The Heroes and the Helpless: The Development of Benevolent Sexism in Children

Sex Roles - Gender-stereotypical attitudes that males should be the protectors and that females need special care as the more delicate gender may reflect foundational components of benevolent...     

Vocal and facial expression matching in infants of mothers with depressive symptoms

This study investigated vocal and facial expression matching in 24 10-month-old infants. Half of the mothers had reported depressive symptoms [i.e., elevated scores on the Center for Epidemiological Studies-Depression Index (CES-D)] during the previous week. Infants were tested using a two-screen preference procedure in which they were presented side-by-side videos of different facial expressions modeled by one female reciting a children's story. A centrally located speaker was used to present a vocal expression soundtrack that matched one of the facial expressions. Separate analyses of variances (ANOVAs) were conducted to analyze the proportion total matching and proportion total looking to the happy and sad expressions. Infants of mothers who reported depressive symptoms displayed less accurate matching of the happy facial and vocal expressions and looked more to sad facial expressions compared to infants of mothers who had not reported depressive symptoms above the normal range. Infants' performance on the expression matching task appears to be related to their primary caregivers' reports of depressive symptoms during the previous week. However, other factors that may be related to the group differences also need to be considered. For example, maternal reports of depressive symptoms may be a marker for other underlying factors that may have affected their infants' performance. © 1997 Michigan Association for Infant Mental Health     

Mothers with Depressive Symptoms Touching Newborns

Previous research has demonstrated the positive effects of early contact on mother–infant touching behaviours. The present study investigated whether the type of maternal touching, shortly after birth, is also determined by the mother's mood state. Mothers with depressive symptoms were compared to non-depressive mothers 1 day after delivery on how they touched their newborns following an initial feeding. The results were counter-intuitive in that no differences were found between mothers with depressive symptoms and non-depressive mothers in type of maternal touching. However, mothers with depressive symptoms talked to their infants less often and talked on the phone more often. In addition, mothers with depressive symptoms showed more neutral and negative facial expressions and fewer positive and more neutral vocal expressions.     

Fostering Spiritual Development through the Religious Dimension of Schools: The report of a pilot study in 17 independent schools

In this article the author examines ways in which spiritual development can be fostered through the religious dimension of schools. She first looks the problem of defining 'spiritual development' and discusses some empirical work in this area. She then presents some of the findings of her pilot study into the perceptions of the religious dimension of their schools by 287 Year 7 and 231 Year 10 pupils in 17 girls' independent schools. She shows the insights gained into spiritual development from pupils' responses to questions on collective worship, Religious Education lessons and school ethos.     

Personality and Church Attendance Among Artists

A sample of 157 adult artists completed the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire together with information about the frequency of church attendance. The data confirmed that church attendance is significantly associated with psychoticism scores, but independent of both extraversion and neuroticism.     

Memory for faces: Encoding and retrieval operations

The reliable finding that trait judgments of faces yield better recognition memory than do feature judgments of faces is conceptualized as an encoding-specificity effect. Specifically, both trait-judgment encodings of faces and face-recognition tests are argued to be holistic, involving topographical information with between-feature processing. Consistent with the concept that encoding and retrieval operations interact to produce retrieval success, it was expected that a memory-for-face test using the Identi-kit (which requires reconstructions of the face at a feature level of analysis) would show trait-encoding tasks to be inferior to feature-encoding tasks. Eighty subjects were assigned randomly to judge a face on 10 trait dimensions (e.g., honesty-dishonesty) or on 10 feature dimensions (e.g., narrow nose-wide nose) and subsequently attempted to recognize the target among five distractors or to reconstruct the face from an Identi-kit. The significant interaction between encoding and retrieval operations indicated that the face was best identified under trait-encoding conditions but best reconstructed under feature-encoding conditions. The match between trait encoding and recognition in yielding high memory performance suggests strongly that trait judgments foster holistic processing of faces (i.e., interfeature topographical information is p-art of the context) and that the recognition of faces also is holistic. Finally, the utility of the feature- vs. holistic-processing distinction is questioned, and an alternative is proposed.     

An Examination of the Cognitive Mechanisms by Which Assigned Goals Affect Task Performance and Reactions to Performance1

In this study, cognitive mechanisms by which assigned goals affect task performance and reactions to performance were examined. Subjects working on a creativity task were assigned one of three performance goals varying in difficulty. Ratings of subjective probability of goal attainment, expected performance, expected satisfaction with goal attainment, and desired performance were obtained prior to each of five blocks of trials. Ratings of satisfaction with performance were obtained after each trial block and ratings of ability were obtained after all trials were completed. As predicted, with increased goal difficulty, subjective probability of goal attainment decreased, but expected performance, expected satisfaction with goal attainment, and desired performance increased. Contrary to prediction, the effect of goal difficulty on task performance was not significant. LISREL analyses revealed that goal difficulty exerted both positive (through expected and desired performance) and negative (through subjective probability of goal attainment) effects on performance. Goal difficulty had a negative effect on satisfaction with performance and ratings of perceived ability. The importance of identifying the cognitive mechanisms by which assigned goals affect performance and the need to consider consequences of assigned goals other than task performance are discussed.     

Handling greedy clergy roles: A dual clergy example

Striking changes have occurred in the number of women who have been ordained as clergy in the Protestant denominations in North America. With these changes has come a concomitant increase in the number of dual clergy couples. These couples are a new variant on the dual career theme. They share some of the same strains which have been identified for dual career couples in general; namely, identity issues, work and role overload, role cycling problems, social network dilemmas and discrepancies between personal and social norms. In addition, particular qualities of the clergy role create problems which these couples must address. One such problem is handling the ambivalent boundary between work and family roles. Two aspects of this issue are the absorptiveness of the role and the embeddedness of both work and family roles. The present paper discusses these boundary issues using data from a study of a population of dual clergy couples in two synods of the Lutheran church in two western Canadian provinces. Strategies for handling these issues are suggested for couples, church leaders and congregational representatives.Thanks are expressed to Les Vaala, Director of Student Life, Camrose Lutheran College, Camrose Alberta who was a cooperating researcher in the study.     

Gender differences in distributive justice preferences: The impact of domain

Past research has found that distributive justice preferences vary markedly both as a function of gender of allocator and the domain in which outcomes or rewards are allocated (e.g., relationships vs. work contexts). This study examined the interaction of these two factors in determining distributive justice preferences. Subjects were asked to fill out two scales designed to assess the degree to which their general distributive preferences in work contexts and in relationships were benevolent (prefer inputs to exceed outcomes), equity sensitive (prefer outcome/input ratios to be equal), or entitled (prefer outcomes to exceed inputs). Results revealed that women's preferences were significantly more benevolent (or less entitled) than men's in work domains, but that men's and women's distributive preferences did not differ significantly in relationships. In addition, both sexes indicated significantly more entitled preferences in work domains than in relationships, but the difference between domains was much greater for men than for women. These results suggest that, when considering issues of justice, men make a greater distinction between domains than do women, and that previously observed gender differences in distributive justice preferences may be specific to the work domain.     

Predicting career-entry pay expectations: The role of gender-based comparisons

This research investigated three sets of factors (career path factors, perceived job inputs, and reference group comparisons) as predictors of career-entry pay expectations for management students about to enter the workforce. As predicted, reference group comparisons accounted for a larger proportion of unique variance in students' pay expectations than either career path factors or perceived job inputs. In addition, same-sex comparisons were stronger predictors of career-entry pay expectations than opposite-sex comparisons. Practical implications and directions for future research are discussed.