Karen A. Cerulo (born January 25, 1957, in Perth Amboy, New Jersey) is an American sociologist specializing in the study of culture, communication and cognition.
In 2012, she won the university's "Scholar-Teacher Award",[10] an honor bestowed on faculty persons who have made outstanding contributions in both research and teaching.
the ways in which colors and shapes are combined in visual images or notes, sounds, odors or words are temporally sequenced in musical, olfactory or verbal messages.
Cerulo argues that structure, like content, carries meaning for those creating and receiving symbol based messages.
Cerulo unfolds this agenda in several articles[11][12][13][14][15][16] and two of her books: Identity Designs: The Sights and Sounds of a Nation[17] and Deciphering Violence: The Cognitive Structure of Right and Wrong.
Contextual factors such as cultural heterogeneity, political or social stability, existing power structures, dominant systems of economic exchange, professional norms of expression, the nature of social ties, or levels of "collective focus" are all associated with certain variants of symbolic structure.
[21][22][23]) Some describe Cerulo's work on symbolic communication as a "demonstration of research ingenuity,"[24] one that "makes important contributions to debates about meaning and measurement.
[27][15][28][16][29][30] For example, her measures of musical structure capture elements of melodic, harmonic and rhythmic motion, ornamentation and dissonance.
As a result, Cerulo's measures make cultural objects such as paintings, logos, anthems, songs, even perfumes accessible sources of social science data, amenable to the field's most rigorous analytic methods.
In it, she builds on two cognitive scientific ideas, prototyping and graded membership, to explain a sociocultural phenomenon she calls "positive asymmetry"—i.e.
Most communities maintain cultural practices (what she calls "eclipsing", "clouding" and "recasting") that background materials dealing with worst-cases or negative concepts.
"[50] She suggests that the cultural practices associated with positive asymmetry harness the brain's propensity toward asymmetrical thinking.
The practices take the mechanic of human brain operations and encode that process into a much more targeted and specialized experiential bias.
Organizations expert Karl Weick says of the book, "This book is a welcome addition to an already growing literature on worst cases … What Cerulo adds to this mix is a mechanism, a catalog of cultural practices that make it difficult for people to envision the worst, a broader range of settings in which this imbalance plays out, initial efforts to characterize settings where negative symmetry is acceptable and encouraged, insistence that the unique details of worst cases are what is important, and a solid grounding at the individual level of analysis with the cognitive principle of 'graded membership'.
"[50] Journalist Barbara Ehrenreich called the book "remarkable" as it "recounts a number of ways that the habit of positive thinking … undermined preparedness and invited disaster.
By exploring people's future imaginings, Cerulo and Ruane uncover a new dimension of inequality—inequality ingrained in mind and body well before action or outcome unfold.