, of both longitudinal and lateral control of the vehicle, have been shown to vary based on affective influences. Research, however, has yet to address how drivers' individual techniques to mitigate emotional reactions influence driving performance. To address this issue, the present study featured a dual-task protocol involving simulated driving together with processing of emotionally-valenced images with a focus on different Predominant Emotion Regulation Techniques (PERT): one adaptive strategy (task-focused coping) and one maladaptive style (emotion-focused coping). Dependent measures included mean driving speed and number of lane excursions. Results indicated that pleasant images degraded longitudinal control to the greatest extent, while unpleasant images produced the greatest detriment in lateral control. Additionally, individuals' PERT played a major interactive role in drivers' longitudinal control leading task-focused females and emotion-focused males to adhere more closely to the speed limit; yet, it did not affect their lateral control. Results hold important potential implications for the amount or variety of training necessary for driver licensure to promote and sustain safe vehicle control.     

Political socialization and policy evaluation: The case of youth employment and training program

The detection and assessment of side effects or unintended consequences in policy evaluation are seldom conducted in other than a casual manner. This paper investigates the unintended impact of an employment and training program on the political orientations of participants. Applying a political socialization framework, this study compared the postprogram attitudes toward citizenship of 286 CETA-eligible youth with a randomly assigned control group of 161 youth. Entering minority status and gender as factors and preprogram attitudes toward citizenship as the covariate, the ANCOVA results indicate that political orientations of experimentais, especially program completers, are significantly higher compared with control group members.