Adolescents' attitudes toward family and gender roles: An international comparison

Adolescents' attitudes toward gender and familial roles were examined using the Attitudes Toward Women Scale for Adolescents [N. L. Galambos, A. C. Petersen, M. Richards, & I. B. Gitelson (1985) “The Attitudes Toward Women Scale for Adolescents (AWSA): A Study of Reliability and Validity,” Sex Roles, Vol. 5/6, pp. 343–356] and the Historic-Sociocultural Premises scale [R. Díaz-Guerrero (1975) Psychology of the Mexican: Culture and Personality, Austin: University of Texas Press]. Participants were 265 international students (11 to 17 years of age) from 46 different countries attending schools in the Netherlands. The countries of origin were grouped into two categories of cultural values based on G. Hofstede [(1983) “Dimensions of National Cultures in Fifty Countries and Three Regions,” in J. B. Deregowski, S. Dziursawiec, & R. C. Annis (Eds.), Expiscations in Cross-Cultural Psychology, Lisse Netherlands: Swets & Zeitlinger]: Wealthier, more individualistic countries comprised Group 1 and less wealthy, more collectivist countries Group 2. Girls responded less traditionally than did boys on both scales. Students from Group 2 countries had more traditional attitudes than did students from Group 1 countries.     

Community-based services and resources: The significance of choice and diversity

Conclusions We are reminded by the growth of consumer-run approaches of the value of diversity and individual choice in community support of persons with severe mental illness. These ideas are evident in the alternative approaches that have been developed to serve persons who have not been reached by more traditional services. The ACT program, described by Bond et al. (1990), is an example of a service approach designed to be responsive to individuals' day-to-day needs as they define them. Continued development of this type of alternative service should be encouraged.Persons coping with severe mental illness benefit from a variety of community supports and resources. Strategies that encourage consumer involvement, ownership, and control help to provide diversity of services and to empower the consumer. Our efforts, as professionals, to provide community services can be enhanced by (a) supporting diversity of service and resource options, both inside and outside of the professional mental health system; (b) developing services that are responsive to individuals needs as they define them; and (c) facilitating the process of consumer choice in selecting resources options.The author expresses thanks to Marc A. Zimmerman and Richard H. Price for comments on earlier drafts of this paper.     

Nontraditional sex role aspirations,gender identity conflict,and disordered eating among college women

Many studies point directly to the role played by sex roles and indirectly to the role played by gender identity in the onset of disordered eating. In this study, women who report adhering to nontraditional sex role aspirations are almost twice as likely as other women to report purging or frequent bingeing. Women who exhibit gender identity conflict by drawing a male or androgynous figure on the Draw-A-Person Test or by reporting a pattern of wishing they had been born a male are more likely than other women to report purging or frequent bingeing. The results are consonant with a hypothesis regarding the etiology of disordered eating that implicates gender identity conflicts among women, particularly women who exhibit nontraditional sex role aspirations.     

Elicited imitation in lexical development: Evidence from a study of temporal reference

This study examined the use of elicited imitation in investigating lexical development within a semantic domain. For this purpose the acquisition of reference to sequence and simultaneity by 3–5 year old children was examined. Three factors were proposed to account for the order in which lexical items within a semantic field are acquired: restrictedness of a lexical item, congruence with perceptual strategies, and conceptual simplicity. A significantly greater number of correct responses was found in sentences describing sequential events than in simultaneous events. Furthermore, imitations of sentences referring to simultaneity were more degraded than imitations of sentences referring to sequence. The children seemed to begin acquiring reference to temporally related events by learning about words describing serially ordered events. A three stage developmental model is proposed to account for the results.Some of the data reported here are drawn from the author's doctoral dissertation from the Department of Linguistics, State University of New York, Buffalo, 1974.     

Response cost and impulsive word recognition errors in reading-disabled children

Subjects were 30 fourth grade children with average intellectual ability but reading achievement at least 1.5 years below grade level. Each child was given two word-recognition lists, the first one as a pretest and the second list under one of three different experimental conditions: control, positive reinforcement (1 nickel for each word read correctly), and response cost (1 of 40 nickels taken back for each word read incorrectly). Relative to the control condition, positive reinforcement led to a significant increase in response latency but no change in errors, while response cost led to both a significant increase in latency and a significant decrease in reading errors. The entire group was found to be impulsive on the Matching Familiar Figures test. The successful reduction in impulsive reading errors was interpreted as support for Kagan's hypothesis that the impulsive child evidences low concern about errors on such academic tasks.This report is based on a senior honors thesis by D. E. B., which was the 1977 winner of the Dashiell-Thurstone Prize for the best undergraduate honors thesis in psychology at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Appreciation is expressed to the following persons for their assistance or comments: Dr. W. Anderson, Ms. D. Crew, Ms. C. Earp, Ms. N. Hardy, Dr. K. Jens, Dr. K. Fleishman, Dr. B. Martin, Dr. G. Mesibov, Mr. S. Muller, Ms. E. Pritchett, Mr. Wall, Ms. Wall, and Ms. M. Walton. The research was supported in part by U. S. Public Health Service, Maternal and Child Health Project No. 916, and by Grants HD-03110 and ES-01104 from the National Institutes of Health.     

The modification of racial bias in preschool children

In previous studies using the Preschool Racial Attitude Measure (PRAM) and other measurement procedures, preschool children have displayed a tendency to evaluate light-skinned (Euro-American) persons more positively than dark-skinned (Afro-American) persons. Both Euro- and Afro-American children demonstrate this pro-Euro/anti-Afro ($\text{E+}\text{A?}$) bias, though it is less pronounced among Afro children.Two experiments designed to modify this racial bias are reported. The first study involved 39 Euro- and Afro-American preschool children and employed operant learning principles to modify $\text{E+}\text{A?}$ bias via a teaching machine procedure which provided reinforcement for pro-Afro/anti-Euro responses. Following training, the children showed a reduction in $\text{E+}\text{A?}$ bias on a test procedure not associated with the training. Follow-up testing of 30 of the children approximately 1 yr after the posttest revealed a tendency for the pro-Euro bias to be partially reestablished. The second study involved 70 Euro-American kindergarten children and was concerned with the modification of $\text{E+}\text{A?}$ bias via a classroom curriculum procedure and the possible influence of the race of the teacher associated with the curriculum. The experimental curriculum, designed to develop positive associations to dark-skinned persons and to the colors black and brown, was shown to have no effect on $\text{E+}\text{A?}$ bias, nor was race of teacher a variable of significance. Possible explantations for the findings of both experiments were discussed.     

HOME SAFETY: DEVELOPMENT AND VALIDATION OF ONE COMPONENT OF AN ECOBEHAVIORAL TREATMENT PROGRAM FOR ABUSED AND NEGLECTED CHILDREN

Parents may be charged with child abuse or neglect or both on the basis of a variety of circumstances. Child neglect, for example, is often documented when caseworkers observe that the family's home itself is so poorly kept that it presents an environment in which young children have ready access to lethal hazards such as poisons, uncovered wall outlets, and firearms. In this study, we describe the development of a Home Accident Prevention Inventory (HAPI) which was validated and used to assess hazards in the homes of several families under state protective service for child abuse and neglect. The HAPI included five categories of hazards: fire and electrical, mechanical-suffocation, ingested object suffocation, firearms, and solid/liquid poisons. Following the collection of baseline data, parents were presented with a treatment package that included instructions and demonstrations on making hazards inaccessible to children, plus feedback regarding the number and location of hazards in the home. The multiple-baseline design across hazardous categories in each family's home showed that the package resulted in decreases in the number of these accessible hazards. These improvements were maintained over an extended period of unannounced follow-up checks. This research provides a model for the development and assessment of an area previously unexamined in the child abuse and neglect literature.     

Perceptions of unresponsive others: Attributions,attraction, understandability,and memory of their utterances

Analyses of the rules governing conversation have frequently pointed to the existence of a rule dictating that responses to others' communications should be relevant. Unfortunately, there have been few systematic theoretical analyses of the consequences of violations of the response relevance rule. The present research was designed to extend our previous analyses of the consequences of responsiveness in dyadic interaction to examine in detail the effects of irrelevant response on processing and retention of response content, and attributions concerning the speaker. It was argued that irrelevant responses will be processed and retained more poorly, because the preceding utterance will provide a less adequate context for their interpretation. In addition, it was argued that unresponsiveness will generally be attributed to the lack of one or more of four factors previously suggested to facilitate responsiveness: attention to the other, understanding of the preceding communication, adequate response repertoire, or motivation to be responsive—along with situational (e.g., distraction) or dispositional (e.g., incompetence) reasons for their absence. These processes were examined in the context of a political debate, in which the relevance of candidates' answers to the questions was varied. As expected, response relevance was shown to facilitate processing (as indexed by ratings of clarity and organization) and retention (both recall and recognition memory) of response content. Further, the unresponsive speaker was perceived to have less clearly understood the questions asked, to possess less knowledge of the facts and understanding of the issues concerning the questions raised, and to be less motivated to discuss the issues raised (as opposed to facilitating his self-presentational goals). Moreover, those attributions were accompanied by attributions of dispositional incompetence. Finally, the unresponsive candidate was perceived as less attractive than the responsive candidate.     

The psychological causality implicit in language

We are concerned with the causality implicit in English verbs that name interactions, either mental or behavioral, between two persons, verbs such as like, notice (mental), and help, cheat (behavioral) in such a context as Ted—Paul. Using four different methods, we show that adult native speakers think of causality in such verbs as unequally apportioned between interactants. For behavioral (or action) verbs greater causal weight is given to the Agent argument of the verb (e.g., Ted in Ted helps Paul) than to the Patient argument (Paul). For mental (or state) verbs greater causal weight is given to the Stimulus argument of the verb (e.g., Paul in Ted likes Paul) than to the Experiencer argument (Ted). For English verbs of the type studied, derivational adjectives often exist (e.g., helpful, cheating, likable, noticeable). Such adjectives are attributive to one or the other argument of the verb base (Agent or Patient; Stimulus or Experiencer). We show that the direction of causal attribution in the adjective (e.g., helpful is attributive to Ted the Agent; likable is attributive to Paul the Stimulus) predicts the primary causal weightings assigned in our experimental tasks. We also show that in the English language adjectives derived from action verbs are almost attributive to the Agent and adjectives derived from state verbs to the Stimulus. Because certain facts about English morphology predict certain ways of thinking about causality, our main finding may seem to be a Whorfian one, a demonstration that language affects thought. However, we argue that it is not that but rather a demonstration that two modes of thought (the Agent-Patient Schema and the Stimulus-Experiencer Schema) affect language use. We suggest that the schemas are universals of human thought.