Androginia psicológica y flexibilidad comportamental

RESUMEN

Los autores investigan la hipótesis de que los sujetos andróginos son más flexibles en su implicación y bienestar ante tareas que se tipifican culturalmente como pertenecientes al “otro” sexo. Comienzan repasando la literatura psicológica acerca de androginia psicológica y flexibilidad comportamental y seguidamente concretan sus hipótesis: comprobar que los individuos andróginos a) mostrarán una mayor implicación en tareas tanto masculinas como femeninas, b) preferirán en menor medida actividades apropiadas a su sexo y c) experimentarán un mayor bienestar psicológico al desarrollar este tipo de actividades que cualquier otro grupo de rol sexual. Tras describir el método y los resultados del trabajo, los autores ofrecen una discusión final de éstos, en la que destacan que su investigación parece confirmar los resultados de Bem: parece que es el rol sexual andrógino el que siente un mayor grado de bienestar al realizar conductas que son sancionadas socialmente como inapropiadas a su sexo y el que escoge un mayor número de este tipo de comportamientos. Los autores finalizan afirmando que también parece haber quedado respaldada la validez predictiva del Bem Sex Role Inventory.     

La adquisición del lenguaje: un análisis interaccional

Resumen

El principal objetivo de esta investigación fue analizar functionalmente las interacciones verbales niño-adulto, en seis sujetos, de edades comprendidas entre los 18 y los 30 meses, y sus familias, observados en ambiente natural. Un segundo objetivo fue definir y poner a prueba un sistema de Categorías funcionales para el análisis del lenguaje infantil. También se realizó un estudio del lenguaje adulto («input parental») en cuanto a una pluralidad de características, incluyendo las similitudes y diferencias entre el lenguaje de los padres y las madres.

Los resultados ponen de relieve que el lenguaje de los niños, a pesar de las limitaciones formales de estas primeras etapas, es altamente funcional e interaccional. También se ha puesto de manifiesto que el lenguaje que el adulto dirige al niño reviste unas características (en cuanto a claridad, corrección, simplicidad, etc.) en sí mismo facilitadoras de los procesos de transmisión-adquisición del lenguaje. Al mismo tiempo se ha evidenciado la existencia de estrategias educativas no intencionales en las interacciones verbales niño-adulto. Estas estrategias poseen cierto valor explicativo respecto a los procesos de desarrollo del lenguaje.

Los niños del estudio y sus familias eran catalano-parlantes, por tanto este trabajo es asimismo un estudio longitudinal sobre la adquisición del catalán como primera lengua.     

Preschool Children’s Beliefs about Gender Differences in Academic Skills

Evidence from different Latin American countries shows a gap in the academic achievement of girls and boys. Chilean children’s achievement is a case in point, with the gender gap being especially large for mathematics achievement. These differences can be explained partly from the viewpoint of beliefs and implicit theories. Research in this field has focused mainly on elementary and secondary students, and there is no relevant data on preschool children. This study examines Chilean kindergarten children’s beliefs about differences in the academicals skills of girls and boys. Eighty-one preschool children (34 girls, mean age 5 years and 11 months) were recruited from schools serving a middle SES population from downtown Santiago. An instrument to test children’s implicit beliefs about gender differences in academic ability was adapted from previous research. Results support the hypothesis that boys and girls at the age of 5 already hold stereotypical expectations about boys’ and girls’ academic achievement. When asked about which school subject a character liked more, was better at, and found easier, participants showed no preference between math and language when reasoning about a male character, but they indicated that a female character would find math harder, perform worse at it, and like it less than language. These responses did not differ according to the gender of the participating children. Implications of these findings are addressed and limitations and future research are discussed.     

Electrophysiological evidence of automatic early semantic processing

This study investigates the automatic-controlled nature of early semantic processing by means of the Recognition Potential (RP), an event-related potential response that reflects lexical selection processes. For this purpose tasks differing in their processing requirements were used. Half of the participants performed a physical task involving a lower-upper case discrimination judgement (shallow processing requirements), whereas the other half carried out a semantic task, consisting in detecting animal names (deep processing requirements). Stimuli were identical in the two tasks. Reaction time measures revealed that the physical task was easier to perform than the semantic task. However, RP effects elicited by the physical and semantic tasks did not differ in either latency, amplitude, or topographic distribution. Thus, the results from the present study suggest that early semantic processing is automatically triggered whenever a linguistic stimulus enters the language processor.     

Unconscious learning. Conditioning to subliminal visual stimuli

The role of consciousness in Pavlovian conditioning was examined in two experiments in which visually masked neutral words were used as the conditioned stimuli (CS) and an electric shock as the unconditioned stimulus (US). The inter-stimulus interval (ISI) was established individually. A detection threshold was used in Experiment 1 and an identification threshold in Experiment 2. The primary dependent variable was the skin conductance response (SCR). Results showed that the conditioned response (CR) was acquired by 58% of participants who perceived stimuli above the identification threshold, 50% of participants who perceived stimuli below the detection threshold, and 11% of participants who perceived stimuli below the identification threshold, but above the detection threshold. These results suggest that consciousness of the CS-US contingency is not a necessary condition for acquiring a CR of the autonomous nervous system (ANS).     

Implicit ambivalence from attitude change: an exploration of the PAST model

Traditional models of attitude change have assumed that when people appear to have changed their attitudes in response to new information, their old attitudes disappear and no longer have any impact. The present research suggests that when attitudes change, the old attitude can remain in memory and influence subsequent behavior. Four experiments are reported in which initial attitudes were created and then changed (or not) with new information. In each study, the authors demonstrate that when people undergo attitude change, their old and new attitudes can interact to produce evaluative responses consistent with a state of implicit ambivalence. In Study 1, individuals whose attitudes changed were more neutral on a measure of automatic evaluation. In Study 2, attitude change led people to show less confidence on an implicit but not an explicit measure. In Studies 3 and 4, people whose attitudes changed engaged in greater processing of attitude-relevant information than did individuals whose attitudes were not changed.     

Discriminative game-related statistics between basketball starters and nonstarters when related to team quality and game outcome

The aim of the present paper was to examine the differences in game-related statistics between basketball players who are selected for the starting five of the team (starters) and those who are not (nonstarters) when related to game outcome (winning and losing) and team quality (best teams, teams classified for the playoffs; and worst teams, teams who miss playoff classification). Archival data were gathered for all 2002-2003 regular season games from the Portuguese Professional League (N = 156). Discriminant analysis was used to identify the game-related statistics that differentiate between starters and nonstarters and interpreted by the examination of the structure coefficients (SC). When the best teams won the games, results described differences between starters and nonstarters with an emphasis on defensive rebounds (SC = .32), assists (SC = .32) and committed fouls (SC = -.68). When the worst teams won the games, results described differences between starters and nonstarters with an emphasis on 2-point field goals successful (SC = .47) and unsuccessful (SC = .48), defensive rebounds (SC =.39), successful free throws (SC =.32), and committed fouls (SC = -.55). An also important finding was that, in best teams, the nonstarters' performance was worse in the games that the team lost, whereas in worst teams, it was the starters' performance that was worse in the games that the team lost.     

How to hit Scylla without avoiding Charybdis: comment on Perruchet, Tyler, Galland, and Peereman (2004)

M. Pe?a, L. L. Bonatti, M. Nespor, and J. Mehler argued that humans compute nonadjacent statistical relations among syllables in a continuous artificial speech stream to extract words, but they use other computations to determine the structural properties of words. Instead, when participants are familiarized with a segmented stream, structural generalizations about words are quickly established. P. Perruchet, M. D. Tyler, N. Galland, and R. Peereman criticized M. Pe?a et al.'s work and dismissed their results. In this article, the authors show that P. Perruchet et al.'s criticisms are groundless.     

Evaluation of consequences of test use in validity theory

There is little doubt about the importance of validity during the compilation and evaluation of tests. Nevertheless, intense debate has arisen with regard to incorporating the consequences of test use as a further source of evidence in the most recent edition of the AERA, APA, NCME Standards . After reviewing the historical antecedents of the issue and the main lines of approach of both defenders and critics, this paper sets out the arguments which may be used in answer to the question: 'At what point should the analysis of the consequences of test use become part of validation?' The response of the AERA, APA, NCME Standards has clear similarities with the perspective adopted towards the consideration of bias in tests as a problem of validity. Finally, the paper describes how consequence validation may be subject to tension arising from the evolution of notions of justice in test use.     

Importance-Performance Analysis for services management

Importance-Performance Analysis (IPA) constitutes an indirect approximation to user's satisfaction measurement that allows to represent, in an easy and functional way, the main points and improvement areas of a specific product or service. Beginning from the importance and judgements concerning the performance that users grant to each prominent attributes of a service, it is possible to obtain a graphic divided into four quadrants in which recommendations for the organization economic resources management are included. Nevertheless, this tool has raised controversies since its origins, referred fundamentally to the placement of the axes that define the quadrants and the conception and measurement of the importance of attributes that compose the service. The primary goal of this article is to propose an alternative to the IPA representation that allows to overcome the limitations and contradictions derived from the original technique, without rejecting the classical graph. The analysis applies to data obtained in a survey about satisfaction with primary health care services of Galicia. Results will permit to advise to primary health care managers with a view toward the planning of future strategic actions.