Sex role identity and self-esteem: A comparison of children and adolescents

While data from a sample of fourth-grade children indicate that both self-efficacy (masculinity) and relationality (femininity) are strongly associated with self-esteem for both girls and boys, results from a comparable sample of adolescents aged 14–18 and a subsample of the fourth graders when they were in twelfth grade indicate that only self-efficacy is generally associated with self-esteem. An association between relationality and self-esteem is found in adolescents only for a small, high-achieving, high-SES subset of androgynous males.We are grateful to the Center for the Study of Women in Society for support for the research reported in this article, to Jeanne McGee for providing access to part of the data used in this study, and to Robert O'Brien for statistical advice. Any opinions expressed in the article, however, are our own.     

Sex-role attitudes of working-class women in Bogota,Colombia 1977

This study examines the sex-role attitudes of 204 working-class women in Bogota, Colombia, and compares their attitudes to recent findings for women in the United States. Historical evidence from Europe and the United States, as well as contemporary evidence from Latin America, provides insight into the ways in which women's work and family commitments can be fully integrated. On the basis of these examples, it is hypothesized that working-class Colombian women will have seemingly inconsistent sex-role attitudes, more inconsistent than those of North American women. The Colombian women studied had highly egalitarian attitudes with regard to women's labor market rights and less egalitarian attitudes with regard to women's family roles. It is further hypothesized that education and wage level will be important factors influencing the sex-role attitudes of working-class Colombian women. A multiple regression analysis confirmed that these factors are successful predictors of sex-role attitudes involving women's family roles. It is proposed that education and wage level reflect an emphasis on individualistic values rather than traditional family values, and thus support more egalitarian attitudes about family roles.The data collection and initial analysis of results for this study were funded by a Rockefeller-Ford Population Policy Grant in 1976–1977. These stages were completed at the Corporacion Centro Regional de Poblacion in Bogota, Colombia, with the assistance of Elsa Gomez and Elena Prada. Further analysis was supported by a State University of New York, University Awards Committee Grant to the author in the summer of 1978. Michael Goode, Norman Goodman, Eugene Weinstein, and an anonymous reviewer all contributed to the final version of this article.     

EVALUATION OF A PARENT-TRAINING MANUAL FOR REDUCING CHILDREN'S FEAR OF THE DARK

We evaluated the effectiveness of a manual to teach parents how to help their children overcome fear of the dark. The primary components of the package included desensitization, reinforcement, and verbal self-control statements. Six fearful children ages 3–11 and their parents participated. A multiple-baseline design across three pairs of matched subjects was used. Outcome measures consisted of the level of nighttime illumination voluntarily set by the child on a rheostat installed in the bedroom and the child's subjective rating of his or her fear level during the night. The data indicated that all children were sleeping all night with the rheostat set at criterion level or lower within 2 weeks after initiation of treatment, without any report of fear. Follow-up measures at 3, 6, and 12 months showed that all children maintained or improved on the reduced fear behaviors achieved during the treatment.     

Psychiatric referrals by a Juvenile court

A psychiatric service for children has attempted to make effective use of its limited resources by specialising in conjoint family therapy and in the establishment of consistent links with the network of other agencies and services working with parents and children. Since involvement with the law is seen as a point of crisis by a family and by the professionals already involved with it, the Juvenile Court is an important focal point in the network. The referral of a particular adolescent 'patient' to a child psychiatrist is described in detail, and the wider implications are discussed.     

The Type A Structured Interview: A behavioral assessment in the rough

The Type A behavior pattern is the focus of considerable research in behavioral medicine because of its causal relevance to coronary heart disease. The primary assessment of Type A behavior is a global rating made from a structured interview. From the perspective of behavioral assessment, this Structured Interview (SI) is important for two reasons. First, it provides an example of the superiority of an observed behavioral measure compared to self-report questionnaires for the assessment of an overt behavior pattern. Second, it provides a unique opportunity for the application of behavioral assessment technology. However, while the SI has demonstrated its clinical and research utility as a diagnostic procedure, its usefulness could be further enhanced in the areas of treatment selection and evaluation. The historical relationship between behavior and coronary heart disease is described. The development of the SI and the strengths of this assessment relative to other measurement approaches are reviewed. The standard questions and administration procedures for the interview are presented, along with several variations and modifications. Following this overview, the SI is discussed from the perspective of behavioral assessment.     

Forgetting of recently acquired or recently reactivated memories

Four experiments compared the rates of forgetting following acquisition of a conditioned aversion and following a reactivation treatment given long after conditioning had been completed. The “reactivation treatment” consisted of a single presentation of the unconditioned stimulus, a procedure known to reinstate, following substantial forgetting, the behavior seen immediately after conditioning. It was first determined that the decrement in performance 1, 3, or 7 days later tended to be more rapid just after original conditioning than following a reactivation treatment given 27 days after conditioning. Subsequent experiments confirmed that the forgetting seen 3 or 7 days after original conditioning was in fact greater than forgetting 3 or 7 days after the reactivation treatment that had followed conditioning by 27 days; also, tests permitted rejection of the hypothesis that this effect could be attributed to nonassociative (systemic) consequences of the conditioning situation. Finally, tests indicated that retention 24 hr after a reactivation treatment was significantly better if the reactivation treatment followed conditioning by 27 days than if it were given just 3 min or 24 hr after conditioning. The central observation emerging from this study, that forgetting is more rapid following original learning than following a temporally remote reactivation treatment, was discussed in terms of potential interactions between the age (or accessibility) of a memory and processes that might be instigated by a reactivation treatment.     

A COMPARISON OF THREE STRATEGIES FOR TEACHING OBJECT NAMES

Researchers in applied behavior analysis have been charged to provide large-scale demonstrations of the outcomes of evaluations. In this research, three experiments were conducted to examine the relative efficacy of three methods of presenting stimuli in object naming tasks. Stimuli were introduced successively, simultaneously, or using a combination of the two procedures. College adults, mentally retarded children and adolescents, and preschool children were taught to produce the names of five Hebrew letters, English words, or American coins, respectively. Presentation method was a between-subjects treatment in a factorial design. Results from the series of systematic replications were consistent in showing better posttest performance for subjects in the Simultaneous and Combined conditions. Further, follow-up data in Experiment III showed that retention was also superior for subjects trained by the Simultaneous or Combined methods. Although the acquisition criterion was met in fewer trials by subjects in the Successive condition, only several minutes more training time was required by the Simultaneous and Combined conditions. From a cost-effectiveness point of view, either of the latter two techniques should be favored over the Successive procedure for teaching verbal naming skills.     

The effect of social cues on the eating behavior of obese and normal subjects1

Schachter's externality hypothesis suggests that overweight individuals are more likely to be induced to eat by salient external cues than normal weight individuals. While a range of studies have demonstrated the plausibility of this hypothesis in the case of sensory stimuli (e.g., taste cues), there is little evidence that the hypothesis applies to social stimuli. The current study examines this latter proposition by exposing male and female, overweight and normal weight subjects to a same-sex or opposite-sex peer model. Under the guise of engaging in a taste experiment, the subjects were either exposed to a model who tasted experiment, the subjects were either exposed to a model who tasted no crackers (no eat), one cracker (low eat), or twenty crackers (high eat). In addition, control model-absent conditions were also run for purposes of establishing baseline eating rates. If the externality hypotheses were to prevail in social domains, one would expect overweight subjects to be more prone to model the cracker-eating behavior of the peer than normal weight individuals. However, the findings indicate that all subject groups regardless of weight evidence a rather clear modeling effect and all subjects evidence social inhibition effects on their eating behavior as well. Several intriguing interactions among subject sex, model sex, subject weight, and social condition were also found. The discussion explores the relevance of an externality model of overweight eating in social domains, and focuses upon the interesting and somewhat distinct pattern of socially mediated eating exhibited by overweight females.     

Facilitating accuracy of imitative articulation through reception training

Accuracy of imitation of nonsense words was examined in first- and second-grade children (65–99 months of age) as a function of prior reception training. Two experiments were conducted, involving within-subject comparisons. In the first, one group of words was trained as labels for nonsense objects, a second received noncontingent feedback yoked to the labeling words, a third was presented an equal number of times to control for exposure, and a fourth group was not included in the training phase. Testing involved accuracy of imitation of all four groups of words. Both the feedback and exposure words were imitated less accurately than the labeling words, but more accurately than the nonexposure controls. The second experiment examined the length of the label-object association, using an overtraining procedure. Words which came under the discriminative control of objects for greater numbers of trials were imitated more accurately than those meeting only a minimum discrimination criterion.     

A comparison of parents' models and expansions in promoting children's acquisition of adjectives

This study investigated the effects of parental models plus nondifferential praise and expansions plus nondifferential praise on 2-year-old children's spontaneous use of color and size adjective-noun combinations. Mothers modeled either a color or size adjective-noun combination and expanded the other. Both parental models and expansions increased the children's spontaneous use of the target adjective-noun combinations, but expansions produced a stronger effect than models. These results, and naturalistic data indicating that parents often provide a large number of expansions for their children, suggest that expansions may play an important role in normal language development.