Illusory Control, Gambling, and Video Gaming: An Investigation of Regular Gamblers and Video Game Players

There is a paucity of empirical research examining the possible association between gambling and video game play. In two studies, we examined the association between video game playing, erroneous gambling cognitions, and risky gambling behaviour. One hundred and fifteen participants, including 65 electronic gambling machine (EGM) players and 50 regular video game players, were administered a questionnaire that examined video game play, gambling involvement, problem gambling, and beliefs about gambling. We then assessed each groups' performance on a computerised gambling task that involved real money. A post-game survey examined perceptions of the skill and chance involved in the gambling task. The results showed that video game playing itself was not significantly associated with gambling involvement or problem gambling status. However, among those persons who both gambled and played video games, video game playing was uniquely and significantly positively associated with the perception of direct control over chance-based gambling events. Further research is needed to better understand the nature of this association, as it may assist in understanding the impact of emerging digital gambling technologies.     

The Presentation of Avatars in Second Life: Self and Interaction in Social Virtual Spaces

What do interactions in virtual spaces suggest about everyday life in the digital age? How do interactions in virtual spaces shape everyday life in the digital age? Guided by hypermodern theory, I conduct participant observation in the social virtual world Second Life to provide tentative answers to those questions. I suggest that Second Life is both a social psychological playground where participants enjoy individualistic fantasies and a virtual community where they collaborate on collective projects. When people define the virtual as real, it is real in its consequences. Accordingly, social virtual spaces such as Second Life offer sociologists unique opportunities for research, education, intervention, and hence the development of a virtual imagination.     

The Globality of Whiteness in Post-Racial Visual Culture

This essay examines the spatial contours of post-racial visual culture. It argues that the ‘post-racial’ names the conditions under which racism operates flexibly within and beyond the logics of the colour line, while routinely disavowing its properly racial character through the symbolic deployment of multicultural humanitarianism. Even as it works through the figure of the ‘post-racial’ to bracket an engagement with the racialized rationale for the ‘nongeneralizability of human value’, the current US racial order has renovated the social structures that shore up whiteness as the privileged form humanity takes. The essay's point of departure is the iconic HOPE poster, produced by Shepard Fairey in 2008. It locates the poster's public display within a visual field subjected to neoliberal processes central to the constitution of a post-racial whiteness. It identifies two key moments in these processes. The first moment abstracts historical practices of materialist antiracism, such that racism becomes visualized as a manifestly individual subjective affair. In the second moment, post-racial visual culture repackages the visual logic of racial reference by displacing anti-black racism into morally benevolent categories suitable for humanitarian intervention, whose additional dematerialization is propped up by its migration to a digital terrain. To make this argument, the essay first offers a genealogy of the HOPE poster as it emerges from street art practices of commodity activism that obscure the structures of racial capitalism. It then treats the poster's central role in the ‘KONY 2012’ campaign, which redeployed this abstraction to recode the power of sight as a privileged form of US humanitarian violence. It concludes by considering the refusals by activists in the Occupy Wall Street movement to countenance a revised HOPE poster, even as the post-racial figure of ‘the protestor’ was lauded in corporate media.     

Confronting Young People's Perceptions of Whiteness: Privilege or Liability?

Using the autobiographies of 193 young whites, I show how contemporary whiteness is characterized by a tension between perceptions of whiteness as a liability versus a privilege. I discuss how many young whites believe whiteness to be both a cultural and economic disadvantage and suggest how these perceptions can interfere with antiracism. Finally, I suggest some pedagogical strategies for educators to use in teaching students about race and ethnicity that might help to dislodge some of these fictions of whiteness.     

The Gambling Preferences and Behaviors of a Community Sample of Australian Regular Video Game Players

Research has noted many similarities between video gaming and gambling activities. It has been suggested that video game players may also be attracted to gambling, although there is limited research on this possibility. The present study examined concurrent video gaming and gambling habits in a sample of regular video game players in Australia (N = 485, 84 % male, M _age = 25.8). Gambling involvement was found to be a generally unpopular activity among regular video game players. No significant association between frequency of video game play and frequency of gambling was found. Although significant correlations between gaming ‘addiction’ scores and gambling frequency were identified, age was the only significant predictor of gambling when controlling for all remaining variables. These findings are critically discussed in the context of past research, and future research directions concerning the link between video gaming and gambling are proposed.     

Energy Expenditure During Physically Interactive Video Game Playing in Male College Students With Different Playing Experience

Objective: Researchers have yet to explore the effect of physically interactive video game playing on energy expenditure, despite its potential for meeting current minimal daily activity and energy expenditure recommendations. Participants and Methods: Nineteen male college students-12 experienced Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) players and 7 inexperienced players- completed maximal oxygen uptake assessments and a 30-minute DDR gaming session. The authors recorded heart rate (HR), rating of perceived exertion (RPE), respiratory exchange rate (RER), oxygen consumption (VO₂), and total steps (TS₃₀). Results: Experienced participants showed higher exercise HR, RPE, RER, VO₂, total and relative energy expenditure, exercise intensity, TS₃₀, and average steps per minute, and less time and steps to expend 150 kilocalories (p < .05). Conclusions: Participants with greater playing experience can work at higher intensities, promoting greater energy expenditure.     

Black Movements Need Black Theorizing: Exposing Implicit Whiteness in Political Process Theory

The history of racism in the United States has produced a paradox in social movement literature: blackness shaped the character and substance of black antiracist mobilization, but whiteness shapes most analysis of their efforts. Despite frequently using the black Civil Rights Movement for theory development and testing, leading theorists have yet to identify a specific theory of race undergirding their analysis or explaining how racism impacts the trajectory of antiracist social movements. Instead, theorists rely on common white-privileging notions of race that hinder analyses of black movements. I critically analyze political process theory (PPT) from a racial perspective, showing that the dominant critiques of PPT stem from PPT creators’ failure to critically theorize race while analyzing the Civil Rights Movement. Theorists implicitly adopted white-centered perspectives that ultimately undermined PPT’s development. I conclude with a call to simultaneously theorize collective action and the system of inequality with which a movement is engaged.     

Perceived Racial Discrimination and Self-Esteem in African American Youth: Racial Socialization as a Protective Factor

Racial socialization was examined as a protective factor that might buffer African American youth from the negative effects of perceived racial discrimination. Two types of racial socialization were examined: messages about race pride and preparation for bias. One hundred twenty-eight eighth-grade African American students participated in the study. As anticipated, both types of socialization moderated the relationship between discrimination and self-esteem. The negative relationship between perceived discrimination and self-esteem was mitigated for youth who reported more messages about race pride and a moderate amount of preparation for bias from their parents. In contrast, low race pride socialization and both high and low preparation for bias were associated with a negative relationship between perceived discrimination and self-esteem.     

Adolescent mothers: Racial differences in childrearing support

This article presents a study of racial differences in the types of support that families and babies' fathers give to teenage mothers. The sample is 203 inner city adolescent mothers were using public health clinics in three midwest cities. Black mothers were younger than white mothers and were less likely to live with a male partner. Although only one black father lived with his baby, while 2/3 of the white fathers lived with their babies, similar percentages of both black and white fathers provided support in a variety of different areas of childcare and financial aid. Thus, there was substantial childcare involvement from absent black fathers. The families of black mothers provided a wider variety of child care and financial support. Multivariate analyses demonstrate that the greater number of different types of support for black mothers from family of origin persisted despite differences in the teen mother's age, the age of the baby, and the family's socio-economic status. Implications for social work interventions are discussed.Preparation of this document was aided by Office of Adolescent Pregnancy Programs, Grant #APR 00930-01-0. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the Third Biennial Conference of the Society for Research on Adolescence, Atlanta, GA, March, 1990.     

Appalachia and the Construction of Whiteness in the United States

The field of critical whiteness studies has made significant progress in the deconstruction of ideologies of white supremacy. In part, this has been accomplished by analyzing whiteness as a racial identity. Another step in this deconstruction has been a focus on groups of marginalized whites, 'white trash' or 'hillbillies'. Since the mid-19th Century, Appalachia has been considered the paradigmatic place for these marginalized whites in the United States. Hillbillies are simultaneously stigmatized and idealized in the national culture. Accounting for both the negative and positive representations makes visible how marginalized white identity is a space where white hegemony is both challenged and reaffirmed.     

Racial Identity Matters: The Relationship between Racial Discrimination and Psychological Functioning in African American Adolescents

This study examines the interrelationships among racial discrimination, racial identity, and psychological functioning in a sample of 314 African American adolescents. Racial discrimination was associated with lower levels of psychological functioning as measured by perceived stress, depressive symptomatology, and psychological well‐being. Although individuals who believe that other groups hold more negative attitudes toward African Americans (low public regard) were at greater risk for experiencing racial discrimination, low public regard beliefs also buffered the impact of racial discrimination on psychological functioning. More positive attitudes about African Americans were also associated with more positive psychological functioning. The results further illustrate the utility of a multidimensional framework for understanding the role of racial identity in the relationship between racial discrimination and psychological outcomes among African American adolescents.     

The Importance of Racial Socialization: School‐Based Racial Discrimination and Racial Identity Among African American Adolescent Boys and Girls

This study examined various parental racial socialization messages as mediators between school‐based racial discrimination and racial identity formation over 4 years for African American boys (N = 639) and African American girls (N = 711). Findings indicated that school‐based racial discrimination was associated with racial identity beliefs. For African American boys, behavioral racial socialization messages mediated the relation between school‐based racial discrimination and racial centrality over time. Mediation also resulted for African American girls, but for a different set of race‐related messages (negative messages and racial barriers) and racial identity beliefs. The developmental significance of the findings and implications for future research are discussed.     

Democracy's Dilemma: Explaining Racial Inequality in Egalitarian Societies

While contemporary criticisms of Gunnar Myrdal's liberal reformism provide an important perspective on racial ideology (G. Myrdal (1944) An American Dilemma: The Negro Problem and Democracy. New York: Harper & Row), most people miss Myrdal's most provocative point. Rather than assuming that egalitarianism could only oppose racial inequality, Myrdal argued that commitment to egalitarianism led Euro-Americans to avoid the dilemma presented by racial inequality in an egalitarian society. Rather than predicting the disappearance of racism, this analysis can be used to predict an increasing demand for racism in the wake of de jure attempts to eliminate racial inequality.     

Racial classification in criminology: The reproduction of racialized crime

The (re)production of knowledge about crime is cultural in terms of the questions asked, the comparisons made, and the hypotheses selected to explain crime causation. Since criminologists do not operate in a vacuum, any prejudgments, biases, and beliefs acquired before their professional socialization may well persist and affect their approach to research over the course of their academic careers. Because American criminologists live in a society that racializes a number of problem behaviors, including crime, it is conceivable that widely held beliefs about race that predate graduate training will find their way into assumptions about the relationship between race and crime. Such preprofessional beliefs are transformed into facts when they meet with widespread agreement from other criminologists and thus come to be taken for granted in the objective pursuit of knowledge. Crime is racialized, for example, when the criminal behaviors of individual black offenders are understood in terms of racial traits, racial motives, or racial experiences. When traits, motives, or experiences are classified as the property of whole races or racial communities, these conceptions of race assume causal significance in explaining criminal behavior. Because these traits, motives, and experiences are supposedly shared by entire races or race-class categories, the predisposition to criminality becomes generalized beyond individual Black criminals to whole races or racial communities of noncriminal Blacks. When crime is thus racialized, whole communities or whole categories of phenotypically similar individuals are rendered precriminal and morally suspect. In addition, such racializations in academic criminology can be used to justify increased control of individual black criminals in the larger society; these controls can also legitimately be extended to encompass whole communities and whole categories of phenotypically similar persons who are not involved in crime. This paper will address the role that racializing assumptions play in traditional criminological theories.     

Brief Report: Thin Slices of Racial Bias

The present work examined the detection of racial bias through thin slices of nonverbal behavior. Thirty Black and 30 White American judges rated the nonverbal behavior displayed by White individuals from 20-seconds of silent videotape of an interaction with either a Black or a White confederate. Correlations between judges nonverbal ratings and targets scores on a response latency measure of racial bias (i.e., Implicit Association Test, IAT) as well as on a self-report racial bias measure (i.e., Affective Prejudice Scale) were obtained. Results revealed that relative to White judges, Black judges nonverbal behavioral ratings were better predictors of both White individuals IAT and explicit racial bias scores, but only if those targets were engaged in an interracial dyad. The results are consistent with recent research finding that subtle forms of racial bias leak through nonverbal behavior, as well as with work noting the predictive accuracy of judgments made from thin-slices of nonverbal behavior.Jennifer A. Richeson and J. Nicole Shelton. Jennifer A. Richeson, Dartmouth College; J. Nicole Shelton, Princeton University. This research was supported by a Rockefeller Center Faculty Fellowship from Dartmouth College awarded to JR, as well as a research grant from Princeton University awarded to JNS. We thank Sue Paik, Lisa Pugh, Kurt Peters, and Leigh Poretzky for help with data collection and stimulus preparation.     

Video Game Use as a Tool for Assessing and Intervening with Identity Formation and Social Development in Family Therapy

Because video games are becoming such an integral part of our culture, modern family therapists are more likely than ever to encounter families with members who play them. It is easy to overlook video game use in terms of its potential as a therapeutic tool, particularly if a therapist possesses only limited knowledge of the medium. Using existing literature and my experience as a lifelong gamer, I provide family therapists with a background of the major video game genres and explain how video games can aid in the assessment of factors such as identity formation and social development. I also provide a systemic case example, recommendations for practice, and a table for quick reference to highlight potential videogame‐based family therapy interventions.     

Racial Differences in Perceptions of Affluence

Abstract

This study examines perceptions held by inner-city blacks and whites of the extent of affluence in America. Blacks generally tend to believe that affluence is more widespread than do whites, although substantial variation in racial differences occurs across sex and age categories. Controls for socio-economic characteristics have little effect on racial differences in perceptions of affluence. The analysis suggests that race has an effect on perceptions of affluence that is independent of the effects of social class.