Young Adults' Anticipated Identity Importance of Career, Marital, and Parental Roles: Comparisons of Men and Women with Different Role Balance Orientations

This article discusses two studies that exploredcollege students' role balance expectations for theirfuture career, marital, and parental identities.Participants were primarily Caucasian. In the first study, men and women who were family, balanced,career, or career/marriage oriented were compared.Variation within gender, especially for women, in theareas of gender attitudes, gender attributes, role identity salience, and anticipated roleacquisition were found. Similarities between gender alsoemerged. The second study examined young adults'perceptions of their parents' identity importance androle balance orientations. Although some genderdifferences emerged, young men and women holding thesame role balance orientation were often similar intheir perceptions of their parents. Taken together,these studies provide evidence that contradictsprevious assumptions about gender differences inexpectations for work and family roles.     

Alcohol Consumption and the Theory of Planned Behavior: An Examination of the Cognitive Mediation of Past Behaviorid

This study examined the predictive power of the theory of planned behavior (TPB) in explaining alcohol consumption in 3 prospective samples of students ( Ns = 178. 176. and 159). Generally, the TPB performed well. with attitudes, subjective norms and perceived behavioral control (PBC) explaining between 28% and 46% of the variability in intentions. Intentions and PBC explained between 12% and 50% of the variability in behavior. Measures of self-identity as a "drinker" and past behavior contributed to predictions of intentions over and above the contribution of attitudes. subjective norms. and PBC. Measures of past behavior but not self-identity consistently contributed to predictions of behavior over and above the contributions from intentions and PBC. The direct relationship between past behavior and intention and between past behavior and behavior (independent of the TPB variables or self-identity) could not be attributed to common method variance.     

When Good Intentions Are Not Enough: Modeling Postdecisional Cognitive Correlates of Condom Use1

Measures of intention usually leave substantial proportions of the variance in behavior unexplained. It has been suggested that improved behavioral prediction could be achieved by identifying postdecisional cognitive processes capable of distinguishing between intenders who do act and those do not act. Condom-related self-report measures of postdecisional cognitive processes were developed and tested in a cross-sectional questionnaire study involving 447 heterosexual students. A discriminant function composed of postdecisional measures was found to significantly distinguish between intenders who reported use and non-use and to correctly classify 80% of intenders. The results indicate that measures of the relative importance of competing intentions, prior planning of specific preparatory actions, and action-specific self-efficacy may enhance the prediction of condom use among intenders.     

Weapon Focus and Gender Differences in Eyewitness Accuracy: Arousal Versus Salience

Competing theories of arousal versus salience and object enhancement vs. reduced perceptual processing as explanations for the weapon focus effect in eyewitness identification were examined. Male and female students ( N = 200) viewed a videotape of a male or female intruder rudely barging into a classroom while carrying a book, a gun, or an unusual object and demanding to know the whereabouts of another student. Feature accuracy recall of both the intruder and the object were assessed on a postexperimental questionnaire. Results supported the salience and reduced-perceptual-processing hypotheses, suggesting that weapon focus may be a special instance of a more general salient object effect. An own-gender bias in eyewitness identification was replicated when no weapon or unusual objects distracted eyewitnesses, but was reversed when a weapon or an unusual object was present.     

The visual perception of surface orientation from optical motion

Observers viewed monocular animations of rotating dihedral angles and were required to indicate their perceived structures by adjusting the magnitude and orientation of a stereoscopic dihedral angle. The motion displays were created by directly manipulating various aspects of the image velocity field, including the mean translation, the horizontal and vertical velocity gradients, and the manner in which these gradients changed over time. The adjusted orientation of each planar facet was decomposed into components of slant and tilt. Although the tilt component was estimated with a high degree of accuracy, the judgments of slant exhibited large systematic errors. The magnitude of perceived slant was determined primarily by the magnitude of the velocity gradient scaled by its direction. The results also indicate that higher order temporal derivatives of the moving elements had little effect on observers' judgments.     

Color spaces of color-normal and color-abnormal observers reconstructed from response times and dissimilarity ratings

With multidimensional scaling analysis, color spaces were reconstructed from reaction times (RTs) required to make same-different judgements of pairs of 15 equiluminant colors and from dissimilarity ratings between them. In addition to normal trichromats, observers with red-green color deficiency were tested. Two main purposes were served by this study: (1) to compare spatial representations of colors derived from discriminative RTs with those derived from dissimilarity measures and (2) to examine whether the task may selectively affect the dimension reflecting, in color-abnormal spaces, the deficient red-green mechanism. Contradicting our hypothesis of lower dimensionality of RT spaces, as compared with rating spaces, no consistent differences in solution dimensionality were found. However, configurations derived from the two measures diverged. The rating procedure yielded the most logical results for recovering color space. The RT configuration revealed contraction in the tritanopic direction, indicating longer color processing when the short-wavelength mechanism is involved, and in addition, for color-abnormal observers, clustering in the protanopic and deuteranopic directions, indicating even longer processing by the deficient red-green mechanism. This finding implies that RTs are suitable for detecting temporal differences in color processing but, for that very same reason, rather ill-suited for reconstructing color spaces.     

The Reduction of Adverse Impact in an Employment Setting Using a Short-Term Memory Test

Research suggests that less adverse impact should result from the use of employment tests assessing memory abilities than is obtained from tests assessing cognitive abilities. To test the application of this principle, a Short-Term Memory test and a Reading Comprehension test were administered as part of a selection battery for entry level police. Subjects were 1423 police officer applicants for a Midwestern city in the U.S. The results for the overall sample showed a smaller standardized difference between the scores of Blacks and Whites on the Short-Term Memory test than on the Reading Comprehension test, a difference which was further reduced when a subsample of Blacks and Whites was created which had been matched on gender, years of education and age.