Rituals Improve Children's Ability to Delay Gratification

To be accepted into social groups, individuals must internalize and reproduce appropriate group conventions, such as rituals. The copying of such rigid and socially stipulated behavioral sequences places heavy demands on executive function. Given previous research showing that challenging executive functioning improves it, it was hypothesized that engagement in ritualistic behaviors improves children's executive functioning, in turn improving their ability to delay gratification. A 3-month circle time games intervention with 210 schoolchildren (Mage = 7.78 years, SD = 1.47) in two contrasting cultural environments (Slovakia and Vanuatu) was conducted. The intervention improved children's executive function and in turn their ability to delay gratification. Moreover, these effects were amplified when the intervention task was imbued with ritual, rather than instrumental, cues

"Girls can't play": The effects of stereotype threat on females' gaming performance

The current study examined the impact of stereotype threat on female online gamers' performance and further examined whether manipulating the availability of multiple social identities effectively eliminated these performance decrements. Further, participants' implicit attitudes towards female online gamers were assessed. Eighty-one participants (60 female) were assigned to one of four experimental conditions: 1), stereotype threat, 2), multiple social identities, 3), female control, and 4), male control. They completed an Implicit Association Test and a gaming task. The number of coins collected in a 5-min time period provided a measure of gameplay performance. Results indicated that stereotype threatened females underperformed on the gaming task relative to males in the control condition. The intervention of multiple social identities successfully protected females' gameplay performance from stereotype threat. Additionally, differences were found between conditions in implicit attitudes pertaining to gender-gaming competence. This research highlights the harmful effects of negative stereotypes on females' gaming performance, and suggests that these decrements may be eliminated when females identify with an alternative positive social identity

Sexual Priming, Gender Stereotyping, and Likelihood to Sexually Harass: Examining the Cognitive Effects of Playing a Sexually-Explicit Video Game

The present study examines the short-term cognitive effects of playing a sexually explicit video game with female “objectification” content on male players. Seventy-four male students from a university in California, U.S. participated in a laboratory experiment. They were randomly assigned to play either a sexually-explicit game or one of two control games. Participants’ cognitive accessibility to sexual and sexually objectifying thoughts was measured in a lexical decision task. A likelihood-to-sexually-harass scale was also administered. Results show that playing a video game with the theme of female “objectification” may prime thoughts related to sex, encourage men to view women as sex objects, and lead to self-reported tendencies to behave inappropriately towards women in social situations

The Lara Phenomenon: Powerful Female Characters in Video Games

The content of games is an understudied area in social scientific research about video games. The purpose of the present study is to contribute to the understanding of the portrayal of gender and race in games. Previous research on game content has revealed that stereotypical masculine characters dominate video games and that those characters are generally White. Nowadays, quite a few video games have women in leading parts; Tomb Raider's Lara Croft is the prototypical example. In our study we investigated the so-called 'Lara phenomenon,' that is, the appearance of a competent female character in a dominant position. We also studied the portrayal of men and the race of both male and female characters. We did a content analysis on the introductory films of 12 contemporary video games. Our results show that female characters appeared as often in leading parts as male characters did. They were portrayed with a sexualized emphasis on female features. Most game characters belonged to the dominant White race, the heroes exclusively so

Information and digital literacies; a review of concepts

A detailed literature reviewing, analysing the multiple and confusing concepts around the ideas of information literacy and digital literacy at the start of the millennium. The article was well-received, and is my most highly-cited work, with over 1100 citations

An introduction to education in American society

xvii, 292 p. : il.; 24 cm