From Pink Frilly Dresses to ‘One of the Boys’: A Social‐Cognitive Analysis of Gender Identity Development and Gender Bias

In middle childhood, many girls go through a curious metamorphosis, in which their earlier embrace of all‐things‐feminine appears to transform into an identity as a tomboy. We believe this striking shift, observed in girls but not boys, signifies a critical development in children’s socio‐cognitive functioning, with implications for their understanding of gender as it relates to their identity and their social relationships. In this article, we review the evidence for this identity shift and present a theoretical account that integrates ideas from social cognition and social development. We argue that this identity shift involves the emergence of public regard and status awareness, with concurrent increases in the complexity with which knowledge associated with gender categories is represented in the mind. We then posit that these changes have important implications for the developmental trajectory of implicit and explicit gender attitudes and stereotypes, and we present a set of predictions generated by our theoretical analysis.     

Dealing with Hurt: An Assessment of Dispositional Style and Ethnicity in Coping Strategies

This study explored differences in coping styles based on the type of hurt experienced. Participants included 398 students (291 female and 87 male), who completed a computerized assessment of dispositional hurt, coping styles, and depression. The interrelationships amongst the two hurt typologies (introjective and retaliatory), 12 coping styles, and depression then were analyzed. Results showed that people with an introjective hurt disposition were more likely to use emotional support and instrumental support than those with a retaliatory hurt disposition, who were more likely to engage in planning and humor. Moreover, ethnic differences for two coping styles emerged; specifically, African Americans were more likely to use religion, whereas Caucasians were more likely to use substances as primary coping mechanisms.     

The impact of emotion on prospective memory and monitoring: No pain, big gain

The emotionally enhanced memory effect is robust across studies of retrospective memory, with heightened recall for items with emotional content (e.g., words like ??murder??) relative to neutral items (e.g., words like ??envelope??). Only a handful of studies have examined the influence of emotion on prospective memory (PM), with mixed results. In some cases emotion enhances PM, and in others it impairs PM. Interpretation of these findings is clouded by methodological differences across studies and by the fact that, to date, no study has examined the impact of emotion on PM monitoring. In our study, we assessed PM performance when PM targets were neutral, negative, and positive, and also investigated monitoring across these different PM target types. Participants showed heightened PM performance for positive and negative relative to neutral targets, yet there was no evidence of additional monitoring for emotional targets. In fact, measures of monitoring were significantly reduced when the PM targets were emotional rather than neutral. Our findings suggest that it is possible to boost PM performance in a focal task using emotional cues, and that the use of emotional cues reduces the need for monitoring.     

Separating mental transformations and spatial compatibility effects in the own body transformation task

Laterality judgments about the left or right hand of a schematic human figure, made from the perspective of the figure, are faster and more accurate when the figure is presented in back-facing view as compared to front-facing view. Mental perspective transformation accounts of this finding have recently been challenged on grounds of a confounding of facing direction with spatial stimulus-response (S-R) compatibility (Gardner and Potts in Acta Psychol 137: 371-381, 2011). We report two experiments that introduced stimulus figures in an orientation that was neutral in terms of spatial S-R compatibility. Results revealed a stable back-facing advantage that cannot be explained by compatibility conflicts. Comparisons of these neutral stimuli and conditions with figures presented in upright or upside-down orientation, however, confirmed a substantial impact of spatial S-R compatibility in the latter conditions. The present experiments show that it is possible to distinguish between mental transformation and incompatibility costs allowing future work to focus on the specialized mental spatial transformation processes.     

The FLOSS alternative: TRIPs, non-proprietary software and development

In this article I examine the relationship between the global governance of intellectual property rights and the deployment of FLOSS in both the public and private sectors of developing economies. I suggest that the support for non-proprietary software (collectively FLOSS) allows developing countries to comply with their multi-lateral commitments and support the potential development of local software development. Because of the General Public License’s dependence on copyright law, the deployment of FLOSS allows compliance with the Trade Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPs) agreement, while at the same time facilitating the development of a local software ‘community’. Linux has propelled the development of computer science and engineering in the poorer nations. Linux is the only way most developing nations have to legally access modern and sophisticated software tools, compilers, and programming environments (Bokhari and Rehman, 1999, p. 63). He is the co-editor of the IPE Yearbook series, and has published widely on intellectual property rights, and the information society. His publications include Intellectual Property Rights: A Critical History (co-authored with Susan Sell) (Lynne Rienner 2005) and The Information Society: A Sceptical View (Polity Press 2002).