Posture and Prediction on the Attitudes Toward Women Scale

A study was performed investigating the relationship between stated attitudes toward the feminist movement and willingness to help that movement. Results suggested that Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS) measures of feminist commitment may be limited by a social desirability variable and that high scores on the AWS do not correlate with a behavioral measure of commitment.     

Does Mother Know Best? An Actor–Partner Model of College‐Age Women's Human Papillomavirus Vaccination Behavior

This study examined the associations of perceived threat, perceived efficacy, and parent–child communication with the extent to which college‐age women received the human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine. Daughters and their mothers completed a survey about the HPV vaccine (N = 182 dyads). The results showed that mothers' perceived self‐efficacy to talk to their daughters and mothers' response efficacy of the vaccine were indirectly related to mother–daughter communication about HPV. Further, mother–daughter communication mediated the relation between mothers' intention to talk to their daughters and daughters' HPV vaccination behavior. This study demonstrates the importance of the social context of health behavior and the role of communication in understanding maternal influence on the HPV vaccination behavior of young adult women.     

Improved motor sequence retention by motionless listening

This study examined the effect of listening to a newly learned musical piece on subsequent motor retention of the piece. Thirty-six non-musicians were trained to play an unfamiliar melody on a piano keyboard. Next, they were randomly assigned to participate in three follow-up listening sessions over 1 week. Subjects who, during their listening sessions, listened to the same initial piece showed significant improvements in motor memory and retention of the piece despite the absence of physical practice. These improvements included increased pitch accuracy, time accuracy, and dynamic intensity of key pressing. Similar improvements, though to a lesser degree, were observed in subjects who, during their listening sessions, were distracted by another task. Control subjects, who after learning the piece had listened to nonmusical sounds, showed impaired motoric retention of the piece at 1 week from the initial acquisition day. These results imply that motor sequences can be established in motor memory without direct access to motor-related information. In addition, the study revealed that the listening-induced improvements did not generalize to the learning of a new musical piece composed of the same notes as the initial piece learned, limiting the effects to musical motor sequences that are already part of the individual’s motor repertoire.     

Sex Roles,Gender, and Fear

Male and female college students classified as masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated on the Bern (1974) Sex Role Inventory (N = 199) were given the Wolpe (1969) Fear Inventory. Significant differences in average fear scores were seen between men and women and between the four sex-role categories, with sex role and gender contributing equally to the variability. The argument is raised here that excessive fearfulness or fearlessness might be as much a product of sex-role conditioning as a product of gender.     

Social Orientation of Students in the Israeli State High School System

In this study, we focused on the relationship between schools differing in their ideologies, beliefs, and environments and students' social orientations. Three research instruments, each examining different social orientations, were administered to 331 11th-grade students attending a random sample of national-religious and national-secular high schools in the Israeli state educational system. The results indicated that students in the national-religious sector had a more conservative social orientations profile than national-secular sector students, who tended to have more liberal and optimistic social orientations.     

Biases in Visual Attention in Depressed and Nondepressed Individuals

Abstract

The present study utilised a cognitive paradigm to examine attentional biases in mildly depressed persons. Twelve depressed and 12 nondepressed subjects completed an attentional task similar to that employed by MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986). A tachistiscope was used to present subjects with a series of word pairs, each with one word printed above the other. Three types of word pairs were presented: manic-neutral, depressed-neutral, and manic-depressed. Selective attention to one member of a word pair was assessed using ac perception task. Based on cognitive models of depression, it was hypothesised that the depressed subjects would attend more to depressed-content words than to manic- or neutral-content words, whereas the nondepressed subjects would not exhibit any attentional biases. In contrast to these predictions, analyses indicated that whereas the depressed subjects attended equally to depressed-, manic-, and neutral-content words, the nondepressed subjects attended more to manic-content than they did to neutral- or depressed-content words. These results add support to the documentation of evenhandedness in the cognitive functioning of depressed subjects, and of self-sewing biases in nondepressed subjects. The present findings are discussed in terms of a zoom lens model of attention, in which depressed persons attempt to exhaustively process their sensory world, but with a loss of attentional resolution. In contrast, nondepressed individuals attempt to process a more limited portion of their sensory world, but with an increase in attentional power. Finally, directions for future research in this area are offered.     

When affective cues broaden thought: Evidence from event-related potentials associated with identifying emotionally expressive faces

Divergent theoretical perspectives predict that the valence of affective cues impacts the breadth and flexibility of cognition, but extant data have not clarified whether such effects transpire extemporaneously or only later via processes of evaluation or selection from among thoughts already generated. The present investigation found more prominent electro-cortical event-related-potential (P3) responses among participants focused on identifying a positively valenced social target (an individual with a happy facial expression) than a negatively valenced social target (an individual with a disgusted facial expression). Indeed, even obvious non-targets (scrambled faces) evoked more-prominent P3 responses among participants in the happy-target than the disgusted-target condition, thereby implicating an effect of the valence of affective cues on the extent of cognitive processing as it unfolds.     

Construal Level Theory of Mobile Persuasion

This article introduces the construal level theory of mobile persuasion. Concepts associated with both construal level theory and mobile technology are articulated through a literature review and synthesized into a series of assumptions that relate specifically to persuasive communication. Eight theoretical propositions are proposed, introducing three message functions: shifting construal level orientation, bridging construal level perception of choice, and traversing psychological distance to choice. We argue that conceptual relationships between the affordances of mobile technology and construal level theory make mobile devices particularly suited to test and implement these propositions. Message success and message resistance are discussed through this framework. We specify the potential to use construal level theory in effective mobile health interventions and propose a research agenda to further apply construal level theory to the process of communication.     

THE SECULAR HERO

This article examines the ideas of a number of leading Israeli intellectuals on basic questions of secularism and the link between secular Jews and their Jewish heritage. The secular Jews at the focus of the intellectuals’ thinking are individualists, men and women of outstanding personality and aptitude. Most of the article discusses their trend towards individualism (which is often only implied). The last part of the article tries to classify the reasons for that trend—some of which are rooted in the political tension inherent in questions of identity and tradition in Israeli society, and others that are the apolitical legacy of spiritual Zionism.     

Endogenous estradiol is associated with verbal memory in nondemented older men

This study examined the relationship between endogenous hormones and cognitive function in nondemented, ethnically-diverse community-dwelling older men enrolled in the Einstein Aging Study (EAS). All eligible participants (185 men, mean age=81 years) received neuropsychological assessment (Free and Cued Selective Reminding Test (FCSRT), Logical Memory (LM), Trail Making Test B (TMTB), block design (BD)) and provided blood samples for hormonal assays (total estradiol, total testosterone, calculated free testosterone index). Linear regression analysis adjusted for age, education, body mass index, and cardiovascular comorbidities indicated that men with high levels of total estradiol demonstrated better FCSRT verbal memory performance (β=0.17, p<0.02) compared to men with lower levels of total estradiol. The results remained unchanged when the model was further adjusted for ethnicity. We did not detect an association between testosterone and cognitive performance. These findings indicate that high levels of total estradiol in older men are associated with better performance on a cue-based, controlled learning test of verbal memory that is a sensitive predictor of dementia.