EFFECTS OF WOMEN'S STUDIES COURSES ON GENDER-RELATED ATTITUDES OF WOMEN AND MEN

Attitudes about feminism, gender equality, and gender differences were assessed for male and female students enrolled in three women's studies courses and four control courses at the beginning and end of an academic semester. Compared to control students, women's studies students agreed more with feminist and equality items, and disagreed more with gender difference items, at the beginning of the term. Nonetheless, belief in gender differences decreased among men, but not women, enrolled in women's studies courses. Additionally, women's studies courses produced increased feminist attitudes among women, but decreased feminist attitudes among the small sample of men in the study.     

Use of trait information in the attribution of intentions by popular,average and rejected children

This study aimed to examine the extent to which children's sociometric status is related to the use of trait information. Therefore, 99 children (aged 4–6) were asked to make inferences about protagonists' future actions when positive or negative trait information was given. Results showed that rejected children were less affected by the protagonist's trait information than their more popular peers (average and popular) in both conditions. As well as their frequently reported hostile bias, rejected children also showed a positive bias. This suggests a general delay in social reasoning among rejected children, but can also be explained by a difference in their development of social cognition based on their atypical daily interactions. Copyright © 2004 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Brief report Low positive affect and less extreme emotional encoding

Current theories suggest low positive affect (PA) should be associated with negative encoding of ambiguous information. However, recent findings (Lawson & MacLeod, 1999) paradoxically suggest that low positive affect may lead to less negative encoding. One possibility is that low positive affect is associated with less emotionally extreme encoding rather than less negative encoding. Undergraduates (22 Low PA, 23 High PA) read potentially negative and potentially positive ambiguous sentences followed by a word related to an emotional or a non‐emotional interpretation of the sentence, or by an unrelated word. Low PA participants demonstrated greater priming for neural interpretations, while High PA participations showed the opposite pattern. There was no interaction with valence, suggesting low positive affect may be related to encoding ambiguity as less emotionally extreme.