A systematic examination of Barbie fashions, accessories, and playsets produced since 1959 reveals several distinct phases in the domestic symbolism associated with Barbie. Today, Barbie grocery shops, cleans house, cares for her young siblings, and assumes careers which fill nurturing and protective roles like those championed in traditional domestic ideology. Yet in the late 1950s, Barbie was...

Introduction Few things influence us as much as colour and few things engage and interest people as much as colour. Colour plays an essential role in the environment in which we live, whether it is at our place of work, in the public environment or in our home. To choose the right colour is necessary to attain the desired effect in colouring and design, both in the colouring of our environment ...

The theory of relativity (1) is considered form a perspective of folklore. Abstracted entities in the theory of relativity are stripped of units in order to provide explanation, to expose an ordinary meaning that employs a fulcrum for visual description. It is suggested that components of the theory‟s construction are not only unusually compatible with the religious and spiritual but are also u...

Although numerous examples of sound symbolism exist in spoken language, little is known about whether listeners recognize and utilize these non-arbitrary relationships between sound and meaning to guide their interpretation of novel words. The present experiments examined the extent to which listeners are able to constrain meaning solely on the basis of the segmental sound structure of language...

How informed is a Latino vote? Though recent scholarship has improved our understanding of Latino political participation, partisanship, and policy preferences, relatively little is known about how Hispanics make electoral decisions. In this effort, we evaluate the role policy issues, candidate affect, and symbolism play in the electoral choices of Latino voters. In particular, we are intereste...

The intelligence community (IC) is asked to predict outcomes that may often be inherently unpredictable-and is blamed for the inevitable forecasting failures, be they false positives or false negatives. To move beyond blame games of accountability ping-pong that incentivize bureaucratic symbolism over substantive reform, it is necessary to reach bipartisan agreements on performance indicators t...