Modification of preschool sex-typed behaviors by participation in adult-structured activities

Earlier studies have shown the girls spend more time than boys in activities that are highly structured by adults. Structured activities may encourage feminine sex-typed behaviors such as compliance to adults; low-structure activities may encourage masculine sex-typed behaviors such as independence and assertiveness. In the present study the effects of high or low levels of adult structuring on children's social behavior during preschool free-play activities were tested in a field experiment carried out during an entire semester in one preschool classroom. For the first 15 minutes of free play, children were assigned to high- or low-structure activities. As predicted, when children were in high-structure activities, they exhibited high rates of bids for recognition and compliance to adults; in low-structure activities, they exhibited peer-directed leadership, bids for recognition, and compliance. There were no generalized effects of these treatments on their subsequent free choice of activities or social behavior. The study demonstrates powerful effects of naturally occurring variations in children's play activities on sex-typed social behaviors.     

Older men,older women: Are their perceived sex roles similar?

Men and women age 60 or older responded to Bem Sex-Role Inventory “masculinity” and “femininity” scale items on two separate administrations of the test. In the first, they described their own attributes; in the second, they described what others expected them to be like. Item analyses determined that the two sexes were more alike than different in sex-role-related attributes and perceived social expectation that they adopt both M and F attributes. Conflicts between actual and expected attributes were more frequent on “masculine” items. Those conflicted on “feminine” items tended to report depression.     

The effect of the two-chair dialogue intervention on self-compassion - adding an emotional evocative component to a basic Rogerian condition

Objective

How people relate to themselves when facing distress or failure influences general psychological well-being and vulnerability to psychological disorders. The aim of the present study was to explore the effect of an emotionally evocative intervention on self-compassion.

Methods

The data were retrieved from a larger study of Emotion-Focused Therapy (EFT) utilising a multiple baseline design comparing two treatment phases. The baseline phase consisted of 5, 7 or 9 therapy sessions where the therapist solely adhered to Rogerian relational conditions, as prescribed in EFT. A two-chair dialogue intervention was then added for five sessions. The sample consisted of 18 self-critical clients with clinically significant symptoms of depression and/or anxiety. The “Self-Compassion Scale” (SCS) was administered pre, mid and post therapy.

Results

The baseline phase did not lead to significant changes in self-compassion. However, the addition of the two-chair dialogue was associated with a significant increase in self-compassion. This increase was due to reductions in the negative subscales, especially the isolation subscale.

Conclusion

The emotionally evocative two-chair dialogue was associated with a significant change in self-to-self relating, compared to relational conditions alone. The two-chair dialogue, thus, seems to be a promising intervention for promoting healthier self-to-self relating.     

Penalized optimal scaling for ordinal variables with an application to international classification of functioning core sets

Ordinal data occur frequently in the social sciences. When applying principal component analysis (PCA), however, those data are often treated as numeric, implying linear relationships between the variables at hand; alternatively, non-linear PCA is applied where the obtained quantifications are sometimes hard to interpret. Non-linear PCA for categorical data, also called optimal scoring/scaling, constructs new variables by assigning numerical values to categories such that the proportion of variance in those new variables that is explained by a predefined number of principal components (PCs) is maximized. We propose a penalized version of non-linear PCA for ordinal variables that is a smoothed intermediate between standard PCA on category labels and non-linear PCA as used so far. The new approach is by no means limited to monotonic effects and offers both better interpretability of the non-linear transformation of the category labels and better performance on validation data than unpenalized non-linear PCA and/or standard linear PCA. In particular, an application of penalized optimal scaling to ordinal data as given with the International Classification of Functioning, Disability and Health (ICF) is provided.     

A NOTE ON THE POSSIBLE DETERMINANT OF “SPLIT REPRESENTATION” AS AN ARTISTIC STYLE

L'A. fait L'hypothèse que le dédoublement de la représentation, qui est caractéristique du style graphique de certaines cultures, provient d'une préférence universelle pour ce type de dessin chez les tout jeunes enfants de toutes cultures; mais dans la plupart des cultures, cette préférence serait supprimée parce que, paradoxalement, les dessins doubles ne permettent pas de reconnaître les objets dessinés aussi facilement que les dessins conventionnels qui sont plus proches de la projection rétinienne des objets. Les dessins avec enchaînement ou dédoublement de la représentation seraient conservés chaque fois qu'ils sont appréciés en tant que code utilisé à d'autres fins que L'information sur les objets peints et pour leur valeur esthétique.     

CIRCULAR RELATION BETWEEN UNDERSTANDING AND LOGIC

Procedures for determining logicality presuppose understanding, and procedures for determining understanding presuppose logic. One can escape from this circle only by presupposing logicality, in agreement with common-sense thinking. Understanding can then be studied as an empirical variable. Traditional research has been based on the opposite solution: Logicality is treated as an empirical variable, understanding is implicitly presupposed; hence results are obtained which do not 'make sense'. One cannot understand the illogical.     

DETERMINANTS OF PERFORMANCE ON DOUBLE CLASSIFICATION TASKS

Two groups of children, median ages 6–7 and 8–7, were presented with objects examplifying three combinations of two dichotomous attributes, and asked to indicate the remaining combination. Keeping objects covered vs. uncovered at the time of the test response had generally little effect. Labelling was consistently superior to perceptual matching, apparently because the latter involved a search process. The errors in the labelling condition consisted mostly in naming an object identical to or different in both attributes from those given, reflecting perhaps an inability to break down the impression of the objects into independent attributes.