“Tout le monde a ses raisons”

Much about Jean Renoir’s La Règle du jeu could place it among the classic works of modernism, but Renoir’s film is also traditional and even conservative. This ambiguity derives from Renoir’s impressionism. He was dedicated to an impressionist aesthetic that he inherited in part from his father, the painter Pierre-Auguste Renoir—an aesthetic that also brought him artistic and ideological uncertainties. Renoir intended mainly to push film further toward full development of its own aesthetic through the fuller realization of an impressionist aesthetic, the immediacy, subjectivism, and immersiveness that had for some time seemed best able to assert film’s unique claim to artistic excellence. But the problem of impressionism—its uncertain way of resolving perceptual differences—threw him back upon older theatrical and pictorial modes. It is finally the problem of such inconsistencies that give La Règle du jeu its major claim to modernism.

The Effects of Written Stuttering Disclosure on the Perceptions of a Child Who Stutters

Purpose This study measured between-groups differences in perceived speech skills and personality characteristics of a 12-year-old male child who stutters (CWS) as a function of a written factual stuttering disclosure statement, delivered by the CWS, his “mother,” or his “teacher.” Method Four hundred twenty-four college-age adults were assigned to one of four groups, including three experimental groups (i.e., written self-disclosure, mother-written disclosure, and teacher-written disclosure) and a control group (no written disclosure). Participants in the control conditions viewed a brief video of the CWS. In the experimental conditions, participants read a brief written disclosure statement for 30 s, followed by the same video used in the control condition. After viewing the video, all participants completed surveys relative to their perceptions of the CWS speech skills and personality characteristics. Results Results reveal that a written stuttering disclosure statement provided by the mother correlated with select significant desirable perceptual differences of the CWS, while a written disclosure statement provided by the CWS yielded insignificant or even undesirable perceptual differences of the CWS. Written stuttering disclosures provided by a “teacher” did not yield any significant between-groups differences in the perception of a CWS. Gender affiliation was found to be a source of covariance in a number of perceived speech skills and personality characteristics. Conclusions Written stuttering disclosure statements provided by the “mother” correlated with select favorable perceptual differences of speech skills and personal characteristics of a CWS. Clinically, the application of novel methods (written and oral disclosure statements) and sources (i.e., CWS advocates such as “mother” and “teacher”) of stuttering disclosure statement can be integrated into a systematic therapeutic program, creating an innovative approach of scaffolding self-advocacy via stuttering disclosure in CWS. Supplemental Material https://doi.org/10.23641/asha.15505857

What you say and what I hear—Investigating differences in the perception of the severity of psychological and physical violence in intimate partner relationships

The correct communication of the severity of violence is essential in the context of legal trials, custody cases, support of victims, etc., for providing fair treatment. A narrator that communicates their experiences of interpersonal violence may rate the seriousness of the incident differently than a rater reading the narrator’s text, suggesting that there exist perceptual differences (PD) in severity ratings between the narrator and the rater. We propose that these perceptual differences may depend on whether the narrative is based on physical or psychological violence, and on gender differences. Physical violence may be evaluated as more serious by the receiver of the narrative than by the narrator (Calibration PD), whereas the seriousness of psychological violence may be difficult to convey, leading to a discrepancy in the seriousness ratings between the narrator and the rater (Accuracy PD). In addition, gender stereotypes may influence the seriousness rating (Gender PD), resulting in violence against women being perceived as more serious than the same violence against men. These perceptual differences were investigated in 3 phases using a new experimental procedure. In Phase 1, 113 narrators provided descriptions and seriousness ratings of self-experienced physical and psychological violence in relationships. In Phase 2, 340 independent raters rated the seriousness of 10 randomly selected narrations from Phase 1. In Phase 3, the genders in the narrations were changed to the opposite gender, and seriousness ratings were collected from 340 different raters. Our results confirmed the hypothesized perceptual differences. Violence to male victims was considerably more likely to be seen as severe when the raters were misled to believe the victim was a woman. We propose that these data provide practical guidelines for how to deal with misinformation in the communication of violence. The data also show that mean values and the confidence of such severity ratings need to be adjusted for several factors, such as whether it is self-experienced or communicated, the type of violence, and the gender of the victims and raters.

Electrophysiological Correlates of Processing Warning Signs With Different Background Colors: An Event-Related Potentials Investigation

Warning signs, as a type of safety signs, are widely applied in our daily lives to informing people about potential hazards and prompting safe behavior. Although previous studies have paid attention to the color of warning signs, they are mostly based on surveys and behavioral experiments. The neural substrates underlying the perception of warning signs with different background colors remain not clearly characterized. Therefore, this research is intended to address this gap with event-related potentials (ERPs) technique. Warning signs with three different background colors (i.e., white, yellow, and blue) were used in the experiment. The results showed that the perceptual differences between different warning signs were present in the form of differential ERPs components (P1, N1, P2, N2, and P3) though subjects were not required to explicitly attend to the warning signs.

Waiting longer, feeling fatter: Effects of response delay on tactile distance estimation and confidence in females with anorexia nervosa

Research suggests that anorexia nervosa (AN) patients overestimate their own body size. However, researchers are divided over whether this overestimation stems from perceptual or non-perceptual differences. In this study, we investigated the influence of non-perceptual factors in tactile size estimation, in a sample of AN patients (N = 30), recovered AN (REC) patients (N = 29) and healthy controls (N=31), by manipulating the role of allowed response time. We further investigated the relationship between allowed response time and participants’ confidence in their tactile judgments. Participants were asked to estimate tactile distances presented on the skin of either a salient (abdomen) or non-salient (arm) body part, either directly after stimulus presentation or after a 5 second delay. Confidence of estimation accuracy was measured after each response. Results showed that allowing AN and REC more time to respond caused them to estimate tactile distances as larger. Additionally, AN patients became less confident when given more time to respond. These results suggest that non-perceptual influences cause AN patients to increase their estimates of tactile distances and become less certain of these estimates. We suggest that previous findings—where AN patients estimate tactile distances as larger than HC—may be due to non-perceptual differences.

On-Beat/Off-Beat

Audio-visual rhythm can be achieved in a variety of ways, in film as well as in music videos. Here, we have studied human visual responses to video editing with regard to musical beats, in order to better understand the role of visual rhythm in an audio-visual flow. While some suggest that music videos should maintain synchrony in the audio-visual rhythm, and others claim that music videos should be rhythmically loose in their structure, there is a functional aspect of vision and hearing that reacts to the juxtaposition of audio and visual rhythms. We present empirical evidence of cognitive effects, as well as perceptual differences with attentional effects, for viewers watching music videos cut on-beat and off-beat.