Attitudes toward women and their work roles: Effects of intrinsic and extrinsic religious orientations

This study examined the effects of personal religious orientation, religious denomination, and gender on attitudes toward women and their work roles using a sample of 263 single undergraduate university students. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation put significantly more emphasis on family than career in their anticipated general lifestyle relative to those with a low intrinsic religious orientation. Subjects with a high intrinsic religious orientation were also more likely to anticipate the female spouse spending less time in a profession during the children's early years. Males showed more traditional attitudes toward women than females, but there were no gender effects on measures of preferred general lifestyle, preferred child-care distribution, or preferred career involvement for the wife. Subjects belonging to mainline and conservative denomination did not differ significantly in their attitudes toward women or their work roles.     

Alcohol-induced state-dependent learning: Differentiating stimulus and storage hypotheses

State-dependent effects of alcohol have been demonstrated in animals and man. Most studies have used tasks for which accurate performance typically requires that stimulus input was adequately stored initially and that the items were retrieved at the time of testing. Thus an alcohol-induced decrement in performance could be due to impaired storage, impaired retrieval, or both. The purpose of this experiment was to distinguish between stimulus and storage hypotheses of state-dependent learning (SDL). Sixteen subjects were used in a 2×2 design in which the task involved the learning and recall of a 19-item ‘route’ map. During initial learning, all subjects were sober. Immediately after learning, half the subjects were given a moderate dose of alcohol. Twenty-four hours later, all subjects were tested for recall under the same or different conditions. Greater retention was found for those subjects whose drug states were the same in memory storage/consolidation and retrieval. Thus an alcohol state effective during the memory consolidation interval following acquisition appears to be a sufficient condition for producing SDL. In this context, SDL might be better termed state-dependent memory storage and retrieval. The implications of these results for the aetiology and treatment of alcohol dependence are discussed.     

Temporal control of behavior and the power law

The performance of rats and pigeons under fixed-interval schedules was studied in two experiments. The duration of postreinforcement pause was a declining proportion of fixed-interval duration. For pigeons this was true both when the duration of the reinforcer was fixed and when it was increased in direct proportion to increases in fixed-interval duration; the longer reinforcer durations did, however, lengthen the postreinforcement pause at higher schedule values. A quantitative analysis of data from Experiments 1 and 2 and from other studies showed that fractional exponent power functions described the relationship between postreinforcement pause and fixed-interval value; similar functions have previously been observed in studies of temporal differentiation. It was concluded that power functions reflect a direct causal, rather than artifactual, relationship between performance and the temporal requirements of reinforcement schedules.     

Are high levels of religiosity inconsistent with a high valuation of science? Evidence from the United States,China and Iran

We asked whether high levels of religiosity are inconsistent with a high valuation of science. We explored this possibility in three countries that diverge markedly in the relation between the state and religion. Parents in the United States (n = 126), China (n = 234) and Iran (n = 77) completed a survey about their personal and parental stance towards science. The relation between religiosity and the valuation of science varied sharply by country. In the U.S. sample, greater religiosity was associated with a lower valuation of science. A similar but weaker negative relation was found in the Chinese sample. Parents in the Iranian sample, by contrast, valued science highly, despite high levels of religiosity. Given the small size of our United States and Iranian samples, and the non-probabilistic nature of our samples in general, we caution readers not to generalise our findings beyond the current samples. Despite this caveat, these findings qualify the assumption that religiosity is inconsistent with the valuation of science and highlight the role of sociocultural context in shaping adults' perception of the relation between religion and science.     

From the Editor

Journal of Medical Humanities -