Book reviews

Cleeremans, A. (1993). Mechanisms of implicit learning. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Pp. 227. ISBN 0-262-03205-8. £26.95.

Manktelow, K.l., & Over, D.E. (Eds.) (1993). Rationality: psychological and philosophical perspectives. London: Routledge. Pp. 322. ISBN 0-415-06955-6. £40.00.

Parkin, A. (1993). Memory. Oxford: Blackwell, Pp. 272. ISBN 0-631-15711-5. £40 (Hbk); ISBN 0-631-15712-3. £12.99 (Pbk).

Hellige, J.B. (1993). Hemispheric asymmetry: What's right and what's left. (Perspectives in cognitive neuroscience series.) Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pp. 396. ISBN 0-674-38730-9. £27.95 (Hbk).     

VOICE MATTERS: BUFFERING THE IMPACT OF A NEGATIVE CLIMATE FOR WOMEN IN SCIENCE

The current study examined whether women scientists' perceptions of voice moderate the impact of poor workplace climates on job satisfaction and whether effective leadership and mentoring promote women's voice. Survey data were collected from 135 faculty women in the natural sciences. The results from multiple regression analyses indicated that negative (e.g., sexist, hostile) departmental climates were related to lower job satisfaction. However, voice interacted with climate, such that women who perceived that they had more voice in departmental matters showed higher levels of job satisfaction than those who perceived having less voice. An additional regression indicated that mentoring by other women (but not men) in academia and effective departmental leadership were positively related to women's sense of voice. Theoretical and practical implications for the retention and success of women in male-dominated fields are discussed.     

Effects of item concreteness on temporal coding

Recently several authors have suggested that coding of serial position in a word list is an automatic process. This contention is questioned in the present paper: two experiments explore the concrete-abstract distinction and show that temporal order retention is higher with concrete than with abstract lists. An alternative view that temporal coding is influenced by either selective attention and/or the selective strategies used by the subjects to meet the requirements set by the memory task is put forward.     

Effects of clausal structure on subject-verb agreement errors

This paper explores the effect of manipulating the internal structure of a complex subject on the incidence of subject-verb agreement errors. Using the sentence completion task (Bock & Miller, 1991), this study followed up on Vigliocco and Nicol's (1995) finding that the syntactic distance between a head noun and a number-mismatching noun contained within a modifier has an impact on error incidence: the greater the distance, the lower the error rate. The study presented in this paper investigated whether this distance effect is purely syntactic; if so, then it would be expected that there would be fewer errors followingThe owner of the house which charmed the realtor... than followingThe owner of the house who charmed the realtors..., since in the latter, the mismatch is syntactically nearer the head noun. Results show no hint of a difference between the two, suggesting that the distance effect is more likely due totemporal distance rather than syntactic distance per se.This research was supported by grant 5 P60 DC 01409-05, a Research and Training Grant funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communicative Disorders, National Institutes of Health, to the National Center for Neurogenic Communication Disorders, University of Arizona. I am grateful to Danielle Cvitanovic, Nicole Diamond and Brad Greenwell for their assistance in testing subjects and scoring responses. I wish to thank Merrill Garrett for reviewing an earlier draft of this paper.     

Rational emotive behavior therapy women's groups: A twenty year retrospective

Editor's Note: Janet Wofe was invited to describe her significant contributions to the evolution of cognitive/behavioral/feminist women's groups, including the personal influences that led her to this particular career focus. In this retrospective, key elements in REBT women's groups are highlinghte and illustrated with a case example; and changes that have occurred in these groups over the past twenty years are described. A comparison is made with other popular types of women's groups and suggestions offered for the further development of gender-informed REBT.     

Visual pop-out in infants: Evidence for preattentive search in 3- and 4-month-olds

The present experiment tested for preattentive visual search in 3- and 4-month-old infants using stimulus features described by Treisman and Souther (1985) as producing visual “pop-out” effects in adults. Infants were presented with two visual arrays to the left and right of midline. One array comprised homogeneous elements, while the other had a discrepant element embedded in it. On the basis of previous research, we expected infants to fixate the array containing the embedded discrepant element. The pattern of fixation indicated detection of the embedded discrepant element for both age groups, but only with stimuli shown to elicit visual pop out in adults. This asymmetry in detection is consistent with the presence of preattentive visual search in infants as young as 3 months.