PREFERRING "HOUSEWIVES" TO "FEMINISTS"

Four studies are described outlining the favorability of attitudes toward women. In Study 1, participants indicated their attitudes toward women and men and their construal of the term "women". The results revealed that women were evaluated more favorably than men, but that male right-wing authoritarians (RWAs) who construed women as referring primarily to feminists were least favorable in their attitudes. In Study 2, participants indicated their attitudes toward both "housewives" and "feminists". The results revealed that feminists were evaluated less favorably than housewives, and that the most negative attitudes toward feminists were expressed by authoritarian men. Study 3 revealed that high-RWA males held more negative symbolic beliefs concerning feminists (i.e., beliefs that feminists failed to promote participants'values) and that these beliefs accounted for variation in attitudes among high RWAs and much of the RWA-attitude relation. Finally, Study 4 revealed that high RWAs perceived greater value dissimilarity between them-selves and feminists. The implications of the findings for future research are discussed.     

Children's Narratives Following Traumatic Brain Injury: Linguistic Structure, Cohesion, and Thematic Recall

Narrative discourse and intellectual functioning were examined 3 years following traumatic brain injury (TBI) in children 1 to 8 years of age at the time of injury. The language-impaired TBI group (n= 9) had language deficits during the subacute stage of recovery; their performance was contrasted with that of a TBI comparison group equated on neurologic and demographic variables that did not show subacute language impairment (n= 8) and a sibling comparison group (n= 9). The language-impaired TBI group had lower Verbal and Full-Scale IQ scores and produced fewer words and utterances than the sibling group on a story retelling task; their stories were characterized by fewer complete referential and lexical ties and more referential errors, indicating difficulty conjoining meaning across sentences. The language-impaired TBI group recalled approximately one-third of the propositions needed to maintain the story theme and made more errors sequencing the propositions than either the TBI or the sibling comparison groups. Group differences were not obtained on the Performance IQ scores or on measures of rate or fluency of speech production, mazes, use of conjunctives, or naming errors. The discourse deficiencies of children with TBI and acute language impairment were most pronounced at the level of cognitive organization of the text reflecting text macrostructure and were least apparent at the level of lexical and sentential organization reflecting text microstructure. Results are discussed in terms of the vulnerability of developing language abilities to disruption by brain injury.     

Behavioral techniques in the treatment of obesity: A comparative analysis

The relative efficacy of the major techniques typically used in behavioral treatment programs for weight reduction was investigated using obese adult volunteers. Study 1 compared the effects of self-monitoring, self-control procedures, monetary rewards, aversive imagery and relaxation training. These procedures resulted in significantly greater weight reduction than either a no treatment group or subjects who graphed and recorded daily weight. Self-monitoring of daily caloric intake was as effective as the other methods, both singly and combined, over a 4 week treatment period. Study 2 compared the long-term effects of self-monitoring vs the full complement of behavioral techniques used in Study 1. The full behavior management program was significantly more effective, both during the treatment period and at 3 and 12 week follow-ups, although self-monitoring again produced substantial weight loss.     

The influence of one memory retrieval on a subsequent memory retrieval

Ss produced an instance of a category and following zero or two intervening items produced a second instance of the same category. The second instance was produced more quickly than the initial instance. This finding, in conjunction with other data reported in the paper, indicate that the reduction in latency for the second instance is due mostly to a reduction in the rate with which the category is searched.     

Object-substitution masking degrades the quality of conscious object representations

Object-substitution masking (OSM) is a unique paradigm for the examination of object updating processes. However, existing models of OSM are underspecified with respect to the impact of object updating on the quality of target representations. Using two paradigms of OSM combined with a mixture model analysis we examine the impact of post-perceptual processes on a target’s representational quality within conscious awareness. We conclude that object updating processes responsible for OSM cause degradation in the precision of object representations. These findings contribute to a growing body of research advocating for the application of mixture model analysis to the study of how cognitive processes impact the quality (i.e., precision) of object representations.