The job climate for women in traditionally male blue-collar occupations

Rapid growth has been observed in recent years in the number of women entering traditionally male blue-collar occupations, yet researchers have paid little attention to this pioneering group. The present study undertook a comparison of the job conditions of two groups of nontraditional women workers, tradeswomen (N=71), and transit workers (N=151); a third group, school secretaries (N=389), was studied as a comparison group of traditionally female workers. Results from a 16-page mail questionnaire revealed that women in traditionally male occupations encountered significantly more adverse working conditions than did their traditional counterparts, and, in addition, reported significantly less satisfaction and more stress at work. Tradeswomen were the most likely to experience sexual harassment and sex discrimination, and black tradeswomen to experience race discrimination. The degree of job satisfaction expressed by the secretaries was unexpected, since most evidence suggests that clerical workers lack autonomy, and encounter boredom and routinization on the job. These findings are discussed in terms of gender segregation and the need to focus future research efforts on specific occupational groups in order to make appropriate policy recommendations as well as to provide help for women in these jobs.This research was supported by grants from the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (Grant No. 1 RO1 OH02162-01A1) and the College of Health and Human Development, The Pennsylvania State University. The authors wish to acknowledge the invaluable contributions of Patty Lambert, Ming Qi Wang, Mary Harmon, Joseph Vasey, Gina Jay, Darrell Harvey, and Haleh Rastegary.     

"FEMINIZATION" OF PSYCHOLOGY

Women are participating in the field of psychology in increasing numbers relative to men. This development has been referred to as the "feminization of psychology," and it carries with it a number of implications. This article reviews statistical data relating to the changing sex ratio and discusses their implications. Participation rates of women in psychology are examined as they pertain to enrollment in doctoral programs, graduation from baccalaureate programs, and career progress within the profession. Implications of changing sex ratios for occupational prestige, income and economics, work structure, education and training, and theory, research, and practice are then discussed. In conclusion, the concept of "feminization" is challenged as questions are raised about whether the increase in the number of women in psychology is a problem, as has been alleged, or a symptom of other problems within the field     

Human adults and human infants show a “perceptual magnet effect” for the prototypes of speech categories,monkeys do not

Many perceptual categories exhibit internal structure in which category prototypes play an important role. In the four experiments reported here, the internal structure of phonetic categories was explored in studies involving adults, infants, and monkeys. In Experiment 1, adults rated the category goodness of 64 variants of the vowel /i/ on a scale from 1 to 7. The results showed that there was a certain location in vowel space where listeners rated the /i/ vowels as best instances, or prototypes. The perceived goodness of Iii vowels declined systematically as stimuli were further removed from the prototypic Iii vowel. Experiment 2 went beyond this initial demonstration and examined the effect of speech prototypes on perception. Either the prototypic or a nonprototypic IM vowel was used as the referent stimulus and adults’ generalization to other members of the category was examined. Results showed that the typicality of the speech stimulus strongly affected perception. When the prototype of the category served as the referent vowel, there was significantly greater generalization to other /i/ vowels, relative to the situation in which the nonprototype served as the referent. The notion of aperceptual magnet was introduced. The prototype of the category functioned like a perceptual magnet for other category members; it assimilated neighboring stimuli, effectively pulling them toward the prototype. In Experiment 3, the ontogenetic origins of the perceptual magnet effect were explored by testing 6-month-old infants. The results showed that infants’ perception of vowels was also strongly affected by speech prototypes. Infants showed significantly greater generalization when the prototype of the vowel category served as the referent; moreover, their responses were highly correlated with those of adults. In Experiment 4, Rhesus monkeys were tested to examine whether or not the prototype’s magnet effect was unique to humans. The animals did not provide any evidence of speech prototypes; they did not exhibit the magnet effect. It is suggested that the internal organization of phonetic categories around prototypic members is an ontogenetically early, species-specific, aspect of the speech code     

Fixation-point offsets reduce the latency of saccades to acoustic targets

If an observer’s fixation point is extinguished just prior to the onset of a peripheral target, the latency to saccade to that target is reduced. We show that this "gap effect" is not specific to visual targets. Observers made saccades to a light flash or to a white-noise burst. A warning tone was presented on every trial to control for the possible warning effect of the fixation-point offset. For both target modalities, saccade latencies were significantly reduced when the fixation point was extinguished 200 msec prior to the target onset. Implications of this outcome for interpretations of the gap effect are considered. It is argued that the presence of a gap effect for tones, in conjunction with previous findings, is consistent with the hypothesis that the gap effect is produced by a facilitation of premotor processes in the superior colliculus.     

Role saliency cues and children's sentence comprehension

Forty-eight children at four age levels (3, 4, 5, and 7 years) acted out active and passive sentences immediately after exposure to matching information, mismatching information, and no-information cues. The matching information cues yielded the highest comprehension scores, followed in order by the no-information and the mismatching information cues. Active sentences were easier to comprehend than passive sentences, and comprehension scores improved with age. Processing context information in the form of role saliency cues is a component of children's language comprehension and development. It was found that context is used differentially depending on age and linguistic knowledge. The results indicated that the analysis of children's comprehension skills is a multifaceted process not solely dependent upon syntactic processing.This research is in part a revision of a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Kent State University, Kent, Ohio. A summarized version was presented at the Annual Convention of the American Speech and Hearing Association, San Francisco, 1978.     

Children at risk for delinquency: A follow-up comparison of aggressive children and children who steal

This study compared the follow-up incidence of court-recorded nonstatus offenses for three groups of adolescent children. These children had been seen 2 to 9 years earlier for problems with aggression in the home (N = 21), for stealing problems (N = 25), or for normative comparisons (N = 14). The results showed that 77% of the children with stealing problems had court-recorded offenses. This was significantly higher than the aggressive children, whose rate did not differ from the normative sample. These findings suggested that young aggressive children were not at risk for adolescent court contact. Instead, it was the young child with identified stealing problems who was highly likely to become an official delinquent. It also appeared that parental reports of stealing events constituted a predictive measure of later criminal acts.