An empirical test of androgyny in the middle years: Evidence from a national survey

Evidence of changes in gender typing at midlife was empirically tested in a secondary analysis of the Quality of American Life study. Several specific hypotheses were tested. The study looked for indications of increasing femininity and/or decreasing masculinity in middle-aged men, and for decreasing femininity and/or increasing masculinity in middle-aged women. In bivariate analyses and in multiple regression analyses, little empirical support was found for role reversal or androgyny at midlife in this nationally representative sample. Satisfaction with family life was the best predictor of overall life satisfaction for men and women of all ages. Race rather than gender and sex role identity interacted with age to predict life satisfaction. Life satisfaction changed little for whites from young adulthood to late middle age, but life satisfaction increased for blacks who were least satisfied with their lives as young adults.The data and tabulations utilized in this article were made available through the Inter-University Consortium for Political and Social Research. The data were originally collected by Angus Campbell and Philip E. Converse. Neither the original source or collectors of the data nor the Consortium bear any responsibility for the analyses or interpretations presented here.     

Multiple personality and hypnosis: the first one hundred years

The Enlightenment brought with it a greater scientific interest in and attention to a wider range of human behavior. In 1789, there emerged during the French Revolution a case of what would be today called multiple personality disorder which came under the care of a local physician, Dr. Eberhard Gmelin. Gmelin had only recently become interested in mesmerism and tried this procedure with this patient. So started an ongoing and gradually increasing exploration of the role of hypnosis in multiple personalities. This paper contributes to the historical background of such psychodynamic concepts as dissociation, splitting, repression, consciousness, subconscious, and unconscious.     

Acquisition context and the use of causal rules

Judgmental asymmetries in using causal knowledge (e.g., for prediction or diagnosis) have been attributed to the inherent directionality of causal knowledge. The present study examines the effect of acquisition context--representations used for initial instruction, and the type of judgement required during acquisition--on judgments using causal rules. In contrast to traditional concept formation research, this paradigm examined the development of procedures for using rules, rather than rule induction. College-student subjects learned to use causal rules describing digital logic gates, receiving instruction with either verbal rules or truth tables, and practicing either predicting or verifying logic-gate outputs. After 200 trials of practice with each rule, subjects were transferred to the untrained judgment task. Transfer was strongly asymmetrical. Subjects trained to make prediction judgments were slowed substantially by transfer to the verification task, while subjects trained to make verification judgments had little difficulty with transfer to the prediction task. Truth-table representations resulted in superior performance, especially for verification judgments. Contrary to prediction, verification judgments always required more time. The results demonstrate that acquisition context may be partly responsible for judgmental asymmetries, and imply that examining conditions of acquisition is important for understanding how causal knowledge is used.     

Prior task failure as a determinant of biofeedback and cognitive task performance

In a study of the effects of controllability of outcomes upon behavior in a biofeedback context, 40 college students were assigned to four groups differing in pretreatment: (1) a success-failure group, given false feedback in a fictitious blood-vessel control task for two sessions designed to convey success followed by two sessions of failure feedback; (2) a failure-failure group, given false failure feedback throughout pretreatment; (3) a contingent failure group, receiving actual feedback in a temperature biofeedback task with criteria that assured failure throughout pretreatment; and (4) a control group, given no specific task during this phase. In a subsequent phase, all subjects received actual frontal (forehead) electromyographic (EMG) response training with biofeedback. In analyses of the results, during EMG training, the contingent failure group attained lower levels than the other three groups. By contrast, on a cognitive (anagram) task, interpolated between pretreatment and EMG training, the contingent failure group demonstrated relatively poorer performance than the other groups. The results are discussed in terms of reactance and learned helplessness theories of perceived loss of control in this context.Some of the data reported here were included in a thesis submitted by the second author in partial fulfillment of requirements for the master's degree in psychology, University of Hawaii, 1981. The entire paper was the basis for a presentation at the annual meeting of the Biofeedback Society of America, Albuquerque, 1984.     

Speed of information processing in academically gifted youths

A group of bright-average 7th grade junior-high-school students was contrasted with a group of manifestly academically gifted students of comparable age who were taking college-level courses in mathematics and science. The groups differed significantly and markedly (showing an overall mean difference of 1.34 SD) on every one of the nine different reaction-time (RT) tasks measuring the speed with which persons perform various elementary cognitive processes. The results indicate that: (1) various RT measurements discriminate about as much between intellectually average and superior groups as past studies have found RT measurements to discriminate between average and subnormal groups: and (2) the academically gifted differ from their nongifted age-peers in more than just scholastic knowledge and advanced problem-solving skills—they differ fundamentally in speed of information processing on extremely simple cognitive tasks with average response latencies of between 0.3 and 1.5 sec.