Tributes or Norms? The Context-dependent Rationality of Social Control

“Now to my distress”

Journal of Historical Pragmatics ◽

10.1075/jhp.00007.sai ◽

2017 ◽

Vol 18 (2) ◽

pp. 295-314

Author(s):

Anni Sairio

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Social Control ◽

Case Studies ◽

Negative Emotions ◽

Letter Writing ◽

Social Conventions ◽

Context Dependent ◽

Early English

Abstract It is argued that shame has become increasingly important as a mechanism of social control in Western societies while our awareness of shame has simultaneously decreased. This paper explores the functions of the lexemes shame, disgrace and ignominy in the eighteenth-century section of the Corpus of Early English Correspondence and investigates how shame-inducing situations were discussed in letter-writing. Direct expressions of shame emerge particularly as formulaic apologies and reflect breached social conventions, honour, inadequacy and immorality. Shame discourse in the two case studies, however, proved to be context-dependent, evasive and euphemistic, and shame was expressed through a range of negative emotions. An element of discomfort in eighteenth-century shame discourse indicates that shame had taboo connotations, but the formulaic presence of shame and its connection to the cultural keyword of honour underlines its role as a mechanism of social control.

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Social Control in Late Antiquity

10.1017/9781108783491 ◽

2020 ◽

Keyword(s):

Social Control ◽

Late Antiquity

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Forming Impressions of Personality

Social Psychology ◽

10.1027/1864-9335/a000179 ◽

2014 ◽

Vol 45 (3) ◽

pp. 153-163 ◽

Cited By ~ 13

Author(s):

Sanne Nauts ◽

Oliver Langner ◽

Inge Huijsmans ◽

Roos Vonk ◽

Daniël H. J. Wigboldus

Keyword(s):

Impression Formation ◽

Context Dependent

Asch’s seminal research on “Forming Impressions of Personality” (1946) has widely been cited as providing evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect, suggesting that warmth-related judgments have a stronger influence on impressions of personality than competence-related judgments (e.g., Fiske, Cuddy, & Glick, 2007 ; Wojciszke, 2005 ). Because this effect does not fit with Asch’s Gestalt-view on impression formation and does not readily follow from the data presented in his original paper, the goal of the present study was to critically examine and replicate the studies of Asch’s paper that are most relevant to the primacy-of-warmth effect. We found no evidence for a primacy-of-warmth effect. Instead, the role of warmth was highly context-dependent, and competence was at least as important in shaping impressions as warmth.

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Memorial Consequences of Environmental Context Change in Children and Adults

Experimental Psychology (formerly Zeitschrift für Experimentelle Psychologie) ◽

10.1027/1618-3169/a000056 ◽

2010 ◽

Vol 57 (6) ◽

pp. 455-461 ◽

Cited By ~ 5

Author(s):

Alp Aslan ◽

Anuscheh Samenieh ◽

Tobias Staudigl ◽

Karl-Heinz T. Bäuml

Keyword(s):

Elementary School ◽

Young Adults ◽

Episodic Memory ◽

Middle Childhood ◽

First Graders ◽

Fourth Graders ◽

Environmental Context ◽

Context Change ◽

Context Dependent

Changing environmental context during encoding can influence episodic memory. This study examined the memorial consequences of environmental context change in children. Kindergartners, first and fourth graders, and young adults studied two lists of items, either in the same room (no context change) or in two different rooms (context change), and subsequently were tested on the two lists in the room in which the second list was encoded. As expected, in adults, the context change impaired recall of the first list and improved recall of the second. Whereas fourth graders showed the same pattern of results as adults, in both kindergartners and first graders no memorial effects of the context change arose. The results indicate that the two effects of environmental context change develop contemporaneously over middle childhood and reach maturity at the end of the elementary school days. The findings are discussed in light of both retrieval-based and encoding-based accounts of context-dependent memory.

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