Feminism and marital dissatisfaction

A questionnaire measuring sex-role attitudes was completed by 809 readers of a popular women's magazine, along with the Kipnis Marital Power Questionnaire and items concerned with marital and sexual happiness. Feminist women were less satisfied with their relationship both generally and sexually, and had a slightly lower frequency of sexual intercourse than traditional women. Analysis of the means used to wield power within the relationship showed that feminist women were more given to confrontation than accomodation, which might account for their marital difficulties. Another type of woman who tended to be unhappy in her marriage was the traditional domestic woman who favoured emotional manipulation as a means of influence within the relationship. Results were consistent with previous findings in showing that happiness decreased with age, duration of marriage and number of children.     

Why Do Eyewitnesses Make So Many Mistakes?

Previous research on eyewitness identification has demonstrated high rates of error. Subjects have frequently identified innocent targets as the "criminal" they had seen earlier (false identifications) or had falsely claimed that the criminal was not in the line-up (misses). The present study examines whether identification error rates are inflated by pressures in the typical experimental situation to "make a guess" regardless of one's confidence in the accuracy of the response. It was found that providing an explicit option for subjects to respond "don't know" significantly decreased false identifications and misses with no cost to the proportion of correct identifications. The addition of written and verbal instructions emphasizing the acceptability of the "don't know" option produced a marginally significant further decline in identification errors, again without cost to correct identifications. The discussion considered implications of the present results for experimental and actual police line-up procedures.     

Sentence frame contexts and lexical decisions: Sentence-acceptability and word-relatedness effects

Many studies have explored the effects of single-word contexts on visual word recognition, and several models have been proposed to account for the results obtained. However, relatively little is known about the effects of sentence contexts. In the experiment reported, the contexts consisted of sentences with the final word deleted, and subjects made word-nonword (lexical) decisions on target strings of letters. Norms were collected to determine the most common completion for each sentence frame. The experiment yielded three main findings: (1) Lexical decisions were fastest for words that were the most common completions; (2) among words not given as completions in the norming procedure, decisions were faster for words related to the most common completions than for words unrelated to the most common completions; t3t also among words that were not produced as completions, decisions were faster for words that formed acceptable completions than for words that did not. These relatedness and sentence-acceptability effects were independent, so that the relatedness effect held even when the target words formed anomalous sentence completions. In order to account for these results, a model combining two types of processes is required. In the model described, schematic knowledge (Rumelhart & Ortony, 1977) operates upon a semantic network to activate particular nodes, and this activation spreads to related concepts as in the Collins and Loftus (1975) model.     

Construing Benefits from Adversity: Adaptotional Significance and Disposltional Underpinnings

ABSTRACT The discovery of benefits from living with adversity has been implicated in psychological well-being in numerous investigations, is pivotal to several prominent theories of cognitive adaptation to threat, and can be predicted by personality differences. This article summarizes the prevalence and adaptive significance of finding benefits from major medical problems, locates the place of benefit-finding in stress and coping theories, and examines how it may be shaped by specific psychological dispositions such as optimism and hope and by broader personality traits such as Extraversion and Openness to Experience. The distinction between beliefs about benefits from adversity (benefit- finding ) and the use of such knowledge as a deliberate strategy of coping with the problem (benefit- reminding ) is underscored and illustrated by daily process research on coping with chronic pain.     

Frequency ratios and the perception of tone patterns

We quantified the relative simplicity of frequency ratios and reanalyzed data from several studies on the perception of simultaneous and sequential tones. Simplicity of frequency ratios accounted for judgments of consonance and dissonance and for judgments of similarity across a wide range of tasks and listeners. It also accounted for the relative ease of discriminating tone patterns by musically experienced and inexperienced listeners. These findings confirm the generality of previous suggestions of perceptual processing advantages for pairs of tones related by simple frequency ratios.     

Computer-administered versus paper-and-pencil surveys and the effect of sample selection

Airport patrons answered a self-administered questionnaire regarding their satisfaction with various airport facilities and operations. The questionnaire was administered either by a computer touch-sensitive screen or by a contextually identical paper-and-pencil version. For the latter method, respondents were selected randomly, and for the former, they were either randomly selected or self-selected. The effect of the method of questionnaire administration on the rating scales was very small when the samples were selected at random. However, there were substantial differences in ratings between self-selected and randomly selected respondents: The former gave consistently more negative ratings. These differences are probably due to psychological factors such as motivation to participate. Also, it was found that self-selected persons using the computer were more likely to make comments. The findings of this study are discussed with emphasis on their implications for computer interactive surveys.     

Units of interaction, evolution, and replication: organic and behavioral parallels

Organic and behavioral evolution both involve variation, selection, and replication with retention; but the individuals involved in these processes differ in the two kinds of evolution. In this paper, biological units of evolution, selection, and retention are compared with analogous units at the behavioral level. In organic evolution, natural selection operates on variations among organisms within a species, with the result of preserving in future generations of organisms those heritable characteristics that contributed to the organism's survival and reproduction. Species evolve as characteristics of the population change as a result of past selection. Continuity in a lineage in the biosphere is maintained by replication of genes with retention of organismic characteristics across successive generations of organisms. In behavioral evolution, reinforcement operates on variations among responses within an operant, with the result of preserving in future responses those characteristics that resulted in reinforcement. Continuity in a behavioral lineage, within the repertoire of a given organism, appears to involve retention and replication, but the unit of retention and replication is unknown. We suggest that the locus of retention and replication is the nervous system of the behaving organism.     

“Innocent Victims” of AIDS: Identifying the Subtext1

References to “innocent victims” of AIDS in the media and public discourse imply that other people with AIDS or HIV are blameworthy. In the present study, college undergraduates read two newspaper articles about an “innocent victim” of AIDS, and were required to report what they understood to be the “victim's” message. Very few participants reported the subtext without prompting. When asked directly, however, most respondents (88%) agreed that the “victim” was making an implicit statement about other people with AIDS, and 70% of this subgroup correctly identified the subtext. Compared to other respondents, those who identified the subtext had more positive attitudes toward homosexuals.