Gender-Role Attitudes in University Students in the United States, Slovenia, and Croatia

Determinants of gender-role attitudes were examined in samples of university students from Pittsburgh in the United States, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Osijek in Croatia. Surveys including items from the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and the Neosexism Scale were administered to a total of 1,544 U.S. students, 912 Slovene students, and 996 Croatian students between the years of 1991 and 2000. As predicted, men held less egalitarian or more sexist attitudes about the appropriate roles for women and men, and those with more frequent attendance at religious services held more sexist attitudes. No changes in attitudes were found for women over time, but Slovene males were found to become more traditional over time.     

Two ways of learning associations

How people learn chunks or associations between adjacent items in sequences was modelled. Two previously successful models of how people learn artificial grammars were contrasted: the CCN, a network version of the competitive chunker of Servan‐Schreiber and Anderson [J. Exp. Psychol.: Learn. Mem. Cogn. 16 (1990) 592], which produces local and compositionally‐structured chunk representations acquired incrementally; and the simple recurrent network (SRN) of Elman [Cogn. Sci. 14 (1990) 179], which acquires distributed representations through error correction. The models' susceptibility to two types of interference was determined: prediction conflicts, in which a given letter can predict two other letters that appear next with an unequal frequency; and retroactive interference, in which the prediction made by a letter changes in the second half of training. The predictions of the models were determined by exploring parameter space and seeing howdensely different regions of the space of possible experimental outcomes were populated by model outcomes. For both types of interference, human data fell squarely in regions characteristic of CCN performance but not characteristic of SRN performance.     

LISP: An introduction and some great programs

Some of the advantages of LISP and some of its unsavory reputation are discussed. Some LISP programs in a variety of areas (chemistry, medicine, question answering, natural language, mathematics, airline tariffs, etc.) are briefly described.     

Brain weights correlate with behavioral parameters in individual inbred mice housed in a common and enriched environment

Fifty 8-week-old Balb/c mice were individually identified and housed together in a large and enriched environment for 5 months. Maze and open field exploration, response to an aversive noise, swimming, and induced grooming tests were applied to each mouse in an initial search for possible relationships between brain morphology and spontaneous behavior in isogenic individuals living in a complex social and physical environment. The tasks generated 39 quantitative behavioral indices which include locomotion, rearing, still, and grooming bout frequencies, latencies, total, and mean bout durations. At the end of the tests, the 7-month-old mice were sacrificed and the fresh weights of their whole brain, cerebellum, brain stem, diencephalon, telencephalon, and prosencephalon were rapidly obtained. Behavioral data have wide variations and do not adjust to normal population distributions. Means of the same parameter differ between tests. A Spearman correlation matrix of all data yielded many significant correlations between indices of the same task which can be interpreted in terms of time budget and sequence probability. Significant correlations between indices of different tests suggest diverse emotionalities, exploratory strategies, and motor skills. The correlations between body and brain weights and among separate brain regions were not significant. There were several low but significant correlations between brain weights and behavioral indices. Such correlations, the resulting factors, and significant behavioral differences between mice with large and small brains suggest that mice displaying low motor activity in novel environments have larger brains and forebrain/hindbrain ratios than mice with high activity, and that animals with high scores of some specific behaviors have larger brain areas physiologically related to such behaviors.(ABSTRACT TRUNCATED AT 250 WORDS)     

Patient variable biases in clinical judgment: conceptual overview and methodological considerations

Specific conceptual factors are presented as having contributed to the negative findings of past psychotherapy bias research. Among these factors are the restrictive nature of both the definition of bias and the model of the biased clinician. A review of published studies of several patient variable biases (e.g., gender, race/ethnicity, and age) indicated that bias may best be defined in broader terms and that its occurrence may be more circumscribed than originally conceived. In addition, the lack of a theoretical perspective in this area of research is noted and the applicability of some social cognitive processes is discussed. Methodological factors are also considered, and recommendations for future research are offered.     

Using item-specific instructional information in achievement modeling

The problem of detecting instructional sensitivity (item basis) in test items is considered. An illustration is given which shows that for tests with many biased items, traditional item bias detection schemes give a very poor assessment of bias. A new method is proposed instead. This method extends item response theory (IRT) by including item-specific auxiliary measurement information related to opportunity-to-learn. Item-specific variation in measurement relations across students with varying opportunity-to-learn is allowed for.This paper was presented at the 1987 AERA meeting in Washington, DC. This research was supported by grant OERI-G-86-003 from the Office of Educational Research and Improvement, Department of Education. The author thanks Michael Hollis and Chih-fen Kao for valuable research assistance, and appreciates valuable comments made by an anonymous reviewer.     

Response to commentaries on “A neurobiological model for near-death experiences”

This work has received financial support from FONDECYT (Project 1111-88). The authors also acknowledge the helpful comments of Dr. Bruce Cassels.