Having it all? Combining work and family in a male and a female profession

Are women in a female-dominated profession more successfully able to combine work and family obligations than women in a male-dominated profession? To explore this question, a comparison was made between the family status and careers of 747 women librarians (a female-dominated profession) and those of 449 women MBAs (a male-dominated profession). It was expected that the librarians would marry earlier and have more children. This general prediction was not supported. Over half of both groups of women were married, and after controlling for age, there were no differences in number of children. However, many women without children in both groups reported that they would like to be mothers. This disparity between wanting children and not having them was more common for women MBAs than women MLSs. MBAs and librarians were about equally likely to have had job interruptions, but librarians were more likely to have worked part-time. Reasons for an interruption to full-time work were as likely to be for problems finding (full-time) work as for family responsibilities. Librarians' salaries were much lower, but job interruptions and part-time work had a more negative effect on the salaries of women in business. In sum, the data suggest that many of the women surveyed have not combined motherhood with a professional career and that it is probably somewhat more difficult to combine a family with a career in business than with a career in library science.     

Judged Person Dangerousness as Weighted Averaging 1

This article reports two experiments requiring subjective evaluative judgments of the potential dangerousness of hypothetical persons. The research operationally fits the paradigm for the study of personality impression formation, and seeks to illuminate the processes by which two offenses combine to evoke a net judgment of dangerousness. The theoretical framework and philosophy adopted is Anderson's information integration and functional measurement theory. In Study 1, all paired combinations of 10 distinctive crimes were each presented as having been committed by the same person on two separate occasions. Subjects judged overall offender dangerousness. In Study 2, judgments of dangerousness were made when the time purportedly elapsing between two crimes was systematically varied over several ranges of up to 41 years. Three key findings emerged. First, judgments of dangerousness result from an averaging process. This result yields paradoxical implications having considerable pragmatic significance. Second, judgments of dangerousness following two sequential criminal acts (one of high and one of low seriousness) are consistently higher when the high seriousness one is the second crime. Third, with certain qualifications discussed in the text, a serious earlier crime appears to elicit an approximately constant magnitude of judged present dangerousness no matter how long ago it was perpetrated. This result implies that subjects infer considerable permanence of criminal predilection to those who have committed a serious crime in the past.     

Effects of partial symmetry, exposure time, and backward masking on judged goodness and reproduction of visual patterns

Six experiments investigated the effects of partial symmetry in visual patterns on judgement of pattern goodness, immediate memory, and learning. In Experiments 1—III pattern goodness ratings were substantially inter-correlated among a self-paced test condition and two conditions producing moderate to severe stimulus degradation (brief tachistoscopic exposure, and backward masking): the less the partial symmetry in a pattern, the lower was the judged goodness of the pattern. In Experiments IV and V immediate reproduction of patterns was observed respectively following exposures of 5-5000 ms, and backward masking. Correct reproduction improved with degree of partial symmetry. Concordant results were found in a free recall learning task (Experiment VI). Correlations between goodness and learning and memory performance for discrete patterns were always substantial. The results strongly suggest that pattern goodness can be appraised reliably and accurately with information processing times too short to permit pattern encoding in short-term visual memory. Evaluation of pattern goodness must therefore rest upon early (precategorical) processing of symmetry features.     

Personality and the topography of the conditioned eyelid response

One-hundred and four women were tested on an eyelid conditioning paradigm in a 2 x 2 x 2 factorial design where two levels of US intensity (1 vs 3 p.s.i.) were balanced against two rest pause interpolations (after 25 and after 50 trials), and the presence or absence of a warning stimulus prior to CS-US presentation. Subjects were later classified as high, low or intermediate extraverts on the basis of a personality questionnaire. A very detailed analysis of conditioned responses was carried out, using both simple and composite measures including work-ratio, utility-ratio, CR frequency, peak latency, peak amplitude, response area and effective response area, degree of avoidance amplitude and latency, etc. Major findings related to similar effects of high intensity US vs low intensity US, and introversion vs extraversion; introverts react as if they were responding to more intense stimuli than extraverts. This finding cuts across other parameter variables, and supports Eysenck's formulation of personality-conditioning relationships in terms of higher cortical arousal in introverts as compared with extraverts.     

The influence of psychoticism and extraversion on classical eyelid conditioning using a paraorbital shock UCS

An experiment is described in which the effects of Psychoticism and Extraversion on classical eyelid conditioning were examined using a balanced design involving two levels of paraorbital shock intensity and two levels of response threshold. Questionnaire measures of Anxiety and Impulsivity were also analysed together with subjective ratings of the UCS. Results were broadly consistent with Eysenck's personality theory in that subjects scoring high on Psychoticism demonstrated lower levels of conditioning.     

Peer support telephone dyads for elderly women: Was this the wrong intervention?

Tested a preventive intervention in which peer telephone dyads were developed for low-income, community-living, elderly women with low perceived social support. After an initial assessment, respondents were randomly assigned to either an assessment-only control or received 10 weeks of friendly staff telephone contact. After a second assessment, participants receiving the staff contact were randomly assigned to continue that contact or were paired in dyads to continue phone contact with one another. Dependent variables were measures of perceived social support, morale, depression, and loneliness. All groups, particularly the staff contact group, showed some improvement in mental health scores over time, but there were no significant differences between intervention groups, or between intervention and assessment-only control groups. The results suggest that participation in the study and in personal assessment interviews at home were probably morale enhancing, and that additional telephone contact did not significantly add to that effect. Evidence also indicates that, in this sample, low perceived family support was significantly related to poor mental health, so it is possible that a program designed to increase friend support may have been the wrong intervention.