Gender differences in distributive justice: The role of self-presentation revisited

Kidder, Bellettirie, and Cohn's [(1977) Secret Ambitions and Public Performances: The Effects of Anonymity on Reward Allocations Made by Men and Women, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Vol. 13, pp. 70–80] self-presentational account of gender differences in distributive justice was examined. Men and women attending two, primarily white, northeastern universities distributed a jointly earned reward between themselves and a hypothetical co-worker who was either a stranger or a friend and whose inferior task performance resulted from either low ability or low effort. Subjects made their allocations under both public and private conditions. Men allocated more equitably (i.e., according to co-worker input) in public than women did, whereas women allocated more equitably in private than men did, only when working with strangers who exerted low effort. In addition, among female subjects, private allocations to low-effort strangers were more equitable than public allocations. Among male subjects, however, public allocations to low-effort strangers were more equitable than private allocations. The conditions under which men make equitable allocations and women make equal allocations, and possible reasons for these differences, are discussed.This research was presented at the 62nd annual meeting of the Eastern Psychological Association, April 11–14, 1991, New York, NY. We are grateful to Brenda Major, Victor Benassi, Rebecca Warner, members of the University of New Hampshire Social Psychology Research Group, and two anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments on an earlier version of this paper.     

Freud and the figure of Moses: the Moses of Freud.

Moses was a lifelong preoccupation of Freud, representing a double and idealized self and object. Freud identified with different aspects of Moses during different periods of development, from concrete hero to abstract ideal. He turned to Moses in the concluding phase of his relationship with Fliess and his self-analysis, and then at other times of crisis. The Moses recreated by Freud is important to the evolution of the concepts of the superego, and his Moses studies simultaneously illuminate the developmental significance of internalization, identification, and abstract symbolic thought. Latently autobiographical, the Moses motif is related to the analysis of unconscious conflict and trauma and to issues of Jewish identity and analytic ideals.     

Sex-role androgyny and patterns of causal attribution for academic achievement

In order to test the role of social psychological factors in the underrepresentation of women in mathmatics and related academic fields, a two-wave panel survey was conducted among freshmen university students (88 females and 44 males). Before and during their first academic year, survey respondents completed questionnaires assessing their psychological androgyny (employing the Bem Sex-Role Inventory) and their causal attributions for success and failure in various areas of academic achievement. Results of cross-lagged panel correlation analyses confirmed the predicted causal relationship between sex-role identification and feelings of control over achievement in mathematics and science among female respondents. No such relationship was evidenced among male respondents or among females for nonmathematical areas of academic achievement.     

Selective inattention to anxiety-linked stimuli

The term selective inattention as used here subsumes those phenomena whose primary function is the active blocking or attenuation of partially processed contents en route to conscious expression. Examples are anxiety-motivated forgetting or perceptual distortion and hypnotically induced negative hallucinations. Studies in the field of selective attention have typically been designed to explain what takes place in a task in which the subject is first instructed to attend to a particular stimulus and then to consciously execute that instruction as well as he can. The rejection of content in process is examined only sceondarily as a consequence of the acceptance of relevant information. In the present experiments and theorizing, the emphasis instead is on inhibitory operations that take place automatically, without conscious intent, in response to a potential anxiety reaction. Experiment 1 explored the interaction of anxiety-linked inattention with strength of a target stimulus. Three female subjects were programmed under hypnosis to respond posthypnotically in the On condition with prescribed degrees of anxiety when certain Blacky pictures popped into mind later ,t the end of experimental trials; in the Off conditionall pictures were to become neutral. With the three female subjects still under hypnosis, each of the loaded pictures was then paired with a four-letter work relevant to the individual's own version of what was happening in the picture. The waking recognition task, carried out with amnesia for the prior hypnotic programming, consisted of tachistoscopic exposure of loaded words and physically similar filler words at four durations within a baseline range of recognition accuracy from 50%--75% correct. The data yielded a curvilinear relationship in which the recognition of only the loaded words was significnatly lower in the On condition at the 60%--70% range of recognition accuracy but not at shorter or longer stimulus durations. Experiment 2, for which the prior hypnotic programming of the same three subjects was similar to Experiment 1, used an anagram approach to comparable four-letter words, except that pleasure-loaded words were introduced as a control along with filler words. Four durations of tachistoscopic exposure of the anagrams were used with each individual, and the major dependent variable was response latency measured in milliseconds. An independent measure of perceptual discriminability of the scrambled stimulus letters was obtained to isolate perceptual from cognitive aspects of the task. The results indicated that both low perceivability and high solvability increase the likelihood of response delays specifically in the presence of anxiety-linked stimuli. Experiment 3 was a nonhypnotic replication of Experiment 2, using 12 male and 13 female subjects. The potential affective loading of key anxiety and pleasure words was accomplished by structured scenarios for the Blacky pictures in which subjects were asked to place themselves as vividly as possible...     

The effects of mood upon imaginal thought

The effects of mood upon imaginal thought were explored with a highly trained undergraduate female hypnotic subject. She was hypnotically programmed to experience free-floating anxiety or pleasure in varying degrees just before the exposure of combinations of three Blacky Pictures, and to produce dreamlike imagery in response to the Blacky stimuli while under sway of the mood. Data from 98 dream trials, separated by amnesia, indicated that the affective states clearly influenced imaginal processes. Blind ratings by a psychoanalyst showed the anxiety moods to be more closely associated with primary-process features characteristic of nocturnal dreams, whereas pleasure had a relatively higher incidence of daydreamlike ratings. Empirical analysis of themes yielded significant relationships of anxiety to physical injury to the self and verbal aggression toward others; pleasure was associated with circular movements and overt sex themes.     

Psychic trauma and traumatic object loss

Psychoanalysis began with the concept of psychic trauma, which was subsequently not clearly differentiated from traumatic object loss or from unconscious conflict and fantasy. Psychic trauma is investigated in relation to unconscious conflict, with and without concurrent object loss. The syndromes of PTSD, uncomplicated by object loss, of traumatic bereavement, and of relatively nontraumatic bereavement, though often interwoven and inseparable, are all different. The significance of the loss, sociocultural factors, and group process influence individual responses to trauma and traumatic bereavement. There are specific neurobiological and psychological sequelae of traumatic experience. Clinical applications are noted.     

A New Definition of Genetic Counseling: National Society of Genetic Counselors’ Task Force Report

The Genetic Counseling Definition Task Force of the National Society of Genetic Counselors (NSGC) developed the following definition of genetic counseling that was approved by the NSGC Board of Directors: Genetic counseling is the process of helping people understand and adapt to the medical, psychological and familial implications of genetic contributions to disease. This process integrates the following: •Interpretation of family and medical histories to assess the chance of disease occurrence or recurrence. •Education about inheritance, testing, management, prevention, resources and research. •Counseling to promote informed choices and adaptation to the risk or condition. The definition was approved after a peer review process with input from the NSGC membership, genetic professional organizations, the NSGC legal counsel, and leaders of several national genetic advocacy groups.