Social Psychology Quarterly

In this article, I detail two rhetorical strategies that trauma carrier groups—including social movement organizations, professional mental health associations, and patient advocacy groups—use to expand the relevance of trauma and Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) through space and time: the social transmission of trauma and the social affiliation of traumatic experiences. With regard to social transmission, carrier groups claim that the psychological consequences of traumatic events are shared by members of established communities (a collective experience framework) and spread through social relationships (a social network framework). They expand the relevance of trauma and PTSD beyond those who directly experience the traumatic event at issue. With regard to social affiliation, carrier groups attribute common consequences to otherwise distinct events, making trauma and PTSD relevant to a growing variety of communities and individuals. Trauma carrier groups use both strategies to generalize a vocabulary of victimization and promote affective solidarity, providing discursive tools that a growing variety of individuals and communities can use to identify with trauma and its consequences. By mapping these rhetorical strategies, I propose a framework for analyzing the microsocial dynamics of cultural trauma and the expansion of the trauma concept as a diagnostic lens for defining diverse individual and social problems.

Oneness refers to the convention of recognizing a single individual's performance and ignoring others, including those who may have performed as well. Although oneness is an adaptation to cognitive deficits, it cannot be explained by them. If long-term and working memory were more capacious, society's need for ideals to establish realm-specific standards and meanings would tend to limit recognition and renown to one individual. The apotheosis of Rosa Parks is a case in point. Her celebrity and the obscurity of others who risked and accomplished more than she are two aspects of the same social process. Revealing oneness to be a social imperative, this case study leads to a broader understanding of collective forgetting.

The belief that women and men are held to different standards of sexual conduct is pervasive in contemporary American society. According to the sexual double standard, boys and men are rewarded and praised for heterosexual sexual contacts, whereas girls and women are derogated and stigmatized for similar behaviors. Although widely held by the general public, research findings on the sexual double standard remain equivocal, with qualitative studies and early attitudinal surveys generally finding evidence of the double standard and more recent experimental vignette designs often failing to find similar results. In this study, we extend prior research by directly measuring the social status of sexually permissive youth. We use data collected from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health to relate adolescents' self-reported numbers of sexual partners to a network measure of peer acceptance. Results suggest that the association between lifetime sexual partnerships and peer status varies significantly by gender, such that greater numbers of sexual partners are positively correlated with boys' peer acceptance, but negatively correlated with girls' peer acceptance. Moreover, the relationship between boys'sexual behaviors and peer acceptance is moderated by socioeconomic origins; sexually permissive boys from disadvantaged backgrounds are predicted to have more friendships than permissive boys from more advantaged backgrounds. Our results thus support the existence of an adolescent sexual double standard and suggest that sexual norms vary by both gender and socioeconomic origins.

Using evidence gathered during 18 months of participant-observation in 2 nursing homes and 65 interviews with staff, this article examines how nursing-home staff use agency as a rhetorical resource to construct a dignified workplace. Staff attribute agency to dying residents, saying they choose the timing and conditions of their death. Staff equally insist that aggressive residents do not have agency. These two sets of attributions are used as counterpoints. Both go well beyond the available facts of the situation and reflect unspoken assumptions and interests of nursing-care workers. Through these attributions, the staff achieves a situated moral order in which compassionate care is provided to deserving residents in caring nursing homes. Staff attributions of agency are collectively shaped by professional philosophies, training and education, and regulatory guidelines. Finally, this article shows how it is analytically and theoretically productive to recast agency as a cultural object, whose use is subject to empirical investigation, rather than as a theoretical construct.

Affect Control Theory (ACT; Heise 1979, 2007) states that people control social interactions by striving to maintain culturally shared feelings about the situation. The theory is based on mathematical models of language-based impression formation. In a laboratory experiment, we tested the predictive power of a new German-language ACT model with respect to actual behavior and felt emotions in leadership; 60 subjects managed a computer simulated company by communicating with 3 different virtual employees (within-subjects manipulation). Half of the subjects were primed with the concept of authoritarian leadership using a situational interview technique; the remainder was primed with the concept of democratic leadership (between-subjects manipulation). There were 14 dependent variables (leadership categories like praise, criticize, augment salary, etc.). The German impression-formation model correctly predicted 27 of 42 between-subjects contrasts (p < .05) and 56 of 84 within-subjects contrasts (p < .01). Moreover, Euclidean distances of emotions predicted by the German ACT model correlated negatively with the frequency with which the subjects experienced these emotions (correlations ranged from r = −.18 to r = −.61). These results support Affect Control Theory's proposition that realistic social interaction can be predicted by mathematical models of affective consistency.