Contextualizing a Life in Science: Janet Taylor Spence and the History of Women and Gender in American Psychology

The present paper reflects on the life and career of Janet Spence (1923–2015) by situating her experiences within the history of women and gender in American psychology. This history has revealed the structural factors that have affected women’s participation in psychology, the shared themes in women’s interpersonal and professional experiences, and the specific strategies that women have used to navigate an androcentric, and at times overtly sexist, discipline. In spanning the second half of the twentieth century, Spence’s career provides an interesting case study of how these decades of institutional and political change affected a specific woman scientist and her science. I argue that her biography can offer rich insights into the complexly intertwined, and even reflexive, relationships among psychologists, their psychologies, and their contexts.     

Remembering Janet Taylor Spence (1923–2015)

Janet Taylor Spence was a history-making figure in professional psychology and in the study of gender. In the period between her birth in 1923 and her death in 2015, vast changes took place in both domains, and Janet Spence was at the center of both. This issue of Sex Roles is dedicated to her life and work, providing a perspective and an accounting of the contributions that she made to our field. The set of papers included here chronicle Janet’s career path, evaluate the impact of her work in the areas of anxiety and of gender, recount memories from her colleagues and students, and in a closing article, analyze her place in the larger historical domain of women in psychology.     

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.     

Sisters of the Heart Along the Way: The Power of the Female Mentoring Relationship

Women's mentoring relationships with other women can have powerful effects on professional development and enrich the lives of both mentor and protégée. Women psychology students and early career psychologists are tasked with integrating their personal and professional identities and overcoming gender-related barriers to professional growth and career success. Mentors provide assistance negotiating these and other challenges to the junior professional's development. The author shares her experience as a woman student and early career psychologist in the context of her relationship with her woman mentor. She discusses her reconciliation of stereotyped beliefs about being a woman and a professional psychologist; processes significantly influenced by powerful characteristics of her mentoring relationship such as supportive encouragement, modeling, transparency, and spiritual connectedness. The author then explores the link between the relational qualities in the mentoring relationship and an enhanced overall approach to clinical work with patients. Last, the benefits of women's intimate relationships are discussed, followed by references that explore benefits and challenges, and models and strategies for women mentoring women. The author concludes that as a sister of the heart relationship, the mentoring bond between women can be a healing and empowering attachment.     

Janet Taylor Spence: Innovator in the Study of Gender

Janet Spence’s contributions moved gender researchers beyond a simple understanding of psychological gender in terms of individual differences in masculinity and femininity. In early work, she constructed the Personal Attributes Questionnaire, or PAQ, consisting of a masculine and a feminine scale, which she interpreted as assessing the core of psychological masculinity and femininity. Spence subsequently recognized that the masculine, or instrumental, scale reliably predicts only self-assertive, dominant behaviors and that the feminine, or expressive, scale reliably predicts only other-oriented, relational behaviors. Moreover, as her work developed, Spence came to understand this self-ascribed instrumentality and expressiveness, not as gender identity, but as two of the several types of psychological attributes that may become associated with individuals’ self-categorization as male or female. She then defined gender identity as the basic, existential sense of being male or female, which generally corresponds to one’s biological sex. Building on her ideas, we argue that gender identity instead encompasses both the sex categorization of oneself, usually as male or female, and self-assessments on gender-stereotypic instrumental and expressive attributes. These two levels of gender identity are linked by people’s self-stereotyping to the extent that they value their group membership as male or female.     

A festschrift for Carolyn Ingrid Saarni

ABSTRACT

To introduce this special issue honoring Carolyn Saarni, this article provides a brief biography of her career. It highlights Carolyn’s foresight in integrating developmental science and counseling psychology to enlighten our understanding of the development of children’s emotional lives. It also describes some of her most creative research, studies that inspired many scholars to this day. It casts Carolyn’s contributions in the historical changes that have taken place in developmental psychology. Lastly, this article also previews the articles presented by contributing authors who count themselves among Carolyn’s colleagues. Those articles focus on research directions in the study of emotional competence, emotion regulation, emotion knowledge, and emotion socialization that have evolved from and been inspired by Carolyn’s rich contributions to developmental psychology.     

From Janet T. Spence’s Manifest Anxiety Scale to the Present Day: Exploring Math Anxiety and its Relation to Math Achievement

Janet Taylor Spence conducted a great deal of foundational work establishing the negative relation between anxiety and performance. Spence operationalized trait anxiety by creating the Manifest Anxiety Scale, and she conducted numerous studies linking scores on this scale to performance across a variety of cognitive tasks. The field of math anxiety research has built from her work to examine the ways in which negative emotions regarding math can hinder math performance. We discuss the antecedents and development of math anxiety, as well as the ways in which other individual differences, such as working memory, affect the relation between anxiety and performance. Although a rich literature has sprung from Spence’s early work, there is much left to do in terms of fully understanding how specific types of anxiety interact with each other, as well as with other individual differences, to determine performance outcomes.     

Mentoring Interns and Postdoctoral Residents in Academic Health Sciences Center

This article was co-authored by a senior mentor and one of her students who worked with her as both an intern and a postdoctoral fellow. It is an expanded version of a presentation given by the first author after receiving the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers (APAHC) Distinguished Achievement in Teaching Award. The article offers a historical view on mentoring, defines and describes the term, and delineates the characteristics of good mentors and mentees. The significant impact of mentoring on the professional and personal development of psychology interns and postdoctoral residents and their mentors in academic health centers is explored. Techniques for developing, maintaining, and promoting effective mentoring relationships are provided and the ethical considerations related to mentoring are examined. This article is based upon an invited address, “Mentoring of Predoctoral Interns and Postdoctoral Fellows in an Academic Health Sciences Center” given by the first author in recognition of the author’s receipt of the Association of Psychologists in Academic Health Centers 2005 Award for Distinguished Achievement in Teaching. The address was presented at the Annual meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, LA, August, 2006.     

Reflections on receiving an award

Reflecting on the events that culminated in her receiving the Award for Distinguished Contributions to Applied Psychology as a Professional Practice, Canter, an independent practitioner, discusses the road she traveled to become a clinical psychologist and to become involved in professional organizational activities. She believes that this award was given to her because of her contributions to psychology over her lifetime as an effective and hardworking leader, mentor, and role model in her home state of Arizona and nationally. She addresses some of her ideas about effective leadership and mentoring in the American Psychological Association (APA), providing many examples from which she has learned. Canter also shares some thoughts about APA's position as a leader in the development and enforcement of professional ethics.     

Ethical Issues When Graduate Students Act as Mentors

The field of ethics in psychology has devoted a great deal of attention to the ethical issues that arise when students and faculty develop mentor–mentee relationships. However, little attention has been given to examining the role of graduate students acting as mentors. Graduate students often supervise and evaluate undergraduates as a part of research and teaching responsibilities, and may act as mentors to more junior graduate students. This article discusses the unique qualities and ethical considerations of graduate students in mentoring relationships. Finally, this article concludes with recommendations on ethical mentorship inspired by the American Psychological Association (2010) Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct.     

Graduate school mentoring in clinical,counselling, and experimental academic training programs: an exploratory study

This study focused on graduate student mentoring within clinical, counselling and experimental psychology programs. A nationwide survey of 336 psychology graduate students indicated that counselling students reported higher levels of socioemotional support in their mentoring relationships, as well as higher overall levels of satisfaction, compared with clinical and experimental students. Clinical and experimental students, however, reported higher levels of selected outcome variables, such as research productivity. The relationships between mentoring qualities and several outcome variables were noted and discussed. This study adds to the developing literature concerning graduate student mentoring within professional psychology training programs.     

Relational Lacunae: Gaps in the Relational Literature and Clinical Practice? Commentary on Paper by Paul Wachtel

I question whether Wachtel’s assertion that there are gaps in the relational literature and residues of a one-person psychology is little more than a reflection of the relational tradition, which encompasses a multiplicity of perspectives. This notwithstanding, his paper helpfully addresses a neglected dimension of clinical practice and provides the opportunity to explore the evolution of Stephen Mitchell’s thinking about the baby as a psychoanalytic metaphor. In doing so, I briefly, if somewhat tangentially, discuss the structure of the inner world, the role of memory in psychoanalysis, the nature of transference, and the extent to which early experiences with caregivers influence adult intimate relationships. To further illuminate Wachtel’s theoretical and therapeutic model, I summarize Mitchell’s (2000) case study of Connie, focusing on his detailed inquiry into her everyday relationship with her husband.     

A woman's struggle in academic psychology (1936-2001)

Tracy S. Kendler's strong desire to get a college education had to overcome economic hardships of the Great Depression and a mother's conviction that finding a suitable husband was more important. Solomon Asch at Brooklyn College, by scholarly example, encouraged her to seek a career in psychology. At the University of Iowa she studied with both Kurt Lewin and Kenneth Spence and finally opted to conduct a research program, ultimately on cognitive development, within a neobehavioristic methodological orientation. Being married to academic psychologist Howard H. Kendler, and a mother of 2 sons, created problems in fashioning an independent academic career, but persistence and research productivity, sometimes a result of collaborative efforts with her husband, finally led to a distinguished career.     

Learning the Ropes: The Protective Role of Mentoring in Correctional Police Officers’ Socialization Process

Formal mentoring is an individualized and contextualized socialization tactic to enhance newcomers’ learning—acknowledged as essential in the early career stage—that can be of particular value when entering a fairly unpredictable and stressful workplace. This research aims to understand the moderating role of formal mentoring in the relationship between organizational socialization and 2 adjustment indicators, a positive 1 (commitment) and a negative 1 (turnover intention). A questionnaire was administered to 117 correctional police officer newcomers, as prisons are especially critical work contexts for newcomers. The results show a direct effect from both socialization and mentoring on commitment and turnover, and an interaction between socialization and mentoring on turnover, although not on commitment. When the socialization process progresses steadily, both socialization and mentoring contribute to good adjustment, but when traditional tactics go wrong, a different learning source (formal mentoring) exerts a protective function, limiting newcomers’ intention to quit. These findings give support to the usefulness of mentoring in a law enforcement context and provide some insight into defining formal mentoring programs.     

Research Mentoring and Women in Clinical Psychology

The main question explored in this study is whether a woman's choice to do research during her career as a clinical psychologist is associated with having had a research mentor. A sample of 616 women, all members of the American Psychological Association holding a Ph.D. in Clinical Psychology, completed a survey about their experience with a research mentor. The data show that research mentoring is positively related to a woman in clinical psychology doing research and whether she, in turn, becomes a research mentor for others. The responses of the participants suggest that a model of mentoring that involves relevant training and practical experience in research may increase the likelihood that female clinical psychologists will choose to do research as part of their careers.     

A citation network analysis of career mentoring across disciplines: A roadmap for mentoring research in sport

ObjectiveGiven our limited understanding of mentoring in sport, reviewing research from other disciplines has the potential to advance knowledge in this context. Therefore, the purpose of this study was to synthesize and evaluate the mentoring literature across disciplines in order to bridge existing knowledge and to situate the mentoring in sport literature.DesignA citation network analysis.MethodA comprehensive literature search was conducted to locate influential career mentoring articles, books, and book chapters across all disciplines. Subsequently, this body of literature was evaluated using citation network to (a) identify the major career mentoring disciplines, (b) locate the most influential career mentoring texts, (c) evaluate the transfer of knowledge across disciplines, and (d) situate and evaluate the mentoring in sport literature.ResultsThe literature search resulted in a mentoring network of 1,819 texts and 10,951 citation links. Five major mentoring disciplines emerged: academic medicine, industrial and organizational psychology, education, nursing, and psychology. The industrial and organizational psychology and academic medicine disciplines were the most substantial mentoring disciplines. Further, the findings suggest the literature is relatively disconnected within and across disciplines. In regard to sport, the mentoring research represented 1.47% of the full-network (29 texts and 50 citation relations) and is interwoven into the industrial and organizational psychology literature.ConclusionGiven the limited sport texts uncovered in the citation network analysis, sport scholars can stand to benefit from the wealth of existing career mentoring literature in other disciplines. Accordingly, the identification of seminal career mentoring disciplines and texts serves to provide sport mentoring scholars with a roadmap to further promote the advancement and dissemination of mentoring knowledge and research.     

Dis-Illusioning Psychology: Epistemology and the Contextual Psychology of Ellyn Kaschak

ABSTRACT

Ellyn Kaschak is a pioneer feminist therapist whose contributions to feminist theory, practice, education, and advocacy have spanned the globe over the past 40?+?years. From being a founder of one of the first feminist counseling services in the country in the early 1970s, Kaschak has influenced decades of feminist, family and multi-cultural therapists through her teaching and countless others through her feminist epistemology and theory development and the Mattering Map. This article describes Kaschak’s life and work and the lasting contributions she has made to the field of feminist psychology.     

The Older Woman as Sage: The Satisfaction of Mentoring

Mentoring is important to the personal and professional lives of many developing professionals, but it is also beneficial in numerous ways to the mentor. This article focuses on the benefits of mentoring from the mentor's prospective, including satisfaction in seeing protégées succeed and empowerment of both the mentor and protégée. This article showcases the importance of being a mentor, the impact mentoring has on developing psychologists, and how mentoring sustains older women's connections and contributions to their field. The authors discuss what mentoring is, what mentors do, how to become a mentor, and the benefits of being a mentor. How one becomes a mentor in various work settings including academia is also discussed, as are concerns regarding inappropriate mentoring relationships and how to improve the quality of the mentoring relationship. The authors suggest that becoming a mentor can be empowering for women clients as well as therapists.     

Is Being a Good Learner Enough? An Examination of the Interplay Between Learning Goal Orientation and Impression Management Tactics on Creativity

This study explores how protégés’ learning goal orientation (LGO) and impression management (IM) tactics interact to explain mentors’ provision of mentoring functions and ultimately, protégés’ creativity. Using longitudinal data from 917 mentor–protégé dyads participating in an 8‐month mentoring program, we found that protégés’ mentor‐focused and self‐focused IM tactics strengthened the relationship between protégés’ LGO and the extent of mentoring provided by mentors, whereas job‐focused IM tactics weakened this relationship. Moreover, these IM tactics moderated the indirect effect of protégés’ LGO on protégés’ creativity through the extent of mentoring provided by mentors. Implications for organizational theory and practice are discussed.     

Is Silence Really Golden? The Role of Spiritual Voice in Folk Pedagogy and Folk Psychology

Most recently, considerable attention has been focused on the social construction of knowledge and an internalist, first‐person perspective on learning. Included in this paradigm shift is a particular ‘hybrid’ of both psychology and educational theory often referred to as ‘theory of mind’ (ToM research) or folk psychology. This article outlines models of teaching, learning, and mind in the hopes that such an advance in understanding children's minds will lead to an improved pedagogy. To address the issues of emotion and ‘spiritual voice’ that may constrain learning in the classroom and self‐development, Belenky et al.’sfive epistemological perspectives or ‘Women's Ways of Knowing’ (New York, Basic Books, 1986) are couched within the framework of Olson and Burner's [Folk Psychology and Folk Pedagogy, in: D. Olson & N. Torrance (Eds) Handbook of Education and Human Development: New Models of Learning, Teaching and Schooling, pp. 9‐27 (Oxford, Blackwell)] four models of mind, teaching and learning. At issue is the dialogical relation between folk psychology and folk pedagogy and its contingency on both culture and context.