Attitudes to Marriage and Sexual Behaviors: A Survey of Gender and Culture Differences in China and United Kingdom

This paper reports a survey carried out among 505 university students in China and 338 students in the United Kingdom. The survey included questions on attitudes toward mate-selection preferences, marriage, and sexual behavior. The findings show that traditional values in mate-selection preferences persist more in China than in the United Kingdom and indicate that, despite a profound social revolution over the last two decades, a relatively conservative sexual culture still exists in China today. Traditional morality and attitudes prevail especially among women. Gender and culture differences are discussed.     

Modality exclusivity norms for 423 object properties

Recent work has shown that people routinely use perceptual information during language comprehension and conceptual processing, from single-word recognition to modality-switching costs in property verification. In investigating such links between perceptual and conceptual representations, the use of modality-specific stimuli plays a central role. To aid researchers working in this area, we provide a set of norms for 423 adjectives, each describing an object property, with mean ratings of how strongly that property is experienced through each of five perceptual modalities (visual, haptic, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory). The data set also contains estimates of modality exclusivity—that is, a measure of the extent to which a particular property may be considered unimodal (i.e., perceived through one sense alone). Although there already exists a number of sets of word and object norms, we provide the first set to categorize words describing object properties along the dimensions of the five perceptual modalities. We hope that the norms will be of use to researchers working at the interface between linguistic, conceptual, and perceptual systems. The modality exclusivity norms may be downloaded as supplemental materials for this article from brm.psychonomic-journals.org/ content/supplemental.     

Effects of anxiety and attention control on processing pictorial and linguistic emotional information

This study investigated the role of executive attention control in modulating selective processing of emotional information in anxiety. It was hypothesized that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control would be associated with greater difficulty in ignoring task-irrelevant threat-related information. The study included both faces and words as stimuli. Cognitive interference effects were assessed using two emotional Stroop tasks: one with angry, fearful, happy and neutral faces, and one with threat-related, positive, and neutral words. An objective measure of attention control was obtained from the Attention network task. There were four participant groups with high/low trait anxiety and high/low attention control. Results indicated that the combination of high anxiety and poor attention control was associated with greater cognitive interference by emotional faces (including angry faces), compared to neutral faces. This interference effect was not evident in participants with high anxiety and high attentional control, or in low-anxious individuals. There was no evidence of associations between anxiety, attention control, and the interference effect of emotional words. Results indicate that high anxiety and poor attention control together predict enhanced processing of emotionally salient information, such as angry facial expressions. Implications for models of emotion processing are discussed.     

No reliable effects of emotional facial expression, adult attachment orientation, or anxiety on the allocation of visual attention in the spatial cueing paradigm

The primary goal of the current study was to examine the allocation of attention to emotional facial stimuli as a function of adult attachment orientation. Using a modified version of the spatial cueing paradigm we examined these effects in three experiments. In each experiment predictable cue validity effects were observed and these effects were always modulated by the expression of the facial cue. Furthermore, the magnitude of these cue validity effects was also influenced by individual differences in both adult attachment orientation and anxiety. The direction of these effects, however, was not consistent across experiments and did not replicate previous findings. We conclude that this paradigm may not usefully elucidate the processes underlying the allocation of attention to emotional stimuli.     

War,revolution, and psychoanalysis: Freudian thought begins to grapple with social reality

Psychoanalytic theory and practice have been affected by external events as well as by internal development. Specifically, the period of the Great War and its aftermath was a turning point in the history of psychoanalysis. These experiences emphasized the inadequacy of the libido theory alone, accelerated Freud's impetus toward metapsychology, and encouraged the articulation of theories of innate destructive urges, of ego instincts, of the superego, and of social interaction. Discussionsof war neuroses, of aggression and the death instinct, of the reality principle, and of the mechanisms of social psychology undermined Freud's original biologism in favor of a social-scientific approach. Psychoanalytic theory began to take more account of social experience and was profoundly changed in the process.     

Cognitive models of stereotype change (4): Motivational and cognitive influences

Three experiments investigating the effects of cognitive and motivational factors on stereotype change are reported. Trait ratings in all three experiments showed there to be greater stereotype-change when stereotype-inconsistent information was dispersed across many group members than when it was concentrated in only a few. A sorting task (Experiment 1) indicated that, in the concentrated conditions the stereotype disconfirmers were more strongly isolated from the rest of the group than in the dispersed conditions. Free recall protocols (Experiment 2) showed greater memory for the target exemplars when subjects anticipated interaction with a group member than when no interaction was anticipated. The questions subject chose to ask target group exemplars were also influenced by anticlpated future interaction. Subjects chose more stereotype-inconsistent questions when interactian was anticipated than when no interaction was anticipated. Experment 3 showed the impact of stereotype-inconsistent information to be greater when expectancies for the stereotyped group are weaker A cued-recall task yielded evidence of spontaneous subtyping. All these studies support the subtyping model, even in the presence of cognitive and motivational factors that might be expected to impede stereotype change.     

Sexual Harassment: A Preliminary Test of an Integrative Model1

Despite the recent increase in research on sexual harassment, most studies have examined the relevant variables in isolation, and little is known concerning the ways in which they may interact or the relative importance of their effects for individuals or organizations. Fitzgerald and her colleagues (Fitzgerald, Hulin, & Drasgow. 1995; Fitzgerald & Ormerod, 1993) proposed a model of the antecedents and outcomes of sexual harassment in organizations. The present study examines a modified version of this model using path analysis with a sample of women employed by the federal government in the late 1980s. These analyses support the basic form of the model, suggesting that sexual harassment is a joint function of the gender context of the victim's job, her relative vulnerability, and the tolerance of the organization for sexual harassment. In turn, harassment was shown to have a negative impact on work and health-related outcomes, exacerbated by assertive coping responses. The implications for organizations are discussed along with recommendations for more stringent tests of the model.     

Careers,contingencies, and locus of control among White college women

This study examined social-psychological antecedents of the sex type of occupational preferences and expectations of White college women. High sex-role contingency orientation (SRCO)—attitudes and explanations for occupational choices which reflect a primary and explicit concern with marriage and family—was associated with expectations and preferences for occupations in which females predominate and with the tendency to have more traditionally feminine expectations than preferences.SRCO was significantly related to locus of control (I-E) with women high or intermediate in SRCO being primarily internal or external; women with low SRCO being primarily intermediate in I-E.This study was supported by a Faculty Research Grant from the Graduate Research Council of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.