Reliability of the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ)

The stability and internal consistency of Spence and Helmreich's Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) and Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) are reported. An entire first-year class of 1,007 male and 78 female cadets at the U.S. Military Academy were given a battery of psychological tests before and after cadet basic training, a 2 1/2-month period. The AWS and PAQ proved to be highly reliable, comparable to other frequently used psychological tests. This psychometric information encourages researchers to make further use of these gender-related instruments.This research was conducted under research grants from the Army Research Institute (Alan G. Vitters and Jerome Adams, Principal Investigators). The views expressed herein are opinions of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the policy of the U.S. Army, the U.S. Military Academy, or the Army Research Institute. The authors appreciate the editorial comments of Dr. Brenda Major.     

Philosophy of medicine in Poland at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries part I: Main authors and the field of their study

Major Polish authors writing on the philosophy of medicine in the period under discussion are briefly presented, namely Tytus Cha?ubiński W?adys?aw Biegański, and Edmund Biernacki. General background of their work and possible influences are described. The views of the above authors on the meaning, scope and importance of the philosophy of medicine are outlined.     

MANAGEMENT OF INAPPROPRIATE BEHAVIORS OF TRAINABLE MENTALLY IMPAIRED STUDENTS USING ANTECEDENT EXERCISE

The effects of several levels of exercise on inappropriate behaviors of four trainable mentally impaired students were observed. Treatment conditions, which occurred as the first daily activity, included: Phase I, daily alternating conditions of warm-up exercises and jogging at a moderate rate for a short distance; Phase II, daily alternating conditions of no-exercise periods and jogging at a vigorous rate for a moderate distance; and Phase III, jogging at a vigorous rate for a moderate distance on consecutive days. For one student two additional conditions occurred, Phase IV, long-distance jogging on consecutive days at a vigorous rate and Phase V, consecutive days of no exercise. Observations of three inappropriate behaviors of each student occurred immediately after, 1 hour after, and 2 hours after each exercise period. Results indicate a decrease in all three inappropriate behaviors for three of four students and an inverse relationship between the level of exercise and the amount of inappropriate behavior for three of four students. Improvements over existing studies are discussed with suggestions for future research.     

Word matching and Lexical Decisions: A Visual Half-Field study

In unilateral Visual Half-Field tasks visuospatial and linguistic processing were compared. In a Word Matching task subjects judged the physical identity of simultaneously presented pairs of three-letter words or legal nonwords. No mainfield effects were found, but word pairs were recognized better and faster as "same" than nonword pairs. Latencies and errors in "different" pairs increased monotonically with position of letter change in the left but not in the right visual field (RVF), suggesting a serial, letter-by-letter way of processing for the right hemisphere and a whole word approach for the left. At this perceptual level the ability to store lexical information from the icon is stressed as a hemisphere-specific factor. In a Lexical Decision task the same subjects judged the same items on the word/nonword dimension. A RVF advantage associated with words as compared to nonwords occurred, as expected. Additional analysis suggests that order and difficulty of tasks may influence females' laterality, as compared to that of males.     

Bimodal assessment in a stressful social encounter: Individual differences,lead-lag relationships,and response styles

Analogue social-stress situations have assumed an important role in the assessment of social anxiety. However, psychophysiological assessment of social anxiety in these laboratory situations has produced inconsistent results. Notably, the empirical relationship between autonomic reactivity and behavioral indices of social anxiety has fluctuated widely. The present study examined the relationship between heart rate and behavioral ratings of social anxiety in a normal college-student sample utilizing a methodology which (a) addressed individual differences, (b) utilized a relatively unobtrusive heart-rate monitoring system, and (c) assessed time-lag relationships between the two measures. Cross-lagged correlations for the full sample of 25 subjects and a subset of heart-rate reactives showed large intersubject variability between the measures. The results support the lack of convergence between the two modes of measurement when subjects are considered as an aggregate.     

Antecedents of employees' mental health—The role of career and work satisfaction

It was hypothesized that individual and situational variables, as a whole, will show stronger relationships with work-related attitudes than with mental health indices. Work-related attitudes, on the other hand, were expected to contribute more strongly to mental health than the individual and situational variables. Results obtained from two groups of staff professionals and retail store managers, using primarily questionnaire data, supported these hypotheses. Career and work satisfaction emerged as the strongest contributors to mental health. Situational variables such as job characteristics, supervisory style, and pay related more strongly to the attitudinal variables than to mental health. This pattern suggests that career and work satisfaction may serve as intervening variables in the relationship between situational variables and mental health.     

Individual response patterns and the effects of different behavioral methods in the treatment of social phobia

The importance of individual response patterns in the treatment of phobic patients was examined in the present study. Forty psychiatric outpatients with social phobia were assessed with a social interaction test which was videotaped. Heart rate was continuously monitored during the test. On the basis of their reactions in the test situation, the patients were divided into two groups showing different response patterns; behavioral and physiological reactors. Within each group half of the patients were randomly assigned to a behaviorally focused method (social skills training) while the other half received a physiologically focused method (applied relaxation). The patients were treated individually in 10 sessions. The within-group comparisons showed that both treatments yielded significant improvements on most measures. The between-group comparisons showed that for the behavioral reactors, social skills training was significantly better than applied relaxation on six out of ten measures, and for the physiological reactors applied relaxation was significantly better than social skills training on three of the measures. The results support the hypothesis that greater effects are achieved when the method used fits the patient's response pattern.     

Child Age and Planum Temporale Asymmetry

Investigations using in vivo magnetic resonance (MR) morphometry have shown that left-right asymmetry of the planum temporale (PT) is a structural correlate of hemispheric functional asymmetries in adult humans (e.g., handedness, language representation). Postmortem studies of brains of fetuses and newborns have demonstrated that PT asymmetry becomes visible as early as in the last gestational trimester. The same studies could not clarify when the full (adult) degree of PT asymmetry is reached during brain development and whether this process may be influenced by functional specialization during childhood. We examined 61 neuropsychiatrically normal right-handed children aged 3 to 14 years (mean age +/-SD, 8.4 +/- 2. 7 years; cross-sectional study). MR morphometry showed no change in PT or planum parietale asymmetry with increasing age or brain volume. An unexpected gender difference of unknown significance emerged, with girls displaying a stronger leftward PT asymmetry, independently of age. For the age range studied, the results suggest that functional differentiation follows a structural asymmetry that is already "preset." Copyright 1999 Academic Press.     

Similar mechanisms underlie curvature comparison by static and dynamic touch

In four experiments, we tested whether haptic comparison of curvature ranging from ?41m to +41m is qualitatively the same for static and for dynamic touch. In Experiments 1 and 3, we tested whether static and dynamic curvature discrimination are based on height differences, attitude (slope) differences, curvature differences, or a combination of these geometrical variables. It was found that both static and dynamic haptic curvature discrimination are based on attitude differences. In Experiments 2 and 4, we tested whether this mechanism leads to errors in the comparison of stimuli with different lengths for static and dynamic touch, respectively. If the judgments are based on attitude differences, subjects will make systematic errors in these comparisons. In both experiments, we found that subjects compared the curvatures of strips of the same length veridically, whereas they made systematic errors if they were required to compare the curvatures of strips of different lengths. Longer stimuli were judged to be more curved than shorter stimuli with the same curvature. We conclude that similar mechanisms underlie static and dynamic haptic curvature comparison. Moreover, additional data comparison showed that static and dynamic curvature comparison is not only qualitatively, but also quantitatively similar.