Gün R Semin
Biographic Data
| ID | 76808 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Gün R Semin |
| GIVEN NAMES | Gün R |
| FAMILY NAME | Semin |
| SIGNATURE | SEMIN G R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Sussex |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-5304-5566 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 69 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 674 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 69 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1973 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 13 |
The spatial grounding of politics
A multi‐analyses approach of inductive/deductive asymmetry in the affective priming paradigm
Rapidly evaluating our environment's beneficial and detrimental features is critical for our successful functioning. A classic paradigm used to investigate such fast and automatic evaluations is the affective priming (AP) paradigm, where participants classify valenced target stimuli (e.g., words) as good or bad while ignoring the valenced primes (e.g., words). We investigate the differential impact that verbs and adjectives used as primes and tar…
Does the Linguistic Expectancy Bias Extend to a Second Language
The linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) reflects the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent behavior more abstractly than expectancy-inconsistent. The current studies replicate the LEB in Portuguese and examine it in a second language (English). Earlier studies found differences in processing a first language (L1) and a second language (L2) shaping affective and cognitive processes. We did not expect these differences to shape the LEB because co…
Mapping human vigilance
A considerable volume of animal research on detecting threat and foraging reveals that the co-presence of conspecifics reduces vigilance and enhances foraging. Monitoring threat is an adaptive process and is of considerable relevance to humans. It is therefore important to understand how the presence of others influences threat monitoring - namely vigilance - and consequently the capacity to detect threats. We examine this with a novel paradigm, …
The “ins” and “outs” of person perception
Denying Psychological Properties of Girls and Prostitutes
This study examines the negative stereotypes of the category of women and their subcategories through the language of insults. Participants produced a list of epithets induced by the same hypothetical scenario in which the protagonist was presented either as a "prostitute" or as a "girl" (i.e., nonprostitute). Findings showed that the prostitute was addressed with taboo-related insults exaggerating sexual behavior, whereas the girl was mainly giv…
Situating person memory
The sound of time
When does mimicry affect evaluative judgment
We investigated the effect of subliminally presented happy or angry faces on evaluative judgments when the facial muscles of participants were free to mimic or blocked. We hypothesized and showed that subliminally presented happy expressions lead to more positive judgments of cartoons compared to angry expressions only when facial muscles were not blocked. These results reveal the influence of socially driven embodied processes on affective judgm…
Grounding person memory in space
In two experiments, we examine and find support for the general hypothesis that memory for behavioral information in the context of an impression formation task depends on where that information is located in vertical space. These findings extend earlier work showing that memory for location and shifts of spatial attention are influenced by the “good is up” metaphor. Specifically, we show that person memory is better for behavioral information in…
Not all implicit measures of attitudes are created equal
Why Your Highness Needs the People
Earlier research ( Schubert, 2005 ) showed that power is represented in vertical space: powerful = up and powerless = down. We propose that power is not simply structured in space in absolute terms, but that relational differences in power moderate the vertical representation of the powerful above the powerless. Two studies reveal that, when power differences are present (vs. absent), the vertical representation of power increases reliably. Power…
Effects of schooling and literacy on linguistic abstraction
Schooling in a Western cultural environment has been shown to promote context‐free (analytic) at the expense of context‐dependent (holistic) processing. In the present study, we examined whether these differences in processing styles also induce a tendency to use more abstract (i.e., dispositional) language when describing human behaviors. Portuguese literate, illiterate, and ex‐illiterates were asked to freely describe behaviors presented visual…
Temperature perceptions as a ground for social proximity
The Thermometer of Social Relations
“Holding warm feelings toward someone” and “giving someone the cold shoulder” indicate different levels of social proximity. In this article, we show effects of temperature that go beyond these metaphors people live by. In three experiments, warmer conditions, compared with colder conditions, induced (a) greater social proximity, (b) use of more concrete language, and (c) a more relational focus. Different temperature conditions were created by e…
Embodiment as a unifying perspective for psychology
Adaptive action is the function of cognition. It is constrained by the properties of evolved brains and bodies. An embodied perspective on social psychology examines how biological constrains give expression to human function in socially situated contexts. Key contributions in social psychology have highlighted the interface between the body and cognition, but theoretical development in social psychology and embodiment research remain largely dis…
Language Puzzles
The linguistic category model (LCM) is highlighted from 3 interrelated perspectives: (a) as a functional tool with distinctive properties that have evolved to link language producers and perceivers and, therefore, adapted to both; (b) within a general framework of linguistic behavior and an analysis of the architecture of linguistic behavior that highlights why lexical decisions, the prime analytic focus of LCM, generally escape conscious access;…
Receivers' Expectations for Abstract Versus Concrete Construal
How does conversational context shape the construal level of future events? According to construal-level theory, temporally distant events are construed more abstractly than close events due to an association between distance and construal level. The authors have argued that situated conversational relevancies determine construal level and therefore that construal level is flexible and determined in situ. Building on research that examined constr…
Situated Social Cognition
Social cognition refers to the mental representations and processes that underlie social judgments and behavior—for example, the application of stereotypes to members of social groups. Theories of social cognition have generally assumed that mental representations are abstract and stable and that they are activated and applied by relatively automatic, context-independent processes. Recent evidence is inconsistent with these expectations, however.…
The effect of linguistic abstraction on interpersonal distance
It is well known that people describe positive behaviors of others close to them (e.g., in‐group member, friend) in abstract terms, but with concrete terms in the case of people who they are not close to (e.g., out‐group member, enemy). In contrast, negative behaviors of people who we are close to are described in concrete terms, but in abstract terms for people who are distant. However, the communicative impact of such subtle differences in lang…
The magic spell of language
Language is a tool that directs attention to different aspects of reality. Using participants from the same linguistic community, the authors demonstrate in 4 studies that metasemantic features of linguistic categories influence basic perceptual processes. More specifically, the hypothesis that abstract versus concrete language leads to a more global versus local perceptual focus was supported across 4 experiments, in which participants used (Exp…
Communicating expectancies about others
The linguistic expectancy bias hypothesis predicts that, in general, person impressions are shared with others via subtle differences in the level of linguistic abstraction that is used to communicate expected and unexpected information about an individual. In a two-part communication experiment, we examined this hypothesis. In the first part of the experiment communicators were asked to provide a description of an event where a good friend had b…
Backward affective priming
When Do We Communicate Stereotypes? Influence of the Social Context on the Linguistic Expectancy Bias
The linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) refers to the tendency to describe expectancy consistent information at a higher level of linguistic abstraction than expectancy inconsistent information. Two experiments examined the influence of the social communicative context on the production of this linguistic bias by manipulating the group membership of the actor in, and the recipient of, stereotypical information. Results supported the prediction that …
How mood turns on language
The cognitive functions of linguistic categories in describing persons
Three studies examined the cognitive implications of linguistic categories in the interpersonal domain. On the basis of conceptual and linguistic criteria, we advance a four-level classification that distinguishes between verbs and adjectives in the interpersonal domain. These four levels (in terms of increasing abstractness) are descriptive action verbs, interpretive action verbs, state verbs, and adjectives. Results from the first two studies r…
Language use in intergroup contexts
Three experiments examine how the type of language used to describe in-group and out-group behaviors contributes to the transmission and persistence of social stereotypes.Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people encode and communicate desirable in-group and undesirable out-group behaviors more abstractly than undesirable in-group and desirable out-group behaviors.Experiment 1 provided strong support for this hypothesis using a fixed-resp…
How do we communicate stereotypes? Linguistic bases and inferential consequences
The linguistic expectancy bias is defined as the tendency to describe expectancy-consistent information at a higher level of abstraction than expectancy-inconsistent information. The communicative consequences of this bias were examined in 3 experiments. Analyses of judgments that recipients made on the basis of linguistically biased information generated by transmitters indicated that behavior in expectancy-consistent messages was attributed mor…
Relocating attributional phenomena within a language‐cognition interface
Two studies are reported which apply a language based model to the actor‐observer domain in attribution theory. This model distinguishes between four classes of interpersonal terms (descriptive action verbs, interpretive action verbs, state verbs, and adjectives) that have been shown to mediate different cognitive inferences. An adaptation of this language based model suggests that actor‐observer differences can be understood as differential lang…
Linguistic Signatures of Regulatory Focus
In 3 experiments, the authors investigated how strategic inclinations associated with promotion versus prevention orientations--that is, eager approach versus vigilant avoidance, respectively--affect the use of language. It is hypothesized that eager promotion strategies used to attain desired end states entail using more abstract language than used with vigilant prevention strategies. This is shown to hold for experimentally induced relationship…
How mood turns on language
Temperature perceptions as a ground for social proximity
The social implications of embarrassment displays and restitution behaviour
The present study examines the evaluative consequences of two kinds of reaction to committing a social transgression. In an experimental study, embarrassment display and restitution behaviour were manipulated orthogonally in the context of a videotaped incident in which an actor was seen to upset a sales display in a store. Subjects were shown one of the four versions of this incident and asked to rate the actor responsible for the mishap. It was…
The question–answer paradigm
In 2 experiments the authors investigated how verb choice in question formulation influences respon-dents ' answers. These studies show that (a) as hypothesized, the choice of verb type (action vs, state) in forming a question influences interviewees ' narratives systematically by impacting, inter alia, which individual is implicitly described as the causal originator of a social event; (b) interviewees are not aware of how their answers are mani…
Revisiting the past and back to the future
Five studies were conducted to investigate the relationship between how people communicate about social events and how representations of these events are stored in memory. It was hypothesized that more distant events in memory would be described with more abstract linguistic predicates, and recent events with more concrete language. The 1st study supported this hypothesis. The 2nd and 3rd experiments demonstrated that abstract predicates used as…
"Multiple inference-inviting properties" of interpersonal verbs
The properties of interpersonal verbs (e.g., help, dislike, etc.) that systematically influence «implicit causality» are analyzed in 3 studies. It is argued that interpersonal verbs have a set of properties (multiple inference-inviting properties [MIIPs]) that are differentially elicited as a function of the type of property primed by the type of inference request
The magic spell of language
Language is a tool that directs attention to different aspects of reality. Using participants from the same linguistic community, the authors demonstrate in 4 studies that metasemantic features of linguistic categories influence basic perceptual processes. More specifically, the hypothesis that abstract versus concrete language leads to a more global versus local perceptual focus was supported across 4 experiments, in which participants used (Exp…
Toward Understanding the Psychology of Reactions to Perceived Fairness
Language use and reification of social information
The present research addresses the interface of social cognition and the use of interpersonal language. Based on a linguistic category model proposed by Semin and Fiedler (1988), it is demonstrated that under different conditions language users tend to describe other people's behavior either in concrete and specific terms (descriptive or interpretive action verbs) or in abstract, dispositional terms (state verbs, adjectives) A two‐stage process i…
When Do We Communicate Stereotypes? Influence of the Social Context on the Linguistic Expectancy Bias
The linguistic expectancy bias (LEB) refers to the tendency to describe expectancy consistent information at a higher level of linguistic abstraction than expectancy inconsistent information. Two experiments examined the influence of the social communicative context on the production of this linguistic bias by manipulating the group membership of the actor in, and the recipient of, stereotypical information. Results supported the prediction that …
Unfolding the concept of person by verbal abuse
Examined the prevalence of an interpersonal device, namely insult types, in a collectivistic and individualistic cultural context as an index of how the concept of person is culturally constructed. Insults were divided into three general categories, individualistic (those that refer directly to a person), relational (those that refer to a person and his/her significant relations) and swear-words. An examination of the insults subjects produced in…
Insight Into Behavior Displayed During Deception
Journal Article Insight Into Behavior Displayed During Deception Get access Aldert Vrij, Aldert Vrij 1Aldert Vrij is a senior lecturer of social and legal psychology at the University of Portsmouth, United Kingdom Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar Gün R. Semin, Gün R. Semin 2Gun R. Semin is a professor of social psychology at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, The Netherlands Search for other works by this a…
The Battle of Words Between Gender Groups A Language-Based Approach to Intergroup Processes
Based on free descriptions of men and women by male and female respondents, a language approach to outgroup homogeneity and discrimination between gender groups is presented. Verbalizations elicited by 10 topic cues (eg., sexuality, education of children, and housework) were coded by valence (positive vs. negative), group reference (ingroup vs. outgroup), and the abstractness of the predicate (descriptive action verb, interpretive action verb, st…
The beholder beheld
The study reported in this paper is concerned with social emotions. These are defined as states which are experienced either exclusively or more intensively before a real or imagined audience. It is argued that when social emotions arise as a consequence of disrupting social rules, this is because the actor in question is aware of a discrepancy between his or her self‐image, which is assumed to be neutral, and the image which he or she assumes to…
Communication constraints on the linguistic intergroup bias
Differential contributions of linguistic factors to memory-based ratings
The systematic distortion hypothesis, which is based on a general cognitive bias contention for memory-based ratings of persons, does not account for functional differences between different types of linguistic form.A distinction between immediate terms (e.g., verbs, behaviors) and mediate terms (e.g., adjectives, traits) is offered.We argue that these linguistic forms fulfill different functions in the description of behaviors and persons.The hy…
Embodiment as a unifying perspective for psychology
Adaptive action is the function of cognition. It is constrained by the properties of evolved brains and bodies. An embodied perspective on social psychology examines how biological constrains give expression to human function in socially situated contexts. Key contributions in social psychology have highlighted the interface between the body and cognition, but theoretical development in social psychology and embodiment research remain largely dis…
Communication Patterns in Interdependent Relationships
Two studies were designed to investigate how the type of interdependence (cooperative vs. competitive) between a speaker and a recipient influences communicators' descriptions of positive and negative target behaviors. The target-addressee relationship was a positive one in the first study. It was expected that speakers in the cooperative condition would describe positive target behaviors in a more abstract way, whereas in the competitive conditi…
The “ins” and “outs” of person perception
Denying Psychological Properties of Girls and Prostitutes
This study examines the negative stereotypes of the category of women and their subcategories through the language of insults. Participants produced a list of epithets induced by the same hypothetical scenario in which the protagonist was presented either as a "prostitute" or as a "girl" (i.e., nonprostitute). Findings showed that the prostitute was addressed with taboo-related insults exaggerating sexual behavior, whereas the girl was mainly giv…
The generation of descriptive‐evaluative responses in scale answering behaviour
A model of subject behaviour in scale answering situations is derived, developed and illustrated empirically. The model allows for the possibility that a subject, faced with a request to describe how much of some attribute an object possesses, may internally represent either that object or some other. Additionally, it allows that he may give honest expression to his internal representation or modify so as to proffer a more ‚functional' descriptio…
Mach V
Two studies on polarization
The plausibility of the implausible
Snyder and Swann (1978) advance an argument that individuals display a cognitive bias in testing hypotheses about the personal attributes of other people, i.e. they seek out information which is supportive of their hypothesis (hypothesis‐confirming strategy). It is argued here that these authors confound the hypothesis a person might entertain (belief) with a hypothesis the person is asked to test (assigned task). The findings of two experimental…
A comparison of the common‐sense and ‘scientific’ conceptions of extroversion—introversion
From research on the organization of implicit personality theory, and on the fakability of psychometrically sophisticated scales a general argument about the conceptual overlap between implicit personality theory and ‘scientific’ theories of personality is developed. This is tested in the case of the common‐sense conception of extroversion—introversion, and that of Eysenck. The convergent validity of these two conceptions are found to be high eno…
The beholder beheld
The study reported in this paper is concerned with social emotions. These are defined as states which are experienced either exclusively or more intensively before a real or imagined audience. It is argued that when social emotions arise as a consequence of disrupting social rules, this is because the actor in question is aware of a discrepancy between his or her self‐image, which is assumed to be neutral, and the image which he or she assumes to…
Activation of bipolar prototypes in attribute inferences
The social implications of embarrassment displays and restitution behaviour
The present study examines the evaluative consequences of two kinds of reaction to committing a social transgression. In an experimental study, embarrassment display and restitution behaviour were manipulated orthogonally in the context of a videotaped incident in which an actor was seen to upset a sales display in a store. Subjects were shown one of the four versions of this incident and asked to rate the actor responsible for the mishap. It was…
The transparency of the sinner
The relationship between higher order models and everyday conceptions of personality
Two studies are reported. The first one is concerned with an examination of the degree to which higher order models of personality differ from everyday social representations of personality. The second study consists in an analysis of intersubjective variations in the organization of everyday personality theories through an examination of the semantic field in which trait terms are represented. It is argued that hypothetico‐deductive models of pe…
Differential contributions of linguistic factors to memory-based ratings
The systematic distortion hypothesis, which is based on a general cognitive bias contention for memory-based ratings of persons, does not account for functional differences between different types of linguistic form.A distinction between immediate terms (e.g., verbs, behaviors) and mediate terms (e.g., adjectives, traits) is offered.We argue that these linguistic forms fulfill different functions in the description of behaviors and persons.The hy…
Lay conceptions of personality
Two studies are reported which examine the availability of scientific propositions of personality in lay conceptions of personality. It is argued from a social constructivist perspective that models of personality must derive from and refer to lay conceptions of persons. Eysenck's trait‐type model of introversion‐extraversion, containing specific propositions about phenotypic and genotypic differences between extraverts and introverts, was utiliz…
The cognitive functions of linguistic categories in describing persons
Three studies examined the cognitive implications of linguistic categories in the interpersonal domain. On the basis of conceptual and linguistic criteria, we advance a four-level classification that distinguishes between verbs and adjectives in the interpersonal domain. These four levels (in terms of increasing abstractness) are descriptive action verbs, interpretive action verbs, state verbs, and adjectives. Results from the first two studies r…
Was gibt es Neues? A Sampler of German Social Psychology
Language use and reification of social information
The present research addresses the interface of social cognition and the use of interpersonal language. Based on a linguistic category model proposed by Semin and Fiedler (1988), it is demonstrated that under different conditions language users tend to describe other people's behavior either in concrete and specific terms (descriptive or interpretive action verbs) or in abstract, dispositional terms (state verbs, adjectives) A two‐stage process i…
The contribution of linguistic factors to attribute inferences and semantic similarity judgements
Two studies are reported which examine the contribution of linguistic factors to attribute inferences and semantic similarity judgements. For this purpose a new method is developed which allows us to examine the contribution of language as a symbolically shared system. The two studies show that a substantial amount of the variance in both attribute inferences and semantic similarity judgements is mediated by socially shared linguistic conventions…
Relocating attributional phenomena within a language‐cognition interface
Two studies are reported which apply a language based model to the actor‐observer domain in attribution theory. This model distinguishes between four classes of interpersonal terms (descriptive action verbs, interpretive action verbs, state verbs, and adjectives) that have been shown to mediate different cognitive inferences. An adaptation of this language based model suggests that actor‐observer differences can be understood as differential lang…
On genetic social psychology
Language use in intergroup contexts
Three experiments examine how the type of language used to describe in-group and out-group behaviors contributes to the transmission and persistence of social stereotypes.Two experiments tested the hypothesis that people encode and communicate desirable in-group and undesirable out-group behaviors more abstractly than undesirable in-group and desirable out-group behaviors.Experiment 1 provided strong support for this hypothesis using a fixed-resp…
Unfolding the concept of person by verbal abuse
Examined the prevalence of an interpersonal device, namely insult types, in a collectivistic and individualistic cultural context as an index of how the concept of person is culturally constructed. Insults were divided into three general categories, individualistic (those that refer directly to a person), relational (those that refer to a person and his/her significant relations) and swear-words. An examination of the insults subjects produced in…
The Linguistic Category Model, its Bases, Applications and Range
A model of interpersonal terms (verbs and adjectives) is reviewed in terms of the research on: (a) the systematic cognitive inferences these terms mediate, and (b) the implications of this model for social cognitive processes as it is applied in different domains such as attribution processes and intergroup relations
Everyday Understanding
Founded in 1974, the Canadian Journal of Communication (CJC) aims to publish Canadian research and scholarship in the field of communication studies. The purview of the journal is the entire field of communication studies as practiced in Canada or with relevance to Canada
The Battle of Words Between Gender Groups A Language-Based Approach to Intergroup Processes
Based on free descriptions of men and women by male and female respondents, a language approach to outgroup homogeneity and discrimination between gender groups is presented. Verbalizations elicited by 10 topic cues (eg., sexuality, education of children, and housework) were coded by valence (positive vs. negative), group reference (ingroup vs. outgroup), and the abstractness of the predicate (descriptive action verb, interpretive action verb, st…
"Multiple inference-inviting properties" of interpersonal verbs
The properties of interpersonal verbs (e.g., help, dislike, etc.) that systematically influence «implicit causality» are analyzed in 3 studies. It is argued that interpersonal verbs have a set of properties (multiple inference-inviting properties [MIIPs]) that are differentially elicited as a function of the type of property primed by the type of inference request
Does Adolescents' Sexual Behaviour Affect their Sexual Attitudes
The longitudinal study reported here examines the relationship between adolescents' sexual experience and their orientations towards sexual issues (e.g., attitudes towards sexual permissiveness, their preferred courtship styles, inter alia). The hypothesis under examination was whether sexual experience influences orientations towards sexual issues. To this end we utilised a random sample of 244 adolescents stratified by area and interviewed twic…
Psychology (67 works) · Social Psychology (56 works) · Cognitive psychology (48 works) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (25 works) · Language, Metaphor, and Cognition (24 works) · Linguistics (23 works) · Social and Intergroup Psychology (23 works) · Social Psychology (21 works) · Cognition (16 works) · Computer Science (16 works)