Young adults' perceptions of social sex roles across the life span

Fifty male and 50 female undergraduates rated 10 age-sex targets (Boy, Girl, Adolescent Boy, Adolescent Girl, Young Man, Young Woman, Middle-aged Man, Middle-Aged Woman, Old Man and Old Woman) on 12 semantic differential scales. Compared with female targets, male targets were rated higher on potency and activity scales and lower on evaluative scales. Semantic distance between male and female targets showed a curvilinear relationship with target age. Results suggested that young adult subjects perceive that sex-role differences first increase and then decrease across the life span.An earlier version of this article was presented at the convention of the Western Psychological Association in Los Angeles, California, April 1976.     

Role perceptions: Variations by sex and roles

A Role Perception Scale utilizing a combined projective-objective methodology was developed to assess female and male perceptions of each of three single roles — work, marriage, and parent — and two combined roles — work-marriage and work-parent. Research participants were 134 college students, 88 females and 46 males. Factor analysis of the objective scale, the only part to be scored, resulted in two major orthogonal factors labeled role engagement and competition factors. Sex and role differences for each factor were analyzed using 2×5 split block analysis of variance design with repeated measures. On three out of the five single and combined roles women perceived more engagement than men. In general males perceived roles as more competitive. These sex differences and patterns identified in within-sex analyses across roles are discussed.Parts of this paper were presented at the American Psychological Association Convention, Washington, D.C., September 1976. Research was supported in part by the Dean's Development Fund, New York University, School of Education, Health, Nursing, and Arts Professions. Both authors are senior authors. The order of names is randomly determined. The authors wish to thank Philip Merrifield and Barbara Hummel-Rossi for their statistical assistance in data analysis.     

The effects of Familial Sinistrality and preferred hand on dichaptic and dichotic tasks

Processing asymmetries for tactile-spatial and auditory-verbal processing were investigated in two studies using the S. F. Witelson (1974, Cortex, 10, 3–17) dichaptic procedure. Experiment 1 used eight right-handed males in a free recall procedure. More shapes were correctly detected by the left hand but only with a right hand response. In Experiment 2, right and left handers with no Familial Sinistrality (FS) were compared with left handers with various types of FS, looking at pre- and postcued order of report and precuing the response hand. No group showed hand asymmetry with pre- or postcuing for either responding hand. Right handers showed no difference with order of report; however, left handers made fewer correct detections for items to be reported second. There were differences between the Parental FS and the Sibling FS groups both on the dichotic listening and the haptic tasks.     

Efficacy of self-instructional training for reducing children''s anxiety in an evaluative situation

Fifty-six fourth-grade children were categorized as either high or low in trait anxiety and then assigned to a self-instruction treatment, minimal-treatment, or no-treatment control condition. At both pretest and posttest, the subjects recited a memorized poem while being videotaped with the expectation that they would be judged on their performance. State anxiety measures, a behavior rating of anxiety, a measure of performance accuracy and the time involved in reciting a poem were obtained at both pretest and posttest. Contrary to expectation, the self-instructional training resulted in subjects' exhibiting greater signs of behavioral anxiety, subjects' hurrying through the task (taking less time to recite the poem) and high trait-anxiety subjects' reporting more state anxiety while anticipating reciting the poem. Correlational analyses indicated that trait anxiety was significantly related to the measures of state anxiety and the behavior rating of anxiety but not to performance accuracy.     

Delayed monochromatic hue matches indicate characteristics of visual memory

Short-term memory for 16 monochromatic hues from 425 to 640 nm was measured after six delays from .1 to 24.3 sec by means of an iterative, momentary stimulus-matching technique. Small shifts were revealed in the remembered hue produced by certain wavelengths at some delays. These shifts did not follow trends consistent with a storage dependent on sensory pathway characteristics, perceptually unique hues, or semantic encoding but may reflect entropic effects in a storage that is remarkably unbiased. By indicating the discriminability of hues in memory, standard deviations of the delayed matches reveal other characteristics of what is stored: Their smooth, exponential growth questions the existence of "levels" and permits estimating the half-life of hue memory; their continued resemblance to the discrimination function for simultaneously perceived hues suggests that the stored activity; closely resembled the sensory response of color. The results also indicate how successive comparisons may be corrected in applied color work.     

Reasoning in the personal and moral domains: Adolescent and young adult women's decision-making regarding abortion

The present investigation of adolescent and young adult women's reasoning, and decision-making about abortion was conducted to determine whether reasoning about abortion could be described by moral, social-conventional, and personal concepts and to examine relationships between domain of reasoning and action choices. Seventy single women, ranging in age from 13 to 31 and divided between 25 women having abortions, 23 women continuing their pregnancies, and 22 never-pregnant women, were administered a semi-structured clinical interview about abortion and two hypothetical moral judgement dilemmas. A classification task was developed to provide an additional measure of reasoning in different domains. Another 29 single, first-pregnant women provided a comparison of the effects of these procedures on decision-making. Content analysis of the protocols revealed that responses to the abortion interview could be reliably distinguished between concepts of morality and personal issues and their coordination or lack of coordination. Subjects treating abortion as a moral issue were more likely to continue their pregnancies while subjects treating abortion as a personal issue were more likely to obtain an abortion. Differences in reasoning between pregnant and nonpregnant subjects were not observed. Moral responses to the abortion interview were found to be highly related to hypothetical moral judgments.     

The role of attentional resources in automatic detection

The question of whether an automatic detection task requires the use of limited-capacity resources was investigated in a series of dual-task experiments. The automatic task required subjects to detect a consistently mapped target digit in a display of letters. This task was paired with a variety of concurrent visual discriminations that could either occur in close proximity to the automatic target or in a disparate display area. The main finding was that accuracy in each task was higher in conditions allowing attention to be shared than when it had to be divided between separate areas. These results indicate that detection of automatic targets depends on the allocation of spatial attention to the target's area.