Investigating Religion and Inequality through Women's Work-Family Pathways

This project investigates the relationship between religious involvement and women's work and family pathways in the United States. I identify five work-family configurations using National Longitudinal Study of Youth 1979 (NLSY79) data and latent class analysis. These configurations incorporate cohabitation histories, timing of family formation, and maternal employment. Then, I analyze how adolescent religiosity and personal and family characteristics are associated with subsequent work-family pathways. Affiliation with an evangelical Protestant tradition is associated with women who form families early, while Catholic affiliation is tied to later family formation. Importantly, family background characteristics such as living with both biological parents and higher parental education, as well as race/ethnicity and the respondent's educational attainment, are the most consistent variables associated with work-family configurations. These results suggest that religious involvement, when considered alongside family background, contributes to women's unequal work-family pathways in adulthood. The close links between religion, family, and stratification are evident in the study of women's work-family experiences.     

Why Do Some Owners Allow Their Dogs to Foul the Pavement? The Social Psychology of a Minor Rule Infraction1

This study combines observational, attitudinal, and self‐report measures, and compares a group of irresponsible dog owners who allow their dogs to foul with a control group of responsible owners who clean up after their dogs. The owners are compared on a variety of attitudinal and personal orientation measures. We observed 101 instances of dog fouling in both park and pavement, and 87 respondents subsequently returned questionnaires. The majority (59%) of people observed cleaned up after their dogs. The irresponsible owners were significantly more tolerant of fouling (dog feces were seen as natural waste and biodegradable) and were more likely to agree that the laws were illegitimate and restrictive.     

Perceptual hysteresis in the judgment of auditory pitch shift

Perceptual hysteresis can be defined as the enduring influence of the recent past on current perception. Here, hysteresis was investigated in a basic auditory task: pitch comparisons between successive tones. On each trial, listeners were presented with pairs of tones and asked to report the direction of subjective pitch shift, as either “up” or “down.” All tones were complexes known as Shepard tones (Shepard, 1964), which comprise several frequency components at octave multiples of a base frequency. The results showed that perceptual judgments were determined both by stimulus-related factors (the interval ratio between the base frequencies within a pair) and by recent context (the intervals in the two previous trials). When tones were presented in ordered sequences, for which the frequency interval between tones was varied in a progressive manner, strong hysteresis was found. In particular, ambiguous stimuli that led to equal probabilities of “up” and “down” responses within a randomized context were almost fully determined within an ordered context. Moreover, hysteresis did not act on the direction of the reported pitch shift, but rather on the perceptual representation of each tone. Thus, hysteresis could be observed within sequences in which listeners varied between “up” and “down” responses, enabling us to largely rule out confounds related to response bias. The strength of the perceptual hysteresis observed suggests that the ongoing context may have a substantial influence on fundamental aspects of auditory perception, such as how we perceive the changes in pitch between successive sounds.     

Who victimizes whom and who defends whom? A multivariate social network analysis of victimization,aggression, and defending in early childhood

The aim of this research was to investigate the interplay between victim‐aggressor relationships and defending relationships in early childhood to test the proposition that young aggressors are less selective than older children in their choice of vulnerable targets. Cross‐sectional multivariate statistical social network analyses (Exponential Random Graph Models) for a sample of 177 preschoolers from seven classes, 5‐ to 7‐years‐old, revealed that boys were more aggressive than girls, toward both boys and girls, whereas defending relationships were most often same‐sex. There was significant reciprocity in aggression, indicating that it was more often bidirectional rather than unidirectional. In addition, aggressors clearly defended each other when they shared their targets of aggression, whereas a marginally significant trend appeared for defending between victims who were victimized by the same aggressors. Furthermore, teacher‐rated dominance was positively associated with children's involvement in both aggression and victimization, and teacher‐rated insecurity was associated with less aggression, but not with victimization. These findings suggest that those who are reported as being victimized may retaliate, or be aggressive themselves, and do not display some of the vulnerabilities reported among older groups of victims. The findings are in line with the proposition that young aggressors are less strategic than older children in targeting vulnerable victims. The network approach to peer victimization and defending contributes to understanding the social processes facilitating the development of aggression in early childhood.     

Measuring health beliefs on the Internet: A comparison of paper and Internet administrations of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control Scale

A growing number of studies have supported the use of unidimensional psychometric test instruments administered via the Internet; however, support for the use of multidimensional scales is weak. The present study compares paper and Internet administrations of the Multidimensional Health Locus of Control (MHLC) Scale (Wallston & Wallston, 1981). In terms of reliabilities and factor structures, the Internet data were found to be at least as good as the paper data. MHLC scores were comparable for paper and Internet administrations, although the Internet sample scored significantly lower on the Powerful Others subscale. Overall, the results show that administration of the MHLC Scale via the Internet can produce data comparable to that obtained by pen-and-paper methods. However, it is concluded that generalization of these findings beyond the psychometric test instrument and sampling procedures used here is not warranted.     

The role of control functions in mentalizing: dual-task studies of theory of mind and executive function

Conflicting evidence has arisen from correlational studies regarding the role of executive control functions in Theory of Mind. The current study used dual-task manipulations of executive functions (inhibition, updating and switching) to investigate the role of these control functions in mental state and non-mental state tasks. The 'Eyes' pictorial test of Theory of Mind showed specific dual-task costs when concurrently performed with an inhibitory secondary task. In contrast, interference effects on a verbal 'Stories' task were general, occurring on both mental state and non-mental state tasks, and across all types of executive function. These findings from healthy functioning adults should help to guide decisions about appropriate methods of assessing ToM in clinical populations, and interpreting deficits in performance in such tasks in the context of more general cognitive dysfunction.     

Sexism and beautyism in women's evaluations of peer performance

The purpose of this study was to investigate independent and interactive effects of physical attractiveness (PA), sex, and task sex-typing on performance evaluations. Subjects were 216 college women who read poorquality essays written on masculine, feminine, or neutral topics. Essays supposedly were written by a male or a female student who was either attractive, unattractive, or physically unidentified. Results indicated that PA enhanced evaluations of both male and female essayists, except for the predicted effect that female attractiveness is less beneficial for masculine than feminine task performances. Women did not evaluate the sexes differently, and sexism was largely restricted to the interactive effects of PA. PA stereotypes also affected causal attributions of performers' outcomes in a manner consistent with attribution theory. These data are considered in the context of the existing literature and the directions for further research on sexism and beautyism.     

Accumulated reinforcers increase academic responding and suppress problem behavior for students with Attention‐Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder

We compared rates of academic responses and problem behavior during mathematics with distributed and accumulated reinforcer arrangements for 3 students with Attention‐Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder who engaged in chronic, severe problem behavior. All 3 students engaged in more academic responding and less problem behavior when reinforcers accumulated throughout the session, relative to conditions in which reinforcers were distributed throughout the session or withheld completely. We then conducted concurrent‐chain analyses to evaluate student preference for the reinforcer arrangements. Two students preferred distributed reinforcers, even though this arrangement continued to produce problem behavior. One student preferred accumulated reinforcers. Our data replicate previous findings regarding the efficacy of accumulated‐reinforcer arrangements, but suggest that students do not always prefer the most efficacious reinforcer arrangement.