FEMINIST CONTRIBUTIONS TO HEALTH PSYCHOLOGY

A brief review of health psychology shows that the early leadership began what has come to be a major alternative to traditional medical models of diagnosis and treatment. Numerous women were involved with these implementations and changes in the field. Many of the key developments within health psychology—for example, behavioral prevention, compliance, coping, health promotion, locus of control, and social support—reflect essentially feminist principles that emphasize the legitimate authority and significance of the individual. Feminist principles of equity and inclusiveness are also represented in emerging concerns that the health needs of many underprivileged groups deserve more focused attention, and, additionally, that entirely new areas of health can be profitably examined within the framework of health psychology.     

The effects of retention interval on preschool children's short-term memory of verbal items

The short-term recall of word-triads was tested, comparing retention over three types of intervals within 24 preschoolers. Retention was significantly lower in the 16 sec unfilled interval condition than in the immediate test condition. This result, predicted from preschoolers' rehearsal deficiency, differs from those obtained in previous adult and child studies. A filled interval condition, requiring irrelevant verbal activity during the 16 sec period, significantly reduced recall from that of the unfilled interval condition. Recognition of the word items on a subsequent recognition test was greater than chance and was not affected by interval condition. This suggests that the condition effects in short-term recall did not disrupt the long-term storage of the items.     

A Plan Recognition Model for Subdialogues in Conversations

Previous plan-based models of dialogue understanding have been unable to account for many types of subdialogues present in naturally occurring conversations. One reason for this is that the models have not clearly differentiated between the varoius ways that an utterance can relate to a plan structure representing a topic. In this paper we present a plan-based theory that allows a wide variety of utterance-plan relationships. We introduce a set of discourse plans, each one corresponding to a particular way that an utterance can relate to a discourse topic, and distinguish such plans from the set of plans that are actually used to model the topics. By incorporating knowledge about discourse into a plan-based framework, we can account for a wide variety of subdialogues while maintaining the computational advantages of the plan-based approach.     

Four‐year‐olds' beliefs about how others regard males and females

Children's awareness of how others evaluate their gender could influence their behaviours and well‐being, yet little is known about when this awareness develops and what influences its emergence. The current study investigated culturally diverse 4‐year‐olds' (N = 240) public regard for gender groups and whether exposure to factors that convey status and highlight gender influenced it. Children were asked whether most people thought (i) girls or boys, and (ii) women or men, were better. Overall, children thought others more positively evaluated their own gender. However more TV exposure and, among girls only, more traditional parental division of housework predicted children stating that others thought boys were better, suggesting more awareness of greater male status. Children's public regard was distinct from their personal attitudes.