Racial stereotypes and interracial attraction: phenotypic prototypicality and perceived attractiveness of Asians

What does it take to find a member of a different race attractive? In this research, we suggest that for Whites, attraction to Asians may be based, in part, on stereotypes and variations in Asians' racial appearance. Study 1 reveals that Asians are stereotyped as being more feminine and less masculine than other racial groups-characteristics considered appealing for women but not for men to possess. Study 2 examines how variation in racial appearance, phenotypic prototypicality (PP), shapes the degree to which Asians are gender stereotyped and how PP relates to perceptions of attractiveness. Higher PP Asian men are perceived as being less masculine and less physically attractive than lower PP Asian men. These findings inform theory on how within-group variation in racial appearance affects stereotyping and other social outcomes.     

Efficacy of an explicit handwriting program

The aim of this study was to investigate the effects of an explicit handwriting program introduced during the first grade of elementary school. Grade 1 children (N=23) with an age range of 6.1 to 7.4 yr. (15 girls, 8 boys) were administered an additional handwriting program of two weekly sessions of 45 min. over six weeks. Another group of 19 Grade 1 children (11 girls, 8 boys) received only the regular handwriting program of one weekly session. The Concise Assessment Scale for Children's Handwriting was administered to measure the changes in quality and speed of handwriting. The children given the explicit program showed better quality and speed of handwriting than did the control group. Their handwriting was more regular, with fewer ambiguous letters and fewer incorrect relative heights.     

Correlates of Breast Self-Examination in a Sample of College Women: Analyses of Linear Structural Relations1

Female college students filled out a questionnaire about breast self-examination (BSE) including (a) past and intended frequency of BSE, (b) attitude toward BSE, (c) beliefs about the benefits and costs of BSE, (d) knowledge about BSE, (e) confidence in ability to perform BSE, (f) social influences to perform BSE, (g) personal experiences related to breast cancer, and (h) perceptions of susceptibility to and severity of breast cancer. Results were consistent with a model in which (a) attitude and confidence are the direct causes of BSE, (b) beliefs about the benefits and costs of BSE are the direct causes of attitude, and (c) social influences (e.g., being taught how) and knowledge are the direct causes of confidence.     

Judgments of natural and anomalous trajectories in the presence and absence of motion

Recent studies have shown that many people demonstrate erroneous beliefs about motion when asked to predict the trajectories of objects. The present experiments examine whether people can select as correct natural trajectories over anomalous ones when presented with the actual on-going event (motion condition) or static representations of the event (no-motion condition). McCloskey's curved tube problem was used as the event. Results indicate that adults benefit from the motion information in these stimuli, choosing the correct path more often in the motion condition. Men performed better than women in both conditions; this gender effect could not be attributed to formal instruction in physics. Only in the no-motion condition did any men prefer a path which reflected an impetus model of motion. Some women chose a curvilinear path in the motion condition, and in the no-motion condition the curvilinear path was their most often selected alternative. Fifth-grade children demonstrated no effect for gender and their path preferences resembled those of adult males. Children's responses failed to demonstrate a preference for those curvilinear paths which reflect an impetus-based approach to the problem. Adults' performance in the no-motion condition was not enhanced by instructions to employ mental imagery of the event.     

Intuitive reasoning about abstract and familiar physics problems

Previous research has demonstrated that many people have misconceptions about basic properties of motion. In two experiments, we examined whether people are more likely to produce dynamically correct predictions about basic motion problems involving situations with which they are familiar, and whether solving such problems enhances performance on a subsequent abstract problem. In Experiment 1, college students were asked to predict the trajectories of objects exiting a curved tube. Subjects were more accurate on the familiar version of the problem, and there was no evidence of transfer to the abstract problem. In Experiment 2, two familiar problems were provided in an attempt to enhance subjects' tendency to extract the general structure of the problems. Once again, they gave more correct responses to the familiar problems but failed to generalize to the abstract problem. Formal physics training was associated with correct predictions for the abstract problem but was unrelated to performance on the familiar problems.     

Understanding wheel dynamics

In five experiments, assessments were made of people's understandings about the dynamics of wheels. It was found that undergraduates make highly erroneous dynamical judgments about the motions of this commonplace event, both in explicit problem-solving contexts and when viewing ongoing events. These problems were also presented to bicycle racers and high-school physics teachers; both groups were found to exhibit misunderstandings similar to those of naive undergraduates. Findings were related to our account of dynamical event complexity. The essence of this account is that people encounter difficulties when evaluating the dynamics of any mechanical system that has more than one dynamically relevant object parameter. A rotating wheel is multidimensional in this respect: in addition to the motion of its center of mass, its mass distribution is also of dynamical relevance. People do not spontaneously form the essential multidimensional quantities required to adequately evaluate wheel dynamics.     

Attributional styles for helplessness and depression: The importance of sex and situational context

Differences between the sexes in attributions for positive and negative outcomes in either affiliative or achievement situations were examined using the Attributional Style Questionnaire (ASQ). Separate regression analyses for each sex related the ASQ to a measure of helplessness and the Beck Depression Inventory. No differences were noted for attributions to internality or stability; however, females attributed more global causality to positive outcome affiliative situations and negative outcome achievement situations. Regression analyses failed to support the helplessness attributional model of depression. No ratings on the ASQ predicted depression for males; furthermore, for females, only the internal/external dimension was relevant, moderated by both outcome and type of situation. Sex differences were discussed in light of the higher incidence of depression among females.     

A comparison of the classification capabilities of the 1-dimensional kohonen neural network with two pratitioning and three hierarchical cluster analysis algorithms

Neural Network models are commonly used for cluster analysis in engineering, computational neuroscience, and the biological sciences, although they are rarely used in the social sciences. In this study we compare the classification capabilities of the 1-dimensional Kohonen neural network with two partitioning (Hartigan and Späthk-means) and three hierarchical (Ward's, complete linkage, and average linkage) cluster methods in 2,580 data sets with known cluster structure. Overall, the performance of the Kohonen networks was similar to, or better than, the performance of the other methods.