Newsworthy Moral Dilemmas: Justice,Caring, and Gender

Gilligan (1982) put forth a care moralorientation based on women's responses to moraldilemmas. We tested in 2 studies Gilligan's predictedgender differences and the effect of dilemma content onmoral orientation. We used real-life dilemmasconsisting of the Baby M surrogate motherhood case andthe Kimberly Mays case where babies were switched atbirth;these dilemmas had the advantage of beingstandardized across all participants, and of being moreinvolving than hypothetical dilemmas. The Baby M dilemmaelicited primarily justice responses while the KimberlyMays case elicited care responses; yet in both these dilemmas, when compared to men, womenscored higher on care, and lower on justice.Additionally, moral orientation was related to specificresolutions ofthe dilemmas.Thus both genders wereflexible in their use of justice and care orientationsdepending on the dilemma, with gender differences stillapparent within dilemmas.     

The use of metaphors in psychotherapy

Metaphors are used in everyday language and play a role in the therapeutic domain. This paper: 1) Examines the linguistic structure of metaphors for its therapeutic relevance. 2) Introduces the concept and use of metaphoric kernel statements. 3) Describes strategic and tactical applications of metaphor in guided metaphoric imagery work, storytelling and metaphoric tasks. 4) Demonstrates the efficacy of metaphor in treatment of cases of traumatic and highly anxiety-provoking issues.     

Another dimension for assessment of speech-sound discrimination: latency of response.

The relationship of speech-sound-discrimination skills and speed of responding was investigated by presenting monosyllabic nouns in three different listening conditions to a total of 72 nursery, kindergarten, and first-grad children divided into three equal-sized groups. Speed of responding was related to the age of subjects, accuracy of responding, and context of presentation of stimulus items. There was a consistent decrease in latency of responding as age increased. Error responses had greater response latencies than correct responses. Response latencies for different contexts of presentation of stimulus items were longest for the paired-comparison context and shortest for the carrier-phrase context. Speed of responding could be considered as an additional parameter when evaluating speech-sound-discrimination skills.     

Intergroup and intragroup competition and cooperation

This study examined the effects on group performance and evaluation of three factors: intergroup competition or cooperation, intragroup competition or cooperation, and task means-interdependence. Intragroup cooperation was related positively to performance on a high means-interdependent task and was related negatively to performance on a low means-interdependent task. However, this relationship held only when there was intergroup cooperation rather than intergroup competition. These results were discussed in terms of their implications for the relative magnitude of the motives produced by the intragroup and intergroup reward structure. Evaluations of ingroup members were higher when there was intragroup cooperation than when there was intragroup competition. To foster ingroup liking, it was not necessary to introduce intergroup competition.