Repeated Exposure to Daytime Soap Opera and Shifts in Moral Judgment Toward Social Convention

This study examined the influence of prolonged exposure to soap opera on character dispositions and real-world moral judgments. Eight groups viewed from 0–7 weeks of soap opera prior to a final week after which participants completed measures of disposition towards show characters as well as perceptions of morality in real-world situations. Results demonstrated the effect of prolonged exposure on both the polarization of dispositions toward characters and a trend in moral judgments toward social convention. These findings highlight the role of disposition within social cognitive theory, and the importance of dispositional considerations in understanding learned morality.     

The impact of virtual reality on parents’ awareness of cognitive perceptions of a dyslectic child

Parents of dyslexic children encounter many difficulties in understanding and accepting their children’s disability. This affects the child’s self-image and the way s/he copes (Hallahan and Kauffman 1991; Einat 2003). The goal of this study was to develop VR immersive simulated states. The simulation was designed to help the parents of dyslexic children experience the kind of errors their children make when reading. Two groups of parents of dyslexic children participated in this experiment, an experimental group (N = 37), which experienced ten 3D worlds simulating different kinds of reading errors, and a control group (N = 30), that watched a movie describing and explaining similar errors. All the subjects were administered a cognitive questionnaire (Shavit 2005) before and after the intervention. In addition, the participants in the experimental group were interviewed before and after the intervention. The results indicate that experiencing a variety of simulated types of dyslexia with virtual reality can bring about improvement in parents’ awareness of the dyslexic child’s cognitive experiences, and that this improvement is significantly greater than that achieved by watching a film about dyslexia.     

Food labels as boundary objects: how consumers make sense of organic and functional foods

This paper considers how consumers make sense of food labeling, drawing on a qualitative, empirical study in England. I look in detail at two examples of labeling: 1) food certified as produced by organic methods and 2) functional food claimed to be beneficial for human health, especially probiotic and cholesterol-lowering products. I use the concept of "boundary objects" to demonstrate how such labels are intended to work between the worlds of food producers and food consumers and to show how information is not merely transferred as a "knowledge fix" to consumer ignorance. Rather, consumers drew on a binary of "raw" and "processed" food and familiarity with marketing in today's consumer culture to make sense of such labeling.     

The impact of Virtual Reality on the awareness of teenagers to social and emotional experiences of immigrant classmates

The current study examined the use of VR (Virtual Reality) and its affect on the degree of awareness of 178 seventh and eighth graders to the emotional and social experiences of a new immigrant during his or her first months in the adoptive country. Students native to the adoptive country were divided into two groups: an experimental group, which tried out VR worlds designed to simulate the emotional and social feelings and experiences of a new immigrant teen, and a control group which viewed a movie on the same subject. In addition, we have examined another group of teen immigrants who provided us with a benchmark of the degree of awareness to be measured. Their responses were compared to those of native teenagers of the adoptive country. All the subjects responded to an awareness questionnaire before and after the experiment (Sever 1977), and had a personal interview before and after the experiment as well. The results indicate that the experience of a VR simulated emotional and social experiences of a recent immigrant teen has intensified the emotional and social awareness of the experiment group while the movie intensified the social feelings only in the control group.