Volunteerism as an aspect of women's work lives

Results of a mail survey of 292 female volunteers, aged 23–44, indicate that the role of volunteer work may be that of consciously chosen primary work, a supplement to primary work, or a vehicle for entry or return to employment. The three roles are associated with differences in relationship to the labor market, satisfactions sought, nature and amount of volunteer work done, satisfaction, involvement, commitment, and plans for continued membership. The survey instrument incorporated the Organizational Commitment Questionnaire, which was evaluated for its applicability to a volunteer population.     

Imaging,empathy, and causal attribution

Three studies were conducted to test whether imagery accounts for the effects of empathy on attributions, that is, whether attributers construct and scan a mental image of social scenarios the same way that actual participants scan a real environment. According to this interpretation, attributers “see” the world as the participant does and make vicarious attributions. An alternative interpretation holds that subjects base vicarious attributions on recreating the motivations and affect of the actor, so that imaging is irrelevant to empathy and attributions. In the first study, subjects who imagined a story from the perspective of a particular character later showed differential recall of story details as a function of role, but not differential attributions. In Experiment 2, role-taking subjects showed clear effects of imaged perspective on recall for story details, but no effects on attributions of causality for an accident. Further, recall and attribution were uncorrelated. In the last study, empathy and imagery role-taking instructions produced independent effects: imagers showed pronounced perspective-relevant recall and empathizers did not. Neither showed unambiguous vicarious attributions. Recall and attribution were again uncorrelated. These studies suggest that the imagery explanation of empathy effects is untenable, and imply that the recall of perspective-relevant details is unlikely to mediate attributions of causality in imaginary scenarios.