Resolving Conflicts Among Self-Evaluative Motives: Positive Experiences as a Resource for Overcoming Defensiveness

The present research investigates how undergoing a negative or positive experience subsequently influences feedback seeking regarding self-attributes varying in self-relevance. Participants were offered feedback from earlier testing regarding their assets or liabilities for attaining various personal goals (general life goals or specific careers). Overall, self-relevance of a goal increased interest in both assets- and liabilities-focused feedback regarding that goal. As predicted, however, the effect of self-relevance depended on whether participants initially failed or succeeded on an unrelated task. Specifically, after failure, the self-relevance of a goal was more likely to increase interest in assets-focused feedback than interest in liabilities-focused feedback. In contrast, after success, the self-relevance of a goal was equally or more likely to increase interest in liabilities-focused feedback than interest in assets-focused feedback. These results suggest that undergoing a positive or negative experience subsequently influences the relative weight of ego-defensive and self-assessment motives in feedback-seeking decisions.     

After the Fall of the Wall: The Impact of the Transition on East German Women

This article addresses the impact of unification on East German families and on the situation of women in the East. The main hypothesis is that women are the losers of German unification, not only in terms of their decreasing participation in the labor force, but also in terms of their weakened position in partnerships and their increasing responsibilities in the domestic sphere. The findings are based primarily on personal interviews of different types of families. The first part of the article describes respondents' recollections of their everyday lives during the days of the former DDR (East Germany) and analyzes the specific family structures and relations between family members that prevailed. It focuses on the domestic division of labor and discusses the impact of high female employment on gender roles in the family and in the socialist society. The second part deals with the effects of German unification on families in East Germany.     

Implicit learning: news from the front

Can we learn without awareness? While the current consensus is most likely to be `no', there is, however, considerable ongoing debate about the role that consciousness plays in cognition and about the nature of consciousness itself. In this article, we review recent advances in the field of implicit learning, based on three perspectives: empirical findings (including neuropsychological evidence), methodological issues, and theoretical positions (including computational models). The overall picture that emerges is complex and reflects a field that is very much in flux: while it seems undeniable that cognition involves some form of unconscious processing, it is as yet unclear how to best separate conscious and unconscious influences on learning, and how to best think about the status of the `cognitive unconscious'. We suggest that implicit learning is best construed as a complex form of priming taking place in continuously learning neural systems, and that the distributional knowledge so acquired can be causally efficacious in the absence of awareness that this knowledge was acquired or that it is currently influencing processing, that is, in the absence of metaknowledge.     

Sexual stereotypes of occupations

This study examined the nature of sex stereotypes of occupations as they exist among college students today. The method of eliciting sexual stereotypes of occupations was distinctive in that three types of rating criteria were used, each emphasizing a different aspect of perception, on the basis of which the ratings of occupations as masculine, feminine, or neutral were subsequently made. The results indicate that sexual stereotypes of occupations are clearly defined and held in agreement by both college men and college women. The study yielded information about the mean rating of each of 129 occupations in terms of its masculinity, femininity, and neutrality.     

The Influence of Religion and Ethnicity on Family Planning Approval: A Case for Women in Rural Western Kenya

The role of sociocultural factors such as religion and ethnicity in aiding or hampering family planning (FP) uptake in rural Western Kenya, a region with persistently high fertility rates, is not well established. We explored whether attitudes towards FP can be attributed to religious affiliation and/or ethnicity among women in the region. Findings show that religion and ethnicity have no impact; the most significant factors are level of education and knowledge about the benefits of FP for the mother. FP interventions ought to include strategies aimed at enhancing women’s knowledge about the positive impacts of family planning.     

Examination of efficacious,efficient, and socially valid error‐correction procedures to teach sight words and prepositions to children with autism spectrum disorder

Prior research shows that learners have idiosyncratic responses to error‐correction procedures during instruction. Thus, assessments that identify error‐correction strategies to include in instruction can aid practitioners in selecting individualized, efficacious, and efficient interventions. The current investigation conducted an assessment to compare 5 error‐correction procedures that have been evaluated in the extant literature and are common in instructional practice for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). Results showed that the assessment identified efficacious and efficient error‐correction procedures for all participants, and 1 procedure was efficient for 4 of the 5 participants. To examine the social validity of error‐correction procedures, participants selected among efficacious and efficient interventions in a concurrent‐chains assessment. We discuss the results in relation to prior research on error‐correction procedures and current instructional practices for learners with ASD.