Who Says It's Sexual Harassment? The Effects of Gender and Likelihood to Sexually Harass on Legal Judgments of Sexual Harassment1

The effects of participants’ gender and propensity to sexually harass were examined in a sexual harassment case in which the gender of the harassers and victim were manipulated systematically. Male and female participants scoring either high or low on the Likelihood to Sexually Harass (LSH) scale (Pryor, 1987) reviewed an ostensibly real hostile work environment case and made judgments about the case. When participants were the same gender as the victim, individual differences in LSH failed to influence their judgments. When the participants’ gender was the opposite of the victim's, those low in LSH perceived the behaviors as more likely to be sexual harassment than those high in LSH. These results are discussed and their implications considered.     

Are Gender Differences in Basic Human Values a Generational Phenomenon?

The Schwartz Value Survey (SVS) was administered to 979 Canadian knowledge workers to determine whether differences in value priorities between men and women differed significantly between members of the Baby Boomer generation and members of Generation X. Multivariate analysis of covariance controlling for education, income, and scale use revealed a significant gender-by-generation interaction, which signifies that the patterns of differences between men's and women's value priorities were different for Baby Boomers and Generation Xers. Four of the 10 SVS value types (i.e., power, tradition, universalism, and achievement) were associated with both gender and generation. A number of other value types were associated solely with generation. The findings suggest that both gender and generation are important variables in the study of values and should not be considered in isolation of each other.     

Spirituality: A Coping Mechanism in the Lives of Adults With Congenital Disabilities

The purpose of this study was to gain insight into the perspective of individuals with congenital disabilities about spirituality as a coping mechanism during crucial times in their lives. Qualitative analysis of interviews assessing turning points in the lives of 15 adults (6 women and 9 men; M = 37 years) with spina bifida, cerebral palsy, or attention deficit disorder was performed to determine how spirituality assisted them at these crucial times. Four recurring themes were identified: God as a guiding force, inner strength, meaning in life, and appropriateness of the use of spirituality in counseling. The authors discuss their findings and the use of spirituality in counseling adults with congenital disabilities.     

Adolescents’ Perceptions of Family Connectedness,Intrinsic Religiosity,and Depressed Mood

Using a sample of 248 ninth and tenth grade students at public high schools, we examined adolescents’ perceptions of family connectedness, intrinsic religiosity, and adolescents’ gender in relation to depressed mood and whether intrinsic religiosity and gender moderated the association of aspects of family connectedness to adolescent depressed mood. Using hierarchical multiple regression analyses we tested models separately for three forms of family connectedness (overall family cohesion, mothers’ support, and fathers’ support), intrinsic religiosity, and depressed mood. In each model, family connectedness was negatively associated with depressed mood. Intrinsic religiosity was not significantly associated with depressed mood. However, in the mothers’ support model, both a two-way interaction (mothers’ support × intrinsic religiosity) and a three-way interaction (adolescents’ gender × mothers’ support × intrinsic religiosity) were significantly related to depressed mood. In the two-way interaction, higher intrinsic religiosity was a moderator, strengthening the association between mothers’ support and depressed mood. In the three-way interaction, gender differences were found. For boys, high intrinsic religiosity strengthened the association between mothers’ support and depressed mood. Among girls, when mothers’ support was low, intrinsic religiosity provided an additional source of connectedness in protecting against depressed mood. Our findings show that connectedness in overall family systems, mother–adolescent subsystems, and father–adolescent subsystems are all important to emotional resilience in adolescents by protecting against depressed mood. Future studies of adolescent religiosity may benefit from including diverse forms of family connectedness in understanding the protective processes provided by aspects of religiosity in promoting adolescents’ emotional resilience.     

An item factor analysis and item response theory-based revision of the Everyday Discrimination Scale

The Everyday Discrimination Scale (EDS), a widely used measure of daily perceived discrimination, is purported to be unidimensional, to function well among African Americans, and to have adequate construct validity. Two separate studies and data sources were used to examine and cross-validate the psychometric properties of the EDS. In Study 1, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted on a sample of African American law students (N = 589), providing strong evidence of local dependence, or nuisance multidimensionality within the EDS. In Study 2, a separate nationally representative community sample (N = 3,527) was used to model the identified local dependence in an item factor analysis (i.e., bifactor model). Next, item response theory (IRT) calibrations were conducted to obtain item parameters. A five-item, revised-EDS was then tested for gender differential item functioning (in an IRT framework). Based on these analyses, a summed score to IRT-scaled score translation table is provided for the revised-EDS. Our results indicate that the revised-EDS is unidimensional, with minimal differential item functioning, and retains predictive validity consistent with the original scale.     

Not your mother's view: the dynamics of toddler visual experience

Human toddlers learn about objects through second-by-second, minute-by-minute sensory-motor interactions. In an effort to understand how toddlers' bodily actions structure the visual learning environment, mini-video cameras were placed low on the foreheads of toddlers, and for comparison also on the foreheads of their parents, as they jointly played with toys. Analyses of the head camera views indicate visual experiences with profoundly different dynamic structures. The toddler view often consists of a single dominating object that is close to the sensors and thus that blocks the view of other objects such that individual objects go in and out of view. The adult view, in contrast, is broad and stable, with all potential targets continually in view. These differences may arise for several developmentally relevant reasons, including the small visuo-motor workspace of the toddler (short arms) and the engagement of the whole body when actively handling objects.     

Packing: A Geometric Analysis of Feature Selection and Category Formation

This paper presents a geometrical analysis of how local interactions in a large population of categories packed into a feature space create a global structure of feature relevance. The theory is a formal proof that the joint optimization of discrimination and inclusion creates a smooth space of categories such that near categories in the similarity space have similar generalization gradients. Packing theory offers a unified account of several phenomena in human categorization including the differential importance of different features for different kinds of categories, the dissociation between judgments of similarity and judgments of category membership, and children's ability to generalize a category from very few examples.     

Focalism and the underestimation of future emotion: when it's worse than imagined

People typically exaggerate the emotional impact of future events. This occurs because of focalism, the tendency to focus on one event and neglect to consider how emotion will be mitigated by the surrounding context. Neglecting context, however, should lead people to underestimate future emotion when context focuses attention on the event. In Study 1, participants underestimated the intensity of their future negative emotions when they reported reactions to a romantic break-up on Valentine's Day versus 1 week before. This relationship was mediated by how frequently they thought about the break-up. In Study 2, participants underestimated the emotional impact of a lost prize when the experimental context forced them to focus on the prize versus when the prize was less evident. Thus, failing to account for the extent to which context would focus attention on the event, a form of focalism, led to underestimation of emotional reactions to a negative event.