The Myth of Motherhood: A Study of Attitudes Toward Motherhood

Traditional attitudes toward motherhood reflect many contradictions. The Motherhood Inventory (Ml), a 40 item questionnaire, has been developed to study attitudes toward motherhood and the motherhood myth. The Ml includes items relating to the control of reproduction, abortion, adoption, single motherhood, male-female relationships, and idealized and punitive attitudes toward mothers. The 301 subjects in this study were drawn largely from undergraduate and graduate students at an eastern university and their parents. Comparisons with scores on the Spence-Helmreich Attitudes toward Women Scale (AWS) revealed that the sample was more liberal than the original AWS sample. Men were found to hold significantly more traditional attitudes toward motherhood than women. Younger subjects also agreed more with the myth of motherhood as did unmarried subjects. Catholics more than non-Catholics rejected abortion and supported the primacy of the woman's role as mother. Education produced the most pronounced effect on attitudes toward motherhood with more liberal attitudes held by those who were college graduates.     

The computer and eye processing pictures: The implementation of a raster graphics device

The process of solving visual analogies was examined using a digital video display and video-based eye tracker. The results indicated that increasing the complexity of an analogy by increasing the number of relations involved in the problem resulted primarily in increasing the time it takes to discover the mapping between the two members of the first pair. The display of the picture and the analysis of the eye fixations are described.     

Modeling,tuition, and sanction effects on self-control at different ages

The effects of age, modeling, tuition, and sanctions on self-control of motor behavior were examined. Children 6, 7, 9, and 11 years of age individually participated. A male model either: (a) instructed and performed “Simon Says” in the traditional manner, (b) introduced the sanction “Don't” on the inhibition trials, (c) performed an action that differed from the instruction, or (d) gave instructions only. Activation latency and inhibition error were influenced most greatly by the actions of the model and the introduction of a negative sanction, whereas tuition was less effective. Age differences were present for inhibition errors as well as activation latency and error. The discussion focused on the differential effects of modeling and tuition on deviant responding.     

Leadership Style and Leader Title

In a 2 by 4 design, leadership style (authoritarian versus democratic) was varied against form of address (Mr., Ms., Miss, Mrs.) in a simulated small group case study. Subjects (374 college and high school students) read the case study and then rated their reactions to the leaderson behavioral differential factors of "subordination" and "friendship." These ratings indicate significant effects due to leader style (i.e., greater subordination and stronger friendship attraction to democratic rather than authoritarian leaders). Leader title produced no significantmain effects although authoritarian leaders using the title Ms. evoked higher subordination (p <.001) than other authoritarian leaders.     

Name ambiguity and androgyny

Subjects with gender-ambiguous names or nicknames (i.e., names that can belong to either males or females) were compared on Bem's androgyny scale to subjects having common or uncommon first names or nicknames to determine if name ambiguity was related to sex-role identification. The results showed that for our sample of college undergraduates (N=489), both males (N=246) and females (N=243) with ambiguous nicknames (e.g., Pat, Tony, Marty) were more often classified as androgynous on the Bem inventory than were subjects with uncommon, common, or no nicknames. Ambiguous first names were unrelated to the androgyny scale. Name and nickname ambiguity were not related to liking of name, self-concept, family tradition, social class differences, or grade point average.A version of this paper was presented at the annual meeting of the Southeastern Psychological Association, Atlanta, March 1978.     

Analogue drinking assessment: Sensation seeking and gender

This study assessed the relationship between sensation seeking measured as a trait variable and drinking behaviors observed unobtrusively in the laboratory. It was hypothesized that high-sensation-seeking subjects would consume more alcohol than low sensation seekers and experience greater enhancement of positive moods and body sensations associated with intoxication. Thirty female and 31 male subjects divided into high- and low-sensation-seeking subgroups participated in an ad libitum drinking situation with the manifest task of taste rating three types of vodka (actually 95% alcohol) or tonic. Dependent variables included beverage consumption, positive/negative mood states, body sensations, breath estimates of blood alcohol levels, and self-rated level of intoxication. All subjects reported feeling the effects of alcohol. Contrary to predictions, high-sensation-seeking subjects neither consumed more alcohol than their low-sensation-seeking counterparts nor drank more alcohol than tonic, Paradoxically, low-sensation-seeking women displayed significantly greater alcohol intake and intoxication than all other groups. Possible explanations for findings were considered as well as the necessity for multimethod assessments of both predictor (i.e., sensation seeking) and criterion (i.e., alcohol consumption) variables across time and situations.This research was supported by Grant Award AA04042-03 from the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism to the first and third authors. Special Appreciation is expressed to Anne T. Patsiokas, Susan W. Altman, Victoria Molony-Sinnott, and Pamela J. Thompson for their invaluable assistance in collecting and analyzing the data.     

Behavioral adaptation to fixed-interval and fixed-time food delivery in golden hamsters

Food-deprived golden hamsters in a large enclosure received food every 30 sec contingent on lever pressing, or free while their behavior was continuously recorded in terms of an exhaustive classification of motor patterns. As with other species in other situations, behavior became organized into two main classes. One (terminal behaviors) increased in probability throughout interfood intervals; the other (interim behaviors) peaked earlier in interfood intervals. Which class an activity belonged to was independent of whether food was contingent on lever pressing. When food was omitted on some of the intervals (thwarting), the terminal activities began sooner in the next interval, and different interim activities changed in different ways. The interim activities did not appear to be schedule-induced in the usual sense. Rather, the hamsters left the area of the feeder when food was not due and engaged in activities they would normally perform in the experimental environment.     

Memory for information about individuals

A semantic network model is structured so that usually there is only one node in the network to represent each individual. A series of experiments were performed to determine under what circumstances subjects would show unitary memory for individuals. The experiments were principally concerned with the speed with which subjects could retrieve the facts and make inferences from them. Subjects learned facts about individuals which could be referred to by two labels. The semantic network model predicted that subjects would integrate facts learned to one label with facts learned to the other. Evidence for such integration was found, but only when considerable effort was taken to encourage the subjects to develop a unitary impression of the individual. The situation was also investigated in which the subjects did not learn of the identity between the two labels until after the facts were learned to each label individually. There was evidence that subjects set up two nodes to represent the. individual, one for each label. There was also evidence that, upon learning of the identity, subjects chose to abandon one of the two nodes and to start a process of copying information from the to-be-abandoned node to the preserved node.     

Motivation×Expectancy×Value: A functional measurement approach

Functional measurement methodology was applied to test theMotive×Expectancy×Value (MEV) model of human motivation. Subjects judged the value of hypothetical games of chance in which hunger, chance of winning a sandwich, and sandwich preference were varied along with similar information concerning a drink. Graphical tests showed excellent agreement between the data and the theoretical properties of parallelism and linear fan shape. Exact statistical tests of goodness of fit confirmed these graphical tests. Despite the complexity of the task, which required integration of six pieces of information, subjects' judgments obeyed a simple cognitive algebra. Applications of functional measurement were suggested for approach-avoidance conflict, level of aspiration, work motivation, and achievement motivation. These methods can provide exact tests of the behavior models in terms of the subjective values at the level of the individual. They thus provide a unified nomothetic-ideographic approach to motivation theory.This work was supported by National Science Foundation grants MBS 74-19124 and BNS 75-21235, and by grants from the National Institute of Mental Health to the Center for Human Information Processing, University of California, San Diego. We wish to thank Donna Rodes for her assistance in the conduct of this experiment.     

Note on functional measurement and data analysis

The guiding idea of functional measurement is that measurement theory and substantive theory form an organic unity. Psychological scales are inherent in the statement of quantitative psychological laws, and these laws themselves form the base and frame for psychological measurement. Valid scales thus depend on empirically valid laws. But establishing empirical validity of any law requires appropriate data analysis. Several statistical problems are discussed with respect to simple algebraic laws. To illustrate the necessity for proper tests of goodness of fit for algebraic models, five sets of experimental data are reanalyzed. In each case, the factorial plot and the analysis of variance showed that the data were nonadditive. Nevertheless, an additive model was fit to the data. The correlations between the data and the predictions from the additive model were extremely high, ranging from .964 to .9997. The corresponding observed-predicted scatterplots also gave little sign of the deviations from additivity. These correlation-scatterplot analyses conceal and obscure what the factorial plot and the analysis of variance reveal and make clear. Other topics discussed are accepting and rejecting the null hypothesis, the use of nonmetric smoothing for parameter estimation, and problems of stimulus-response-model generality. An extension of functional measurement is suggested for a practicable error theory for nonmetric analysis.