In Memoriam

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

THE MEASUREMENT OF GENDER-ROLE ATTITUDES A Review and Commentary

This article reviews measures of gender-role attitudes with an emphasis on The Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1972); the Sex Role Egalitarianism Scale (SRES; Beere, King, Beere, & King, 1984); the Modern Sexism Scale (MS; Swim, Aikin, Hall, & Hunter, 1995); the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory (ASI; Glick & Fiske, 1996), and the Children's Occupational Activity Trait-Attitude Measure (COAT-AM; Bigler, Liben, Lobliner, & Yekel, 1995). The discussion of gender-role attitude measures focuses on the following themes: psychometric criteria; theoretical and conceptual distinctions among measures; domains of attitudes and behaviors included; relationship to other measures; and the meaningfulness and relevance of items. Gender-role attitude scales are viewed as measuring gender-role ideology in a particular sociohistorical context; context-specificity is viewed as contributing to the proliferation of scales, and as limiting the usefulness of scales across cultural and temporal boundaries.     

Appearance of the Moss-Harlow effect with stimuli equated for novelty

An experiment tested for the Moss-Harlow Effect in 3- and 5-year-olds with stimulus novelty equated. Experimental groups familiarized themselves with each pair of test objects by sorting them, then received a P or N information trial and test trials. The Effect was found after the equation for novelty. Age did not interact with type of information trial. The Effect appears better interpreted in terms of an exploratory tendency than of stimulus novelty.