Online dating is a growing social phenomenon that has evolved from a controversial practice to a relatively accepted method of seeking a significant other. Online dating typically consists of individuals subscribing to a chosen website designed to facilitate relationship establishment, creating a profile, and then actively seeking other participants with the traits they desire in a mate. The process can be complex, and those who are involved are at risk of being deceived by dating prospects. As individuals create their profile, they make a choice of whether they want to portray their actual self or their ideal self. It is up to the other participants with whom they communicate to determine if they are being honest or not, and weigh the importance of this information. With this known risk, individuals still find the motivation to participate in online dating. The purpose here is to understand these motivations from a sociological perspective, and in doing this, Cooley and Durkheim are being applied. Cooley is relevant to the distinction between the ideal and actual self, and how our connection to groups relates to online dating, while Durkheim is applied to the dynamics of the online dating community as a whole, specifically what keeps people involved in this behavior. Additionally, these concepts aid in describing the structure of the online dating society itself.
College of Arts & SciencesAcademic DepartmentsPsychology, Sociology & Criminal JusticePsychology, Sociology and Criminal Justice ResearchPsychology, Sociology and Criminal Justice Research
Throughout history societies have had crime, and punishments for them. Societies have also had the unfortunate habit of ostracizing those convicted of crimes that are consider especially heinous and deplorable. One group of criminals is that is particularly looked down upon is sexual offenders. The very term makes those around shake their head is disgust and instills fear into the hearts of parents. What is even more unfortunate than society’s ability to ostracize is the fact that many times we do so without proper knowledge. People react based solely upon immediate visceral and emotional reactions. The aim of this paper is to take a deeper look into the current punishments for those convicted of a sexual offense, and whether these punishments socially isolate them. By utilizing theories from Charles Horton Cooley and Emile Durkheim, in concert with an interview with a local registered sexual offender the cause and consequence of the legislation in place will be examined.
Typically speaking, eating disorders are viewed as a psychological problem caused by external social forces, however there is a double standard when a male jockey has an eating disorder as opposed to an adolescent female. Females strive to keep their weight low due to distorted views of their body and consequently applied with the stigma of being an anorexic or bulimic. On the other hand, jockeys are striving to keep their weight down in order to maintain the lowest weight possible so they can race horses. It has become a socially acceptable act in the world of horse racing to abuse one’s body by means of starvation, purging, sauna abuse, or drug abuse. This receives a double standard because this exposed phenomenon is expected out of jockeys. Teenage girls prefer to keep their disordered eating a secret; thus it is viewed as a psychological problem that requires help. Help is not an option for jockeys, because their behavior is acceptable; it is either keep the weight down or never race again. Jockeys view their behavior as an occupational necessity and they understand it must be done. Furthermore, ideologies from classical social theorists Emile Durkheim and Charles Horton Cooley can be applied to explain the nature of this behavior. Durkheim’s ideas about social facts, solidarity, and the collective conscience all contribute the group dynamic amongst jockeys with eating disorders. Additionally, Cooley’s ideas about the looking glass self and of primary groups provide an additional explanation for the behavior of the jockeys.
Extensive work has shown that stress exerts a profound, yet complex, influence on learning and memory and can enhance, impair or have no effect on these processes. Two factors that mediate this complexity are the temporal proximity of the stressor to the learning experience and the emotional nature of the to-be-learned information. We have examined the differential effects of brief stress on the learning and memory of emotional and non-emotional words when the stress was administered immediately before learning versus when it was administered 30 min before learning. Seventy-two undergraduate students were randomly assigned to stress or no stress conditions. Participants in the stress conditions were exposed to a socially evaluated cold pressor test; they submerged their dominant hands in a bath of ice cold (0-2°C) water for 3 min while being stared at by a confederate of the opposite sex and believing that they were being videotaped. Participants in the no stress conditions submerged their dominant hands in a bath of warm (35-37°C) water for 3 min. All participants rated the painfulness and stressfulness of the water bath manipulation. Either immediately (Exp 1) or 30 minutes (Exp 2) after water bath exposure, participants were presented with a list of 30 words (10 neutral, 10 positive, 10 negative); they read each word aloud and rated its emotional valence. Saliva samples and cardiovascular measurements were collected throughout the session to verify the induction of a physiological stress response. Twenty-four hours following exposure to the list of words, participants returned to the laboratory and completed free recall and recognition tests. In both experiments, stressed participants exhibited significantly greater blood pressure, salivary cortisol levels, and subjective pain and stress ratings of the water bath manipulation. Stress applied immediately prior to learning (Exp 1) significantly enhanced the recognition of positive words, while stress applied 30 min prior to learning (Exp 2) significantly impaired free recall of negative words. In contrast to the effects observed in Exp 1, the deleterious effects of stress observed in Exp 2 were associated with participants’ cortisol and blood pressure levels. These findings support previous human research by demonstrating that stress has a greater effect on the acquisition and consolidation of emotional information, implicating the involvement of amygdala-induced modulation of hippocampal function in such effects. They also lend insight into the differential effects that acute stress may exert on learning and memory depending on the temporal proximity of the stressor to the learning experience.
The way in which individuals communicate has always been an important part of attaining any understanding of social order or progress. This statement is extremely important in itself, because whether we conceptualize order or progress, according to the power struggles of economics asserted by Marx, the development of social solidarity as argued by Durkheim, or the description of self and society as “twin-born”, as Cooley and Mead contend, all social facts seem to arise in conjunction with, or as a function of, communication. It may be reasonable to assume that nearly every aspect of sociological theory can be elaborated and built upon by considering the differing modes of communication. Of utmost importance in this paper is the manifestation of modern social communication in today’s virtual technologies. Important apparatuses here are the mediums of the Internet, as well as others, which are increasingly implicated in social life. Specifically, my direction in this paper seeks to discover if modern communications technologies bring individuals together as often stated, or on the other hand, if they produce an isolation and domination over the masses. Issues will circle around the friendship communities of Facebook and Myspace, prepackaged anagramic dialogue in text messaging (i.e. lol, omg, and others), deviant Internet groups and communities, advertising, etc. All these issues will be approached from a largely theoretical background in hopes of creating a structured theoretical springboard for further empirical testing, and will center around the theories of Marx, Durkheim, Cooley and Mead, Weber, and possible others.
World of Warcraft (WoW) is a Massive Multi-Player Online Role Playing Game (MMORPG) that has created a virtual reality free of prejudices and stereotypes based on handicap, education levels, socioeconomic levels, religions, age, or sexual orientation. The game has become the great equalizer that destroys the barriers created by real-life differences and classifications. There are races in game, but not the same races that we know in the real world. Instead, this world is full of Trolls, Taurens, Dwarves, Undead, and Draenei. While there are classes, something like occupations within the game, they are nothing like real life occupations. Even though WoW has shown that, even in a virtual society, people create stereotypes based on defining characteristics, neither race nor class are the same as in the real world, with their own stereotypes and assumptions based solely on play in game and not external factors. The only real world defining characteristic that is in-game is gender. In a virtual world where real life distinctions are blurred, the only transition to the virtual self is gender, and the only stereotypes that are the same in both worlds, the virtual and the real, is gender. While caricatures are an integral part in understanding Goffman’s theory on the self, even escapism, such as when one plays an online role-playing game, has some basis in the prevalent social structures, especially when related to gender roles in WoW.
Sex is a biological need that must be satisfied, just like drinking when one is thirsty or eating when one is hungry. It is something that causes some populations to explode and others to dwindle. In the beginning, sex was taboo and rarely spoken of, but today, it is thrown in society’s face through the marketing and entertainment industry. With sex playing a much more open role in society it has become a major aspect of identity. Both men and women find themselves affected by sex in today’s world, but women seem to feel its effects more so then men. These effects both take place on the positive and negative end of the spectrum. This paper uses post-modernism, the cybernetic identity model (Burke and Reitzes 1981; Burke 1991), and works on emotional labor (Hochschild 1983) to evaluate the consequences of living in a sexual society.
Throughout the past, much research has been done to examine and explain adult sex offenders. On the other hand, very little research has been conducted to explain what causes a juvenile to become a sexual offender. By incorporating the research that has been done on juveniles, this paper is designed to use psychological and sociological theories to explain the possible reasons for why a juvenile might become a sex offender. Many juvenile sex offenders have a history of abuse, of feeling powerless, of not caring about punishment, and a general lack of empathy. One can explain their behavior through Mead’s theory of the self where the juvenile tends to put more focus on the “I,” rather than the “me” (Mead 1934). Similarly, using Freud’s theory, one could argue that the juvenile sex offender tends to focus more on his id impulses, rather than on the ego or superego. Sociologically speaking, the concept of self-efficacy (Gecas 1982) is key to explaining the juvenile sex offender, as is Gottfredson’s and Hirschi’s General Theory of Crime. Using these theories, one can argue the lack of self-control a juvenile has could cause the youth to offend, as well as provide possible reasons for this lack of self-control.
