The Effects of Prior Attitudes and Attitude Importance on Attitude Change and Class Impact in Women's and Gender Studies1

Attitude change in women's and gender studies (WGS) students has been a central goal of the WGS movement since its inception. Attitude change theory stresses the crucial roles of prior attitudes and attitude importance in the effectiveness of a persuasive message. This study examined attitude change dynamics in 548 WGS students drawn from 32 United States college campuses. Results provided partial support for the following hypotheses: (a) Students with attitudes discrepant from the WGS message demonstrate more resistance to attitude change when they deem these attitudes to be more important, and (b) WGS class impact is greater among students who rate class‐relevant attitudes as more important.     

Understanding Male Bias Against Girls and Women in Science1

Boys consistently have expressed more negative attitudes toward women in science than have girls. The basis of these negative male attitudes was explored in a sample of 159 male and 158 female science‐oriented high school students. The students participated in a science enrichment program in which positive information about women in science was provided. Consistent with theories of prejudice and stereotyping: (a) at the beginning of the program, more negative attitudes toward women in science were linked to lower science self‐confidence among boys, but not among girls; and (b) following the program, analysis of residual post‐scores (with pre‐scores controlled) indicated that changes in self‐confidence over the course of the program were related significantly to changes in attitudes toward women in science among boys but not among girls. Implications for girls’ and women's participation in science are discussed.     

Speaking with Frankenstein

This collaborative essay experimentally applies the insights of Mary Shelley's 1818 gothic fantasy Frankenstein to clinical interactions between present-day physicians and the patients they, akin to Shelley's human protagonist, so often seem to bring (back) to life. Because that process is frequently fraught with unspoken elements of ambivalence, disappointment, frustration, and failure, we find in Shelley's speculative fiction less a cautionary tale of overreach than a dynamic parable of the role that the unspoken, the invisible, and the unknown might play in contemporary physician/patient relationships. Playing with that parable, we consider its relevance to four often unacknowledged dynamics that shape physician/patient interaction: commitment to a false binary of life and death; the tyranny of normative aesthetics; shared negative affect; and the ethics of care and care-denial. To "speak with Frankenstein" is, we show, to make space for the otherwise unspeakable. The result is a more complete model of narrative medicine that accommodates to its ideal of open communication and full attention the persistence of what cannot be said, seen, or known--only imagined and approximated.

     

Everyday material engagement: supporting self and personhood in people with Alzheimer’s disease

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Threats to the self and personhood of people with ADRD include the disturbing images of Alzheimer’s disease as the death before death, culturally...     

THE DIFFERENTIAL RELATIONSHIP OF FEMINIST ATTITUDES AND FEMINIST IDENTITY TO SELF-EFFICACY

Feminist theorists have suggested that feminism provides a number of benefits for women, particularly regarding self-evaluations. However, most studies have conflated feminist attitudes and feminist identity. The main goal of this study was to assess the differential relationships of feminist attitudes and feminist identity to self-efficacy. Four hundred thirty-five students were surveyed at the beginning and end of their women's and gender studies (WGS) classes. In general, feminist attitudes and feminist identity were related to self-efficacy variables at pretest and to change in these variables over time. Feminist identity partially mediated the relationship between feminist attitudes and self-efficacy. Additionally, the results of this study generally support previous findings regarding the effect of WGS classes on students' feminist attitudes, feminist identity, and self-efficacy. Implications of these findings for the importance of feminist identity are discussed.     

Context dependent latent inhibition in adult humans

Learning the association between one stimulus (a condition stimulus, CS) and another (unconditioned stimulus, US) can be impaired by prior exposure to the CS alone—latent inhibition (LI). Current theories attempting to elucidate the cognitive deficit in schizophrenia have used the abolition of LI in schizophrenia as an indicator of attentional dysfunction. However, it has always been unclear if human and animal LI are measuring the same psychological processes. It is obviously important to clarify this relationship so that theoretical and experimental developments in the rat do not mislead the investigation of brain-behaviour relationships in schizophrenia. LI in the rat is strongly dependent upon context. Our aim was to examine the context specificity of LI in humans and specifically to: (1) investigate whether participants' belief that they are in a different context is sufficient to abolish LI, even though there is no physical change in the environment; (2) produce a context manipulation that is immune to alternative interpretation in terms of stimulus generalization decrement; and (3) investigate whether a "tonic" change of context reduces or abolishes human LI, thus complementing previous reports using a "phasic" change of context. In two experiments we manipulated context in either the real world or a virtual world, and showed that LI is abolished by a change of context in adult humans.     

PUTTING FEMINIST PEDAGOGY TO THE TEST

Critics of women's studies (WS) have charged that WS teaching overemphasizes students'personal experience and is overly politicized. They claim further that WS classes discourage critical, independent thinking and stifle open, participatory learning, causing student dissatisfaction. This study provides empirical evidence of the process of WS teaching from the perspective of 111 teachers and 789 of their students from 32 campuses in the United States. Contrary to WS critics, WS faculty and students reported strong emphases on critical thinking/open-mindedness and participatory learning and relatively weaker emphases on personal experience and political understanding/activism. In addition, student ratings of positive class impact were higher for WS than non-WS classes. The results support the pedagogic distinctiveness of women's studies.     

Method of Suicide in the Mentally Ill: A National Clinical Survey

Comparisons of psychiatric patients who die by suicide using different methods are scarce. We aimed to establish the methods of suicide used by those who are currently or have recently been in contact with mental health services in England and Wales (N = 6,203), and describe the social and clinical characteristics of suicides by different methods. We found that hanging, self‐poisoning, and jumping (from a height or in front of a moving vehicle) were the most common methods of suicide, accounting for 79% of all deaths. The implications of these and other findings are discussed.