Sex differences in verbal skills: Use of spelling-sound and lexical information

An experiment is described in which possible sex differences in lexical and phonological skills were investigated. A spelling test was used which could not be done on a phonological basis alone and which entailed lexical access for good performance. Women were judged on the evidence for this task to have better lexical ability than men, but no difference was found on a task designed to tap knowledge and use of phonological information in the form of spelling-sound correspondences.     

Spatial and movement-based heuristics for encoding pattern information through touch

Seven experiments investigated the heuristics people use to encode spatial pattern information through touch. Observers traced a tangible pathway with one hand and then answered questions about either the euclidean line between the pathway endpoints or the pathway itself. Parameters of the euclidean line were held constant, while characteristics of the felt pathway were manipulated. Experiments 1-4 showed that blindfolded sighted and blind observers increasingly overestimated the length of the euclidean line as the length of the explored pathway increased. This indicates a movement-based heuristic for encoding distance. Experiments 5-7 indicated that judgments of the position of the euclidean line did not vary with the position of the felt pathway or the extent to which it deviated from that line. Instead, the results indicated that observers relied on implicit spatial axes, which are movement independent, to judge position. These and other results have implications for theories of haptic encoding of spatial pattern and for the construction of tangible graphics displays.     

The Role of Reproductive Strategies in Academic Attainment

Since there is a tradeoff between prolongedformal education and early reproduction, education canbe construed as a long-term reproductive tactic. Thisreproductive strategies approach was tested by looking at relationships between sociosexuality (SOI)and parental investment (parental income, number ofsiblings, parental divorce, number of step siblings,birth intervals, birth order, closeness to parents) and GPA of 139 White students at a privatecollege. Parental investment was reduced to threefactors (Family Composition, Family Security, andMarital Instability), the last of which was negativelycorrelated with GPA and positively correlated with SOI.SOI was a much stronger (negative) predictor of GPA inwomen, but not men, than ACT was. Results support thereproductive strategies approach and imply that prediction of academic difficulty (and genderdifferences therein) must confront reproductiveissues.     

On Post-Heideggerean Difference: Derrida and Deleuze

This paper takes up the Heideggerean question of difference. I argue that while Heidegger raises this question, his response to the question remains ambiguous and that this ambiguity pivots around the question of time. The bulk of the paper then looks at how Derrida and Deleuze respectively attempt to advance beyond Heidegger's ambiguity regarding the questions of difference and time. Derrida is able to demonstrate the manner in which time—as delay—is constitutive of any attempt to think difference. I argue, however, that his innovative articulation of “différance” maintains an extrinsic rather than intrinsic relation to difference in-itself. To achieve an intrinsic relation, it is necessary to turn to the work of Deleuze, particularly to his discussion of “nonsense” and “singularity.”     

African-American Humor and Trust

Human Studies - One can understand humor in terms of one or some combination of the three types of humor (incongruity, release, superiority) and also by envisioning humor as a finite-province of...     

Forgetting in context: The effects of age, emotion, and social factors on retrieval-induced forgetting

Retrieval-induced forgetting (RIF) refers to the finding that selectively retrieving some information impairs subsequent memory for related but nonretrieved information. This occurs both for the individual doing the remembering (i.e., within-individual retrieval-induced forgetting: WI-RIF), as well as for individuals merely listening to those recollections (i.e., socially shared retrieval-induced forgetting: SS-RIF). In the present study, we examined how the contextual factors of age and emotion independently and interactively affect both WI-RIF and SS-RIF. The results indicated that both WI-RIF and SS-RIF occurred at equivalent levels, both for younger and older adults and for neutral and emotional information. However, we identified a boundary condition to this effect: People only exhibited SS-RIF when the speaker that they were listening to was of the same sex as themselves. Given that participants reported feeling closer to same-sex speakers, this suggests that people co-retrieve more, and therefore exhibit increased SS-RIF, with close others. In everyday life, these RIF effects should influence what information is remembered versus forgotten in individual and collective memories.     

Motivational pursuits in the context of human sexual relationships

The current article examines how close relationships combine with individual differences in sex motives (Cooper, Shapiro, & Powers, 1998) to shape sexual experience. We first provide an overview of the motivational approach as it relates to sexual behavior and then describe 2 broad mechanisms (1 transactional, the other interactional) by which motives and relational context combine to shape behavior. Drawing on our past research, we review evidence showing that people select relationship contexts based partly on their motives and that these contexts in turn shape future motives and behavior; that partner motives shape sexual experience above and beyond one's own motives; and that both the broader relationship context and partner motives moderate the effects of one's own motives on sexual experience. We conclude that the nature of motivational pursuits cannot be adequately understood in the abstract, but rather we must take into account the relational context in which one's needs are pursued.