Acquisition of superexcitatory properties by an irrelevant background stimulus

Six appetitive conditioning experiments with rats demonstrated that an irrelevant X accompanying a negative patterning discrimination (XA+, XB+, XAB-) acquires extraordinarily high levels of conditioned excitation. Responding to X was similar to that evoked by 2 excitors in combination (Experiment 1) and was greater than responding to a separately reinforced Y (Experiments 2-5). Superexcitatory properties were not acquired by X in the nonpatterning discriminations of Experiments 2-4. Experiment 5 found that A and B, if anything, were weakly excitatory. Making them more strongly excitatory after conditioning did not interfere with retention of the original discrimination (Experiment 6). Results support a counterintuitive prediction of associative theories that, under carefully arranged conditions, irrelevant stimuli may acquire superexcitatory properties.     

Daily Affect and Intimacy in Emerging Adult Couples

We investigated individual- and couple-level associations between daily intimacy and affective states (N = 2211 observations) in 20 heterosexual emerging adult couples (age 18–25 years, M = 23) who had been in a sexual relationship with one another for at least 3 weeks (M = 12 months). Individual analyses revealed that emerging adults’ feelings of intimacy varied from day to day and that there were no gender differences in daily intimacy. Affect and intimacy were positively associated within day for women, but not for men. Time-lagged individual-level analyses revealed that prior-day positive or negative affect did not predict present-day intimacy for men or women. However, prior-day intimacy positively predicted present-day positive affect in men and negatively predicted present-day negative affect in women. Time-lagged couple-level analyses revealed that men’s prior-day positive affect positively predicted their female partner’s present-day intimacy. Women’s prior-day intimacy negatively predicted their male partner’s present-day negative affect. Implications of the day-to-day associations of intimacy with positive and negative affect within emerging adult couples are discussed.     

“Doing Gender” and “Doing Religion” in Science: A Cross-National Examination

Women tend to be both underrepresented in science and overrepresented in organized religion, yet the connection between these two phenomena is rarely examined. With survey data collected among 6,537 biologists and physicists from four national contexts—the United States, the United Kingdom, Italy, and India—we test whether science as a social field shapes religious expressions and attitudes differently for men and women. Findings reveal a religious gender gap in India and Italy but not in the United States and the United Kingdom. Further, except in Italy, men had higher odds of perceiving religion and science to be in conflict, believing that their colleagues have a negative attitude about religion, and reporting that science made them less religious. Evidence suggests that men in science may disproportionately internalize normative pressures to masculinize by eschewing religion. Our findings have implications for selection into academic science and the practice of religion among men and women in science.     

Elemental and configural processing of novel cues in deterministic and probabilistic tasks

Three experiments examined whether transfer of past learning depends on how well the original discrimination is learned. To vary terminal learning levels, cues were either perfect (deterministic) or imperfect (probabilistic) predictors of a trial’s outcome. Participants in Experiment 1 acquired a configural, an elemental or a control discrimination. Tests for generalization showed that past learning influenced the processing of new compounds formed from elements of the original discrimination, especially so when the original discrimination was deterministic. Similar results were found in Experiment 2 when the test stimuli were elements derived from novel compounds presented after the original discrimination was acquired. Experiment 3 used filler trials to equate learning in the probabilistic and deterministic tasks, and demonstrated that final levels of learning, rather than task per se, was the critical variable mediating transfer. Implications for rule-based and associative theories are discussed.     

Associations Between Gender Segregation and Gender Identity in College Students

We investigated associations between gender segregation and the two traditions of gender identity identified by Wood and Eagly (2015): gender-typed personality traits and gender reference group identity. We also investigated whether one of these traditions was associated with gender segregation to a greater extent than the other. Our sample consisted of 73 male (and 93 female undergraduate students aged 18–24 attending a university in the northeastern United States of America. In support of our hypotheses we found that male and female college students reported a greater proportion of same-gender than cross-gender friends and that gender segregation was negatively associated with femininity for male college students and positively associated with gender reference group identity for male and female college students. In addition, as hypothesized, we found that gender reference group identity was associated with gender segregation to a greater extent than gender-typed personality traits. That gender segregation is associated with gender reference group identity to a greater extent than gender-typed personality traits supports a multifaceted model of gender, and it highlights the importance of considering different traditions of gender identity in gender research (Mehta 2015; Wood and Eagly 2015).     

Foster Children Caught in Loyalty Conflicts: Implications for Mental Health Treatment Providers

Fifty-two foster parents participated in a two-hour training on the topic of children caught in loyalty conflicts. Prior to and following the training attendees completed measures including one in which they rated their foster children's exposure to 15 different family situations which research indicates are likely to induce feelings of loyalty conflict in children. Analyses of these data indicate that each of the situations was endorsed by between one fourth and one half of the sample. Three-fourths of the foster parents endorsed at least one of the situations, with the average number 5.5. Implications for clinicians working with this population are discussed.     

Righteous Rhetoric: Sex,Speech and the Politics of Concerned Women for America

Abstract

This article considers the Catholic Church's rejection of female sexed bodies as capable of symbolizing Christ in the Eucharist of God's agency in the world. The theories of René Girard provide a useful resource for analyzing the fear of female sexuality within Catholicism. They reveal that an obsessive focus upon sex has been the means through which the male tendency towards sacrificial violence, forbidden within Christianity, has continued to exert a powerful influence. A recognition of this substitutory process would not only enable a revisioning of the roles women and men might play within the Church, but also enable the Church to more effectively oppose the ‘culture of death’ which endangers us all.