Is it emotion or is it stress? Gender stereotypes and the perception of subjective experience

Two studies of college undergraduates (ns = 95 and 92, primarily non-Hispanic whites and Asian Americans) investigated gender stereotypes of stress and emotion, as well as variables that influence the perception of gender-related differences. Study 1 assessed how gender stereotypes differ from the self-reports of men and women. When asked to choose a label for the subjective experience of the average man and the average woman in a series of problematic hypothetical situations, participants generally tended to believe that the average female would feel ‘emotional,” but that the average male would feel “stressed.” By contrast, the label participants chose to describe their own subjective experience was not significantly affected by their gender. In addition, participants believed the average woman and man differed more in the intensity of their emotions than in the intensity of their stress, a belief contradicted by their own self-reports. Results of Study 2 indicated that gender-related differences in estimations of stress and emotion for the self were reduced or eliminated when specific information about experience-eliciting situations was provided. We would like to thank Matthew Dank for his help in preparing the stimulus materials.     

Gender and Self-Reported Sexual Arousal in Response to Sexual Stimuli: A Meta-Analytic Review

Social constructionist theories and sociobiological perspectives have led to increased interest in gender differences in sexual behavior. This study involved a meta-analysis of gender differences in sexual arousal in response to sexual stimuli. Forty-six studies in which participants were presented with a sexual stimulus depicting males and females and in which participants responded using a self-report measure of arousal were compiled, and 62 independent effect sizes were aggregated. An overall effect size of d = .31 showed a small to moderate-sized gender difference in sexual arousal with men reporting more arousal than women across all studies. There was significant variation in the effect sizes, though, which was only partially explained by variables coded from the studies. It was found that the gender difference was slightly larger for studies using pornographic vs. erotic stimuli, was larger for studies where participants were tested in a private setting or small group compared to a large group, and was much larger for college age participants compared to those who were older than college age. Generally, the pattern of results provided more support for predictions from social influence theories compared to sociobiological theory.     

Behavior analysis and farm animal welfare

This article demonstrates that there is a role for behavior-analytic techniques in the area of farm animal welfare and provides examples of the kinds of work that can be done. Behavior-analytic procedures, specifically those used in the study of psychophysics, preference, and demand, can provide answers to three questions people concerned with the welfare of farm animals are likely to ask: What can the animals detect? What do they like and dislike? What will they work to attain or preserve? Such information certainly is necessary for making reasonable decisions about animal welfare, although it is not sufficient in and of itself.     

Effects of Disaggregation on Managerial Assessment Center Validity

Assessment center validity data from a large, international petrochemical company were disaggregated by managerial level and business stream. As with previous research, the correlations were higher for the current job grade criterion than for performance ratings. Overall, disaggregating the data did not have the effect of increasing the assessment center—performance rating validities. However, when the validation data were disaggregated by business stream, there were differences in the pattern of the relationships between assessment factors and performance.     

CLUSTERS PRECEDE SHAPES IN PERCEPTUAL ORGANIZATION

Abstract —Does perceptual grouping require attention? Recent controversy on this question may be caused by a conflation of two aspects of grouping: element clustering (determining which elements belong together) and shape formation (determining cluster boundaries). In Experiment 1, observers enumerated diamonds that were drawn with either lines or dots. These two types of stimuli were subitized (enumerated rapidly and accurately in the range from one to three items) equally well, suggesting that clustering dots into countable entities did not detnand attention. In contrast, when target diamonds were enumerated among distractor squares in Experiment 2. only line-drawn items could be subitized. We propose that clustering and shape formation not only involve different perceptual processes, but play different functional roles in vision.     

ON THE NEED FOR A BASIC SCIENCE APPROACH TO PSYCHOTHERAPY RESEARCH

Abstract— This article argues that the greatest progress in developing more effective psychotherapist will come from a renewed emphasis on designing and conducting therapy research as basic science devoted lo the acquisition of cause-and-effect relationships and from collaborations between clinical researchers and basic researchers from other domains of psychology.     

WORKING MEMORY CAPACITY DISSOCIATES LEXICAL AND SENTENTIAL CONTEXT EFFECTS

Abstract— Semantically associated and unassociated word pairs were embedded in normal meaningful sentences and in sentences that were semantically anomalous throughout The influence of lexical context was isolated via comparison of responses to the second words of the associated and unassociated pairs. The influence of sentence-level context was isolated by comparing responses to the same words in the two sentence types Subjects of high, medium and low working memory capacity (as evaluated by the reading span test) showed modulations of event-related brain potentials in response so lexical context. In contrast, only the high- and medium-capacity groups were responsive to purely sentence-level semantic context. The results demonstrate that sentential context influences the processing of words in intermediate sentence positions at normal reading speeds but that the on-line utilization of this context is more demanding of working memory than single-word contexts.     

THE SIMILARITY OF BRAIN ACTIVITY ASSOCIATED WITH TRUE AND FALSE RECOGNITION MEMORY DEPENDS ON TEST FORMAT

Abstract— Event-related potentials (ERPs) were compared for correct recognitions of previously presented words and false recognitions of associatively related, nonpresented words (lures). When the test items were presented blocked by test type (old, new, lure), waveforms for old and lure items were different, especially at frontal and left parietal electrode sites, consistent with previous positron emission tomography (PET) data (Schacter, Reiman, et. al., 1996). When the test format randomly intermixed the types of items, waveforms for old and lure items were more similar. We suggest that test format affects the type of processing subjects engage in, consistent with expectations from the source-monitoring framework (Johnson, Hashtroudi, & Lindsay, 1993). These results also indicate that brain activity as assessed by neuroimaging designs requiring blocked presentation of trials (e g, PET) do not necessarily reflect the brain activity that occurs in cognitive-behavioral paradigms, in which types of test trials are typically intermixed.     

SIGNIFICANCE TESTING IN PSYCHOLOGICAL RESEARCH:

Abstract— Empirical surveys show that reports of significance tests appear in the vast majority of articles in psychological research journals and are relied on by both investigators and journal reviewers when making decisions about replication of experiments and submission and acceptance of research reports Evaluation of claims by critics that significance testing is, nonetheless, counterproductive yields suggestions for improvements of prevailing practices, but also the recommendation that decisions about significance testing versus alternative procedures should remain the province of the individual investigator, unconstrained by mandates or prohibitions by publishers or officials of scientific associations. The prime focus for efforts toward improvement of research design and data analysis in psychology and other behavioral sciences should be upgrading the mathematical and general scientific preparation of students preparing for research careers in these fields     

Precursors to Masochistic and Dependent Character Development

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -