Women's and men's willingness to self-disclose to therapists and friends: The moderating influence of instrumental,expressive, masculine,and feminine topics

The present study used the Masculine and Feminine Self-Disclosure Scale to investigate women's and men's willingness to self-disclose about the instrumental, expressive, masculine, and feminine aspects of themselves to four target persons: female and male therapists and friends. The data revealed that women's and men's willingness to self-disclose to therapists and friends was tempered by the gender of the target person and the particular “masculine” and “feminine” content of the disclosure topic. Men were more willing than women to discuss the global masculine aspects of themselves with a male friend. In contrast, women were more willing than men to discuss (1) their expressive behaviors with both female and male friends and (2) their global feminity with female and male therapists and friends. The discussion emphasizes gender role phenomena as an important dimension of women's and men's willingness to disclose personal information about their masculinity and femininity to therapists and friends.     

Psychological Masculinity amid Femininity: Relationship to Striving and Self-Concept in the Achievement and Interpersonal Domains

The relative influences of gender and individual differences in psychological masculinity and femininity on the achievement and interpersonal strivings, abilities, and self-concepts of 176 male and female college students were investigated. The results indicate that psychological masculinity and femininity are better predictors of strivings and self-concepts in the achievement and interpersonal domains than gender. Only with respect to subjects' expected and ideal financial responsibilities, an area which is governed by strong societal sex role norms, does the influence of gender surpass that of psychological masculinity and femininity. The results are discussed in terms of the personality strengths and social competencies that derive from masculine and feminine personality traits.     

性别角色和主观幸福感的关系模型：基于中国大学生的检验

在西方文化下,关于理想的性别角色类型主要存在三种观点：一致性模型、双性化模型、男性化模型。按照一致性模型,具有男性化特质的男性和具有女性化特质的女性是最为理想的;按照双性化模型,在男性化特质和女性化特质两个维度上得分都高的个体社会适应性最强而且心理最健康;按照男性化模型,男性化特质才是心理健康和社会适应的主要决定因素。研究运用大样本的网络数据,探讨在中国文化下,上述三个模型在中国的适用性,具体地,在性别角色类型和主观幸福感的关系上的适用性。结果发现：双性化模型得到支持,同时具有男性化特质和女性化特质的个体主观幸福感最高;男性化模型和一致性模型都没有得到支持。这表明在当代西方文化下的理想模型——男性化模型并不适用于中国,理想的性别角色模型具有文化特异性。这一结果不仅增进和丰富了人们对文化对心理和行为的影响的认识,还对我国目前青少年良好个性品质的塑造和培养以及心理健康教育的实践具有重要指导作用     

Blazing and Illuminating a Trail: The Career and Scholarship of Janet Taylor Spence

Janet Taylor Spence was a gender pioneer in her career as an academic psychologist and an important contributor to the psychological study of gender roles. That is, she both blazed a path for women in academia and contributed to our scientific understanding of the factors that produce and shape such paths. In this piece, I address both these aspects of her life and work. I begin by briefly highlighting Spence’s groundbreaking posts in academia and her influence on my own academic career. With respect to her research, I identify five aspects of Spence’s work that were innovative and made important, lasting contributions to theoretical and empirical approaches to understanding gender in the United States. I first describe Spence’s commitment to challenging the ideological beliefs about gender held by laypeople and scientists alike by engaging in empirical tests of commonly held beliefs. I next review Spence’s argument that within-individual variability of gender-typing of the self is normative rather than unusual. Third, I describe Spence’s beliefs about the relation between gender-typing of the self and gender-typing of others, and fourth, I describe Spence’s work concerning the mechanisms that support self-perceived femininity and masculinity. In the fifth and final section, I highlight Spence’s treatment of environmental contributions to gender role development.     

INSTRUMENTAL AND EXPRESSIVE TRAITS, TRAIT STEREOTYPES, AND SEXIST ATTITUDES What Do They Signify?

College students rated die typical male and female student and themselves on 22 instrumental (I) and 16 expressive (E) items from the PAQ (Spence & Helmreich, 1978) and the BSRI (Bern, 1974), as well as on the BSRI items "masculine" and "feminine." They also completed measures of gender stereotypes and sexist attitudes. Significant gender stereotypes were found on all but two I and E items in both genders. Significant gender differences in self-report were found on all the E items but on only 41% of the I items, confirming our hypotheses that societal changes have led women to develop more agentic self-conceptions. The pattern of relationships found between the self-report, stereotype, and attitude measures supports the utility of a multidimensional approach to gender. Responses to the items "masculine" and "feminine" confirm the implications of our hypothesis that these items primarily assess men's and women's basic sense of gender identity.     

男性化与女性化对面孔偏好的影响—— 基于图像处理技术和眼动的检验

采用图像处理技术和眼动探讨了性别二态线索对面孔偏好的影响。实验1发现非面孔线索未掩蔽和掩蔽时, 感知男性化技术与原始照片条件下女性化的男性面孔更有吸引力和信任度; 性别二态技术条件下, 非面孔线索未掩蔽时男性化的男性面孔更有吸引力和信任度。实验2表明被试对男性面孔的平均瞳孔大小和注视次数均大于和多于女性面孔, 首次注视时间短于女性面孔; 被试对男性化面孔的首次注视时间和首次注视持续时间均长于女性化面孔。     

In the Eye of the Beholder: Knowledge that a Man is Gay Promotes American College Students’ Attributions of Cross-Gender Characteristics

In this study, we examine whether an actual (rather than hypothetical) man being labeled “gay” either by himself or by another influences American (US) undergraduates’ attributions of the man’s masculinity, femininity, and likeability, replicating (with refinements) a similar study from the 1970s. One hundred ninety-two male and 591 female undergraduates, almost exclusively white, in Kentucky observed two gender-typical white men (one very masculine and the other of average masculinity, both low in femininity, both gay) play a word game on videotape; prior to playing, each man labeled either himself or the other man as either gay or adopted. Male participants rated the men as less masculine and more feminine than female participants, but the label used did not differentially influence male and female participants. Both male and female participants rated each man less masculine and more feminine when labeled gay than when the other man was labeled gay, and rated the more masculine man less masculine and more feminine when labeled gay than when labeled adopted. Whether either man was labeled by himself or by the other man, or whether either man was a labeler or in the presence of a self-labeler, had no effect on participants’ ratings of the men’s masculinity or femininity. Both men were rated as likeable across all conditions. While the stereotype of gay men as more feminine and less masculine than other men appears robust since the 1970 study, the dislike of gay men appears to have abated.     

Sex-role identity and self-esteem in female graduate nursing students

This study investigated masculinity and femininity characteristics and levels of self-esteem of 96 female graduate nursing students between the ages of 20 and 50. The instruments used were incorporated into a questionnaire which was mailed to each student. Self-esteem was measured by a version of Coopersmith's Self-Esteem Inventory which Good and Good modified to adapt to adult standards. To measure femininity and masculinity, a shortened version of the Bem Sex Role Inventory was used: Subjects rated themselves along a 7-point Likert scale for 10 masculine and 10 feminine traits. The categorical method of scoring by Spence, Helmreich, and Stapp was employed. The students were fairly evenly distributed across the following four categories: low masculine-low feminine; low masculine-high feminine; high masculine-low feminine; and high masculinehigh feminine. The students in the high masculine-low feminine and the high masculine-high feminine categories were found to have a statistically higher mean self-esteem than the students in the low masculine-low feminine and low masculne-high feminine categories. Implications were mentioned regarding the development of a high degree of both masculine and feminine characteristics in nurses.     

Gender differences in idiosyncratic sex-typed self-images and self-esteem

The present study focused on the relationships between idiosyncratic sextyping and self-esteem. Idiosyncratic, feminine, masculine, and nonstereotyped sets of self-attributes, termed self-images (SI), rather than conventional masculinity, femininity and their interaction (androgyny), were used. Findings from two studies with two groups of 337 Israeli early adolescents boys and girls, and 280 male and female university students, using two instruments of sex-typed self-attributes (newly devised Self-Related Self-Image Scale and Spence Personal Attributes Questionnaire) and based on idiosyncratically defined sex images, supported our hypotheses. The findings showed that males' self-esteem was predicted significantly by their masculine SI, that females' self-esteem was predicted significantly by their nonstereotyped SI, and that the feminine SI predicted significantly the self-esteem of neither. Findings based on conventional sex role orientation scores supported former findings of significant relationships between masculinity and male and female self-esteem. The results showed that the self-esteem of male students, but not that of boys, was significantly predicted by their nonstereotyped SI too. Partial support was found for the hypothesis that more females than males are likely to redefine conventional masculine attributes as nonstereotyped. The whole set of findings were interpreted as indicating that self-esteem is dependent on socially rewarded and self-synchronized sex-typed attributes.Study 1 is based on the master's thesis submitted to Ben-Gurion University by the second author under the advise of the first one.     

Sex-role identity and male and female homosexuality

The incidences of sex-role outcome within homosexual and heterosexual male and female young adult samples were compared using a fourfold typology (both masculine and feminine, masculine, feminine, neither masculine nor feminine). Sex-role identity disparities between the female groups were more clear-cut; the most striking difference was the high incidence of masculinity (60%) within the homosexual female group. No significant differences for males were found, although a trend was noted toward higher incidence of femininity and lower incidence of masculinity in homosexuals. The second purpose of the study was to search for possible developmental antecedents to heterosexual deficit in unselected college samples. The same key pattern of psychometric indices was identified for males and females. Low heterosexuality and the closest approximation to the modal sex-role identity among homosexuals of their sex were found in females primarily identified with masculine fathers and low in role consistency and in males primarily identified with feminine mothers and low in role consistency.     

Interactive effects of social context and sex role identity on female self-disclosure during the acquaintance process

Female subjects who differed in masculinity and in femininity self-disclosed to a same-sex confederate in contexts that made either social/expressive motives or instrumental motives particularly salient. The confederate spoke first on each of four disclosure topics, presenting either intimate or nonintimate information in her disclosures. The results were consistent with our primary assertion that measures of sex role identity would accurately forecast contextual variations in female self-disclosure. Specifically, femininity tended to promote self-disclosure in social/expressive contexts while clearly inhibiting such exchanges in the instrumental context. Supplementary data revealed that the tendency of highly feminine participants to close up in the instrumental context stemmed not from problems in their contemporaneous interpersonal relationships with their partners, but rather from a concern that disclosing too much might adversely affect their partners' evaluation of their competencies. Although masculinity did not exert direct effects of female self-disclosure within any particular context, it did have an influence, for subjects high in femininity were highly self-revealing across contexts if they were also high in masculinity (i.e., androgynous).This research was supported by National Institute of Mental health Grant MH 43726-01 to David R. Shaffer.     

Still a Hetero-Gendered World: A Content Analysis of Gender Stereotypes and Romantic Ideals in Chinese Boy Love Stories

Boy’s Love (BL) stories are a fictional fantasy textual story that describes a romantic relationship between men. Previous qualitative studies claimed that BL stories have depicted androgynous characters and egalitarian love relationships. The current study undertook a quantitative content analysis of 87 randomly sampled popular Chinese BL stories. Our coding system for coding both the masculinity and femininity of each main character in the selected BL stories was developed based on several previous studies. Gay male characters in BL stories were depicted as either similar to traditional masculine men (i.e., scoring high in masculinity and low in femininity) or similar to traditional feminine women (i.e., scoring high in femininity and low in masculinity). In the romantic relationships, BL stories typically paired a masculine character with a feminine character. In addition, heterosexual romantic ideals were prevalent in BL stories. Such an analysis challenges the previous analysis of BL stories. It suggests that heteronormative gender stereotypes exist in BL stories, even if these stories depict gay male characters and romantic relationships. These findings have important implications for understanding media effects in stereotypes toward gay men in contemporary Chinese society. It also encourages further research on alternative explanations for women’s motivation in reading and writing BL stories.     

领导者性别身份的评价差异：基于内隐领导理论的实证分析

本研究基于内隐领导理论,运用配对问卷法,探究领导者性别身份的三种评价差异：自我评价与下属评价的差异,男性领导与女性领导的下属评价差异,男性下属与女性下属的评价差异。结果显示,与领导者自评的性别身份相比,下属易高估领导者的男性化;且下属评价男性领导的男性化显著高于女性化,而评价女性领导时两者并不存在显著差异。此外,男性下属对领导男性化的评价高于女性下属的评价。     

SEX-ROLE IDENTITY, GENDER IDENTITY, AND SELF-SCHEMATA

Forty females and 40 males were shown slides of masculine and feminine phrases controlled for social desirability, sex-linked content, syllable length, and negative semantic construction to evaluate schematic processing on the dimensions of masculinity and femininity. Their responses to the phrases were timed. The BSRI, PAQ, and SSR1Q administered subsequent to the slide presentation were used to categorize subjects into groups of masculine, feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated. Comparisons between the groups evaluated by the different scales indicated that the PAQ was the best predictor of schematic processing and that the SSRIQ and gender were not predictors of schematic processing. Correlations between the SSRIQ and the masculine and feminine scales of the BSRI and PAQ provided evidence partially supportive of Storms's (1979) theory that sex-role identity influences the development of same-sex-typed attributes but does not influence opposite-sex-typed attributes.     

The Factor Structure of the Narcissistic Personality Inventory

Seventy-seven female and 86 male psychologist practitioners filled out the Bem Sex Rote Inventory to describe either a healthy adult male, healthy adult female, or healthy adult, sex unspecified. Analyzing the data according to Bem's classification of masculinity, femininity, and androgyny produced a significant Scale X Condition interaction with male and female practitioners ascribing significantly more masculine than feminine traits to healthy adult men, yet displaying no comparable differences when rating healthy adult women. Analyzing the data according to Spence's classification of masculine, feminine, androgynous, and undifferentiated produced a Group X Condition interaction with practitioners ascribing significantly more masculine traits to healthy adult men and significantly more feminine traits to healthy adult women. Reanalyses omitting "masculine" and "feminine" from Bem's fist of sex-typed traits produced nonsignificant results. The relationship of this to recent criticisms of the construct validity of the BSRI and to the validity of earlier results of therapist sex-role bias was discussed.     

Models and Measurements of Psychological Androgyny: A Cross-Cultural Extension of Theory and Research

This paper explores models and measurements of psychological androgyny by extending research to a new cultural context—Singapore. Five studies, which include the construction of a culturally appropriate measurement of masculinity and femininity and the investigation of the masculine, additive, and interactive models of psychological androgyny, are reported. The results indicate that the Singapore Androgyny Inventory (SAI) demonstrated good internal consistency and temporal stability. M and F scales were unidimensional and orthogonal with composite items reflecting instrumental and expressive orientations. Masculinity was associated with need for achievement (r = .56), and femininity related to need for affiliation (r = .24). In addition, a 2 (gender) × 2 (M) × 2 (F) analysis of variance revealed main effects for both masculinity and femininity on personal and social self-concept, but no significant interaction effects. The same analysis demonstrated main effects only for masculinity on psychological well-being and self-acceptance. Taken together, evidence supported a differentiated additive model rather than a masculine or interactive model of androgyny, self-concept, and mental health. The advantages of cross-cultural extensions in psychological androgyny research are also discussed.     

Masculinity unraveled: the roots of male gender identity and the shifting of male ego ideals throughout life

A model of masculine gender identity development is presented that demonstrates how a male's sense of his masculinity and the ambiguities of his gender are being reworked throughout his life. Of factors shaping the boy's sense of masculinity early on, particular emphasis is placed on the role of the involved father, the nature of the parental relationship, and the mother's recognition and affirmation of her son's maleness. While healthy masculine gender identity is founded predominantly on the boy's unique struggles in separating from his mother, it does not result from what has been traditionally viewed as the boy's disidentification from her (and from the feminine more generally). Indeed, boys who need to violently repudiate their identifications with their mother are more susceptible to a fragile, rigid masculine identity and narcissistic psychopathology. A case example of a young adult man illustrates the impact of identifications with both parents. The interplay of early masculine identity development and later life challenges confronting the adult male is briefly noted. "Masculine" ego ideals shift across developmental junctions until, ultimately, a more mature sense of masculinity emerges: the phallic wish to deny differentiation and maintain unlimited possibility is renounced and mourned and certain real limits concerning sex, gender, and generational differences are accepted. This reshaping of the "masculine" ego ideal consequently involves the transformation of a man's previously adaptive "phallicism" into more realistic, "genital" ego ideals-an achievement involving interplay between masculine and feminine identifications and the integration of antithetical elements no longer so unconsciously gendered.     

Semantic Differential Investigation of Sexually Symbolic Concepts Using a Psychiatric Population

Masculinity-femininity ratings via the Semantic Differential of 18 concepts were made by 25 male and 25 female psychiatric patients. The psychoanalytic view that certain concepts symbolize masculinity or femininity did not receive unqualified support in this investigation. Objects such as “ship,” “oven,” and “room,” which psychoanalysts regard as feminine were rated masculine. Similarly, “umbrella,” “necktie,” and “hat,” considered masculine by psychoanalysts were rated feminine.