Psychological androgyny and ego development

Psychological androgyny has often been described as associated with increased behavioral flexibility, with the availability of skills in both traditionally masculine and feminine areas. Ego development has been described as involving an increasing differentiation of one's perception of self, of behavior, and of one's thoughts and feelings, as well as an increasing ability to integrate these differentiated aspects. We therefore predicted that androgynous individuals would show higher levels of ego development than sex-typed individuals, who would in turn be higher than undifferentiated subjects. Eighty-four undergraduate and graduate students completed the Washington University Sentence Completion Test and the Personality Research Form AN-DRO scale. No evidence of a relation between these measures was found. Several other negative findings have recently been reported, using other sex role measures. It appears that ego development, as currently measured, is not associated with sex-related self-concepts, as typically measured, though it may be associated with more androgynous sex role expectations of others, and with self-perceptions of agency and communion. Measures of sex-related self-concepts that provide separate scores for positive and negative attributes should be employed in future studies.This report is based on a thesis conducted by the first author in partial fulfillment of requirements for a master's degree in psychology, under the supervision of the second author. The authors are grateful to Leo Goldberger, Bob Holt, and an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments on an earlier draft of this report.     

Developing rich and quickly accessed knowledge of an artificial grammar

In contrast to prior research, our results demonstrate that it is possible to acquire rich, highly accurate, and quickly accessed knowledge of an artificial grammar. Across two experiments, we trained participants by using a string-edit task and highlighting relatively low-level (letters), medium-level (chunks), or high-level (structural; i.e., grammar diagram) information to increase the efficiency of grammar acquisition. In both experiments, participants who had structural information available during training generated more highly accurate strings during a cued generation test than did those in other conditions, with equivalent speed. Experiment 2 revealed that structural information enhanced acquisition only when relevant features were highlighted during the task using animation. We suggest that two critical components for producing enhanced performance from provided model-based knowledge involve (1) using the model to acquire experience-based knowledge, rather than using a representation of the model to generate responses, and (2) receiving that knowledge precisely when it is needed during training.