When beauty isn't talent: The influence of physical attractiveness,attitudes toward women,and competence on impression formation

The present study investigated the effect of attitudes toward women, physical attractiveness, and competence on impression formation of women. Male and female undergraduates read a competent or incompetent essay allegedly written by a physically attractive or unattractive female and responded to questions about the essay and its writer. Subjects were classified as traditionals, moderates, or liberals on the basis of their scores on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale. Female subjects' impressions were affected by the competence of the stimulus person and by their sex-role attitudes, but were not influenced by the physical attractiveness of the writer. Males, however, were influenced by all three variables. Evidence was found for a reversal of the physical attractiveness stereotype for liberal males with reference to incompetent women. The implications of these findings for physical attractiveness research are discussed.The authors wish to express their appreciation to Walter Stephan, Judith Langlois, Janet Spence, and Richard Archer for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article. Thanks are also due to Richard Roberson for assistance in data collection.     

Recognition memoryfor pictorial events

Subjects viewed sequences of slides depicting everyday events, and in later recognition tests, they correctly rejected distractors that were inconsistent with some invariant of the event but falsely accepted consistent distractors. J. J. Jenkins has accounted for the differential recognition of consistent and inconsistent slides of pictorial sequences in terms of fusion, the abstraction of an event from a series of temporally related items. The conditions under which event fusion was likely to occur were manipulated in three experiments: degree of ordering of the action-sequence slides, semantic vs. nonsemantic orienting tasks during acquisition, and duration of retention interval Recognition performance was generally more accurate under conditions of semantic processing, ordered acquisition sequences (for the semantic task), and shorter retention intervals. However, these variables did not affect differential recognition of consistent vs. inconsistent slides. A further experiment showed that the absence of an effect of disordering acquisition sequences on differential recognition could not be attributed to subjects’ reordering the disordered sequences in a way consistent with the original event. The data did not support the hypothesis that recognition performance was based on fusion of events depicted by temporally ordered slide sequences. It was suggested that memory for featural detail is a relevant factor in performance.     

Prominent publications in cognitive psychology

This article identifies the 50 publications in cognitive psychology that were most frequently cited in the professional literature between 1979 and early 1982. The characteristics of these publications are discussed, and comparisons are made with other relevant findings.     

Mouse killing in rats induced by lesions of the medial hypothalamus or medial accumbens: short-term preoperative exposure to a mouse does not suppress the killing

Rats were either exposed or not exposed to a mouse in their living cage for a 48-hr period. At the end of this time a bilateral lesion was made in the medial accumbens region or in the medial hypothalamus. When tested 2 days postoperatively, the killing frequency among rats that had been exposed to mice preoperatively was not significantly lower than that of rats that were not preoperatively exposed. The ineffectiveness of preoperative experience in suppressing the mouse killing induced by medial accumbens and medial hypothalamic lesions is similar to that found previously with dorsal-median raphe lesions and olfactory bulb lesions and is in contrast to the ease with which preoperative experience prevents mouse killing induced by septal lesions and serotonergic lesions induced by 5,7-dihydroxytryptamine.     

Structural and strategic approaches to psychosomatic families.

Patterns of relatedness characteristic of psychosomatic families are discussed. A step-wise intervention procedure based on structural and strategic approaches is presented. The goals of the procedure are to establish symptomatic relief and modify concurrently the patterns of relatedness. The procedure is applied to a sample of families in which a child presents with psychogenic abdominal pain. This paper is intended as a detailed and practical guide to working with such families; a degree of generalization is possible, as well.     

Increasing Career Center Accessibility for the Blind

To improve career planning services for visually impaired persons, the career center at Florida State University developed a self-directed program. This article describes strategies for making career information materials and resources more accessible to the blind.