Gender Role Stereotyping in Advertisements on Two British Radio Stations

The portrayal of men and women in two differentsamples of British radio advertisements was examined. Itupdated an earlier British study (Furnham &Schofield, 1986) which was recently replicated in Australia (Hurtz & Durkin, 1997). Onehundred advertisements from each of two London basedradio stations were content analyzed into eightcategories referring to the central figure of thecommercial; credibility, role, location, arguments, reward,product, accent and narrator. On both radio stationswomen were significantly more likely to be portrayedpromoting products for self-enhancement and with bodily health and domestic products, and food.There was only one significant difference in portrayalbetween the two stations, suggesting somegeneralizability of these findings. The results arediscussed in terms of development and maintenance ofgender role stereotyping in different aspects of themedia.     

Do Promise Keepers Dream of Feminist Sheep?

This article describes a qualitative researchstudy of Promise Keeper fathers. Twenty-two middleclass, primarily White suburban fathers were interviewedin focus groups abouttheir fathering experiences. The grounded theory analysis found that the menwere experiencing gender role strain as they tried toconform to traditional masculine role norms. The PromiseKeeper movement provided them with an ideology and social supportsystem that facilitated theirbecoming more involved fathers, while simultaneouslyreassuring them that they were the leaders of theirfamilies. Using these supports, the men were able to construct a more personally gratifyingfatherhood identity. These results suggest a possibleinterpretation of why the Promise Keeper movement hasappealed to more men than has the pro-feminist men's movement.     

Neonatal finger and arm movements as determined by a social and an object context

What kind of hand and finger movements are newborn infants preoccupied with, and how are these movements organized and controlled? These questions were studied in two experiments under three conditions: a social condition, in which the mother (in expt 1) or the experimenter (in expt 2) sat face to face with the infant; an object condition, in which a ball moving slowly and irregularly was presented to the infant; and a baseline condition (in expt 1) without ball or mother present. The size of the ball and the distance to it was chosen so that it approximately corresponded to the visual angle of the head of the model. Twenty-six neonates participated in the study ranging from 2 to 6 days of age at the time of observation. All infants were in an alert, optimal awake state during the experiments. The infants' finger movements were scored from video recordings. The result revealed a large variety of relatively independent finger movements. It was found that finger movements differed both in quantity and quality between the three conditions. There were many more finger movements in the social condition than in the object and baseline conditions. In addition, there were relatively more transitional finger movements and flexions of the hand in the social condition, and relatively more thumb-index finger activity and extensions of the hand in the object condition. Finally, the arms were more often forward extended in the object condition than in the social condition. The results support the notion that neonates show different modes of functioning towards people and objects.     

Play and cognition: Studies of pretence play and conservation of quantity

Study 1 examined the relative effectiveness of four different training conditions on the attainment of conversation of quantity. Subjects were 75 nonconserving preschoolers, ranging in age from 3.10 to 5.0 years. Treatment consisted of pretense play training, direct conservation training, a combination of pretense play and conservation training, mere exposure to the conservation tasks without the benefits of instruction, and a control condition which provided only conservation pre- and post-tests. The results of the two conservation post-tests indicated that a combination of pretense play and conservation training was the most effective condition, followed by the conservation training and then by the pretense play training. The data also suggested that the effects of the conservation-only training condition might be less stable than those attained with pretense play training. Study 2 compared the effectiveness of child initiated pretense play training with adult initiated play. Subjects were 47 nonconserving children ranging in age from 4.0 to 5.8. Treatment consisted of child initiated pretense play, adult initiated play, a condition which combined both treatments, and a control group. The results of the two conservation post-tests indicated that the child initiated pretense play training was most effective, followed by the combined condition and by the adult initiated training. The three pretense play training conditions induced significantly more conserving responses in previously nonconserving children than the control group.     

Methodological Problems in Operant Learning Research with Human Infants

A great number of the recent studies on infant operant learning use the mobile conjugate reinforcement paradigm with 2- and 3-month-old infants. This paradigm has proved to be adequate for the study of learning and the transfer of learning. However, difficulties linked to the high attrition rates of subjects, and the variability in performance are frequently observed in studies using other paradigms or in studies with older infants (4–5-month-olds). The problems noted in a group of studies seem to be related to important methodological issues such as the brevity of the learning sessions, the choice of dependent measures, and the management of variability in performance. The use of single-subject designs and the use of variables encountered in infants' daily learning experiences may be the solution to some of the problems.     

Cohesion and power in the families of children involved in bully/victim problems at school

The dimensions of Power and Cohesion have been found to be useful in describing family systems. They may also be predictive of children who will bully others or be victimized themselves. A sample of 20 bullies, 20 victims, 20 bully/victims, and 20 control children were selected from three middle schools via a system of peer nominations. These children then completed a version of the Family System Test (FAST) to establish how they perceived their families on the dimensions of Power and Cohesion. The four subgroups showed characteristic differences on the FAST plots, which are discussed. Future use of the FAST test in examining the link between perceived family structure and peer relationships seems warranted.     

Effects of occupational prestige,employment status,and marital status on perceptions of mothers

Perceptions of mothers were investigated as a function of their marital status, employment status and prestige of their jobs. College students (128 females and 96 males) evaluated a briefly described adult female stimulus person on 24 7-point bipolar scales that described job performance characteristics and personality traits. Each subject rated one of 16 mothers of a young child. The mother was portrayed as either divorced or married and as either currently employed or formerly employed (by choice) in an occupation of either moderate or low prestige. Employed mothers were perceived as more competent in their jobs but as less well-adjusted than nonemployed mothers. Mothers with moderate-prestige occupations were viewed as more competent than those in low-prestige occupations, especially if they were currently employed. Married mothers were seen as better adjusted than divorced mothers.Portions of this paper were presented at the meeting of the Midwestern Psychological Association, Chicago, Illinois, May 1989.     

Personality and the effects of stress on recognition memory

The experiment examined the contribution of anxiety, extraversion, neuroticism, and psychoticism to recognition memory for pictures and words using a signal detection method. Independent groups of subjects performed a recognition memory task under one of four conditions (control, noise, threat, and reward) that was intended to capitalize on dispositions which characterize the personality dimensions. In an ego threat condition involving personal evaluation, introverts displayed a performance decrement relative to noise and reward conditions. Psychoticism was inversely related to performance in the noise and threat conditions and directly related in a reward condition. In general, J. A. Gray's (1981) model of anxiety and impulsiveness accommodates much of the data, but the mechanisms which mediate the influence of personality on memory performance are not clear.     

Instrument considerations in measuring fast eye movements

The dynamic limitations of eye movement recorders can distort the measurement of fast eye movements such as saccades and nystagmic quick phases. In this paper, the effects of the bandwidth and noise of recording methods and the problems incurred by digital sampling are discussed theoretically with respect to the measurement of peak velocity and duration of fast eye movements. As a practical example, a TV-based infrared corneal reflex system is examined and a method for calibrating it for peak velocity measurement is described.