Inferences about the femininity of competent women and their implications for likability

Male (N=59) and female (N=60) college students were given a written protocol describing a competent, achievement-oriented female stimulus person (SP) with either a masculine or feminine pattern of vocational and avocational interests. Three groups were given a masculine-pattern protocol and one group was given a feminine-pattern one. They were then asked to rate the SP on likability in work and social settings, femininity, and a number of other personal attributes. Two groups given the masculine-pattern protocol were also supplied with the SP's responses to items from a “personality” test answered in a predominantly feminine (Masculine—Feminine SP) or masculine (Masculine-Masculine SP) direction. The remaining groups (Masculine-Neutral and Feminine-Neutral SPs) were given no additional information. In agreement with previous findings, the Masculine-Neutral SP was liked more in social settings than was the Feminine-Neutral one. It was hypothesized and confirmed that the Masculine-Neutral SP would be perceived as similar to the Masculine-Feminine SP in femininity and likability and that both these SPs would be judged to be higher on these characteristics than the Masculine-Masculine. Complex results were obtained from the ratings of other attributes. Overall, they indicated that the Masculine-Feminine SP, in whom femininity was explicitly suggested, received the weakest ratings on a series of achievement-related attributes and the Masculine-Neutral SP the strongest.     

What’s up in mental rotation?

We report two experiments on the influence of head tilt on mental rotation. In Experiment I, subjects decided whether dot patterns were or were not repeated about a line. Their reaction times (RTs) were consistent with the interpretation that they mentally rotated the patterns so that the line was subjectively vertical before making their decisions. When the subjects tilted their heads, the RT functions shifted in the direction of the tilt, indicating that the subjective vertical lay closer to the retinal than to the gravitational vertical. In Experiment II, subjects decided whether singly presented alphanumeric characters in various orientations were standard or backward (mirror-reversed). Again, analysis of their RTs suggested mental rotation to the standard upright, but the function was unaffected by head tilt; in this case, the subjects operated in subjective gravitational rather than retinal coordinates. The choice of retinal or gravitational coordinates may depend on whether the stimuli are interpreted egocentrically or as part of the external world.     

Visual interaction in a group of introverts and extraverts

Ten introverts and 10 extraverts were selected from a student population on the bask of their responses to the E.P.I. The groups contained 5 men and 5 women and were matched for Neuroticism. Each subject took part in two 4-minute conversations, one with a male confederate, one with a female confederate. The same two confederates were used throughout the experiment, and no attempt was made to programme any aspect of their behaviour. Two trained observers, who sat behind a one way screen situated close to the speakers, recorded the visual and speech behaviour of both subject and confederate by means of a four-channel event-recorder. The recordings were made for the last 3 minutes of each interaction. Extraverts Looked more frequently than introverts, but there were no differences between the two groups in the proportions of time spent in Looking and eye-contact, or in the mean length of Looks. Extraverts also spoke more frequently than introverts, a finding which may complement that for the number of Looks. The findings could not be explained by the behaviour of the confederates, since they behaved consistently across the two groups of subjects. The experiment is discussed with particular reference to Mobbs (1968) and Kendon and Cook (1969). Comparisons of methodology are made.     

CONCEPTS OF INTELLIGENCE: A COMPARISON OF CHINESE GRADUATES FROM CHINESE AND ENGLISH SCHOOLS IN HONG KONG*

The present study investigated the concepts of intelligence of two groups of Hong Kong Chinese university students. They differed in the secondary schools from which they graduated, one followed the Chinese system and the other the English system. These two groups were otherwise similar in age, academic achievement, and racial background. Subjects were asked to rate items selected from four popular intelligence tests in terms of their relevance to measuring intelligence and perceived difficulty. The relevance ratings were taken as reflections of the group's concept of intelligence. Factor analysis revealed two major factors and several minor factors underlying the relevance ratings of the two groups. The major ones were Non-verbal and Verbal reasoning skills, and the minor ones were Social, Numerical, and Retrieval skills. The Non-verbal reasoning skill was rated equally relevant by the two groups of subjects and was considered as the most relevant skill to measuring intelligence. The Verbal reasoning and Social skills were next, followed by the Numerical skill with the Retrieval skill being the least relevant. The Chinese-school group tended to rate the Verbal reasoning skill to be less relevant than did the English-school group. These findings were attributed to the mental effort involved in solving each type of task and to the differences in school instruction.     

Response set effects in recognition memory

In three experiments, Ss responded to individual digits or letters according to whether or not each was in some prememorized list. There were either two possible responses (yes-no condition) or a single response (yes-only and no-only conditions). With memory sets of one, two, or four digits, RT was a linear function of memory set size. The slope of the function was least under the yes-only condition and greatest under the yes-no condition. Nonspecific practice had little effect on any of the slopes. With memory sets of 4, 8, or 12 letters, the slopes under the yes-only and yes-no conditions did not seem to differ, and practice with specific sets flattened the function considerably in both cases. Overall, the errors under the yes-no condition were mostly false alarms, those under the no-only condition mostly misses, and those under the yes-no condition were divided about equally. The results are interpreted partially in terms of a multiple-observations model of decision time.     

Errors and error detection in typing

The errors and error detections made by qualified and trainee typists were examined, when they were given a passage of prose that included pseudo-words and words made up of random consonants. It was shown that trainees make more and detect relatively fewer errors. For all typists errors are made more often per letter in long or degraded words and are relatively less likely to be detected.     

Maximizing the discriminating power of a multiple-score test

Maximizing the discriminating power of a multiple-score test involves maximizing the homogeneity of each subtest and minimizing the correlations between subtests. A method is presented for constructing such tests from items whose intercorrelations are not too high. Under certain restrictions the saturation, defined as the proportion of inter-item covariance to total variance, is maximized for each subtest. The nucleus of each subtest is three items with high covariancesinter se. All items which will lower the saturation are discarded; the one item is added which will maximize the saturation of the resultant test. This process is repeated until all the items are included or discarded for that subtest. If the correlation between any such subtests approaches the geometric mean of their saturations, their items form a new pool for one or more subtests. Formulas are presented for deciding which items to eliminate in order to reduce further the correlations between subtests.This research was supported in part by the United States Air Force under Contract AF 33(038)-10588 with Human Resources Research Center, Lackland Air Force Base, San Antonio, Texas. Permission is granted for reproduction, translation, publication use and disposal in whole and in part by or for the United States Government.