Speeded induction under uncertainty: The influence of multiple categories and feature conjunctions

When people are uncertain about the category membership of an item (e.g., Is it a dog or a dingo?), research shows that they tend to rely only on the dominant or most likely category when making inductions (e.g., How likely is it to befriend me?). An exception has been reported using speeded induction judgments where participants appeared to use information from multiple categories to make inductions (Verde, Murphy, &; Ross, 2005). In two speeded induction studies, we found that participants tended to rely on the frequency with which features co-occurred when making feature predictions, independently of category membership. This pattern held whether categories were considered implicitly (Experiment 1) or explicitly (Experiment 2) prior to feature induction. The results converge with other recent work suggesting that people often rely on feature conjunction information, rather than category boundaries, when making inductions under uncertainty.     

Antecedents, correlates, and consequences of sexual jealousy

The paper presents a social-psychological approach to the empirical study of sexual jealousy, after surveying the philosophical, sociological, anthropological, psychoanalytic, and nonscientific literature on the subject. The social-psychological approach focuses on the environmental and situational factors that cause people to act in a jealous manner. One hundred and three men and women varying in age, length of relationship, and relationship style responded to a specially designed sexual jealousy inventory. Results indicated that jealousy is a negative physiological, emotional, and mental state, experienced at least at some point of their lives by all the subjects in the study. Numerous antecedents, correlates, and consequences of jealousy were investigated and discussed. Fifty-four percent of the subjects described themselves as “a jealous person” even when they had good situational reasons to feel less secure in the relationship and to experience jealousy, and even though this dispositional self-attribution has negative consequences for coping.     

Biology Precedes, Culture Transcends: An Evolutionist's View of Human Nature

I will, first, outline what we currently know about the last 4 million years of human evolutionary history, from bipedal but small-brained Australopithecus to modern Homo sapiens, our species, through the prolific toolmaker Homo habilis and the continent wanderer Homo erectus. I shall then identify anatomical traits that distinguish us from other animals and point out our two kinds of heredity, the biological and the cultural.
Biological inheritance is based on the transmission of genetic information, in humans very much the same as in other sexually reproducing organisms. But cultural inheritance is distinctively human, based on transmission of information by a teaching and learning process that is in principle independent of biological parentage. Cultural inheritance makes possible the cumulative transmission of experience from generation to generation. Cultural heredity is a swifter and more effective (because it can be designed) mode of adaptation to the environment than the biological mode. The advent of cultural heredity ushered in cultural evolution, which transcends biological evolution.
I will, finally, explore ethical behavior as a model case of a distinctive human trait, and seek to ascertain the causal connections between human ethics and human biology. My conclusions are that (1) moral reasoning—that is, the proclivity to make ethical judgments by evaluating actions as either good or evil—is rooted in our biological nature; it is a necessary outcome of our exalted intelligence, but (2) the moral codes that guide our decisions as to which actions are good and which ones are evil are products of culture, including social and religious traditions. This second conclusion contradicts those evolutionists and sociobiologists who claim that the morally good is simply that which is promoted by the process of biological evolution.     

Increase in arab women's perceived power in the second half of life

An increase in perceived power in midlife was demonstrated among 60 middle-class Arab women in Israel. 20 of the women were young (age 20–40) 20 were middle aged (45–55) and 20 were older (60–80). Perceived power was studied using card 4 of the Thematic Apperception Test (TAT). The TAT stories were rated on three dimensions of perceived power: security, inner strength, and interpersonal influence. Results indicate that the young Arab women ranked lowest in security and inner strength. There was a bigger difference between the young women and the two other groups than between the middle-aged and older women. In addition, all three groups, while describing men as having more interpersonal power and security, still described women as having more inner strength.The authors wish to thank Latifa Manzur and Anat Zohar-Aizen, students at Tel-Aviv University, for their help in the data collection.     

Sex and Gender As Raw Political Material: Local Women Negotiate Globalization

In Mexico and around the world women face globalization processes and changing economies that they have little power to refuse. Yet, like other groups on the margins, women confront globalization and make local uses of it. Sex and gender are deeply implicated in globalization and are the raw political material in struggles for and against parity for women.In this introduction to the special volume of Sex Roles on Maya women's negotiating globalization, I discuss local ways that women draw on sex and gender to encounter economic transformations, to expand parity in the public and the domestic spheres,and to create a we solidarity across class and ethnic differences.     

Reviews of current books

Pastoral Psychology -     

The experience of tedium in three generations of professional women

Tedium, defined as the experience of emotional, physical, and mental exhaustion, was studied in three generations of professional women, who were questioned extensively about their lifestyles, life stresses, and life attitudes. Results indicated that in spite of the differences in life features and pressures among the three groups, the similarities in their experiences, attitudes, and overall life satisfaction are rather impressive. The differences among the generations tended to cluster around the more stressful environment of college for the young preprofessional women, who experienced most tedium and were most overextended and conflicted, and around the more traditional attitudes toward women and women's issues expressed by the older postprofessional generation, who also had the least tedium. The midcareer professional women were characterized by more positive life attitudes, more satisfaction from their work, and by liberal feministic attitudes toward working women's issues. Three focal variables were hypothesized and documented to be important tedium correlates for all professional women. Of the three, role conflict rather than number of roles was found to be a positive tedium correlate. Sense of control and especially having social support systems emerged as significant negative tedium correlates.An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the Annual Convention of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August 26–30, 1977. The authors wish to thank Trudy Solomon, who assisted in the organizational aspects of the study, and Susan Reuss and the students of the University of California, Berkeley's social psychology course, who took part in the group research project and helped in the data collection.