Archive of PsycCRITIQUES^® Listserv Announcements

Ever wonder what's in PsycCRITIQUES^®?

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Who Ya Gonna Call?

Last month we asked, why do people rely on experts? We're going to pursue that topic a bit more this month. What gives that person the gravitas to review cutting-edge work in the behavioral sciences as a genuine peer? What credentials do they have that make them credible? If you are an informed reader, do you in fact agree with the review that has been given?

Sometimes that first question answers itself, as for example, when the name of the reviewer is well known. For example, over its 55-year history, PsycCRITIQUES (formerly Contemporary Psychology: APA Review of Books) has had as reviewers some of the big guns in psychology.  Reviewers have included household names, like Zimbardo, Kazdin, Milgram, Seligman, Bandura, and Csikszentmihaly. Phil Zimbardo, for example, has written 11 reviews about topics such as how group behavior can diminish our humanity ("Cults in Everyday Life: Dependency and Power"). Most readers would agree that the man behind the Stanford Prison Experiment has the chops as a social psychologist to write a review about group behavior.

Some review sources make clear that reviews need to be done by someone who is legitimately a peer of the published author he or she is reviewing, while others are open to anyone who has a thoughtful response. As there are different kinds of readers, different kinds of reviewers can be very useful. PsycCRITIQUES is specifically peer review. If you wonder about the educational or professional background of a particular reviewer, PsycCRITIQUES provides a helpful tool that can give you that information easily. Have you noticed the little person icon to the right of each author's name on the review itself? If you click on it, you'll find a short reviewer's biography. Thus, at the click of a mouse, you can see and assess for yourself the accomplishments of the person who is conducting the review.

As is true with any social media that lists reviewers (Netflix used to have a nifty feature that would even rate how "like me" a reviewer was by comparing our reviews), another way for you to find reviewers whose opinions you value is simply to take note of reviewers who write reviews you find helpful. That's especially useful if you are at the beginning of your career path. Take advantage of the fact that reviewers concentrate on specific subject areas and build your own list.

For example, if you are interested in recent books about psycholinguistics and language development, running a search in PsycCRITIQUES would yield 73 reviews published in the past 5 years. A closer look would show you that David Carroll and Sheila Kennison had between them written more than 10% of the total number of recent relevant reviews on a topic that interests you.

A quick look at her review would tell you, among other things, that

Shelia M. Kennison, PhD, is an associate professor in the Department of Psychology at Oklahoma State University. Her research investigates cognitive processes, psycholinguistics, reading, and bilingualism. She teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in statistics, research design, and language development.

If you were especially impressed with Dr. Kennison's review, then create an alert for the reviewer and the topic. He or she will almost certainly be reviewing other work that you find relevant in the future.

The Not-So-Hidden Persuaders

Recent research has shown what many of us have long suspected: oenophiles have a much more acute sense of taste then the rest of us. Thus, experts' recommendations are of little use to most drinkers because our palates are not "sophisticated" enough to appreciate the subtle flavors. Indeed, the academic Journal of Wine Economics (it's not in PsycINFO; I checked) published an article called "Do More Expensive Wines Taste Better?" that concluded, based on a study of 6,000 blind tastings, that people actually enjoyed more expensive wines slightly less than their cheaper counterparts. Yet the fine wine market continues to grow (for a bundle of reasons; many of us believe that we are among those who can detect the difference or aspire to be, but few of us — over a certain age anyway — would consider showing up at an event with a cheap bottle of wine).

We shape ourselves in no small part based on somewhat mysterious standards that we get from in-the-know sources. If you were putting together course materials for a class that included forms of persuasion, such as Marketing, Communications, Social Psychology, or Political Theory, what information could you find in PsycCRITIQUES that can shed light on this behavior?

A search for "identity" or "self-esteem" or "image" limited to persuaders such as "advertising", or "peers", or "experts" returns about 150 results, among them the following:

• "Consumers Should Be Afraid, Very Afraid," (Clark, 2009), reviewed Deception in the Marketplace: The Psychology of Deceptive Persuasion and Consumer Self-Protection. A scholarly book appropriate to an academic setting, it is also aimed at helping consumers help themselves by recognizing deception and responses to it. The book draws from social psychology, consumer psychology, developmental psychology, marketing, communication, and sociology and focuses on what role researchers can play in helping others to understand deceptive persuasion.
• "The Consumer's Search for the Good Life," by Hollenbeck and Zinkhan reviewed Consumer Culture, Identity and Well-Being: The Search for the "Good Life" and the "Body Perfect" (2008). The book presented a series of studies that exemplify how advertising and mass media appeal to consumers to promote the acquisition of material goods and their symbolic role in shaping the buyers' desires. Addressing both genders in terms of their attraction to materialism and compulsive buying, the book demonstrated the negative effects that mass consumption has on an individual's identity and psychological well-being.
• If you'd like a film for your class, read "Looking Good Says It All," a review of The Devil Wears Prada (Frankel, 2006). A popular film that drew on the Faust legend, the story suggests that what one wears is both an assertion about oneself and a protection against the judgment of others, with fashion magazines and "experts" the priests of orthodoxy. Women are the intended consumers and imbibe identity development and gender socialization with fashion.

Imagine the strength of persuasion needed to have enticed the human animal to wear ties and high heels almost without question.

Are You Talking to Me?

You've probably heard someone toss off a comment like "more than two thirds of communication is nonverbal." If that is true — the objective facts are hard to pin down — then it is clearly important that we as individuals have some grasp of how that communication works. In some cases, believing we "speak" that language can backfire, as in a recent case in which a rebuffed investment banker's email went viral after being posted by the exasperated recipient. Among its 1,600 words, he berated her for "leading him on," because

"You played with your hair a lot. A woman playing with her hair is a common sign of flirtation. You can even do a Google search on it. When a woman plays with her hair, she is preening. I've never had a date where a woman played with her hair as much as you did."

Alas, as our investment banker's experience has shown, the grammar and syntax of this language is not so fixed. PsycCRITIQUES, however, provides reviews of in-depth resources, and a search on body language and nonverbal communication limited to the past 5 years could provide him with helpful books and films to get through the no-doubt dateless stretch that lies ahead of him.

Those resources include the following:

• "Gaze: Light and Dark" (Conner, 2011) is a review of the film The Secret in Their Eyes (El Secreto de Sus Ojos). Although much research on eye contact and gazing has focused on interpersonal attraction, gaze can have a darker role as well and be used to communicate threat and dominance. The Secret in Their Eyes is an Argentinean film that comments on the power of gaze and its role in obsession as well as in love.
• "Judgmental Biases and Nonverbal Behavior" (MacGregor, 2008) is a review of What Every body Is Saying: An Ex-FBI Agent's Guide to Speed-Reading People. Its basic theme is that in situations involving social interaction, people are not static but dynamic and can be read and decoded by interpretation of their nonverbal behavior expressed semantically as body cues or "language. "Although a given cue might be misinterpreted, an ensemble of cues that are consistent gives an indication of the quality of the experience an individual is having."
• "Seeing Double: The Reframing of Emotional Intelligence" (Fox & Maloney, 2007) is a review of Social Intelligence: The New Science of Human Relationships by Daniel Goleman. A book intended for the general public, much of the text concerns the groundbreaking discoveries being made in the field of neuroscience and the additions they are making to the biological bases of interpersonal relations. Goleman brushed "the new science of human relationships" in relating how varied neurological processes work to facilitate or undermine the establishment of nonverbal communication between people.

Studies have ranged across fields including everything from linguistics and social psychology to dance and anthropology. Our oldest communication, what made us human and underlies all other language, speaks from our hands and eyes and in the way we move in relation to each other.