Long term marriages in Sweden: And some comparisons with similar couples in the United States

This international, five-country long term marriages study of couples who have been married, or unmarried and cohabiting, for 20 years or longer is designed to study, among other things, marital satisfaction. This first report of the Swedish part of the study reports on a Swedish version of the self-rating Dyadic Adjustment Scale (DAS) used to investigate self-rated marital satisfaction. The couples describe high marital satisfaction and a high sense of coherence (SOC) compared to other groups. Contrary to other studies, no differences were found between men and women regarding SOC. The differences between them, that describe high relative to low marital satisfaction, pertain to matters of recreation, sex, life philosophy, time spent together, and frequency of quarrels. The men reported greater marital satisfaction than the women.     

Negative priming without probe selection

Responses to an object may be slower or less accurate if that object shares attributes with a recently ignored object(negative priming). Some studies have found negative priming only if the probe trial required selection against a distractor stimulus. In the present experiment, subjects responded to the location of a target (O), ignoring a distractor (X) if it appeared in another location. Reaction time was slower to probe targets that appeared in the same location as the prime distractor, regardless of whether or not the probe target was accompanied by a distractor.     

The word "bioethics": its birth and the legacies of those who shaped it

Extensive historical sleuthing reveals that the word "bioethics" and the field of study it names experienced, in 1970/1971, a "bilocated birth" in Madison, Wisconsin, and in Washington, D.C. Van Rensselaer Potter, at the University of Wisconsin first coined the term; and André Hellegers, at Georgetown University, at the very least, latched onto the already-existing word "bioethics" and first used it in an institutional way to designate the focused area of inquiry that became an academic field of learning and a movement regarding public policy and the life sciences. A further comparison of the Potter and the Hellegers/Georgetown understandings of bioethics and the relative acceptance of the two views will appear in the March 1995 issue of this journal.     

The effects of maternal employment and non-maternal infant care on development at two and four years

Differences in maternal employment during children's first year of life and children's entry into non-maternal care before the age of 1 year failed to predict differences in cognitive and socioemotional development at 2 and 4 years of age, after family background variables were controlled. Two samples were studied: a population sample of 1100 Bermudian children and a smaller subsample of children most of whom were determined to be at risk for developmental problems. To assess the effects of maternal employment, we compared infants with mothers who worked 20 or more hours a week to infants with mothers who worked less than 20 hours a week. To assess the effects of entry into non-maternal care before the age of one, we compared infants who were placed in regular non-maternal care before the age of one versus infants who did not experience regular non-maternal care before the age of one. The results revealed that family background variables frequently predicted many child outcome measures in both the total sample and the smaller research sample. After controlling for family characteristics, no differences were found between children whose mothers worked 20 or more hours a week when they were infants and children with mothers who worked less than 20 hours a week in either sample. In addition, age of entry into non. maternal care before the age of one did not significantly predict any child outcome measures.     

Contextual influences on interactive processing: Effects of discriminability,quantity, and uncertainty

Three contextual factors—(1) the discriminability of stimuli in pitch, (2) the number of stimuli differing in pitch, and (3)the uncertainty regarding which stimuli or tasks would appear—were manipulated as subjects performed speeded loudness classifications in each of six experiments. The magnitude of Garner interference and effects of congruity were used to gauge the degree of interactive processing. Enhancing pitch discriminability caused monotonic increases in interference and congruity. Stimulus-task uncertainty mediated the changes in Garner interference wrought by increased discriminability. Uncertainty also caused a surprising shift in congruity from strongly positive to strongly negative as uncertainty grew. Increasing stimulus quantity lowered interference, but had inconsistent effects on congruity. Regression analyses suggested that, collectively, these three contextual variables underlie most failures of selective attention in speeded classification.