Speech style,gender stereotypes,and corporate success: What if women talk more like men?

This study tests competing socialization- and identity-based hypotheses concerning the impact of variations in speech style (powerful/powerless) on perceptions of male and female managerial job applicants. In addition, we investigate the effect of the gender of the observer on sensitivity to variation in speech style. Supportive of the socialization hypothesis, speech style has a significant effect on expectations of “success” and “acceptance” in a managerial position, as well as on attributions of situationally relevant traits regardless of the gender of the applicant. However, the identity perspective is supported by the finding that gender of the applicant affects perceptions of “liking” and attributions of gender-linked traits. We argue that the relevance of evaluative dimensions and traits for a particular context affects the impact of gender on the interpretation of actions. As predicted, female observers were more sensitive to variations in speech style. In fact, the effects of speech style on evaluations of applicants disappeared when only male responses were considered. The implications of these findings for equal opportunity in hiring and promotion are discussed.     

Studying intergenerational transmission of eating attitudes and behaviors: methodological and conceptual questions.

Associations between parent and child attitudes and behaviors related to eating and weight were examined among college-age men and women and their mothers and fathers (ns = 44, 47, 87, and 66, respectively). Parent attitudes and behaviors were assessed from the perspective of the parent and the student, and 2 pathways of influence were examined: modeling and direct criticism. In general, students' attitudes and behaviors were more strongly related to perceptions of their parents rather than to parents' own self-reports. There was more support for perceived direct criticism as a pathway of influence, particularly for daughters. Perceived criticism about eating and appearance had large associations with student attitudes and behaviors. Weight loss behavior was related to perceived criticism among daughters and to perceived paternal eating attitudes among sons. Results highlight important methodological and conceptual questions for intergenerational research.     

Problems with the Seeing = Knowing Rule

The view that children understand the mind via a coherent theory is supported by evidence that children rigidly follow a Seeing = Knowing Rule: seeing, and only seeing, leads to knowing. This paper presents two kinds of evidence that children do not follow this rule. First, we critically review previous findings that children neglect the role of inference and argue that these studies do not in fact support the view that children follow a Seeing = Knowing Rule. We then present two studies in which children who correctly attributed ignorance and false belief to an observer in a false belief task also attributed ignorance (Study 1) and false belief (Study 2) in true belief tasks. These findings demonstrate that children sometimes attribute ignorance and false belief to an observer who is granted visual access, an outcome that should not occur if children rigidly follow the Seeing = Knowing Rule. We end by discussing some problems associated with modifying the Seeing = Knowing Rule to account for children's failure on the true belief task.     

Grammatical class effects in relation to normal and aphasic sentence processing

Agrammatic, Broca's aphasic patients, Wernicke's aphasic patients, and neurologically intact control subjects were asked to detect target letters in prose passages and in a scrambled word passage. The targets were embedded, in some instances, in content words (open-class vocabulary items), and in other instances, in function words (closed-class vocabulary items). With respect to the prose passages, both the control subjects and Wernicke's aphasic patients were more apt to notice target letters when they appeared in the open-class items than when in closed-class items; by contrast, the agrammatic Broca's patients showed no vocabulary class detection difference. The Wernicke's patients were not entirely normal, however: Whereas the normal subjects showed a much smaller vocabulary class effect for letter detection in the scrambled condition, the Wernicke's maintained the pattern they had shown in the prose condition. These and other findings obtained on the letter cancellation task are discussed in relation to lexical access mechanisms geared to sentence parsing.     

Unraveling Cultural Threads: A Qualitative Study of Culture and Ethnic Identity Among Urban Southwestern American Indian Youth Parents and Elders

We utilized qualitative methods to explore ethnic and cultural identity among urban Southwestern American Indian youth, parents, and elders. Twenty-four respondents ranging in age from approximately 13 to 90 years were interviewed in focus groups divided by age. Six major themes and seventeen sub-themes related to tribal and pan-American Indian ethnic identity were identified. Two important findings emerging from our study were that common ethnic identity constructs can be validated and new identity constructs discovered through qualitative methods. These and other findings suggest the importance of qualitative methods in better understanding cultural and ethnic identity. Of particular significance was the notion that the most salient and relevant identity constructs can be learned from the voices and perspectives of ethnic identity members themselves across generations, age, tribal groups, gender, and reservation and urban residence.     

Toddlers’ Understanding of Peers’ Emotions

The second year of life sees dramatic developments in infants’ ability to understand emotions in adults alongside their growing interest in peers. In this study, the authors used a social-referencing paradigm to examine whether 12-, 18-, and 24-month-old children could use a peer's positive or negative emotion messages about toys to regulate their own behavior with the toys. They found that 12-month-olds decreased their play with toys toward which a peer had expressed either positive or negative emotion compared with play following a peer's neutral attention toward a toy. Also, 18-month-olds did not respond systematically, but 24-month-old children increased their toy play after watching a peer display negative affect toward the toy. Regardless of their age, children with siblings decreased their play with toys toward which they had seen a peer display fear, the typical social-referencing response. The authors discuss results in the context of developmental changes in social understanding and peer interaction over the second year of life.