The social costs of sounding gay: voice-based impressions of adoption applicants

In three studies (total N = 239) we examined the unexplored question of whether voice conveying sexual orientation elicits stigma and discrimination in the context of adoption. Studies 1 and 2 were conducted in Italy where same-sex adoption is illegal and controversial. Study 3 was conducted in the United Kingdom where same-sex adoption is legal and generally more accepted. The three studies show that listeners draw strong inferences from voice when judging hypothetical adoption seekers. Both Italian and British listeners judged gay-sounding speakers as warmer and as having better parenting skills, yet Italian participants consistently preferred straight over gay-sounding applicants, whereas British participants showed an opposite tendency, presumably reflecting the different normative context in the two countries. We conclude that vocal cues may have culturally distinct effects on judgment and decision making and that people with gay-sounding voices may face discrimination in adoption procedures in countries with antigay norms.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Dynamical behaviour of Coven's aperiodic cellular automata

AbstractWe show that the aperiodic cellular automata studied by Coven (1980), that is the maps F : [0, 1]Z → [0, 1]Z induced by block maps f : [0, 1]r + 1 → [0, 1] such that f(x0,x1,…,xr) is equal to (x0 + 1)mod 2 if x1…xr = b1…br and equal to x0 otherwise, where B = b1…br is a given aperiodic word, have the following position in classification of K…rka (1994): they are regular, contain equicontinuous points without being equicontinuous, and are chain transitive but not topologically transitive. Therefore they do not have the shadowing property; this answers in the negative a question raised by P. K…rka

Who has a better auditory gaydar? Sexual orientation categorization by heterosexual and lesbian, gay and bisexual people

Lesbian, gay and bisexual (LGB) people are supposed to be better at gaydar than heterosexual. Across two studies we examined auditory gaydar performed by LGB and heterosexual listeners. In Study 1 participants (n = 127) listened to male and female speakers (n = 10) and judged their sexual orientation on a binary choice (gay/lesbian vs. heterosexual). In Study 2, participants (n = 192) judged speakers’ (n = 31) sexual orientation on a Kinsey-like scale (1 = exclusively heterosexual, 7 = exclusively gay/lesbian). Results showed gaydar judgments differences in relative terms that did not indicate an overall gaydar accuracy. Moreover, LGB participants were not better at gaydar than heterosexual participants but rather showed a shift in criterion when making auditory gaydar judgments, namely they report a weaker straight categorization bias. Overall, these findings contribute to the understanding of sexual orientation categorization among heterosexual majority and LGB minority groups.info:eu-repo/semantics/publishedVersio

Quasicrystalline Order in Binary Dipolar Systems

Motivated by recent experimental findings, we investigate the possible occurrence and characteristics of quasicrystalline order in two-dimensional mixtures of point dipoles with two sorts of dipole moments. Despite the fact that the dipolar interaction potential does not exhibit an intrinsic length scale and cannot be tuned a priori to support the formation of quasicrystalline order, we find that configurations with long--range quasicrystallinity yield minima in the potential energy surface of the many particle system. These configurations emanate from an ideal or perturbed ideal decoration of a binary tiling by steepest descent relaxation. Ground state energy calculations of alternative ordered states and parallel tempering Monte-Carlo simulations reveal that the quasicrystalline configurations do not correspond to a thermodynamically stable state. On the other hand, steepest descent relaxations and conventional Monte-Carlo simulations suggest that they are rather robust against fluctuations. Local quasicrystalline order in the disordered equilibrium states can be strong.Comment: 10 pages, 7 figure

Voice changes meaning: the role of gay- versus straight-sounding voices in sentence interpretation

Utterances reveal not only semantic information but also information about the speaker’s social category membership, including sexual orientation. In four studies (N = 345), we investigated how the meaning of what is being said changes as a function of the speaker’s voice. In Studies 1a/1b, gay- and straight-sounding voices uttered the same sentences. Listeners indicated the likelihood that the speaker was referring to one among two target objects varying along gender-stereotypical characteristics. Listeners envisaged a more “feminine” object when the sentence was uttered by a gay-sounding speaker, and a more “masculine” object when the speaker sounded heterosexual. In Studies 2a/2b, listeners were asked to disambiguate sentences that involved a stereotypical behavior and were open to different interpretations. Listeners disambiguated the sentences by interpreting the action in relation to sexual-orientation information conveyed by voice. Results show that the speaker’s voice changes the subjective meaning of sentences, aligning it to gender-stereotypical expectations.info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersio

Weak pinning and long-range anticorrelated motion of phase boundaries in driven diffusive systems

We show that domain walls separating coexisting extremal current phases in driven diffusive systems exhibit complex stochastic dynamics, with a subdiffusive temporal growth of position fluctuations due to long-range anticorrelated current fluctuations and a weak pinning at long times. This weak pinning manifests itself in a saturated width of the domain wall position fluctuations that increases sublinearly with the system size. As a function of time $t$ and system size $L$, the width $w(t,L)$ exhibits a scaling behavior $w(t,L)=L^{3/4}f(t/L^{9/4})$, with $f(u)$ constant for $u\gg1$ and $f(u)\sim u^{1/3}$ for $u\ll1$. An Orstein-Uhlenbeck process with long-range anticorrelated noise is shown to capture this scaling behavior. Results for the drift coefficient of the domain wall motion point to memory effects in its dynamics.Comment: 6 pages, 4 figures plus 6 pages supplemental material with 3 figure

A real space renormalization group approach to spin glass dynamics

The slow non-equilibrium dynamics of the Edwards-Anderson spin glass model on a hierarchical lattice is studied by means of a coarse-grained description based on renormalization concepts. We evaluate the isothermal aging properties and show how the occurrence of temperature chaos is connected to a gradual loss of memory when approaching the overlap length. This leads to rejuvenation effects in temperature shift protocols and to rejuvenation--memory effects in temperature cycling procedures with a pattern of behavior parallel to experimental observations.Comment: 4 pages, 4 figure