Gendered Constructions of Power During Discourse About Sexual Harassment: Negotiating Competing Meanings

A qualitative study using same-sex and mixed-sex focus groups and stimulated recall interviews was designed to identify and explore gendered constructions of power during discourse about sexual harassment. It was discovered that the men tended to construct power as hierarchically held by individuals with formal authority. Consequently, they tended to view sexual harassers as managers and supervisors. Women tended to view power as a negotiated process in which power was gained and lost through interactions. Consequently, the women tended to perceive all members of an organization as possible harassers. When these men and women were given an opportunity to discuss these issues during mixed gendered interactions, they failed to recognize the gendered constructions of power. Implications are discussed.     

A Study of Volunteer Clients Who Experienced Live Sessions of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy in Front of a Public Audience

This is a study of the responses of 100 selected subjects who gave their reactions to experiencing a live session of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy (REBT) with Albert Ellis in front of a public audience. Ninety-seven of the respondents found their session helpful; only 13 felt uncomfortable discussing their problems in public; 99 of them felt that Dr. Ellis focused on their main problem; 94 of them reported that they somewhat or very much used Dr. Ellis's suggestions; 90 of them felt that the members of the audience suggestions were helpful; and 93 of them said that they would like to work with Dr. Ellis again at a public therapy session. Limitations of this study are discussed.     

Femininity, Mental Weakness, and Difference: Male Students Account for Anorexia Nervosa in Men

The purpose of this study was to examine how men account for the diagnosis in men of anorexia nervosa (AN), a condition commonly associated with women. Male students participated in focus group discussions of topics related to AN. Discussions were tape-recorded with participants' consent, transcribed, and then analyzed using discourse analysis. The participants spontaneously constructed AN as a female-specific condition. When asked to account for AN in men, they distanced AN from hegemonic masculinities in ways that sustained both dominant masculine identities and gender-specific constructions of AN. These findings show how issues of health and gender are interlinked in everyday understandings of AN. Future researchers might usefully consider how the construction of gender-specific illness implicates wider notions of both feminine and masculine gender identities.     

Stimulus-response compatibility with wheel-rotation responses: Will an incompatible response coding be used when a compatible coding is possible?

Three experiments were conducted in which subjects responded to left-right tones with clockwise-counterclockwise rotations of a steering wheel using one of two stimulus-response assignments. When the hands were at the bottom of the wheel, where hand movement is opposite to wheel movement, subjects coded responses according to the frame that yielded a compatible mapping when the instructions did not emphasize either hand or wheel movements (Experiment 1). When instructions emphasized hand movements, responses were coded relative to the hand-referenced frame (Experiment 2), and when the wheel controlled a visual cursor, responses were coded relative to a cursor-referenced frame (Experiment 3). Coding with respect to these frames occurred even when the resulting mapping was incompatible.     

Psychophysiological adaptation: An investigation of multiple parameters

Heart rate (EKG), digital skin resistance level (SRL), and frontalis electromyography (EMG) of 20 undergraduate volunteers were monitored in three 30-min sessions to chart the course and magnitude of adaptation. As a group, 7, 13, and 13 min of adaptation were required for SRL, EMG, and EKG, respectively. High arousal levels in any of these measures at the session's outset resulted in longer adaptation times compared to low initial arousal. EMG showed the strongest variance across sessions. Females required longer adaptation periods than males in SRL and EKG. Self-reported trait anxiety levels bore little relationship to adaptation course. Methods were outlined for setting individualized adaptation periods by either the min 1 EMG level or regression equations for the initial values of each of the measures. Overall, psychophysiological adaptation proved to be an influential variable requiring experimental management to avoid confoundment with treatment effects.Portions of this research were presented at the meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, Washington, D.C., March 1980. We gratefully acknowledge statistical consultation given by Virginia Weymouth, Memphis State University Department of Computer Services, and Dr. Michael Lupfer.     

Predicting the psychological health of older adults: Interaction of age-based rejection sensitivity and discriminative facility

We hypothesize that older adults who anxiously expect, readily perceive, and intensely react to social rejection because of their old age (i.e., have high age-based rejection sensitivity) are vulnerable to depression and poor social functioning. We further hypothesize that the association between age-based rejection sensitivity and poor psychological health would be attenuated among older adults who possess adequate cognitive coping ability—they can discern and respond discriminatively to subtle variations in situational demands (i.e., have high discriminative facility). Based on the results of a focus group study, we constructed an age-based rejection sensitivity measure, which predicts greater depression, poorer social functioning, greater loneliness, and lower life satisfaction among individuals in late adulthood. As hypothesized, the relationship between age-based rejection sensitivity and poor psychological health was weaker among older adults with high (vs. low) discriminative facility.     

Abstract-concept learning in Black-billed magpies (<Emphasis Type="Italic">Pica hudsonia</Emphasis>)

Abstract relational concepts depend upon relationships between stimuli (e.g., same vs. different) and transcend features of the training stimuli. Recent evidence shows that learning abstract concepts is shared across a variety species including birds. Our recent work with a highly-skilled food-storing bird, Clark’s nutcracker, revealed superior same/different abstract-concept learning compared to rhesus monkeys, capuchin monkeys, and pigeons. Here we test a more social, but less reliant on food-storing, corvid species, the Black-billed magpie (Pica hudsonia). We used the same procedures and training exemplars (eight pairs of the same rule, and 56 pairs of the different rule) as were used to test the other species. Magpies (n = 10) showed a level of abstract-concept learning that was equivalent to nutcrackers and greater than the primates and pigeons tested with these same exemplars. These findings suggest that superior initial abstract-concept learning abilities may be shared across corvids generally, rather than confined to those strongly reliant on spatial memory.