Parents, Careers and Culture: The View of Ethnic-Minority and Ethnic-Majority Girls

In a study concerned with factors affecting career aspirations, 45 Muslim and 71 non-Muslim secondary-schoolgirls completed scales requiring them to rate themselves on attributes chosen for their relevance to careers. Subjects also completed these scales as they believed their parents would rate them. Minimal differences were shown between the two groups and, contrary to stereotype, Muslim girls did not indicate that their fathers would rate them low on such attributes. Interviews conducted with 21 of the Muslim pupils indicated little conflict in their homes over vocational issues and revealed that both parents, but especially fathers, were supportive of higher education and careers for their daughters.     

Developing Data-Based Communications in Social Psychological Research: Adolescent Smoking Prevention1

The present paper deals with how pre-intervention data were gathered from a sample of junior high school students to whom a smoking prevention program was addressed and how these data were used in the creation of trigger films which were an important element in the prevention program. The coping techniques used by students who are successfully able to withstand social pressures to smoke were determined from pre-intervention group interview-role-playing sessions with samples of students from two schools representative of the intended target population of the smoking prevention program. These data were used in the production and editing of ten-minute, sound, color films which reflected simulations of the student responses in the interview-role-playing sessions. Assessment of the impact of these filmed social-inoculation coping strategies indicates that they appear to be a promising component of smoking deterrent programs for adolescents.     

Facial expressive behaviors of high self-monitors are less sex-typed

The present study compared the expressive behavior of high and low self-monitoring men and women. Silent excerpts from videotapes of standardized interviews were shown to naive judges. Three dimensions of the target persons' facial expressive behaviors were rated by separate groups of judges. Each excerpt was rated as more happy or unhappy, and as more excited or relaxed, and as more spontaneous or controlled. The ratings of the expressive behavior of high self-monitoring targets were less consistent with social stereotypes and past research findings comparing men's and women's expressive behaviors than were ratings of low self-monitors. These findings are discussed in terms of the origins of sex differences in expressive behavior and in terms of the constructs of self-monitoring and psychological androgyny.The authors wish to express their appreciation to students in experimental social psychology at the College of Charleston who aided in all phases of this research.     

Emergence of thematic concepts in repeated listening to music

A repeated listening procedure was designed to monitor changes in listener's appreciation of thematic categories in musical compositions. Subjects listened to a recorded musical composition. Passages selected from the composition were then played in pairs, and listeners rated their similarity. The similarity data were submitted to INDSCAL, a multidimensional scaling procedure, which located the passages in an n-dimensional space. This procedure was repeated in three separate sessions, so that changes in the perceived musical structure could be observed. In Study 1, subjects heard Liszt's Sonata in b, and target passages were Theme A, Theme B, and three variations of each theme. While extrathematic dimensions dominated early acquaintance, a theme dimension emerged in the second and third sessions. Musicians gave higher weight to the theme dimension than did nonmusicians, and theme was the only dimension for experts on this sonata. Musicians were also more accurate in a final classification test, but only after repeated listening. The effect of repeated exposure on transfer to new theme exemplars was considered in Study 2. It is hoped this work will foster more naturalistic approaches to musical cognition.     

Erotic stimuli and aggression: facilitation or inhibition.

The present experiment attempted to reconcile previous results on the relationship of erotic stimuli and aggression. Subjects were either insulted or not insulted prior or subsequent to observing erotic stimuli of varying levels of arousal inducements. It was found, in support of prior research, that mildly erotic stimuli had an inhibiting effect on aggression when viewed subsequent to anger arousal, whereas highly erotic stimuli tended to maintain aggression at a level similar to nonerotic exposure. Prior viewing of erotic stimuli, however, had a facilitative effect on aggressive behavior. It was proposed that erotic stimuli have two components (arousal and attentional shift) that interact with anger arousal to either inhibit or facilitate aggressive behavior. The article considers the implications of this two-component system for future research on erotic and aggressive stimuli.