“Theobiology”: Attempting to Understand God and Ourselves

Theobiology, describing the interface between theology and biology, is proposed as a means to help us in our attempt to understand God, God's world, and ourselves. This embodiment of theological knowledge includes the relationship of humans to plants and animals, to the environment or God's world of creation, to God. Humans experience through their bodies and bodily functions, their senses and perceptions, all knowledge, including theological, psychological, and sociological knowledge. Gender, perhaps the largest division in any species, is a very important issue in biology and in theobiology. The gender and attributes associated with God and Christ—those of the male—have alienated and disenfranchised female persons. A balance between flesh and spirit, the sacred and the secular, women and men is vital if we are to achieve a healthy life and to live as a loving Creator would want all to live—in love, peace, and harmony, with caring and mutual respect among all that make up life—plant, animal, environment, and God.     

Stress experienced by women doctoral students,need for support,and occupational sex typing: An interactional view

The present study was concerned with emotional stress experienced by women doctoral students as an interactive function of type of department and personal need for support. Subjects were women registered as doctoral students at a large state university in the fall semester of 1975. Of the total, 86 were from female minority departments, 177 from egalitarian departments, and 114 from female majority departments. Stress from time pressures, marital pressures, and overall stress were all found to be interactive functions of need for support and type of department. The female minority group showed the strongest relationship between need for support and each of the three significant stress variables. Implications of these findings for women in graduate school are discussed.This study was supported in part by a grant from Division 9 of the American Psychological Association and by the Measurement and Evaluation Center at the University of Texas at Austin. It was based on a dissertation, under the direction of H. Paul Kelley, submitted in partial fulfillment of the doctoral degree at the University of Texas at Austin. The author wishes to thank Lucia Gilbert and Charles Holahan for their helpful comments on an earlier draft of this article.     

We've come a long way,maybe: College students' plans for work and family

Young men and women today face considerable choices as they plan for family and work. We explore college students' educational preparations, as well as their attitudes, orientations, and expectations for work and family. Although we find some changes toward a more gender-equal society, we also find potential conflicts which these individuals will have to face as they attempt to combine work and family roles. Women and men are doing equally well in college, both men and women have equal commitments to work roles, and both value family. However, both men and women expect that women will play a more prominent role in the family and men a stronger role in the workplace. The orientation and plans of these college students do not anticipate symmetrical relationships in which both men and women share household and work responsibilities.We are grateful to Brenda K. Hawks, Sue Curry Jansen, and Judith Lasker for their careful readings of earlier drafts of this paper. Special thanks go to the students in SR377/477 for their major contribution in collecting the data which are analyzed herein.     

Children as witnesses: A comparison of lineup versus showup identification methods

The goal of this study was to compare children's and adults eyewitness identification accuracy when presented with an array of possible suspects (‘lineup’) versus one suspect (‘showup’). Kindergarten children and adults were shown a slide show of a staged theft and subsequently asked whether, of the photo or photos shown them, the perpetrator was present or not. Children were more likely than adults to identify the perpetrator correctly when that suspect was present in the lineup or showup. Children were also more likely than adults to make an incorrect identification of another person when the perpetrator's photo was not present in the lineup or showup. Because false positive identification errors are more difficult to detect with the showup than the lineup, use of the showup may be less appropriate with child witnesses than with adults due to children's greater tendency to make positive identifications.     

Self-reported measures of appetite in relation to verbal cues about many foods

In the present study a representative sample of students from a general college population were exposed to a list of written food cues and asked to rate each of the foods according to its nutritional value. Subjects who were exposed to the food list subsequently reported increases in hunger, desire to eat, and number of foods currently hungry for, as well as reduced fullness, compared to controls who were not exposed to the food list. Also, there was a trend for the food-cued subjects to report hunger for lower fat foods compared to the controls. The results are discussed in terms of previous research and suggestions for future research are provided.     

Trust, Dependency, and Control in the Contemporary Organization

Trust is an essential element in productive and effective intraorganizational communication and interaction. The present study examined several consequences of trust in terms of influence strategies used and the frequency with which people interact with each other. The study also examined the extent to which the technology of work affects management's dependency on their employees. It was found that distrust of subordinates by managers (n = 275) was associated with the use of strong tactics of influence, little dependency on employees, and the use of personal-related characteristics to explain distrust. It was also found that distrust of managers by subordinates (n = 267) was associated with the use of strong methods of influence, less interaction, less attempts to influence, and the use of personal-related characteristics to explain lack of trust. These findings have clear implications for understanding the relation among worker trust, dependency, and social influence. The data suggest that both employees and employers could benefit from considering the importance of a trusting relationship in the workplace.     

“I Was Really, Really, Really Mad!” Children's Use of Evaluative Devices in Narratives About Emotional Events

Children (ages 3, 5, and 8 years, mostly White and middle-class) were asked to tell personal experience narratives about a time when they had been happy, surprised, and mad. Their explicit emotion labels as well as their use of linguistic forms of evaluation to convey emotion were assessed. Five-year-old boys were the most likely to explicitly label anger, while gender and age differences in explicit emotion labels were absent for the other two emotions. However, children used many more linguistic devices for providing evaluation than explicit emotion labels in their narratives. They also provided more with age, and they used more evaluative devices when talking about anger-arousing events than about happy or surprising events. The few gender differences suggested that 3-year-old girls may acquire earlier mastery of evaluative devices than do boys, especially references to emotional states.     

The Effects of a List of Food Items on Motivations to Eat in Dieters and Nondieters

A major health problem in our society is obesity, which is frequently caused by overeating or eating inappropriate foods. It has been suggested that the prevalences of food and food-related cues contribute to overeating and that dieters are particularly sensitive to food stimuli. In the present study, the influence of dieting was examined in a representative sample of college students who were exposed to a list of written food cues or who served as controls. The list of food cues increased motivation to eat in nondieting subjects, but did not appear to influence the appetites of dieters. It may be that dieters are more resistant to the effects of more subtle food cues, even when many cues are presented sequentially.