Body Objectification, Self-Esteem, and Relationship Satisfaction: A Comparison of Exotic Dancers and College Women

We examined body objectification, self-esteem, and relationship satisfaction differences between college women and exotic dancers and the relationships among these measures for both groups. Forty-three college women and 40 female exotic dancers completed a questionnaire that assessed each of these constructs. Relative to college women, exotic dancers reported less relationship satisfaction, more body surveillance, and a greater prioritizing of body attractiveness over physical competence. Relationship satisfaction and the prioritizing of appearance over physical competence varied for the heterosexual and bisexual dancers. For exotic dancers, the body objectification measures of surveillance and shame were negatively, and body control was positively, related to self-esteem; body shame was negatively related to relationship satisfaction. For college women, higher levels of body surveillance and body shame were associated with higher prioritizing of physical attractiveness relative to physical competence.     

The deployment of attention in short-term memory tasks: Trade-offs between immediate and delayed deployment

Memory at times depends on attention, as when attention is used to encode incoming, serial verbal information. When encoding and rehearsal are difficult or when attention is divided during list presentation, more attention is needed in the time following the presentation and just preceding the response. Across 12 experimental conditions observed in several experiments, we demonstrated this by introducing a nonverbal task with three levels of effort (no task, a natural nonverbal task, or an unnatural version of the task) during a brief retention interval in a short-term digit recall task. Interference from the task during the retention interval was greater when resources were drawn away from the encoding of the stimuli by other factors, including unpredictability of the end point of the list, rapid presentation, and a secondary task during list presentation. When those conditions complicate encoding of the list, we argue, attention is needed after the list so that the contents of passive memory (i.e., postcategorical phonological storage and/or precategorical sensory memory) may be retrieved and become the focus of attention for recall.     

The Headscarf Controversy: A Response to Jill Marshall

This paper argues that Article 8 of the ECHR, as applied to the protection of a person’s right to wear a headscarf, is an inappropriate locus for thrashing out arguments about the right to protection of religious freedom, and that Article 9 allows for a broader legal and political analysis of the multiple meanings and impacts of religion in our lives. However, the law should not prohibit women from wearing the headscarf. Legal regulation of the headscarf should be replaced with robust political debate about the many diverse and intersecting ways in which it is possible to experience womanhood, sexuality, culture, religion, race, nationality and economic security in the twenty-first century.

Personal Inadequacy and Intimacy Predictors of Men's Hostility Toward Women

In this study we examined social/personality and intimacy predictors of men's hostility toward women (HTW). The study was framed in terms of a projection model that suggests that men's feelings of inadequacy contribute to hostility toward women. The sample consisted of 172 college men. The strongest attitudinal predictors were measures of locus of control. These data support the feminist analysis of sexual violence as an issue of power and lend support to the proposed projection model in terms of perceived powerlessness. In addition, based on the projection model, intimacy predictors for best male friend and female romantic partner were examined. The strongest correlate of men's HTW was intellectual intimacy, which conceptually is more related to the idea of an egalitarian relationship than other aspects of intimacy and may be most inhibited in men who are hostile toward women's intimate relationships.     

Rates and Correlates of DSM-IV Diagnoses in Women Newly Diagnosed with Breast Cancer

Although the presence of psychological distress has been documented in women with breast cancer, previous studies have not established rates of DSM-IV diagnoses in this population, nor have prior investigations compared the utility of diagnostic interviewing vs. symptom checklists to assess distress. DSM-IV diagnoses of anxiety disorders and major depression, symptoms of anxiety and depression, and quality of life were examined in 207 women with newly diagnosed breast cancer. Eighteen percent of breast cancer patients met criteria for a current DSM-IV anxiety or depressive disorder and 54% met criteria for a disorder at some point in their lifetime. These rates are comparable to those found in recent community epidemiological studies (e.g., R. C. Kessler, K. A. McGonagle, S. Zhao, C. B. Nelson, M. Hughes, S. Esheman, et al., 1994). Sensitivity, specificity, and positive predictive value for anxiety and depression symptoms as predictors of DSM disorders were relatively poor. However, after accounting for demographic, treatment, and cancer variables, self-reported anxiety symptoms were significantly related to the presence of an anxiety disorder and self-reported depressive symptoms were significantly related to a diagnosis of a depressive disorder. Symptoms of anxiety and depression contributed significantly and uniquely to physical, medical, and sexual quality of life; DSM-IV diagnoses were not significantly related to quality of life after controlling for symptoms of depression and anxiety. The importance of measuring both symptoms of distress and psychiatric diagnoses in cancer patients and the clinical practice implications of the results are discussed.     

An analysis of immediate serial recall performance in a macaque

There has been considerable research into the ability of nonhuman primates to process sequential information, a topic that is of interest in part because of the extensive involvement of sequence processing in human language use. Surprisingly, no previous study has unambiguously tested the ability of nonhuman primates to encode and immediately reproduce a novel temporal sequence of perceptual events, the ability tapped in the immediate serial recall (ISR) task extensively studied in humans. We report here the performance of a rhesus macaque on a spatial ISR task, closely resembling tasks widely used in human memory research. Detailed analysis of the monkey’s recall performance indicates a number of important parallels with human ISR, consistent with the idea that a single mechanism for short-term serial order memory may be shared across species.     

Codependency and gender-stereotyped traits

Sex Roles - This study examined the relationship between gender, positive and negative gender stereotyped traits, and eight codependency scales among 339 female and 115 male college students. The...     

Decoding deficits and social competency: A continuous rating approach

Males who self-reported heterosocial difficulties and whose performance in a role-played interaction was judged to be of low social competence were compared to high-competent males on a continuous rating task. The rating task required that subjects make continual, ongoing social competency ratings of their own and six other males' performance in a role-play situation. The continuous measurement of performance provided a profile of ratings that was compared on frequency, latency-to-first ratings, profile elevation or level, scatter, and patterning. Low-competent males had longer latencies-to-first ratings than high-competent males and less scatter in their continuous ratings than did the high-competent group. The reduced scatter effect for continuous ratings replicates previous work done with global ratings and suggests that the low-competent group may not be able to discriminate among social stimuli as well as the high-competent group. The research also suggests that the continuous rating methodology may hold promise as a tool to investigate social perception processes.     

Enhancement of 4-year-old children's memory span for phonologically similar and dissimilar word lists

Previous research suggests that preschool children are deficient in rehearsal and that stimulus list repetitions can improve their recall, presumably by substituting for the products of rehearsal. However, the previous research included interitem or postlist retention intervals of several seconds or more. We examined the utility of list repetitions with reference to an ordinary span task in which spoken words were presented 1 s apart for immediate recall. Lists with phonologically similar versus dissimilar items were included, to determine if the overall pattern of recall could be made more similar to what is ordinarily obtained in older children. Cumulative repetition was found to cause a moderate increase in both memory span and the phonological similarity effect. Other types of list repetition provided more insight into types of stimulus redundancy that were helpful (e.g., repeated serial order information) or not helpful (e.g., forced articulatory coding) to children attempting to recall spoken lists. The underlying mnemonic processes are discussed.