The effect of intergender conflict on sex-role attitudes

This study explored conditions under which initially multidimensional attitudes change and coalesce into unidimensionality. One hundred twenty-one college students participated in a pretest-posttest control group experimental design involving a prejudice reduction simulation. One group was exposed to overt statements and action that supported traditional male dominance. This group exhibited significantly more modern sex-role attitudes than did the other groups; and the former's attitudes shifted to unidimensionality while the others' attitudes did not. The data also suggest independence between techniques that produce racial/liberalism and sexrole attitude modernity.     

F. M. Kamm,Morality, Mortality. Volume II: Rights,Duties, and Status

Theoretical Medicine and Bioethics -     

Language Acquisition is Language Change

According to the theory of Universal Grammar, the primary linguistic data guides children through an innately specified space of hypotheses. On this view, similarities between child-English and adult-German are as unsurprising as similarities between cousins who have never met. By contrast, experience-based approaches to language acquisition contend that child language matches the input, with nonadult forms being simply less articulated versions of the forms produced by adults. This paper reports several studies that provide support for the theory of Universal grammar, and resist explanation on experience-based accounts. Two studies investigate English-speaking children’s productions, and a third examines the interpretation of sentences by Japanese speaking children. When considered against the input children are exposed to, the findings of these and other studies are consistent with the continuity hypothesis, which supposes that child language can differ from the language spoken by adults only in ways that adult languages can differ from each other.     

Recollective experience in word and nonword recognition

The functional relationship between memory and consciousness was investigated in two experiments in which subjects indicated when recognizing an item whether they could consciously recollect its prior occurrence in the study list or recognized it on some other basis, in the absence of conscious recollection. Low-frequency words, relative to high-frequency words, enhanced recognition accompanied by conscious recollection but did not influence recognition in the absence of conscious recollection. By contrast, nonwords compared with words enhanced recognition in the absence of conscious recollection and reduced recognition accompanied by conscious recollection. A third experiment showed that confidence judgments in recognizing nonword targets corresponded with recognition performance, not with recollective experience. These measures of conscious awareness therefore tap qualitatively different components of memory, not some unitary dimension such as "trace strength." The findings are interpreted as providing further support for the distinction between episodic memory and other memory systems, and also as providing more qualified support for theories that assume that recognition memory entails two components, one of which may also give rise to priming effects in implicit memory.     

The Sexualisation of Culture?

This article examines contemporary debates about the ‘sexualisation of culture’. It sets out the context for claims that Western societies are becoming more sexualised and it explores a number of competing perspectives about sexualisation. It then looks in more detail at the nature of claims about sexualisation as they emerge from the different disciplinary perspectives of Psychology and Media and Cultural Studies, contrasting the strengths and weaknesses of each, and raising criticisms of both. In a final discussion section, the article considers the usefulness or otherwise of the notion of ‘sexualisation’ as analytic category and points to the need to go beyond polarised positions. It advocates a psychosocial approach that takes seriously differences and power in considering the contemporary proliferation of ‘sexualised’ images, practices and media.     

Introduction: A ‘Curvature of Social Space’

This article provides a comprehensive and critical overview of existing research that investigates (directly and indirectly) the religio-spiritual dimensions of electronic dance music culture (EDMC) (from disco, through house, to post-rave forms). Studies of the culture and religion of EDMC are explored under four broad groupings: the cultural religion of EDMC expressed through ‘ritual’ and ‘festal’; subjectivity, corporeality and the phenomenological dance experience (especially ‘ecstasy’ and ‘trance’); the dance community and a sense of belonging (the ‘vibe’ and ‘tribes’); and EDMC as a new ‘spirituality of life’. Moving beyond the cultural Marxist approaches of the 1970s, which held youth (sub)cultural expressions as ‘ineffectual’ and ‘tragic’, and the postmodernist approaches of the early 1990s, which held rave to be an ‘implosion of meaning’, recent anthropological and sociological approaches recognise that the various manifestations of this youth cultural phenomenon possess meaning, purpose and significance for participants. Contemporary scholarship thus conveys the presence of religiosity and spirituality within contemporary popular cultural formations. In conclusion, I suggest that this and continuing scholarship can offer useful counterpoint to at least one recent account (of clubbing) that overlooks the significance of EDMC through a restricted and prejudiced apprehension of ‘religion’.     

Replies to Donald Wiebe on the world academy of religion

W. Owen Cole ed., Comparative religions—A modern textbook, London, Blandford Press 1982, 256 pp. £6.95

Ake Hultkrantz, Belief and worship in native North America, edited, with an introduction, by Christopher Vecsey. Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press 1981, xxvii + 330 pp. $30

Richard C. Martin, Islam: A cultural perspective, Prentice-Hall series in world religions, Prentice-Hall International 1982. 178 pp. £5.95

A. Rosalie David, A guide to religious ritual at Abydos, modern egyptology series, Aris and Philips Ltd. 1981. xiv + 182 pp

W. Owen Cole, The guru in Sikhism, London, Darton Longman and Todd 1982. 128 pp. £3.95