Gender-bound definitions of mental health

Fifteen male and 15 female American therapists-in-training (clinical and counseling psychology graduate students) were asked to take the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI) under each of two instructional sets. In one set, they were instructed to respond to the items as a healthy male would respond, and in the other, as a healthy female would respond. The MMPI profiles obtained from male and female subjects were not significantly different, indicating that these male and female therapists-in-training did not differ in their perceptions of healthy men and women. When the data for male and female subjects were combined, however, healthy women were perceived differently than healthy men on several scales, although the MMPI profiles obtained under both instructional sets were well within normal limits.     

Freud as Leonardo: Why the First Psychobiography Went Wrong

ABSTRACT The first genuine psychobiography, Sigmund Freud's Leonardo da Vinci and a Memory of His Childhood (1910/1957b), presented several important guidelines for psychobiographical research Among them were the rejection both of pathography and of idealization, and the avoidance both of arguments built upon a single clue and of strong conclusions based upon inadequate data Though the guidelines are sound, Freud violated those guidelines in the very work where they first appeared Freud's methodological errors and his “obsession” with the Leonardo book are traced in part to his projective identification with Leonardo, incorporating aspects of his own sexual history and his anxieties about the future of the psychoanalytic movement     

The relationship of social power to visual displays of dominance between men and women

Two studies, with undergraduate subjects, investigated how sex and situation-specific power factors relate to visual behavior in mixed-sex interactions. The power variable in Study 1 was expert power, based on differential knowledge. Mixed-sex dyads were formed such that members had complementary areas of expertise. In Study 2, reward power was manipulated. Consistent with expectation states theory, both men and women high in expertise or reward power displayed high visual dominance, defined as the ratio of looking while speaking to looking while listening. Specifically, men and women high in expertise or reward power exhibited equivalent levels of looking while speaking and looking while listening. High visual dominance ratios have been associated with high social power in previous research. Both men and women low in expertise or reward power looked more while listening than while speaking, producing a relatively low visual dominance ratio. In conditions in which men and women did not possess differential expertise or reward power, visual behavior was related to sex. Men displayed visual behavior similar to their patterns in the high expertise and high reward power conditions, whereas women exhibited visual behavior similar to their patterns in the low expertise and low reward power conditions. The results demonstrate how social expectations are reflected in nonverbal power displays.     

Personal vulnerability, life events, and depressive symptoms: a test of a specific interactional model

We tested Beck's (1983) hypothesis that depressive symptoms occur when an individual experiences a negative life event that specifically matches the individual's personal motivational vulnerability. Ninety-eight undergraduates completed measures of depression level, recent life events, and sociotropic and autonomous achievement motivations. Consistent with the theory, sociotropy was associated with depression level and also served as a moderator of the relations between depression and frequency of recent negative social events. However, sociotropy also demonstrated nonpredicted interactive effects with negative events categorized a priori as autonomy related. Autonomy was unrelated to depression and showed no evidence of being a vulnerability to any type of life event. The findings generally support the value of examining the role in depression of interactions between personality characteristics and life events, although they do not support the specific matching predictions.     

Effects of Playing Videogames on Children's Aggressive and Other Behaviors1

Noting the pervasiveness of videogames in American culture, the authors set out to examine the effects that playing videogames has on children. Thirty-one children were matched on sex, randomly assigned to play either a violent (karate) videogame or a nonviolent (jungle vine swinging) videogame, and then observed during free play. The main results were that the children who had played the jungle swing videogame later played more with a jungle swing toy and that the children who played the violent videogame later showed more aggression. The authors interpreted the findings as an indication that young children who play videogames later tend to act similarly to how their videogame character acted.     

Effects of Computer Privacy on Help-Seeking1

Subjects (N= 28) performing a complex disjunctive concept-formation task on a microcomputer were given the opportunity to seek help following failure to correctly identify concepts. The proportion of those seeking help was significantly greater when the source of help was the computer itself (86%) rather than another person (36%). Consistent with past research, those who did not ask for help gave reasons other than the potential negative social consequences of doing so. Self-report data and a systematic test for the presence of experimenter-induced demand ruled out several possible sources of confounding. The results have implications for designers of time-sharing and networked computer systems.     

Disarmament Decisions as Social Dilemmas1

The individual deciding on a nuclear weapons production policy is faced with a dilemma in which a choice must be made to support one of several conflicting defense policies. In order to investigate the social-psychological variables that are related to armament policy decision making, a telephone survey was conducted in the City of St. Louis, Missouri. Adult subjects (N= 110) responded to questions concerned with cognitive, attitudinal, and emotional responses to nuclear arms. Participants were also asked to choose a weapons production policy for the United States under conditions of continued and decreased Soviet nuclear arms production. Results indicated that respondents decisions about nuclear weapons production were related to their support for deterrence, the availability of their nuclear-related images, their emotional response to nuclear war, their attributions of responsibility for the prevention of nuclear war, and their political party affiliation. Distinctions between antinuclear decision-makers and pronuclear decision-makers are discussed.     

Conceptions of states and traits: dimensional attributes with ideals as prototypes

Traits and states are concepts that people use to both describe and understand themselves and others. We show that people view these concepts as prototype-based categories that have a graded internal structure and fuzzy boundaries and identify a set of attributes that define the prototypical cores of two categories: traits and states. Prototypical traits are stable, long-lasting, and internally caused. Prototypical states are temporary, brief, and caused by external circumstances. These prototypes are not defined by averages, as the family-resemblance principle would suggest, but by ideal (or extreme) attribute values. Like other ideal-based categories, traits and states serve particular goals. Trait concepts permit people to predict the present from the past; state concepts identify those behaviors that can be controlled by manipulating the situation. These two complementary schemas are part of the extensive theory of psychological causality that is implicit in language. Abstract social concepts differ from object categories in their category standards, the nature of their attributes, and the interrelations among those attributes.     

Role of visual information in ball catching

The present study is concerned with the perceptual information about the body and space underlying the act of catching a ball. In a series of four experiments, subjects were asked to catch a luminous ball under various visual conditions. In general, catching in a normally illuminated room was contrasted with catching the luminous ball in an otherwise completely dark room. In the third and fourth experiments, intermediate conditions of visual information were included. The results suggest that it is possible to catch a ball with one hand when only the ball is visible, but performance is better when the subject has the benefit of a rich visual environment and two hands. The second experiment indicated that subject performance does improve with practice in the dark, but time spent in the darkened room itself doesn't result in a significant decrement in performance. Results of the third study suggest that vision of one's hand does not aid in the performance of this task whereas the presence of a minimal visual frame appears to aid performance. The final study examined the relation between catching performance and body sway under similar visual conditions. Results of this experiment imply that persons who exhibit relatively little postural sway in full-room lighting performed better at this catching task.