The different effects of family on objective career success across gender: A test of alternative explanations

Gender gaps in achieved rank and salary, common indicators of objective success, often are attributed to the different family roles and responsibilities of men and women. This study tested three explanations for the different effects of family on careers: that is, choice, performance, and signaling explanations. In a sample of American doctoral graduates, the impact of family on career outcomes was felt at entry, early, and middle career stages and support was provided for arguments of all explanations. At the time of graduation, two family variables, the presence of a young child, and not having a non-employed spouse, were associated with women favoring work-family balance in jobs that in turn predicted geographic restrictions on employment. For men, family structure was not associated with job preferences. At later career stages, women did not experience the performance benefits from having a non-employed spouse that men did. In addition, women were at a career disadvantage because they were far less likely to have non-employed spouses who were associated with achieving high ranks by middle career for both genders.     

Orthographic repetition blindness

Repetition blindness (RB) is the failure to report the second occurrence of a repeated word, when words are sequentially and briefly displayed (Kanwisher, 1987). RBis also observed for non-identical words, such as home, dome . Explanations for non-identity RB assume that similarity at the level of the whole word causes the secondword to be suppressed ('similarity inhibition'). Three experiments demonstrate that RB is robust for diverse types of orthographic relatedness, including critical words that share only their first initial letter, their last two letters, first three letters, middle three letters, beginning and final letters, three alternating letters, and three non-aligned letters (as in chance hand ). The theoretical construct of similarity inhibition may be able to account for these data, although one mechanism previously proposed in the literature, neighbourhood inhibition, is probably not a useful way to explain the data on RB for words sharing only one or two letters. Weintroduce an alternative explanation for orthographic RB: Only the repeated letters are suppressed, and amount of RB depends on howeasily the perceiver can reconstruct the target word from the non-suppressed letters.     

Stimulus exposure effects in human associative learning

Learning that one cue (CS) predicts a second, salient cue (US) can often be slowed by prior exposure to one or both stimuli. In animals, CS-US learning is more strongly retarded following uncorrelated exposure to both CS and US than following exposure to the US alone. In this paper we present several studies showing a similar effect in humans, using a computer-based task. Experiments 1 and 2 used a between-groups design and demonstrated a strong CS/US exposure effect, whether or not the US was signalled by a neutral cue during exposure. Experiment 3 demonstrated similar effects using a within-subjects design. Overall, these results are consistent with several theoretical interpretations and suggest that uncorrelated CS/US exposure leads to a robust retardation of subsequent CS-US learning in humans.     

Vehicle Drivers and Fatal Accidents

ABSTRACT: This study attempts an exploratory study of the question, What happens to drivers of vehicles involved in accidents in which there is a fatality, whether or not the driver was at fault? The purpose of the investigation was to attempt to determine what, if any, crisis intervention is needed for such drivers. A total of 33 drivers participated who were involved in such an accident from 6 months to 11 years prior to the interviews. Major findings are (1) the range of time for drivers to resolve their crises seemed to be from a few hours to years after the accident, (2) the crises created many psychosocial and physical problems for these drivers, (3) the support of family, friends, and significant others was the most important variable for the drivers in crisis resolution, (4) condemnation hindered them most.