Responsiveness to babies: Life-situation specific sex differences in adulthood

Responsivity to babies was observed in 96 mature adults representative of three junctures of parenthood: parents of infants, parents of 8-to-9-year-olds, and parents of adolescents. Among the measures used were reactions to an unfamiliar infant in a waiting room, interest in pictures of babies versus other objects, and sex-role concept and attitudinal questionnaires. Stage of family life cycle affected women's responsivity, but not men's. New mothers displayed a heightened generalized interest in babies which is optimally timed and functional in terms of sex-differentiated role requirements. A possible confounding between cohort effects and stage in the family life cycle was examined and rejected. Traditionally sex-typed behaviors were reinterpreted as life-situation specific rather than general traits.This study was supported by grants from NIMH (1 R03 MH28264-01) and from Boys Town Center for the Study of Youth Development, Stanford University. The authors thank Barbara Aschenbrenner for her invaluable assistance in all phases of the research.     

Presence and television.

Film and a number of emerging entertainment technologies offer media consumers an illusion of nonmediation known as presence. To investigate the possibility that television can evoke presence, 65 undergraduate students were shown brief examples of rapid point‐of‐view movement from commercially available videotapes on a television with either a small screen (12 inches [30.5 cm], measured diagonally) or a large screen (46 inches [116.8 cm]). Participants' responses were measured via a questionnaire and a computer‐based recording of arousal (electrodermal activity). Viewers of both televisions reported an enjoyable sense of physical movement, excitement, involvement, and a sense of participation. Furthermore, as predicted, participants who watched the large screen television thought the movement in the scenes was faster, experienced a greater sense of physical movement, enjoyed the movement to a greater extent, found the viewing experience more exciting, and were more physiologically aroused. Practical and theoretical implications are discussed.     

Bias toward regular form in mental shape spaces

The distribution of figural "goodness" in 2 mental shape spaces, the space of triangles and the space of quadrilaterals, was examined. In Experiment 1, participants were asked to rate the typicality of visually presented triangles and quadrilaterals (perceptual task). In Experiment 2, participants were asked to draw triangles and quadrilaterals by hand (production task). The rated typicality of a particular shape and the probability that that shape was generated by participants were each plotted as a function of shape parameters, yielding estimates of the subjective distribution of shape goodness in shape space. Compared with neutral distributions of random shapes in the same shape spaces, these distributions showed a marked bias toward regular forms (equilateral triangles and squares). Such psychologically modal shapes apparently represent ideal forms that maximize the perceptual preference for regularity and symmetry.