The Origins of Prognostic Differences: A Topography of Experience and Expectation in a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit

This article is devoted to the phenomenon of prognostic difference on a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit (NICU) and it argues that circumstantial elements, the NICUs local history, and individual knowledge and experience of those involved must be taken into account. By capitalizing on prognostic markers as an analytical category, it becomes possible to study the difference between professionals and parents and how they use similar reasoning to reach substantively different conclusions. Potentially relevant factors in the construction of prognoses are the role of other children, medical technology and the use of the NICU space in the production of prognostic knowledge. My argument underscores that only a multi-layered analysis of these processes accounts for actors divergent prognoses.     

Dignity and Dirty Work: Nurses’ Experiences in Managing Genetic Termination for Fetal Anomaly

Qualitative research was conducted with forty-one female registered nurses from four Canadian hospitals who manage the genetic termination (GT) procedure for women who end a wanted pregnancy due to fetal anomaly. Based on the sociological concept of dirty work, interest focused on nurses experiences with work that is viewed as unpleasant and undesirable, work that others would prefer not to do or even know about. The absence of institutional support led to a number of problems for the nurses. They readily discussed situations fraught with dilemmas and frustrations, yet they described this work as professionally rewarding and personally gratifying. They found strategies to respond to the dirty work aspects of their job. Particularly, the quality of care they were able to provide transformed their job from dirty work and led them to find dignity and satisfaction.     

Prosody–face Interactions in Emotional Processing as Revealed by the Facial Affect Decision Task

Previous research employing the facial affect decision task (FADT) indicates that when listeners are exposed to semantically anomalous utterances produced in different emotional tones (prosody), the emotional meaning of the prosody primes decisions about an emotionally congruent rather than incongruent facial expression (Pell, M. D., Journal of Nonverbal Behavior, 29, 45–73). This study undertook further development of the FADT by investigating the approximate timecourse of prosody–face interactions in nonverbal emotion processing. Participants executed facial affect decisions about happy and sad face targets after listening to utterance fragments produced in an emotionally related, unrelated, or neutral prosody, cut to 300, 600, or 1000 ms in duration. Results underscored that prosodic information enduring at least 600 ms was necessary to presumably activate shared emotion knowledge responsible for prosody–face congruity effects. Marc D. Pell is affiliated with the School of Communication Sciences and Disorders, McGill University, Montréal, Canada.     

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.