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.     

Disinhibition of return: Unnecessary and unlikely

Recently, from data obtained with a temporal order judgment (TOJ) task, Gibson and Egeth (1994) concluded that inhibition of return (IOR; a response time effect that reveals slower responding to targets at previously cued versus uncued locations) reflects impaired perceptual processing. By replotting their data, we demonstrate that the perception of temporal order is influenced only by the facilitatory effect of a cue at short stimulus onset asynchronies (SOAs) and is unaffected by IOR at long SO As. The target paper proposed that, when extra stimuli are presented at task-relevant locations (i.e., in the TOJ task), IOR is prevented by a hypothetical process that is known as disinhibition of return (DOR). We argue that the assumptions that IOR affects perceptual processing and that DOR exists are unnecessary, as a more parsimonious response-based interpretation of IOR is consistent with their data. Further, we summarize recent results and present new data that demonstrate that DOR is unlikely.     

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.     

Warm-up effects in the learning of discrete motor skills

Three experiments were conducted to determine the influence of warming-up activities on performance and on learning in two discrete motor tasks. During initial trials on the criterion task, Ss were given various types of warming-up activities having an activity-set that was either the same as or different from the criterion task. Test trials followed in which all groups practiced the criterion task only. No significant differences in performance on the criterion task were found regardless of the appropriateness of the warming-up activity during initial trials. The results suggested that warming-up properties are not a factor in original learning of discrete motor skills.