Men's and Women's Reactions to Hypothetical Sexual Advances: The Role of Initiator Socioeconomic Status and Level of Coercion

Research on sexual coercion has revealed a beauty bias in that participants judge coercive sexual advances committed by attractive individuals as more acceptable than coercive advances committed by unattractive individuals. In this study, we examined the extent to which there exists a similar socioeconomic status bias in people's perceptions. Participants (N = 160) read 1 of 8 vignettes that depicted sexual advances and responded to several questions about the acceptability of the initiator's behavior. The coerciveness of the advance was manipulated by varying whether the touch occurred in a gentle manner with no threat or in a forceful manner with a threat of harm. Male participants always received a vignette that portrayed a woman initiating a sexual advance, and female participants always received a vignette that portrayed a man initiating a sexual advance. Socioeconomic status of the initiator was manipulated by what type of clothing he/she wore (shabby or expensive) and the car he/she drove (old or new). Results indicated that a gentle touch was more acceptable than a forceful touch, and men found sexual advances more acceptable than did women. Participants rated sexual advances by wealthy individuals as more acceptable than sexual advances by poor individuals. However, the greater acceptability of advances by wealthy individuals appeared to hold up only in the case of a gentle touch. In addition, men appeared to be more prone to the socioeconomic status bias than were women. Methodological limitations and future directions are discussed.     

Sympathy reconfi gured: Some reflections on sympathy, empathy and the discovery of values

Two words, sympathy and empathy, are commonly used to describe three distinguishable things. These are: i) an elementary, involuntary capacity which puts us in touch with the emotional state of another; ii) the use of 'trial identification' to discover, consciously or unconsciously, the emotional state of another; iii) the affect of compassion. Because these three usages have not been clearly sorted out, and because the word sympathy has been disparaged, empathy has been overused, and a variety of technical terms (including intersubjectivity, recurrent primary identification, projective identification, alpha function etc.), all of which have important specialised applications, have been used confusingly to describe functions at a much higher level of generality. This paper attempts to sort out the three meanings with reference to the history of the two words, and also to show that the use of clear general terms gives us a more intelligible linguistic base from which other matters can be considered: in particular, whether an origin can be discerned for judgements of value other than that of superego internalisation.     

A survey of psychologists' attitudes towards and utilization of exposure therapy for PTSD

Although research supports the efficacy of exposure therapy for PTSD, some evidence suggests that exposure is under-utilized in general clinical practice. The purpose of this study was to assess licensed psychologists' use of imaginal exposure for PTSD and to investigate perceived barriers to its implementation. A total of 852 psychologists from three states were randomly selected and surveyed. An additional 50 members of a trauma special interest group of a national behavior therapy organization were also surveyed. The main survey results indicate that a large majority of licensed doctoral level psychologists do not report use of exposure therapy to treat patients with PTSD. Although approximately half of the main study sample reported that they were at least somewhat familiar with exposure for PTSD, only a small minority used it to treat PTSD in their clinical practice. Even among psychologists with strong interest and training in behavioral treatment for PTSD, exposure therapy is not completely accepted or widely used. Clinicians also appear to perceive a significant number of barriers to implementing exposure.     

Encoding and retrieval in aging and memory loss, a fMRI study

Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) is a term for nondemented individuals with memory complaints and deficits greater than age-adjusted normal performance. Functional MRI (fMRI) may be a more sensitive method than other techniques to reveal functional abnormalities in individuals with MCI, only a proportion of whom progress to Alzheimer's disease (AD). fMRI was carried out while subjects (four MCI, five age-matched normal controls, and one AD) performed incidental encoding (deep and shallow) and recognition tasks for colored and black and white photographs contrasted to baseline fixation. fMRI revealed interesting dissociations between activation patterns and behavioral performance when comparing the MCI and AD to the NC.     

Why do young infants fail to search for hidden objects?

Recent evidence indicates that infants as young as 3.5 months of age understand that objects continue to exist when hidden (Baillargeon, 1987a; Baillargeon & DeVos, 1990). Why, then, do infants fail to search for hidden objects until 7 to 8 months of age? The present experiments tested whether 5.5-month-old infants could distinguish between correct and incorrect search actions performed by an experimenter. In Experiment 1, a toy was placed in front of (possible event) or under (impossible event) a clear cover. Next, a screen was slid in front of the objects, hiding them from view. A hand then reached behind the screen and reappeared holding the toy. The infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event, suggesting that they understood that the hand's direct reaching action was sufficient to retrieve the toy when it stood in front of but not under the clear cover. The same results were obtained in a second condition in which a toy was placed in front of (possible event) or behind (impossible event) a barrier. In Experiment 2, a toy was placed under the right (possible event) or the left (impossible event) of two covers. After a screen hid the objects, a hand reached behind the screen's right edge and reappeared first with the right cover and then with the toy. The infants looked reliably longer at the impossible than at the possible event, suggesting that they realized that the hand's sequence of action was sufficient to retrieve the toy when it stood under the right but not the left cover. A control condition supported this interpretation. Together, the results of Experiments 1 and 2 indicate that by 5.5 months of age, infants not only represent hidden objects, but are able to identify the actions necessary to retrieve these objects. The implications of these findings for a problem solving explanation of young infants' failure to retrieve hidden objects are considered.     

The evolution of pure alexia: a longitudinal study of recovery

This case report documents the partial recovery, over a 12-month period, of pure alexia in an adult female following a left occipital infarction. Measures of speed and accuracy were obtained on an oral reading and a lexical decision task immediately postonset and then on 10 subsequent occasions. Explicit letter-by-letter reading was observed only during the first week poststroke but a significant effect of word length was seen in all testing sessions. Reading accuracy was relatively good at all stages and reading latency showed a remarkable decrease over time but did not reach normal reading rates. The inability to use higher-order orthographic knowledge, as manifest in the absence of a word superiority effect, was still noted at one year postonset. We therefore concluded that the change in behavior was attributable to increased proficiency in the use of the adaptive letter-by-letter procedure rather than to the resolution of the underlying deficit. It is suggested that longitudinal neurobehavioral studies add to our understanding of the alexic deficit and provide insight into the recovery process.     

Cross-lingual measurements of interconsonantal differences

Native speakers recorded pairs of consonant-vowel (CV) and vowel (V) syllables in Japanese, American English, Serbo-Croatian, and Italian. All initial consonants of each language were paired with each other. For example, a speaker would read a-a, a-pa, a-ma, etc., through all of the consonants. The next series would commence pi-i, pi-pi, pi-bi, pi-mi, etc., through the consonants. Five vowels were used. Following typical instructions of the method of magnitude estimation, native panels of 20 to 26 listeners, all university students, individually assessed the sameness or difference of a pair of syllables. The measures were normalized and averaged for each series of pairs of syllables.Sixteen of the prevocalic sounds, including the absence of a consonant, were deemed phonetically similar from language to language. First, intercorrelations were computed among the languages with respect to the 16 judgments made of the differences between each consonant and the consonants of that language, itself included. Second, a factor analysis was made of each matrix of interconsonantal distances. Third, a cluster analysis was made of the 64 (=16×4) sounds of the four languages.