Semantic Influence on Processing Gender Agreement: Evidence from Hebrew

In the present study we examined the influence of manipulating the animacy of the sentential subject on the size of the syntactic priming effect induced by violation of subject–predicate gender agreement in Hebrew. The agreement violation delayed naming incongruent compared with congruent predicates. This priming effect was stronger when the sentential subject was an animate than an inanimate noun. Additional experiments revealed that: (1) the interaction between the priming effect and animacy of the subject could not be explained on the basis of differences in the phonological transparency of the gender inflection in the two groups of nouns, and (2) it was sensitive to the ratio of animate/inanimate conditions in a block. We suggest that the interaction between the processing of agreement and the effect of animacy is influenced by a controlled process of verifying the coherence of a currently identified word within a built-up context.     

Ambivalence Over Emotional Expression and Psychological Weil-Being Among Rheumatoid Arthritis Patients and Their Spouses1

Associations between ambivalence over emotional expression and psychological well-being among rheumatoid arthritis patients and their spouses were investigated. Sixty-nine couples completed questionnaires assessing ambivalence over emotional expression, emotional expressiveness, psychological well-being, and strategies used in coping with arthritis. Associations between the patient's ambivalence and psychological well-being were stronger for those married to a highly ambivalent spouse, although this pattern of results was not found for spouses. Lower psychological well-being among more ambivalent spouses, and to a lesser extent patients, could be partially explained by their greater use of passive and distancing coping strategies. Results emphasize the importance of taking a dyadic approach to the study of psychological functioning among chronically ill patients and their spouses.     

Dynamic object perception by pigeons.

Three experiments examined pigeon discrimination of computer-generated three-dimensional (3-D) projections of cube and pyramid objects. Four pigeons were tested using a go/no-go procedure involving static and dynamically rotating presentations of these stimuli. Transfer tests with different types of rotational and featural transformations suggested the pigeons may have used a 3-D representation of the objects as their primary means of performing the discrimination. The comparative implications for object and motion perception in animals are considered.     

Self-Esteem: The Past of an Illusion

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Reflections on unethical experiments and the beginnings of bioethics in the United States

The author offers personal reflections on the development of research ethics in the United States, primarily during the 1960s. He explores the efforts of the pioneers in the field of human experimentation ethics to raise and discuss issues such as the value conflict between the acquisition of knowledge and respect for the autonomy of research subjects and the crucial importance of disclosure in the informed consent process.     

Gender attitudes in children

This study investigated children's gender attitudes as a function of the sex, age, and race of the child as well as a geographical SES factor. Two attitudes were measured: gender pride (attributing positive characteristics to a child of the same sex) and gender prejudice (attributing negative characteristics to a child of the other sex). Results indicated that all children tended to select children of the same sex for the positive attributes, but that both boys and girls selected boys for the negative attributes. Although all sex pride scores decreased with age, this effect was most pronounced for girls from an upper-lower-class urban environment.The write-up of this article was supported by our current National Institute of Mental Health Grant No. 1R01MH29417-01, Principal Investigator, Dr. Phyllis A. Katz.     

Memory for item order and phonetic recoding in the beginning reader

A defect in immediate memory for item order is often attributed to poor beginning readers. We have supposed that this problem may be a manifestation of an underlying deficiency in the use of phonetic codes. Accordingly, we expected good and poor readers to differ in their ability to order stimuli that can be easily recoded as words and stored in phonetic form, but not in their ability to order nonlinguistic stimuli that do not lend themselves to phonetic recoding in short-term memory. The purpose of the present study was to test this hypothesis by examining the ability of good and poor readers to reconstruct the order of sets of briefly presented stimuli that varied in the extent to which they could be distinctively recoded into phonetic form: pictures of common objects versus nonrepresentational, “doodle” drawings. As expected, an interaction between reading ability and type of stimulus item was found, demonstrating the material-specific nature of poor readers' ordering difficulties. These findings support the hypothesis that a function of the phonetic representation is to aid in retention of order information, and that poor readers' ordering difficulties are related to their deficient use of phonetic codes.     

Sex-role imitation in children: Effects of sex of child,sex of model,and sex-role appropriateness of modeled behavior

The qualifying influence of the sex-role appropriateness of observed behavior on children's same-sex imitation was investigated. In each of two studies employing a 2×2×2 design, girls and boys observed a live male or female model display appropriate (to the child's sex) or inappropriate behavior. Results that were consistent in both studies indicated an interaction between sex of child and appropriateness. Boys imitated less when exposed to the inappropriate than to the appropriate sequence. An interaction between sex of child and sex of observer was obtained on only one measure in Experiment I (girls responded more quickly to a female than to a male model). In this study, girls also displayed greater opposite-sex imitation than boys; in Experiment II, there were no differences between boys and girls in either same- or opposite-sex imitation. The results are discussed with regard to the same-sex hypothesis and the differential impact of sex-role factors on boys and girls.The authors wish to thank the children, parents, and staff of Forest Park Elementary School for their participation and cooperation in the conduct of this study. Special thanks are extended to Mr. Paul H. Daby, Principal. The contribution of the undergraduate models and experimenters is also acknowledged.