DEVELOPMENT OF ANDROGYNY

While many researchers have documented the existence of pressures toward traditional sex-typing in the family, schools, and media, little consideration has been given to the effectiveness of these sources in fostering more flexible orientations to sex-typing. The present paper focuses on the extent to which parents are able to influence their children toward the development of nonstereotyped behaviors, conceptualized here in terms of androgyny. This issue is examined through an-exploration of several theories of sex-role development and empirical research on sex-role development. Additional consideration of theories and research on life-span development and resistance among children in the current culture to nonstereotyped behavior lead to a distinction between short-term and long-term effects of nonsexist parental behavior. Although androgynous parents may not produce androgynous children, their children often do grow up to be androgynous adults.     

A DUAL-IDENTITY FRAMEWORK FOR UNDERSTANDING LESBIAN EXPERIENCE

The diverse life experiences of contemporary lesbians are shaped by women's differing ties to two social worlds, the majority heterosexual society and the minority subculture of the lesbian or sexual-minority world. This article presents a detailed conceptual analysis of a dual-identity framework that emphasizes lesbians' simultaneous affiliations with both lesbian and mainstream/heterosexual communities. The usefulness of this approach is discussed, with emphasis on implications for understanding individual differences in exposure to gay-related stress and mental health. Results from a survey of 116 lesbians showed that scores on measures of Lesbian Identity and Mainstream Identity were not significantly correlated with each other. Both lesbian and mainstream identities were significantly related to lesbians' reported experiences of discrimination, feelings of internalized homophobia, and life satisfaction. Limitations of the dual-identity framework and suggestions for future research are considered.     

Perceptual adjustment to time-compressed speech: A cross-linguistic study

Previous research has shown that, when hearers listen to artificially speeded speech, their performance improves over the course of 10–15 sentences, as if their perceptual system was “adapting” to these fast rates of speech. In this paper, we further investigate the mechanisms that are responsible for such effects. In Experiment 1, we report that, for bilingual speakers of Catalan and Spanish, exposure to compressed sentences in either language improves performance on sentences in the other language. Experiment 2 reports that Catalan/Spanish transfer of performance occurs even in monolingual speakers of Spanish who do not understand Catalan. In Experiment 3, we study another pair of languages— namely, English and French—and report no transfer of adaptation between these two languages for English—French bilinguals. Experiment 4, with monolingual English speakers, assesses transfer of adaptation from French, Dutch, and English toward English. Here we find that there is no adaptation from French and intermediate adaptation from Dutch. We discuss the locus of the adaptation to compressed speech and relate our findings to other cross-linguistic studies in speech perception.     

Long Term Outcomes to Family Caregiver Empowerment

The Vanderbilt Caregiver Empowerment Project evaluated a training program designed to enhance empowerment of caregiver and their subsequent involvement in the mental health treatment of their children. The intervention utilized a multi-component parent training curriculum that was designed to enhance: (a) knowledge of the service system; (b) skills needed to interact with the mental health system; and (c) the caregiver' s mental health services self-efficacy designed to improve caregivers beliefs in their ability to collaborate with service providers. The resulting increased empowerment was hypothesized to increase caretaker involvement, which should affect service use and ultimately the mental health status of the child. A randomized design was used to test the effectiveness of this model with caregivers of children receiving mental health services. The results one-year after the training replicated the intermediate outcomes of the project conducted 3-months after the training. The initial training continued to significantly influence the parent's knowledge and mental health services self-efficacy. However, the intervention had no effect on caregiver involvement in treatment, service use or the mental health status of the children.     

Creative Change: The Life and Work of Four Novelists: Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth

Robert Kastenbaum has argued that we need to take a life-span approach to the lives of artists in order to determine what factors affected their creativity. To that end, I briefly review the lives of four writers, Jane Austen, E. M. Forster, Barbara Pym, and Henry Roth. Each followed a different pattern: Austen wrote productively until her early death; Forster ceased to write novels after his midlife success; Barbara Pym continued to write until her death from cancer; and Henry Roth restarted his moribund career in his seventies. These differences suggest that creativity is closely connected to life events and the artist's psychological state of mind.     

A study of pragmatic skills of clutterers and normal speakers

In communication dyads, three junior high clutterers interacted verbally with three matched control subjects in a task that required one member of the dyad to explain a complicated route (from a marked map of a town center) to the other (who had an unmarked map.) Members played both roles in the dyads. These six subjects were compared with one group of normally speaking control subjects carrying out the same task. Both quantitative and qualitative analyses indicate that, compared with normal speaking pupils, clutterers frequently manifested pragmatic errors and communication failures.     

Switching attention between the ears to monitor tones Nigel Harvey

Alternating dichotic presentation of tones was compared with monaural presentation in two different perceptual tasks. When Ss were asked to detect higher frequency target tones in fists of six background tones, they missed less than 5%. However, when the presentation was fast (10/sec) and the tones alternated dichotically, Ss reported “hearing” only three or four tones. In two further experiments, Ss were asked to judge the number of tones or to report their spatial and temporal positions; these tasks were much less accurately performed, for the dichotic lists, than the target detection task. The differing effects of switching rate on these tasks are discussed in relation to the types of processing they require.     

Anxiety and affiliation in children

Hypotheses about the relationship between anxiety and affiliation derived from the psychoanalytic, drive, and social comparison models were tested by exposing high anxious (HA) and low anxious (LA)Ss to stress and subsequently to conditions meant to fulfill either nurturance or information needs. Unstressed and non-need fulfilled control groups were included. (N=224 grade school children.) Stress significantly increased the strength of adult affiliating in HA Ss; nurturance reduced it. Peer affiliating was not influenced by stress or information, nor did the conditions affect the affiliation of LASs. Results supported the hypothesis that dependency motives mediate the anxiety-affiliation relationship.This study is based on a doctoral dissertation completed at Yale University. The author thanks Prof. Seymour Sarason, who directed the thesis, and the children, teachers, and school psychologists of Milford, Conn. whose cooperation made this study possible.