An Empirical Examination of Same- and Other-Gender Sexual Harassment in the Workplace

This study examines sexual harassment (SH) whichinvolves members of the same gender, either male orfemale. Data are taken from the 1988 Department ofDefense Survey of Sex Roles in the Active Duty Military. Separate comparisons for male (38% White, 31%Black, and 31% ‘other’) and female (48%White, 27% Black, and 25% ‘other’) targetsare made between sameand other-gender SH related to fourmajor components of a conceptual model proposed by Fitzgerald,Drasgow, Hulin, Gelfand, & Magley (1997). Thesecomponents include sexual harassment behaviors, personalvulnerability, target response styles, and consequences of the SH for the target. The sexualorientation of targets and perpetrators is notconsidered because data were unavailable. Results reveala number of meaningful differences between sameandother-gender SH. The most striking result is that maletargets of same-gender SH experience consequences thatare significantly more pervasive and severe than thoseexperienced by male targets of other-gender SH.Organizational implications are discussed.     

Boundary regulation in family and personal systems: Perceptions of late adolescents

Examination of boundary regulation can provide family therapists with a framework to describe both the functioning of family systems and personal systems (i.e., the intrapsychic functioning of individual family members). In the present study, late adolescents' perceptions of boundary regulation within their family systems (i.e., ratings of family health, communication, leadership, expressiveness, cohesion, and family conflict) were related to regulation of their personal boundaries (i.e., self-reported personal competence, distress, and patterns of defense mechanism use). In addition, personal system variables reliably discriminated between adolescents who described their families as psychologically healthy versus psychologically unhealthy.     

Pharmacological dissociation of memory: anisomycin, a protein synthesis inhibitor, and leupeptin, a protease inhibitor, block different learning tasks

Inhibition of protein synthesis by anisomycin for a short duration impairs memory of a one-trial inhibitory avoidance task in rats. Memory of escape conditioning involving eight trials is disrupted only if the duration of protein synthesis is prolonged by repeated injections. In marked contrast, olfactory memory of rats trained on two odor discriminations is not affected by anisomycin even if the duration of inhibition is prolonged and the number of trials is reduced to a minimum. In previous work, leupeptin, a thiol proteinase inhibitor, was shown to impair olfactory discrimination learning, but left inhibitory and avoidance conditioning intact. Together, these results provide a pharmacological double dissociation of memory, and suggest that the same chemistries, or mixtures of chemistries, may not be involved in all types of memory.     

Laboratory functions for the Tecmar Lab Tender and IBM PC

A set of assembly language functions has been written to interface laboratory software for the IBM PC to the Tecmar, Inc., Lab Tender circuit board. These functions provide convenient access to the Lab Tender’s parallel ports, timers, A/D converters, and D/A converters from laboratory control programs written in the C language.     

Help Seeking: Effects of Visibility of Task Performance and Seeking Help

This study manipulated independently whether help seeking and task performance were public or private, since in public settings persons may lose esteem by seeking help or by demonstrating unsuccessful performance. Subjects were given false feedback that they were doing poorly on a task involving judging levels of neuroticism in others, and were given all opportunity to seek help by consulting a set of guidelines. The main result was an interaction with help seeking most likely when task performance was public and help seeking was private.     

Vocational role choice in second- and sixth-grade children

In a replication of two investigations reported by Looft (1971a, 1971b), 40 second- and sixth-grade male and female students were interviewed concerning their desired and expected vocational aspirations. In contrast to Looft's findings, no significant sex differences were found for either grade level in (a) the number of different (nonoverlapping) vocations nominated or (b) the number of subjects changing initial vocational role choices. When the issue of traditionality of vocational choice (i.e., vocations socially identified with the sex of the subject) was examined, it was found that half of the sixth-grade females interviewed nominated nontraditional vocations (e.g., basketball player, police officer). It was observed further that males in both the second- and sixth-grade samples overwhelmingly nominated traditional vocations. Contrary to Looft's interpretation, the findings suggest that although goals associated with the women's liberation movement (e.g., changes in sex-role expectations) are not demonstrated clearly in the vocational aspirations or expectations of young children, they may be reflected in the aspirations of adolescent females.     

Beauty Is Only "Name" Deep: The Effect of First-Name On Ratings of Physical Attraction

College students ( n = 197) voted to select a beauty queen from among six photographs equivalent in physical attractiveness, as determined by rankings of 35 students from a separate university. Half the photographs bore a desirable first-name and half were assigned an undesirable first-name. As predicted, firstname had a significant effect on physical attraction: Girls with desirable firstnames received 158 votes to 39 for those with undesirable names. These data were discussed in terms of an additive, rather than an interactive, effect, due to the nature of the task. The strength of these findings was related to the study's ecological validity.