The effect of race,sex, and career goal differences on sex role attitudes at home and at work

Male and female blacks and whites whose career goals differed as to sex role stereotypy were administered two sex role inventories. One measured attitudes toward women's expanding sex roles in the home/personal environment, while the other measured sex role attitudes in the working environment. The major finding of the present study is that black women had more traditional sex role attitudes in the home environment than white women but the same sex role attitudes about working, whereas both black and white women were more liberal in their sex role attitudes in both environments than black and white men.     

Context effects on the perceived physical attractiveness of faces

Four experiments were conducted to study the nature of context effects on the perceived physical attractiveness of faces. In Experiment 1, photos of faces scaled on attractiveness were presented in sets of three, with target faces appearing in the middle flanked by two context faces. The target faces were of average attractiveness, with the context faces being either high, average, or low in attractiveness. The effect of the context was one of assimilation, rather than contrast, regardless of whether the persons in the photos were portrayed to be associated. This result was interpreted in terms of a “generalized halo effect” for judgments of the physical attractiveness of stimuli within a group. Presenting the persons of a set as friends enhanced the perceived attractiveness of the target face but only when the context did not contain a face of low attractiveness. In Experiment 2, the assimilation effect was observed to carry over to influence ratings of the target faces several minutes after the context faces had been removed. Experiment 3 showed the assimilation effect to be robust regardless of whether the context was composed of two faces or one, but Experiment 4 showed the assimilation effect to be evident only when the context faces were presented simultaneously with the target.     

The effects of censorship and attractiveness of the censor on attitude change

The effects of censoring a communication, overriding the censor, and the attractiveness of the censor on the potential audience's attitude and desire to hear the communication were studied. Subjects were told that a speech which they were to have heard had been censored by a positively, negatively, or neutrally evaluated group. Some subjects were told that the experimenter had decided to override the censor and that they would hear the communication. Other subjects were told they would not hear the censored communication. The results indicated that censorship, regardless of the attractiveness of the censor, caused the potential audience to change their attitudes toward the position to be advocated by the communication and to increase their desire to hear that communication. These effects were interpreted as resulting from the arousal of psychological reactance. When the censor was overriden and the audience felt that they would hear the communication, their desire to hear it decreased. Further, subjects who had been told that a positively evaluated group had censored the speech changed their attitudes away from the position to be advocated by the communication while subjects who believed that a negative group had censored the speech changed their attitudes toward the position of the communication. These results were interpreted as evidence of cognitive balancing.     

Developmental changes in memory: The effects of processing time and rehearsal instructions

An overt rehearsal procedure was used to investigate the relationship between children's rehearsal strategies and free recall performance. Previous work has shown that developmental differences in rehearsal content, rather than rehearsal frequency, affect recall performance. This experiment investigated the effects of increased processing time and rehearsal training upon recall. Third-grade girls (age 8) were able to use additional processing time to increase the activity of their rehearsal, and they showed corresponding improvement in recall. In contrast, third-grade boys (age 8) and sixth-grade boys and girls (age 12) did not take advantage of a slower presentation rate to rehearse more actively, and their recall did not change. Further, even without additional processing time, both the third-grade boys and girls were able to use an instructed active rehearsal strategy to facilitate their recall. The direct manipulation of rehearsal activity and the resulting improvement in recall provide experimental support for the proposed relationship between rehearsal content and recall from long-term memory store.     

Exposure effects in person perception: Familiarity,similarity, and attraction

Two experiments explored the relationship between familiarity, similarity, and attraction. In the first experiment, subjects viewed photographs of faces at various exposure frequencies and then rated them for likeableness and similarity. Familiar people were regarded by the subjects as both more likeable and more similar to themselves. The effects of familiarity on perceived similarity were primarily mediated by changes in attraction, although some evidence of a direct link between familiarity and perceived similarity was also found. In the second experiment, subjects viewed the same stimuli at a single exposure frequency, and received bogus information regarding the similarity of the people shown therein. Subsequent ratings of likeableness and perceived familiarity revealed that people who seemed similar to the subjects were regarded as both more likeable and more familiar. The effects of similarity on perceived familiarity were almost entirely mediated by changes in attraction. Some of the theoretical implications of these findings are discussed.     

The sex by race interaction in cognitive measures

Data consisting of 79 cognitive measures from Project TALENT for 100,000 white and black high school students have been analyzed for possible race by sex interactions. Control variables included geographical area, grade in high school, and socio-economic class. Race by sex interactions are largest when socioeconomic class is controlled and are highly related to the size of the main effect of sex as well. White boys and girls differ more than black boys and girls whether the overall sex difference favors males or females. Sex by grade and, to a lesser extent, sex by area interactions were also moderately large and consistent with the size of the main effect of sex. Since there are no consistent relationships with other main effects, and since the measures producing sex differences also tend to produce the interactions, it is concluded that sex differences and the interactions with sex share the same causes. Differences between these results and those of Jensen are also discussed.     

Some effects of attitudinal similarity and exposure on attraction and aggression

Previous research investigating the relationship of attraction and aggression has yielded somewhat equivocal results. The present study investigated the influence of two variables, attitudinal similarity and exposure, on interpersonal attraction and physical aggression. Fifty-four subjects received differential exposure to another individual and were later given information concerning this individual's attitudes. The subject's attraction toward the stimulus person was assessed followed by measures of aggression toward the stimulus person. Analysis of variance indicated that an attitudinally similar other was liked significantly more (p < .01) and aggressed against significantly less (p < .05) than an attitudinally dissimilar other. The exposure variable had no main effect on either attraction or aggression but interacted significantly (p < .05) with the attitudinal variable in producing differential attraction.     

Active selection of items to be remembered: The role of timing

A series of experiments was carried out in which Ss were required to extract critical stimuli from a stream of nine spoken inputs, presented at various rates, and report on these after the presentation of each list. The critical items were normally digits at positions 2, 4, 6, and 8 in the input sequence. Subjects were required to employ either an “active” extraction strategy, aimed at achieving temporary storage only of items to be remembered, or a “passive” strategy, involving storage of all inputs with subsequent extraction of critical items. The initial experiment showed that the active strategy markedly improved performance efficiency as the presentation rate decreased; passive performance remained relatively stable. Experiments 2 and 3 indicated that the level of active performance was higher when critical items were categorically different from unwanted items. There were indications that this effect was independent of the effect of changes in the presentation rate.The final experiments in the series showed that when Ss were denied the opportunity of predicting the time of arrival of critical items active performance hardly benefitted from a reduction in rate.A “controlled activation” process is proposed as a basis for S's ability to modulate his state of alertness, so as to maximize receptivity for critical stimuli arriving at well-defined points in time.     

Effects of sex of subject,sex of stimulus cue,and androgyny level on evaluations in work situations which evoke sex role stereotypes

This study examined the differential evaluation of male and female stimulus cues and the effect of subject's androgyny level on their evaluations. Male and female college students filled out the Bem Sex Role Inventory (1974) and responded to set of five in-basket tasks taken from the Rosen, Jerdee, and Prestwich (1975) study of male managers. Sex of subject, sex of stimulus cue in the in-basket tasks, and androgyny level were varied in a series of 2 X 2 X 3 analyses of variance. On some tasks, male and/or female subjects responded in a sex role stereotyped manner. There were no effects for androgyny level. The discussion focused on circumstances under which stereotyping occurs and implications of the study.     

Some effects of task relevance and friendship on helping: You don't always help the one you like

It was hypothesized that being outperformed on a task that is relevant to one's self-definition is threatening to self-esteem, and that this threat is greater when one is outperformed by a friend rather than by a stranger. When another's performance threatens self-esteem, persons will be less likely to help the other by making the task easy. To test these hypotheses, 52 friendship pairs participated with strangers in a word identification task described either as a measure of important skills (high relevance) or as a game (low relevance). Participants chose clues for both a friend and a stranger to use in identifying target words. As predicted, they gave harder clues under high-relevance than under low-relevance conditions. Moreover, they gave harder clues to strangers than to friends under low-relevance conditions, but gave harder clues to friends than to strangers under high-relevance conditions.     

The effect of training procedures on the overlearning reversal effect in young children

The performance of 80 preschool children on a reversal problem was studied as a function of amount of training and type of training procedure used during acquisition and reversal. In the extinction phase of reversal learning, subjects given a correction procedure during the reversal problem made fewer perseverative errors than subjects given noncorrection. In the reversal midplateau phase of reversal learning, overtraining facilitated reversal learning for subjects receiving noncorrection during the acquistion problem, but not for subjects receiving correction. A shift in training procedure between acquisition and reversal increased the number of subjects who reached criterion immediately after perseveration. Since these results are difficult to explain in terms of traditional learning theories, an alternative response-switching strategy explanation was proposed.     

Age differences in organization and recall: The effects of training in categorization

An alternating sort/recall task was employed to train fourth graders and college students in organizational strategies. Free-sorting Ss, at both age levels, sorted a group of words into two to seven categories. Analyses of final sorting patterns indicated reliable differences between the children and adults. The organizational schemes thus developed by the free-sorting Ss were taught, by means of a yoking procedure, to other Ss. Results indicated that the recall of fourth graders was improved when they were forced to learn the sorting patterns developed by the older Ss. Similarly, impairment in the recall of college students was observed when they were required to sort according to the organization employed by the fourth graders. These findings imply that changes in organization can result in changes in recall performance.     

Peripheral vision: The effects of developmental,perceptual, and cognitive factors

The effects of perceptual and cognitive factors on information processing in the visual periphery were studied in 5- and 8-year-old children and in adults. Subjects judged either the similarity (Study 1) or the identity (Study 2) of geometric forms. In both studies, two forms were simultaneously presented for 20 msec at 2, 4, or 6°, with one form on either side of the fovea. Type of form and Axis of presentation were varied. Both studies demonstrated declining performance with increasing distance, poorer performance with open than closed forms, poorest performance along the vertical axis, and no major interaction of these factors with age. Greater “flattening” of the visual field was found in Study 2 than in Study 1 for all age groups. The results indicate that the parafoveal visual field is elliptical and that more difficult tasks accentuate this asymmetry. This effect of task demands on the relative flatness of the effective visual field cannot be interpreted on the basis of anatomical factors. The findings indicated striking developmental similarity in the effect of several variables on parafoveal processing and challenge the idea of greater tunnel vision in preschoolers than in adults. Further, the data suggest that perceptual and cognitive factors influence the size and shape of the effective visual field across the full age range studied.     

Development of classification: The use of similarity and dimensional relations

Findings about perceptual development indicate that overall similarity is the primary perceptual relation by which young children compare complex objects. Traditional studies of classification, however, did not focus on children's organizational use of holistic relations but rather on their ability to classify by dimensions or criterial attributes. The results from such traditional studies suggest that young children are deficient classifiers. The present research investigated the possibility, contrary to the traditional view, that 4- to 6-year-old children are competent and systematic classifiers at least by overall similarity. In three experiments, preschoolers and kindergarteners classified various sets of multidimensional stimuli that could be organized into categories by overall similarity or by dimensional attributes. Consistent with the research in perceptual development, the children were highly attentive to overall similarity. However, the preschoolers in particular showed marked difficulty in using this relation to form categories of more than two objects. The children's difficulties were highly reminiscent of traditional claims about early classification. Analyses of the classification strategies used by the children, however, suggest that even the youngest children understood the purpose of a classification. The developmentla changes appear to be in the ability to execute a classification. Importantly, type of classification strategy was independent of type of category organization. Individual children used the same strategies both when classifying by overall similarity and by dimensional attributes. These results strongly suggest that it is the classification skills themselves, and not just the ability to classify by particular relations, that change with age.     

The ability for dimensional analysis in preschool and retarded children: evidence from comparison, conservation, and prediction tasks

Previous findings of a developmental trend from holistic to analytic modes of processing yield to two possible interpretations—the ability to analyze into dimensions increases with age, or a production deficiency for the strategy of analyzing decreases with age. In the three studies reported here an attempt is made to elucidate which of these interpretations is the more correct by investigating the performance of preschoolers and retarded children in three tasks, all of which require dimensional analysis. The three tasks involve (a) same-different comparisons of selected dimensions of stimuli, (b) judgments of whether dimensions are conserved through transformations of objects, and (c) predictions of the outcomes of transformations that selectively modify dimensions of objects. Normal 3-year-old children and mildly retarded preadolescents make many errors on all three tasks and the patterns of these errors are predictable from holistic processing. Older groups of normal preschoolers, 4.5 to 5 years old, perform very well on the tasks, although they show some hints of remaining analytic deficits. It seems likely that the ability to analyze does undergo development in the preschool years, but that the production-deficiency interpretation also has merit, particularly for explaining developmental trends within the elementary school range.     

Generality of persistence: The role of stimulus and response factors in persistence to punishment

Previous research has shown that intermittent punishment of a response increases its persistence to continuous punishment and that intermittent punishment training in one situation produces persistence to continuous punishment in other situations. Experiment 1 showed that as long as the instrumental response and punishing stimulus were held constant from intermittent to continuous punishment marked differences between these situations had no decremental effect on persistence. Experiment 2 showed that intermittent punishment training of one response resulted in substantial persistence to continuous punishment of a different and apparently incompatible response and that such response change had no more than a marginal effect on persistence. The results were seen as requiring some revision to the traditional conditioning-model interpretation of persistence to punishment.