Nonverbal Behavior in the Digital Age: Explorations in Internet Social Communication

This Special Issue of the Journal of Nonverbal Behavior explores nonverbal issues in the digital age, with an emphasis on how information is communicated and received on social networking sites such as Facebook. In addition to showing that a variety of user characteristics play an important role in the exchange of information, the featured articles also reveal the impact of different types of nonverbal cues individuals use to create and manage impressions.     

THE TAXPAYER RELIEF ACT OF 1997 AND HOMEOWNERSHIP: IS SMALLER NOW BETTER?

Prior to the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997 (TRA97), the capital gain from the sale of a home was taxed differently for those over and under the age of 55. TRA97 eliminated this differential treatment. Using a difference‐in‐difference approach, we find that home sellers slightly under the age of 55 were 6.2% more likely to move for a less expensive house to maintain, 6.6% less likely to move for a larger place, and 5.2% more likely to reside in a condominium after TRA97's enactment, relative to those slightly over 55. (JEL H24, R21)     

Family Intervention and Health Care Costs for Kansas Medicaid Patients with Schizophrenia

Despite a number of studies investigating the effect of pharmacotherapy on treatment costs for schizophrenia patients, there has been little attention given to the effect of family intervention. In this study, data from the Kansas Medicaid system were used to analyze healthcare costs for 164 schizophrenia patients who had participated in family intervention. Structural equation modeling was used to test two competing views of the role of family intervention in treatment. The results showed that a model including direct and indirect effects of family intervention provided a better fit to the data. Family intervention had a significant indirect effect on general medical costs (through other psychological treatment) that showed a savings of $586 for each unit increase in the provision of these services. In addition, the total indirect effects for family intervention showed a $580 savings for general medical costs and $796 for hospitalization costs (for each unit increase).     

The Divide Between “Evidenced‐Based” Approaches and Practitioners of Traditional Theories of Family Therapy

Evidenced‐based approaches continue to grow in the field of family therapy. However, practicing family therapists do not always embrace these approaches. In this article, we explore factors contributing to practitioners' concerns with evidence‐based treatments and suggest a broader, more clinically palatable view of evidenced‐based treatment. We also suggest how family therapy researchers, practitioners, and educators might begin to close the researcher–clinician divide in the best interest of all concerned.     

The Whitening Hypothesis Challenged: Biculturalism in Latino and Non‐Hispanic White Intermarriage

Assimilation theory holds that intermarriage between minorities and non‐Hispanic whites is a gauge of integration and assumes that minorities jettison their ethnic identification in favor of whiteness. Drawing on race relations theory to argue that intermarriage is potentially transformative for non‐Hispanic whites as well as Latinos, this article challenges assimilation theory's bias that minorities (should) undergo cultural change and that non‐Hispanic whites remain unmoved. This article uses in‐depth interviews with Latino and non‐Hispanic white married couples to assess the consequences of ethnic intermarriage from the perspectives of both partners. Interethnic partners engaged in four “ideal types” of biculturalism, running largely contrary to assimilation theory's social whitening hypothesis. Due to boundary blurring, exemplified by affiliative ethnic identity, non‐Hispanic whites can migrate into Latino culture.     

The Place of Africa,in Theory: Pan-Africanism,Postcolonialism, Beyond

Twentieth-century African theory translated two destructive diasporas – of peoples by the slave trade, of lands by empire – into a creative third: a pan-Africanist philosophy of decolonization that recovered Africa's pluralism as a powerfully “diasporic” defiance of imperial taxonomies. Comparing a 1967 lecture given in Cairo by Senegalese poet-president Léopold Sédar Senghor with a 1955 treatise on the philosophy of revolution by Egyptian president Gamal Abdul Nasser (Jamal ^cAbd al-Nasir), and both with Achille Mbembe's 2001 On the Postcolony, this essay shows how Senghor marshals race/culture hybridities, Nasser historical/geographic alignments, and Mbembe temporal entanglements to deconstruct monolithic constructions of “Arab”, “Black”, and “African” being, space, and time – and to pluralize and “world” a continent. It argues that the logics of trans-territoriality and trans-temporality that informed Third World solidarity in the 1950s–1970s represent a forgotten legacy of pan-Africanism to postcolonialism and to global theory generally. Africa's place, in theory, decenters Eurocentrism.     

Towards an affirmative public domain

Two competing and yet complementary philosophical concepts form the foundation for the legal protection of intellectual property – ‘competing’ in that created works protected by copyright are unavailable for unrestricted use by others as a result of the economic monopoly given to the works’ owners, and ‘complementary’ in that the presumption is that works no longer protected by copyright serve as the basis for the creation of new copyrightable works. These unprotected works comprise the ‘public domain,’ which has never been affirmatively defined. In Golan v. Holder (2012), the US Supreme Court concluded that such a realm is constitutionally unimportant. This research contends, however, that the Court's decision is incorrect, that Golan, federal legislation, and international treaties threaten to bring larger and larger portions of cultural and intellectual content under the control of a property regime that does not understand the contradiction inherent in the notion of absolute property rights in intangible goods. The result is that the public domain is under tremendous pressure from those entities which have the most to gain from expanded authorial rights and from a weakened and less inclusive public domain. Citizens thus will have fewer rights to access and freely use their culture as they choose. The eventual significance of this evolution will be that further creativity and innovation will be stifled, the opposite of the intention of intellectual property law. In this article, we develop an affirmative definition of the public domain, which we believe will correct the imbalance in current intellectual property law.