Family Gender Role and Guilt in Spanish Dual-Earner Families

In dual-earner families the balance between work and family demands facilitates the development of guilt feelings when parents perceive a non-fulfillment of their responsibilities in childcare. Specifically, women who aspire to personal and professional development on the basis of more egalitarian gender role models must deal with the traditional stereotypes that maintain an intensive maternity mandate that prioritizes the family. On the other hand, for men the role change is primarily in the family setting with the development of a new father role more involved in the care of their children, which is not easily compatible with the more traditional breadwinner role. This study explored the feelings of guilt about parenting in 251 employed Spanish parents with children between 3 and 6 years of age, through the Scale of Guilt Feelings about Parenting, and its relationship with traditional stereotypes of maternal and family role. The scale addresses diverse situations pertaining to child rearing in which work requirements do not allow parents full availability for the care of their children. This availability is present in the model of intensive maternity and in the new father role model. Results indicate the presence of similar and high levels of guilt in fathers and mothers, although in men guilt is related to a non-traditional family role ideology, whereas in women guilt is related to a more traditional maternal role stereotype.     

Contrasting cue-density effects in causal and prediction judgments

Many theories of contingency learning assume (either explicitly or implicitly) that predicting whether an outcome will occur should be easier than making a causal judgment. Previous research suggests that outcome predictions would depart from normative standards less often than causal judgments, which is consistent with the idea that the latter are based on more numerous and complex processes. However, only indirect evidence exists for this view. The experiment presented here specifically addresses this issue by allowing for a fair comparison of causal judgments and outcome predictions, both collected at the same stage with identical rating scales. Cue density, a parameter known to affect judgments, is manipulated in a contingency learning paradigm. The results show that, if anything, the cue-density bias is stronger in outcome predictions than in causal judgments. These results contradict key assumptions of many influential theories of contingency learning.     

Implicit orientation toward family and school among bilingual Latino college students

The authors examined the associations that underlie the orientations of bilingual Latino college students toward family and school. Participants completed, in English or Spanish, 3 implicit association tests assessing their attitude toward family vs. school, identifications with these concepts, and self-esteem. Results revealed a more positive attitude toward, and stronger identification with, family than school. Identification with family was stronger among participants who completed the study in English, suggesting self-definition in terms of distinctions from the context. Last, the more participants valued family over school and identified with family rather than school, the higher was their self-esteem. These findings shed light on the subtle, yet crucial, mechanisms by which cultural knowledge is incorporated in the self-concept of bilingual Latino college students.     

Social cognitive predictors of well-being in African college students

Lent and Brown's (2006, 2008) social cognitive model of work well-being was tested in two samples of African college students, one from Angola (N = 241) and one from Mozambique (N = 425). Participants completed domain-specific measures of academic self-efficacy, environmental support, goal progress, and satisfaction, along with measures of global positive affect and life satisfaction. Path analyses indicated that the model fit the data well overall, both in the full sample and in separate sub-samples by country and gender. Contrary to expectations, however, self-efficacy predicted academic satisfaction only indirectly, via goal progress; and goal progress predicted life satisfaction only indirectly, via academic satisfaction. The predictors accounted for substantial portions of the variance in both academic domain satisfaction and life satisfaction. Implications for research and practice involving the social cognitive model are considered.     

Depressive Realism: Wiser or Quieter?

The Psychological Record - Depressive realism consists of the lower personal control over uncontrollable events perceived by depressed as compared to nondepressed individuals. In this article, we...     

Antagonism of behavioral effects of bromocriptine by prolactin in female cats

The effects of the dopaminergic agonist bromocriptine (BC) and exogenously administered prolactin (PRL) on the spontaneous behavior of female cats were investigated. The objective was to test whether BC-induced behavioral effects may be antagonized by PRL. BC (6 mg/kg ip) administration induced abnormal behaviors such as limb flicks, abortive grooms, head/body shakes, and hallucinatory-like behavior/escape as well as excessive grooming. PRL (5 mg/kg ip) administration induced biphasic changes in grooming. The first change was an increase in grooming frequency averaging 256% of baseline control values and lasting for 1 h. This change was followed by reductions in grooming of 75 and 82.5% below baseline during Hours 2 and 3 postinjection, respectively. Combined BC and PRL treatment antagonized the frequency of BC-induced motor effects such as limb flicks, abortive grooms, and head/body shakes. Limb flicks occurred nine times more often 2 h after BC alone than after BC and PRL. The combined treatment also antagonized the excessive grooming observed after separate administrations of BC and PRL. The observed interactions between PRL and BC behavioral effects support the notion that PRL may be an important modulator of dopamine-dependent motor behavior in female cats.     

Effects of spatial attention on detection and identification of oriented lines

In this paper, we study the effects of spatial attention on detection and identification of oriented lines presented at near-threshold luminance. In the first experiment, we found that the cuing effect was greater when observers had to discriminate between two close orientations than when they had to discriminate between two far-apart orientations. In the second experiment, we examined the effects of peripheral cues on summation of low-contrast oriented lines. We found that the range of orientations within which summation occurred was greater when the cues were invalid than when they were valid. Our results suggest that attention to a specific location in the visual field modulates the neural channels which code orientation in at least two different ways: (a) spatial attention increases the responsivity of these channels to stimuli presented at this location, and (b) it reduces the bandwidths or ranges of orientations to which these channels are sensitive. These results suggest that the properties of the orientation-tuned channels, including those that seem to exert their effects at early stages of orientation processing (e.g., tuning function), may not be fixed, but rather vary according to the attention being paid to the spatial region within which the target stimulus is presented.     

The twofold face of fatalism: collectivist fatalism and individualist fatalism

Fatalism has been a central framework for understanding the psychological processes in cultures with pronounced collectivism that are economically poorly developed. In this context, fatalism emerges as cognitive schema defined by passive and submissive acceptance of an irremediable destiny, governed by some natural force or the will of some God. This image has now lost such a clear profile. But currently, fatalism also accompanies the life of people from individualist cultures, who live in a highly developed, or even opulent, economic context. In this case, fatalism is like some mood of uncertainty, insecurity, and helplessness following the events that characterize the society of global risk. In this paper, we propose a theory to develop the two faces of fatalism.     

Depression and the complete state model of health

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. In order to specify the contents of this positive state, the Complete State Model of Health (CSMH) considers mental health as a series of symptoms of hedonia and positive functioning, operationalized by measures of subjective, psychological, and social well-being. This model has empirically confirmed two new axioms: (a) rather than forming a single bipolar dimension, health and illness are correlated unipolar dimensions, and (b) the presence of mental health implies positive personal and social functioning. In the present article, we have taken the CSMH as the theoretical framework for the study of depression. Confirmatory factor analyses did not support the first axiom. In fact, the model that posits that measures of mental illness and health form a single bipolar dimension provided the best fit to the data.     

Psicología social del lenguaje I: Presupuestos básicos

RESUMEN

Este artículo ofrece una visión del trato que ha tenido el lenguaje en la Psicología desde las perspectivas más importantes que lo han abordado: conductista, psicosocial y psicolingüística; seguidamente el autor propone la conceptualización del lenguaje desde una perspectiva esencialmente conductual o socio-comportamental, considerándolo como la conducta social por excelencia; por último, desarrolla unos criterios para su análisis y estudio desde una perspectiva psicosocial, terminando el trabajo con un resumen en cuatro puntos de los elementos que una psicología social del lenguaje debe tener presente. Este artículo será seguido de una continuación en el número 5/6 de Estudios de Psicología.