Department of Communication

Data and R code for manuscript "The perception of spontaneous and volitional laughter across 21 societies."

Complete dataset for manuscript "Detecting affiliation in colaughter across 24 societies" in PNAS.

On-line discussion, while promising in theory, often turns out to be disappointing in application. Low levels of student participation are a particularly vexing and common problem. I argue that to overcome these chronic problems, instructors must recognize the collective action problems inherent in on-line discussion and address them, primarily through the use of selective incentives.

I test this contention using on-line experiments conducted on undergraduate political science students. The results of the experiments provide evidence of an underlying free-rider problem and support for the contention that selective incentives are an effective means of overcoming this problem. In another level of analysis, the experiment also shows that even basic student-to-student on-line discussion can be an effective teaching tool, rivaling the effectiveness of more costly traditional web sites.

80 male and female students were exposed to sexually violent, sexually non-violent or neutral stimuli. All subjects then viewed an interview with an actual rape victim and responded to a questionnaire assessing rape-related attitudes and perceptions. Weeks later, subjects indicated their views on rape as part of what was purported to be a general survey of public attitudes. The data indicated that exposure to sexual stimuli, of a violent or non-violent nature, reduced the extent to which subjects perceived that pornography may have detrimental effects but did not affect reactions to rape. Correlational data revealed that sexual arousal to the portrayal of sexual violence, but not to non-violent sexuality, was associated with a self-reported possibility of engaging in rape, a self-report that was strongly related to a callous attitude towards rape and rape victims.

Malamuth, Feshbach, & Jaffe (1977) recently outlined a model designed to integrate some of the findings in the sex and aggression literature. The purpose of the present paper is to elaborate upon some aspects of that model, to discuss a recent experiment designed to directly test its predictions, and to consider additional directions for the model's development and for research.