There were two questions, one based on a more brutal depiction than the other. The independent variables were gender, ethnicity, and a question with two levels of brutality. The dependant variable was the participants rating of the severity of punishment. There was a marginal interaction of gender and ethnicity on the rating of penalization. Female participants tended to rate the punishment more harshly depending on their ethnicity than did male participants.
Findings imply that gender and ethnicity affect how people want to punish criminals.
Although similar in emotional content, release from PI should occur if these two dimensions constitute separable semantic dimensions. Furthermore, bilinguals might not respond as robustly to the semantic differences as native English speakers since the lexical-semantic mapping is less fluent. Forty university students were given trials from one emotional pole and a fourth trial using words from the opposite emotional pole. There was a 30 second distraction period between memorization and recall. Proactive interference occurred with the semantic switch, however, there was no interaction or main effect for language background.