THE MEASUREMENT OF GENDER-ROLE ATTITUDES A Review and Commentary

This article reviews measures of gender-role attitudes with an emphasis on The Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1972); the Sex Role Egalitarianism Scale (SRES; Beere, King, Beere, & King, 1984); the Modern Sexism Scale (MS; Swim, Aikin, Hall, & Hunter, 1995); the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI; Glick & Fiske, 1996), and the Children's Occupational Activity Trait-Attitude Measure (COAT-AM; Bigler, Liben, Lobliner, & Yekel, 1995). The discussion of gender-role attitude measures focuses on the following themes: psychometric criteria; theoretical and conceptual distinctions among measures; domains of attitudes and behaviors included; relationship to other measures; and the meaningfulness and relevance of items. Gender-role attitude scales are viewed as measuring gender-role ideology in a particular sociohistorical context; context-specificity is viewed as contributing to the proliferation of scales, and as limiting the usefulness of scales across cultural and temporal boundaries.     

Tracing the Gender Gap in Political Interest Over the Life Span: A Panel Analysis

Despite recent advances in gender equality in political representation and the availability of resources, this article shows that there is a persistent gender gap in declared political interest over the life cycle. Using evidence from the British Household Panel Survey (BHPS), we track the gender gap through the life span of citizens. At age 15, there is already a substantial gender gap of 20 percentage points in the probability of respondents reporting being politically interested, pointing to gendered socialization processes as the key explanation for such differences. In the following 10 years, as people develop into adults and unravel their political orientations, the extent of the gender gap continues to grow by about 10 additional percentage points. Following these formative years, attitudes crystallize and so does the gender gap, remaining at the same size (around 30 percentage points of difference between women and men) over the life course. These findings suggest that the development of gender roles during early childhood is a crucial phase in the source of the gender gap, deserving further attention from scholars.     

Evidence for different components in children's visuospatial working memory

There are a large number of studies demonstrating that visuospatial working memory (VSWM) involves different subcomponents, but there is no agreement on the identity of these dimensions. The present study attempts to combine different theoretical accounts by measuring VSWM. A battery composed of 13 tests was used to assess working memory and, in particular, the hypothesized mechanisms involved in the tasks, that is, active processing and passive recall of visual versus sequential‐spatial versus simultaneous‐spatial versus verbal tasks. The battery consisted of a number of tests already used in previous studies and new tests developed to examine specific components of working memory. We analysed the psychometric characteristics of the tests, the correlations amongst measured variables and estimated the measured variables with structural equation modelling in children attending third and fourth grades. Results revealed that the best model was composed of a specific verbal factor, three visuospatial passive factors (sequential‐spatial, simultaneous‐spatial, and visual) and one visuospatial active factor.     

Integrating Social Comparisons into Perceived Organisational Support (POS): The Construct of Relative Perceived Organisational Support (RPOS) and its Relationship with POS,Identification and Employee Outcomes

Incorporating the perspective of social comparison processes into the study of organisational support, we propose a new construct, namely, Relative Perceived Organisational Support (RPOS). This construct captures an employee’s global perceptions that the organisation supports him/her more than others. Further, we examine whether RPOS is an antecedent of POS, as well as the role of organisational identification in the RPOS-POS relationship. Moreover, we examine the effects of RPOS on employee outcomes (intent to quit and willingness to support the organisation), investigating whether POS explains such effects. Our study incorporates three field studies; the first validated the measurement instrument (RPOS) and the other two tested our hypotheses. Our results indicated that RPOS is an antecedent of POS. Organisational identification plays an important role in such a relationship, mediating the effects of RPOS on POS and interacting with RPOS regarding the prediction of POS. Last, RPOS was found to be negatively related to intent to quit and positively related to willingness to support the organisation. According to our findings, POS fully mediated such effects.     

CONSIDERING THE SOCIAL CONTEXT IN GENDER RESEARCH

Although a large body of research has investigated the possibility of motivational or attitudinal differences in women and men that would explain observable differences in levels of achievement, much of this research has failed to produce the expected results. It is proposed that the failure of researchers to consider the personal and contextual characteristics of their college student samples may have contributed to this lack of results. Some of the relevant variables include those provided by the (lack of) context of the typical laboratory experiment. Other context cues emerge from an analysis of the life stage of the typical research study participant. Predictions about achievement differences across the early adult years are outlined. This same life stage analysis is also briefly applied to other areas of gender research.     

The contribution of speech rate and pitch variation to the perception of vocal emotions in a German and an American sample

The present study examined acoustic cue utilisation for perception of vocal emotions. Two sets of vocal-emotional stimuli were presented to 35 German and 30 American listeners: (1) sentences in German spoken with five different vocal emotions; and (2) systematically rate- or pitch-altered versions of the original emotional stimuli. In addition to response frequencies on emotional categories, activity ratings were obtained. For the systematically altered stimuli, slow rate was reliably associated with the “sad” label. In contrast, fast rate was classified as angry, frightened, or neutral. Manipulation of pitch variation was less potent than rate manipulation in influencing vocal emotional category choices. Reduced pitch variation was associated with perception as sad or neutral; greater pitch variation increased frightened, angry, and happy responses. Performance was highly similar for the two samples, although across tasks, German subjects perceived greater variability of activity in the emotional stimuli than did American participants.     

Comments on “Intra- and interspecific variation in self-control capacities of parrots in a delay of gratification task”

Animal Cognition - Brucks (Anim Cogn 25(2):473–491, 2021) have published an intriguing paper on the differing abilities of various species of parrots to succeed in a delay of gratification...