Does sexist language reflect personal characteristics?

We investigated whether or not sexist language in written form can be linked to traditional views of sex roles, assertiveness, psychological androgyny, Christian beliefs, or sexist language in oral form. In Experiment 1, undergraduates were given an essay designed to test written sexist language and several pencil-and-paper personality inventories. No relationship between sexist language and interpersonal assertiveness or psychological androgyny was found. However, those who avoided sexist language were less traditional in their sex role perceptions scored lower on a scale of Christian beliefs. In Experient 2, the method of measuring sexist language was expanded by using three essay responses and a brief oral interview. Those who used sexist language in written form were more likely than others to use sexist language in oral form on some responses. Interpretations and implications of the findings are discussed.     

‘I am–we are’: personal and social pathways to further study, work and family life

This project explores the apparent layers in motivation for young people’s plans in order to extend Pathways Theory. We bring together personal, relational and group motivation to explain the planned pathways to study, work and family life. Location was an Australian town, close to the national socio-economic average, to control broad social factors. Participants (N = 78) were 12 to 18 year-old girls and boys (mean age 14.5 years). Results provide little support for popular explanations based on demographic factors (age, gender, family background) and broad personal indicators of self esteem and mood. Instead, the results support proposed differential explanations for pathways to study, work and family life. In particular, personal aspects of identity and self concepts, social expectations and group identity influence young people’s pathways to further study. Group uniqueness explains pathways to paid work, yet experience of higher education tends to limit plans for family life. Findings support inclusion of personal, relational and group motivations in developing innovative theories of pathways motivation. Ongoing work considers common and distinct explanations across socio-economic contexts.     

Attributions About Achievement and Intentions About Further Study in Social Context

This project examined sources and consequences of attributions for achievement for boys and girls at co-ed (N = 663) and single-sex schools (N = 697). Overall attributions emphasised long and short term effort, over other personal (ability, liking) and social reasons (parents, teachers) or feeling good or bad on the day. Attributions were substantially similar for girls and boys, with particular variations in attributions to effort and ability at co-ed and not single-sex schools. Results suggested an illusory glow for boys more than girls in attributions to ability and effort for doing well in Mathematics and English, and traditional gender stereotyping in attributions to poor ability for not doing well in Mathematics. Results showed weak associations between attributions about effort and ability with intentions for Mathematics and English courses in senior high school. Findings suggest further research about personal and social sources of attributions in co-ed schools, and question the practical significance of attributions for achievement motivation.     

Frontal brain electrical activity (EEG) and heart rate in response to affective infant-directed (ID) speech in 9-month-old infants

Many studies have shown that infants prefer infant-directed (ID) speech to adult-directed (AD) speech. ID speech functions to aid language learning, obtain and/or maintain an infant's attention, and create emotional communication between the infant and caregiver. We examined psychophysiological responses to ID speech that varied in affective content (i.e., love/comfort, surprise, fear) in a group of typically developing 9-month-old infants. Regional EEG and heart rate were collected continuously during stimulus presentation. We found the pattern of overall frontal EEG power was linearly related to affective intensity of the ID speech, such that EEG power was greatest in response to fear, than surprise than love/comfort; this linear pattern was specific to the frontal region. We also noted that heart rate decelerated to ID speech independent of affective content. As well, infants who were reported by their mothers as temperamentally distressed tended to exhibit greater relative right frontal EEG activity during baseline and in response to affective ID speech, consistent with previous work with visual stimuli and extending it to the auditory modality. Findings are discussed in terms of how increases in frontal EEG power in response to different affective intensity may reflect the cognitive aspects of emotional processing across sensory domains in infancy.     

CS-dependent response probability in an auditory masked-detection task: considerations based on models of Pavlovian conditioning.

Experimental studies were performed using a Pavlovian-conditioned eyeblink response to measure detection of a variable-sound-level tone (T) in a fixed-sound-level masking noise (N) in rabbits. Results showed an increase in the asymptotic probability of conditioned responses (CRs) to the reinforced TN trials and a decrease in the asymptotic rate of eyeblink responses to the non-reinforced N presentations as a function of the sound level of the T. These observations are consistent with expected behaviour in an auditory masked detection task, but they are not consistent with predictions from a traditional application of the Rescorla-Wagner or Pearce models of associative learning. To implement these models, one typically considers only the actual stimuli and reinforcement on each trial. We found that by considering perceptual interactions and concepts from signal detection theory, these models could predict the CS dependence on the sound level of the T. In these alternative implementations, the animals response probabilities were used as a guide in making assumptions about the "effective stimuli".     

Sleep deprivation selectively impairs memory consolidation for contextual fear conditioning

Many behavioral and electrophysiological studies in animals and humans have suggested that sleep and circadian rhythms influence memory consolidation. In rodents, hippocampus-dependent memory may be particularly sensitive to sleep deprivation after training, as spatial memory in the Morris water maze is impaired by rapid eye movement sleep deprivation following training. Spatial learning in the Morris water maze, however, requires multiple training trials and performance, as measured by time to reach the hidden platform is influenced by not only spatial learning but also procedural learning. To determine if sleep is important for the consolidation of a single-trial, hippocampus-dependent task, we sleep deprived animals for 0–5 and 5–10 h after training for contextual and cued fear conditioning. We found that sleep deprivation from 0–5 h after training for this task impaired memory consolidation for contextual fear conditioning whereas sleep deprivation from 5–10 h after training had no effect. Sleep deprivation at either time point had no effect on cued fear conditioning, a hippocampus-independent task. Previous studies have determined that memory consolidation for fear conditioning is impaired when protein kinase A and protein synthesis inhibitors are administered at the same time as when sleep deprivation is effective, suggesting that sleep deprivation may act by modifying these molecular mechanisms of memory storage.     

Family Ritual and Routine: Comparison of Clinical and Non-Clinical Families

Research demonstrates that the constructive use of family rituals is reliably linked to family health and to psychosocial adjustment. This study explores the relationship between family rituals and child well-being. Two samples participated: 21 families whose adolescent was receiving psychiatric treatment and 21 families in which the adolescent was a public school student. A parent and the adolescent were individually interviewed regarding family rituals and completed standardized measures of adolescent and family functioning. Analyses demonstrated that, in addition to significant sample differences in the expected direction on measures of functioning, the non-clinical families scored significantly higher on the index of family rituality than did the treatment families; this is additional evidence that family rituals are a correlate of child well-being. Further analysis of the data pointed to “people resources” as a robust dimension in its association to adolescent functioning. The role family ritual and routine plays in defining family relationships, both within the nuclear family and with other important adults, was significantly related to clinical status. This work may point to an important, yet overlooked, dimension of family ritual life, the relational qualities of rituals and routines.     

Memory for melody: infants use a relative pitch code

Pitch perception is fundamental to melody in music and prosody in speech. Unlike many animals, the vast majority of human adults store melodic information primarily in terms of relative not absolute pitch, and readily recognize a melody whether rendered in a high or a low pitch range. We show that at 6 months infants are also primarily relative pitch processors. Infants familiarized with a melody for 7 days preferred, on the eighth day, to listen to a novel melody in comparison to the familiarized one, regardless of whether the melodies at test were presented at the same pitch as during familiarization or transposed up or down by a perfect fifth (7/12th of an octave) or a tritone (1/2 octave). On the other hand, infants showed no preference for a transposed over original-pitch version of the familiarized melody, indicating that either they did not remember the absolute pitch, or it was not as salient to them as the relative pitch.