Love It or Leave It: A Look at Women in Clerical Occupations1

This study was conducted among female clerical workers to examine factors associated with attitudes toward bridging programs. These programs facilitate women's transition from traditional to nontraditional careers. In a proposed model, 2 paths linking masculine and feminine traits of the self‐concept to personal relative deprivation were tested. Whereas feminine traits were expected to correlate with masculine traits, the former was predicted to yield feelings of relative satisfaction and the latter to evoke relative deprivation. Relative deprivation was predicted to increase intention to endorse bridging program activities. Results support the model, albeit analyses suggested an additional path from masculine traits to bridging program activities. Implications of this reality test of the relations between self‐concept, relative deprivation, and career mobility are discussed.     

Bilateral Art: Integrating Art Therapy,Family Therapy,and Neuroscience

This paper describes the systemic use of a neurologically-based art therapy modality—bilateral art—that engages both dominant and non-dominant hands in the process of creating images in response to opposing cognitions or feelings. It describes both neuroscience and family therapy perspectives that argue for the use of bilateral art. A specific protocol for bilateral art therapy is provided along with a case study demonstrating integration of the protocol into the systemic treatment of a young family. Carole M. McNamee, PhD, is Research Professor and Clinical Associate, Director of the Arts in Healthcare Project, The Family Therapy Center, Department of Human Development, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, Blacksburg, VA 24061 (cmcnamee@vt.edu).     

The When and How of Evaluative Readiness: A Social Cognitive Neuroscience Perspective

In this article we consider the phenomenon of evaluative readiness, whereby the activation in memory of a goal leads to an unintentional increase in positivity toward stimuli that can facilitate the goal. We review four lines of work that together address the question of when goals lead to this kind of automatic shift in people’s attitudes. We then consider how contemporary models of cognition might explain this effect. We review whether dual systems models and single interacting system models can explain the phenomenon of evaluative readiness. Based on recent work in cognitive psychology and computational neuroscience, we then argue for the potential explanatory value of turning to a multiple interacting systems framework for explaining the phenomenon of evaluative readiness.     

Demystifying Intuition: What It Is,What It Does,and How It Does It

Definitions of intuition are discussed and two working definitions are proposed. This is followed by a list of eight unresolved problems concerning intuition. It is suggested that all of these problems can be resolved by cognitive-experiential self-theory (CEST), a dual-process theory of personality according to which people process information with two systems, an experiential/intuitive system that is an associative learning system that humans share with other animals and a uniquely human verbal reasoning system. Intuition is considered to be a subsystem of the experiential/ intuitive system that operates by exactly the same principles and attributes but has narrower boundary conditions. The next section includes a presentation of the most relevant aspects of CEST with an emphasis on the operating rules and attributes of the experiential/intuitive system. This is followed by demonstrating how the operation of the experiential/intuitive system can resolve each of the unresolved problems concerning intuition. The article closes with a comparison of the advantages and disadvantages of the experiential/intuitive and rational/analytic systems. It is concluded that neither system is generally superior to the other, as each has important advantages and disadvantages.     

Prototypes of Discrimination: How Status Asymmetry and Stereotype Asymmetry Affect Judgments of Racial Discrimination

This research investigated status asymmetry and stereotype asymmetry features of the racial discrimination prototype. Consistent with status asymmetry predictions, Black observers made greater attributions to discrimination when the victim was Black and the perpetrator was White than when the roles were reversed. In contrast, White observers made similar attributions to discrimination, regardless of status asymmetry. In partial support of the stereotype asymmetry hypothesis, Black and White observers made greater attributions to discrimination for Black victims in a domain where Blacks are negatively stereotyped than positively stereotyped. However, attributions to discrimination for White victims were unaffected by the domain.     

The Projective Way of Knowing: A Useful Heuristic That Sometimes Misleads

For many purposes, people need a reasonably good idea of what other people know. This article presents an argument and considers evidence that people use their own knowledge as a basis for developing models of what specific other people know in particular, that they tend to assume that other people know what they know. This is a generally useful heuristic, but the assumption is often made uncritically, with the consequence that people end up assuming that others have knowledge that they do not have.     

Helping Children Enter Into Another's Experiences: The Look and Feel of It

The role of focusing 4-year-olds' attention on “feeling” or “looking” was examined in three experiments by testing predictions about children's memory for their interactions with an adult partner as they engaged in a collaborative task. Children made collages with an adult partner, and they were later asked to remember who placed the pieces on the collage. Children were more likely to claim they placed pieces actually placed by their partner (Experiments 1, 2, and 3), unless directed to think about how their partner looked when placing the partner's pieces (Experiments 1 and 3). False claims were observed after children were directed to think about how it would “feel” to perform the actions, whether motoric instructions were focused on the self (Experiment 2, N = 48) or partner (Experiment 1, N = 40, and Experiment 3, N = 24). Furthermore, false claims (referred to as I did it errors) were positively associated with accurate collage memory (Experiment 3). These findings suggest that adopting a perspective during encoding that involves “feeling” movements—whether focused on the self or partner—plays an important role in children's memory for collaboration (in this context, memory for contributions made by children or their adult partners to the completion of a collage). A focus on “feeling” may be a way to “enter into” the experiences of another, promoting anticipation and recoding, which may lead to better learning in both collaborative and non-collaborative contexts.     

Mathematics the Critical Filter: A Look at Some Residues

Interviews were conducted regarding attitudes toward sex role and mathematics with three cognitively equated groups of girls who had enrolled in different amounts of theoretical (college-track) math in high school ( n =87). Girls who took the least math were less ambitious and in some ways, more independent. Girls who took four years of theoretical math had more pleasant earliest memories of math, fewer negative experiences with teachers, but more conflict between sex role and achievement. Results continue to underscore contradictions in the socialization of girls.