Masculine/feminine: A personological perspective

How might our expanding knowledge of gender contribute to a deeper understanding of personality? This paper offers a personological perspective for considering the import of contemporary work, and focuses on the ten substantive papers included in this issue of the Journal of Personality An agenda for our future inquiry is proposed that includes (a) revising our ideology of science in a postpositivist era, (b) recognizing the complexity of personality as a domain distinguished from “human being theory,” (c) developing richer and more comprehensive personality theory, and (d) studying persons over time The papers reported in this issue contribute in various ways to the enrichment of personological understanding     

The Glory of God is a Human Being Fully Alive: Predictors of Positive Versus Negative Mental Health Among Clergy

Clergy fulfill vital societal functions as meaning makers and community builders. Partly because of their important roles, clergy frequently encounter stressful situations. Further, studies suggest that clergy experience high rates of depression. Despite this, few studies have examined protective factors for clergy that may increase their positive mental health. We invited all United Methodist clergy in North Carolina to participate in a survey. Of church‐serving clergy, 85 percent responded (n = 1,476). Hierarchical multiple regression was used to assess the predictors of three positive and four negative mental health outcomes. The three sets of predictors were: demographics, which explained 2–10 percent of the variances; variables typically related to mental health (social support, social isolation, and financial stress), which explained 14–41 percent of the variances; and clergy‐specific variables, which explained 14–20 percent of the variances, indicating the importance of measuring occupation‐specific variables. Some variables (e.g., congregation demands) significantly related to both positive and negative mental health, whereas others (e.g., positive congregations, congregation support) significantly related primarily to positive mental health. In addition to their intervention implications, these findings support separate consideration for negative versus positive mental health.     

Gender,sexual orientation,and disordered eating

Abstract

While most patients with bulimia nervosa are heterosexual women, a significant number of men with bulimia nervosa are gay males, suggesting that gay men, more than heterosexual men, may be at risk for developing eating disorders. This study compared the food-related attitudes and behaviors of heterosexual men and women in contrast with those of lesbians and gay men, attempting to find whether one's sexual orientation may contribute to differential risk. Two thousand employees were randomly selected from a large health care corporation, of whom 805 returned a completed questionnaire including Stunkard and Messick's (1985) Dietary Restraint and Disinhibition Scales. A stratified random sample was drawn to include demographically comparable groups of 25 lesbians, 50 gay men, 75 heterosexual women, and 75 heterosexual men. Women were less satisfied with their appearance at their present weight and expressed more restraint and more negative feelings after bingeing than did men. Heterosexual women were most dissatisfied with their weight, although heterosexual men were more objectively overweight. Gay men and heterosexual women were similar in disordered eating patterns and disinhibition, contrasting with lesbians and heterosexual men.     

More Research Questions: Rebuttal to Bornstein, Langer, and Stickney

Stickney (2010), Bornstein (2010), and Langer (2010) expand the research recommendations for experimental writing research that Range and Jenkins (2010) generated from gender schema, gender role, and socialization theory. Stickney derives research questions from communication and emotion theory. Bornstein and Langer focus on assessment in this paradigm. Bornstein’s multimodal assessment strategy might improve understanding of apparently inconsistent findings, indicate unstudied processes of interest, and show how changing instructions might maximize writing benefits. Langer’s recommendations to examine gender differences in pre/post/and follow-up emotional outcomes, and in subjective, expressive, and physiological indicators of emotion, identify potential new outcome measures in this research. All three commentaries show promise of advancing our understanding of how writing about trauma might help women and men.     

Who Benefits from Pennebaker’s Expressive Writing Paradigm? Research Recommendations from Three Gender Theories

Pennebaker’s experimental writing paradigm quantifies who, when, and how people benefit from writing about trauma, but researchers and meta-analyses thus far have rarely considered gender. Gender theories specify useful research strategies. Gender schema theory suggests examining gendered measurement biases, gender-relevant writing content, and whether traditional masculinity predicts benefits. Social role theory suggests assessing physician visits, disclosure history, and privacy as possible moderators of benefits. Socialization theory suggests assessing emotional approach coping, imagined readers, alexithymia, and whether mastery instructions influence benefits. All specify measuring functionally related gender constructs (gender schemas, gender roles, and socialization), asking whether gender proxies co-varying moderators and mediators of benefits, and examining possible linkages between benefits, trauma type, and disclosure. Help-seeking and somatization require integrated theoretical approaches.     

Kommunizierende Agenten: Gestische und natürlichsprachliche Interaktion

Communicating agents: Gesture and natural language interaction Summary. An important scientific method within cognitive science consists in the synthesis of cognitive abilities, of forms of behavior by developing specific artificial agents. Many current approaches make use of the notion of an agent in order to develop concepts of cognitive behavior on different levels of abstraction. Basic properties of agents are: reactivity, autonomy, goal directed activity, and communication. This contribution examines the communicative aspect, i.e. the interaction by gesture or language and their integration, e.g. in identifying referents. Since we conceive communicating agents as systems able to synthesize such interactions as well as their integration, this will be illustrated with respect to two artificial systems. The GRAVIS system detects objects as well as pointing gestures of an instructor, and the camera agent is able to focus on specific objects. The CoRA system processes situated natural language instructions, and the simulated robot agent is able to integrate the use of language, perception and action. Finally we propose an integration of both approaches. Zusammenfassung. Ein wichtiger Forschungsansatz innerhalb der Kognitionswissenschaft besteht in der Synthese kognitiver Fähigkeiten und Verhaltensweisen durch den Bau geeigneter, künstlicher Systeme. Viele der in jüngerer Zeit verfolgten Ansätze nutzen dabei den Begriff des Agenten, um kognitives Verhalten auf unterschiedlichen Abstraktionsebenen zu konzeptualisieren. Grundeigenschaften von Agenten sind u.a. Reaktivität, Autonomie, Zielgerichtetheit und Kommunikationsfähigkeit. In dem vorliegenden Beitrag interessieren wir uns für die Ebene kommunikativen Verhaltens, bei der Gestik und Sprache zur Vermittlung eines Sachverhaltes zusammenwirken, und verstehen unter einem kommunizierenden Agenten ein System, das für solches Verhalten einen nennenswerten Kompetenzausschnitt realisiert. Wir stellen hierzu beispielhaft zwei Systeme vor. Das System GRAVIS demonstriert die Referenzierung von Objekten im Blickfeld eines Kamerakopfes durch Handzeigegestik eines Instrukteurs. Das System CoRA demonstriert die Verarbeitung sprachlicher Handlungsanweisungen im Kontext der Kooperation mit einem simulierten Roboter. Abschließend wird die Integration der beiden Ansätze diskutiert.     

Perhaps Unidimensional Is Not Unidimensional

Miller (1956) identified his famous limit of 7 ± 2 items based in part on absolute identification—the ability to identify stimuli that differ on a single physical dimension, such as lines of different length. An important aspect of this limit is its independence from perceptual effects and its application across all stimulus types. Recent research, however, has identified several exceptions. We investigate an explanation for these results that reconciles them with Miller’s work. We find support for the hypothesis that the exceptional stimulus types have more complex psychological representations, which can therefore support better identification. Our investigation uses data sets with thousands of observations for each participant, which allows the application of a new technique for identifying psychological representations: the structural forms algorithm of Kemp and Tenenbaum (2008) . This algorithm supports inferences not possible with previous techniques, such as multidimensional scaling.