Socialization influences of collegiate female athletes: A tale of two decades

Over the past decade, sport participation opportunities for females have increased dramatically. The purposes of this study were to compare perceptions of encouragement and support from socializing agents for: (a) female collegiate volleyball players competing during the 1979 and 1989 seasons, and (b) female collegiate athletes and female and male nonathletes. Female athletes (n= 345), female nonathletes (n= 128), and male nonathletes (n= 88) completed a questionnaire to assess significant others' influence on sport involvement during childhood, adolescence, and college years. Results indicated that interest and encouragement by parents, older siblings, and friends significantly increased for female athletes over the past 10 years during one or more developmental period. Discriminant analyses revealed that female athletes perceived stronger influences from mother, siblings, friends, and coaches than did male and female nonathletes. These results demonstrate that female athletes received greater social support than their peers a decade earlier, and these influences were significantly different than male and female nonathletes. This study was supported by a grant awarded to the first author by the Center for the Study of Women in Society, University of Oregon, Eugene.     

Sex-selective abortion: a relational approach

A critical application of Ruddick's model of maternal thinking is the best way to grapple with the ethical dilemmas posed by sex-selective abortion which I view as a "moral mistake." Chief among these is the need to be sensitive to local cultural practices in countries where sex-selective abortion is prevalent, while simultaneously developing consistent international standards to deal with the dangers posed by the use of sex-selective abortion to eliminate female fetuses.     

SEMANTIC NETWORKS IN THE DIVIDED CEREBRAL HEMISPHERES

Abstract— Hemispheric differences in the recognition and manipulation of meaning may be based on distinctions in size, composition, or organization of the right and left semantic networks. The present study describes these features of pictorially based semantic networks in 3 subjects with complete forebrain commissurotomy. Stimuli were presented for prolonged viewing to the left and right visual hemifields. For each trial, the subjects chose from a 20-choice array all pictures that were associated with a target, then indicated the member of each pair of chosen associates that was more closely related to the target. The hemispheres' networks were found to be of similar size and composition, but were organized differently. The right hemisphere more often produced linear rankings of semantic associates to a target than did the left, and rankings by the two hemispheres were not strongly correlated. Hemispheric differences in semantic organization mirror differences in perceptual organization, with the right hemisphere specialized for conventional meaning and the left hemisphere specialized for detecting and processing deviations from standard meaning.     

Letter detection: A window to unitization and other cognitive processes in reading text

Experiments are reviewed that use the letter-detection task, in which subjects read text and circle target letters. Evidence is provided that the letter-detection task reveals the processing units used in reading text and is influenced as well by visual, phonetic, and a combination of semantic and syntactic factors. Specifically, it is shown that circling a target letter in a word depends on the familiarity of the word’s visual configuration, the location of the word in the reader’s visual field, the phonetic representation of the letter in the word, and a combination of the word’s meaning and its grammatical function.     

Paradoxical experiential therapy: A description of the technique and rationale of a nonbehavioral therapy for an unselected patient population

Paradoxical Experiential Therapy, a new technique of psychotherapy, is a nonbehavioral, short-term, experiential form of individual psychotherapy which produces long-lasting changes in ego strength, anxiety, depression, guilt, anger, and other common psychiatric symptoms, in an unselected patient population, in approximately 40 to 60 hours of therapy. This is accomplished by the use of structured fantasies accompanied by feelings which are instantly paradoxical to the content and nature of the fantasies themselves, and by other structured fantasies with paradoxical input from the therapist.     

An investigation of peak shift and behavioral contrast for autoshaped and operant behavior.

Instrumental treadle press and nonreinforced key peck responses were monitored during discrimination training and generalization testing in pigeons on positive and negative reinforcement schedules. In Experiment 1, six pigeons pressed a treadle for food on a multiple variable-interval extinction schedule. In Experiment 2, three pigeons pressed a treadle to avoid shock on a multiple free-operant avoidance extinction schedule. Different color keylights signaled S+ and S- components. Some positive behavioral contrast occurred during discrimination training, but the effect was small. Pecking occurred to the S+ keylight in Experiment 1 but not in Experiment 2. On stimulus generalization tests, all subjects displayed a positive peak shift when pressing the treadle for food or to avoid shock. However, peak shift was not found for nonreinforced "autopecks" on the stimulus key, although an area shift was observed in Experiment 1. This is the first demonstration of peak shift for pigeons pressing treadles and the only reliable demonstration of peak shift when negative reinforcement maintained responding. These results, in combination with previous demonstrations of peak shift for rats pressing levers and pigeons pecking keys, indicate that peak shift is a general by-product of operant discrimination learning, since it occurs across a variety of the organisms, responses, and reinforcers.     

Response class: A Guttman scale analysis

This study addressed the problem of response class as it relates to coercive child behavior. Guttman scale analyses were used to determine if there were regular, unidimensional progressions across eight coercive response categories; that children who performed high probability coercive behaviors would also tend to perform all of the lower probability coercive behaviors. Rank-order correlations were done to determine if there was consistency in the response class across settings. Two samples of boys were observed in two school settings, classroom and playground. One sample was a derivation sample of 26 boys, the second a replication sample of 27 boys. Reproducibility coefficients for the derivation sample were .92 for the classroom Guttman scale analysis and .93 for the playground analysis. For the crossvalidation sample the reproducibility coefficients were .94 in both settings. Rankorder correlations across settings and done in terms of the number of subjects performing each of the coercive responses were .971 (df=6,p<.001) for the derivation sample and .996 df=6,p<.001) for the crossvalidation sample. It was concluded that the eight coercive responses observed appeared to constitute a response class, i.e., the ordering of the responses was transitive across subjects, and that the coercive response hierarchy was stable across school settings for groups of children.I wish to extend thanks to Gerald Patterson et al., of the Oregon Social Learning Center, for their space, time, and encouragement. Special thanks to Mark Weinrott for his excellent editorial comments.     

Accessibility of the voicing distinction for learning phonological rules

In three experiments a series of nonsense syllables ending in consonants was presented to adult subjects who had to discover or learn a rule classifying the syllables into two groups. The rule was based either on the voicing of the final consonants or on an arbitrary division of them. Subjects performed better with the voicing than with the arbitrary rule only when there was a straightforward relationship between the voicing rule and the plural formation rule in English or, more generally, when voicing assimilation with an added consonant was involved and attention was focused on the sound and articulation of the syllables. We conclude that the voicing distinction is not ordinarily accessible and that individuals easily learn and use phonological rules involving voicing assimilation because of articulatory constraints on the production of consonant clusters.