Identification with aggression vs. turning against the self: An empirical study of turn-of-the-century European Jewish humor

Self-directed demeaning ethnic humor is hypothesized to represent either a means of self-deprecation or a stance of disidentifying with one’s own group of origin. Compendia of published Yiddish humor were examined to empirically test competing conceptualizations of Jewish wit. Results are analyzed in the context of the social milieu of the publication samples.     

Commentary on high-performance computing and human vision II: Virtual reality and eyeball tracking

Visualization of scientific data that are not normally visible can be greatly enhanced by understanding human visual perception. Mars the Movie illustrated the use of stereo resolution for producing realistic vistas of the Mars surface. The real-time recording and analysis of eyeball-tracking data is another example of human vision research which benefits from high-performance computing. Currently the bottleneck is not in the hardware but in the available software to transform data efficiently.     

Psychometric Properties of the Right Wing Authoritarianism Scale in Black and White South African Students

Recently Taylor and Boeyens (1991) showed that the South African Personality Questionnaire has inadequate internal consistency and factorial validity for use in the black population. This paper reports a study supporting their conclusion that scales developed with data from a white sample do not hold together psychometrically or conceptually when used with a black sample. In a sample of white students, Altemeyer's Right Wing Authoritarianism scale, initially developed in Canada, had an acceptable alpha of 0.83, but there was an unacceptable alpha of 0.43 in a black student sample. Item and factor analysis showed that for the black sample there was little structure and that the scale was effectively a set of heterogenous items. This paper presents a detailed discussion of the item and factor analyses and shows how certain items have different connotations for whites and blacks as a result of their different political and cultural histories. Although cultural differences in conservatism can be observed by looking at individual items, a comparison between black and white individuals on the higher order construct of Authoritarianism cannot be made. It is concluded that basic conceptual work based on the phenomenology of the concept being measured needs to precede the psychometric development of scales for use in the black community.     

Stereotypes about children with traditional and nontraditional gender roles

Two studies were done to assess different aspects of gender stereotypes about traditional and nontraditional girls and boys. In Study 1, 81 undergraduates (57 females, 24 males; 88% Caucasian, 12% Asian) rated the typicality and desirability of 25 personality traits and behaviors for boys and girls. Analyses showed that this sample believed that typical girls and boys differ on 24 out of the 25 behaviors and traits. There were fewer differences when they rated the desirability of the characteristics for each sex. In Study 2, 154 undergraduates (97 females, 57 males, 82% Caucasian, 18% Asian) estimated the percentage of occurrence of 26 traits and behaviors in traditional and nontraditional girls and boys (i.e., tomboys and sissies). These estimates were used to determine two aspects of stereotypes: the characteristics that are perceived to occur most often in a group and the characteristics that are particularly distinctive for a group. Again, stereotypes of girls and boys were found to be extensive. Percentage estimates, however, illustrated that stereotypes are probabilistic in that many boys and girls are believed to have both masculine and feminine characteristics. Stereotypes of nontraditional children were compared to stereotypes of traditional children. Analyses showed that tomboys were stereotyped similarly to traditional boys but sissies were not stereotyped similarly to traditional girls. Instead, the sissy stereotype was found to be very narrow. The advantage of using a variety of assessments methods is discussed.     

Perceived stress,life events,dysfunctional attitudes,and depression in adolescent psychiatric inpatients

Hewitt, Flett, and Mosher (1992) examined the factor structure of the Perceived Stress Scale (PSS) and its relation to depression in adult psychiatric patients. This study sought to replicate and extend their findings, using a sample of 203 adolescent psychiatric inpatients. All patients admitted to the adolescent unit in a psychiatric hospital over a 3-year period were administered the PSS, as well as measures of depression, life events, dysfunctional attitudes, and intellectual abilities. Consistent with Hewittet al., two factors were found in the PSS, reflecting perceived distress and perceived coping ability. Regression analyses indicated that, for males, both factors account for independent variance in depression, whereas for females, only the distress factor is related to depression. In addition, for both male and female, dysfunctional attitudes account for significant variance in depression in addition to PSS, but negative life events do not. None of the variables were related to intellectual abilities. Implications for clinical assessment and intervention are discussed.     

The self and recollective experience

Three experiments investigated the hypothesis that self-reference at encoding increases the probability of recollective experience in recognition memory. In all three experiments separate groups of subjects studied words naming personality traits. One group judged the self-relevance of the traits, the other groups performed orientating tasks low in self-reference. In a recognition test subjects first identified old items and then indicated which of these were accompanied by recollective experience ('remember' responses) and which were recognized on some other basis ('know' responses). No reliable differences in overall recognition performance between self-referent and semantic encoding tasks were observed. However, subjects who encoded trait adjectives with reference to the self produced reliably more remember responses and few know responses than subjects who had encoded the items in the low self-referent tasks. Experiment 1 demonstrated a self-reference effect in recognition accompanied by recollective experience after 1-hour retention interval, while Experiment 2 found this effect to persist over a 24-hour retention interval. Experiment 3 demonstrated that this self-reference effect is obtained under incidental as well as under intentional learning conditions. Taken together these findings demonstrate the importance of self-reference as a factor in determining the likelihood that recognition judgements will be accompanied by recollective experience.     

Syed Ameer Ali: A bridge‐builder?

This paper examines whether there is any truth in the contention that Syed Ameer Ali (to adopt the English formulation of his name that he himself used) was an effective interpreter of Islam between East and West. To that end, it examines his background and early life, his credibility as an interpreter of Islam to the British élite and as a Muslim interpreter of Christianity. It concludes that he was far more at home in Western intellectual assumptions of his day than in Islamic scholarship and was not the effective interpreter he aspired to be. This raises on‐going questions about whether there is any future for Islamic modernism or whether it is too tainted by association with imperialism and other Western phenomena.     

Gender bias and moral decision making: The moral orientations of justice and care

This study investigated gender related moral reasoning in student essays containing arguments on moral issues. Undergraduate students in a medical ethics course viewed two films on morally controversial issues. The students wrote brief essays about the films which were transcribed and numerically coded to conceal the author's gender from the evaluator. Using a coding scheme originated by Lyons, the evaluator classified each essay as a justice/right essay or a care/response essay or an equal response essay. Subsequently, calculations were made to determine the percentage of male authored essays that were justice/rights essays or care/response essays and the percentage of female authored essays that were justice/rights or care/response essays. The males (87.7%) tended to exhibit the justice/rights moral orientation, and the females (69.4%) exhibited the care/response moral orientation. Several different calculations were made to determine various degrees of gender related orientations also. The difference in orientation was highly statistically significant (p≤0.001). These data contribute to understanding moral orientation and development. Interpretations are given to explain some differences between the genders and help explain the traditional roles in society that males and females have played historically.     

Heterogeneity of deficits in developmental dyslexia and implications for methodology

Most of the studies overviewed by Farmer and Klein (1995) in their review of temporal processing disorders in developmental dyslexia have taken a group study approach in which a group of dyslexic readers is compared with a group of normal readers on some task thought to be relevant to the reading disorder. Because of the acknowledged heterogeneity of deficits among developmental dyslexics, this group study methodology is inappropriate and is likely to lead to findings in one lab that cannot be replicated in another. The single case study methodology, which has been used successfully in the study of adult neuropsychological impairments, should be adopted in the study of developmental impairments as well. In the case study approach, each individual is studied thoroughly with tasks designed to tap the various components of the cognitive domain under study in order to determine which components are spared and which impaired. Data are not averaged, but reported separately for each case. Some recent findings from case studies on developmental dyslexia are reviewed and suggestions are made as to how the case study approach could be used in analyzing whether a temporal processing disorder, or any other hypothesized factor, is causal to the reading disorder.