“Immersed in World of Warcraft”: A Discursive Study of Identity Management Talk About Excessive Online Gaming

Online excessive gaming has been associated with negative player identity constructions depicting an abnormal life-style. Up-to-date, there is limited insight into player identity management talk about excessive online gaming. To address this gap, drawing from discursive and rhetorical psychology, we investigated naturally occurring talk of 134 players of World of Warcraft (WoW) -a Massively Multiplayer Online Role-Playing Game (MMORPG)- from three publicly available websites and of five players from one focus group. The analysis illuminated participants’ dilemmatic and contradictory ways of constructing the player identity, while displaying immersion in the game. Participants invoke identity constructions like ‘nolifer’, ‘hardcore’ or ‘clean’ player, which they disavow or assign to themselves and to each other depending on the conversational context, while attending to concerns about (ab)normalcy. The study’s findings highlight a dynamic process of player identity construction in talk, occasioned by and exemplifying the contingencies of the discursive context.

The Truth Project

The United States Constitution grants Americans the “right to a speedy and public trial,” with an assumption that the trial is impartial and fair. Recent data suggest a nontrivial number of cases fail to meet this standard. During interrogations, suspects can be presented with false evidence, long interrogations can undermine a suspect’s cognitive ability, and minimization tactics often mislead suspects into believing justice is on their side. These dynamics facilitate false confessions and wrongful convictions, which are common in the United States and globally. We argue the current approaches to understand and predict innocence in legal cases are insufficient and interdisciplinary research is required to prevent innocent people from going to jail. In this review, we cover research on wrongful convictions and false confessions, ending with The Truth Project ( www.truth-project.io ), a new global framework to connect scholars and facilitate research into behavioral patterns of innocence.

Present-Future Self-Continuity and Intergenerational Communication as Predictors of Young Adults’ Evaluations of Older Adults and Attitudes Toward Aging

This study examined how young adults’ perceived similarity to their future self at age 70 ( present-future self-continuity) and experiences of environmental “chatter” about aging predicted their views of older adults, and their anxiety and efficacy related to aging. Experiencing nonaccommodation from older adults predicted greater anxiety, lower efficacy, and more negative views of older adults; greater present-future self-continuity predicted higher efficacy about aging. Young adults’ present-future self-continuity also moderated the effects of accommodation from older adults on these outcomes.

The Effects of Expertise, Status Power, and Language Use on Perception of Task Partner

An experiment manipulated the relative expertise and status power of dyad task partners, examining how expertise and status power affect language use and if linguistic cues that emerged during the interaction influence a partner's assessment of the speaker's competence. One hundred twenty-eight dyads worked together on a problem-solving task without knowing who had received better quality information beforehand. One hundred twenty-four interactions were transcribed and quantified using both language software and human coders. Members with superior expertise spoke more words and used more tag questions than those with less expertise. The data did not yield support for more politeness in low-status members’ language nor more confidence in high-expertise members’ language. Members who spoke more were perceived as more competent by partners. Members who used more hedges were perceived as more competent and polite. Results identified language features that can be used strategically to exert influence on others and manage impressions.

Argumentation and Incivility in Online Forums: The Case of Discussing Colorism

Conversation argument theory is used to analyze seven online discussions of colorism, a form of skin tone prejudice. Discussants’ comments (N = 587) expressed ad hominem acts (17%), reasoning activities (59%) and delimitors (e.g., addressed objections, 37%). Unlike general forums confrontation-initiated forums had more ad hominem acts. Posts with compared to posts without ad hominem acts had fewer reasoning activities and delimitors. General colorism forums were the most civil and developed, findings that have implications for designing online forums.

Will You Go on a Date with Me? Predicting First Dates from Linguistic Traces in Online Dating Messages

From conveying intimacy (“I like you”) to irritation (“stop messaging me!”) and dissatisfaction (“I don’t think we’ll work out”), language use plays a fundamental yet often overlooked role in the initiation of relationships. In online dating, daters exchange messages to determine how interested they are in a partner and whether they would like to go on a first date with them. In two studies, we examined whether linguistic features present in online dating messages can predict whether a first date took place. In Study 1, we identified five interpersonal processes related to first date outcomes: investment, interdependence, emotional dynamics, decision-making, and coordination. In Study 2, we tested our hypotheses generated from Study 1 on a new dataset. Our results suggest that certain linguistic features within online dating messages can be used to predict above chance the likelihood of going on a first date.

Minority Language Learning and Use: Can Self-Determination Counter Social Determinism?

To what extent is minority language use in society imposed by social determinism, a force acting on individuals based on the language group's relative vitality in terms of demography, institutional support, and status? Can social determinism be countered by the force of self-determination sustained by group members’ personal autonomy, critical consciousness, and strong engaged integrated identity? These questions are addressed by testing a revised Self-determination and ethnolinguistic development (SED) model, using structural equation modeling. This model specifies how three categories of language socialization (enculturation, personal autonomization, critical consciousness-raising) mediate between objective ethnolinguistic vitality (EV) and four psycholinguistic constructs (engaged integrated identity, community engagement, linguistic competencies, subjective EV) in the prediction of minority language use. Results on a large sample of French Canadian students in different EV settings strongly support the SED model and show that social determinism can be at least moderately countered by psycholinguistic constructs that increase individual self-determination.

Language, Discrimination and Employability: Employers’ Othering and Racist Representations of Domestic Migrant Workers on Social Media

Discursive othering deals with the many ways in which language is used to express prejudice against minorities, and it outlines the processes and conditions that promote group-based inequality and marginalization. This article focuses on online othering, and it analyzes a corpus of 615 comments posted by Hong Kong employers of domestic migrant workers (DMWs) on social media. First, a quantitative analysis of the corpus outlines the content categories found in the posts, and second, a discourse analysis of representative excerpts illustrates the claims made about DMWs. Employers engage in othering of their helpers, and the analysis shows how demeaning racist comments function to publicly shame them and warn others not to employ them. The article uses Language and Social Psychology frameworks to analyze the posts, and it discusses the functions of using racist derogatory language. The paper concludes by discussing how research may be used to address pressing social issues.

Language and Social Psychology Approaches to Race, Racism, and Social Justice: Analyzing the Past and Revealing Ways Forward

Issues of race, racism, and social justice are under-studied topics in this journal. This Prologue, and our Special Issue (S.I.) more broadly, highlights ways that language and social psychology (LSP) approaches can further our understanding of race, racism, and social justice, while suggesting more inclusive directions for their theoretical development. Acknowledging the inspiration from the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, we begin by discussing our deeply-held personal and emotional connections to recent societal events, including police violence against innocent Black civilians and the prevalence of anti-Asian hate. What follows, then, is: a historical analysis of past JLSP publications on these issues, a proposal for more intersections between LSP and communication social justice research, and an overview of the BLM movement together with the four articles that follow. We conclude by advocating for individual and institutional practices that can create socially-just changes by LSP scholars in the academy.

Presidential Profanity in Duterte's Philippines: How Swearing Discursively Constructs a Populist Regime

Swearing in public discourse represents a contentious rhetorical feature of populist leaders’ transgressive politics. This paper argues that, beyond constituting merely “offensive” speech, swearing generatively accomplishes a host of discursive functions which contribute to the fortification of a populist regime. Taking populist President Duterte of the Philippines as a case in point, we utilize a critical text analytics approach to examine his use of profane language across a corpus of 746 of his public speeches. We find that Duterte discursively harnesses swear words to: (a) affirm vernacular identities with hostile humor, (b) claim outsider virtues against corrupt institutions, and (c) marshal insider force as the nation's sovereign leader. Swearing thus represents a rich discursive resource for populist leaders to navigate their contradictory positions as insiders and outsiders to political power, toward both public endearment and coercion of the nation's people. Our findings suggest the importance of critically examining language in relation to collective-level phenomena like populism and the utility of mixed methods approaches for enriching global psychologies of politics and language.