Book reviews

Integrative Psychological and Behavioral Science -     

A pointing technique for rapidly collecting localization responses in auditory research

A technique is described for rapidly collecting responses in auditory-localization experiments. Subjects indicate the perceived direction of the sound by pointing at a 20-cm-diam spherical model. In Experiment 1, the subjects judged the direction of a broadband signal, which could originate from any of 239 directions ranging through 360° of azimuth and between ?45° and +90° of elevation. Using this technique, the subjects responded 2–8 times more rapidly than previous subjects who used either a verbal-reporting technique or a head-pointing technique. Localization judgments were as accurate as they had been with verbal reports, but were not as accurate as judgments collected using the head-pointing technique. In Experiment 2, the signal was turned off and the experimenter read the spherical coordinates of the signal location to the subjects. The subjects pointed to these coordinates more accurately than they had judged the direction of the sounds in Experiment 1, suggesting that the response technique had not been the limiting factor in that experiment. Circumstances relevant to the choice of response techniques for auditory-localization experiments are discussed.     

Gender and social support: Taking the bad with the good?

In examining past research, a paradox can be found in the relationships between gender, social support, and depression. Although women report higher levels of depression than men, they also generally report more social support—a factor found to reduce depressive symptoms. In efforts to explain this seeming inconsistency, it was hypothesized that women report both more support and more depression because they are more likely than men to experience both positive and negative aspects of social relationships. Based on a community sample of predominantly Caucasian respondents, findings indicate that greater perceived support among women can be explained by more frequent contact with network members and a tendency to possess relationships characterized by greater intimacy, emotional disclosure, and empathy. However, women also report more frequent negative interactions with network members and are more adversely affected by marital conflict than are men. While negative interactions and conflict cannot account for gender differences in depression, they do help to explain how women can experience both more support and more depression. Among women, the health-enhancing effects of support on depression may be balanced by the detrimental effect of conflict.     

Work-Relationship Values and Gender Role Differences in Relation to Career-Marriage Aspirations

This study of female and male undergraduate business majors explored the relationship of their preferred future career-marriage arrangement to their relationship and work values, work motivation, and gender role orientation Results indicate that the dual-career, career-job, and career-home groups showed significant differences on these dimensions. Additionally, sex and gender role differences reflected cultural stereotypes of achievement orientation in men and barriers to career pursuits of women. The results are discussed in terms of interpersonal, intrapersonal, and societal factors underlying career-marriage aspirations. Implications for practitioners and suggestions for future research are given.     

The other side of the coin: Cognitive properties of nonreward

In this comment, I examine Amsel’s theory in the light of rats’ reaction not to frustrative non-reward per se, but to the more complicated case in which frustrative nonreward is part of a rule-based sequence of reward quantities. The discussion goes beyond Amsel’s emphasis on dispositional memory to consider cognitive and representational memory—the signaling properties of reinforcement and nonreinforcement. The strengths and weaknesses of Amsel’s theory are discussed with the fresh perspective that this viewpoint provides, and some issues emerge that may be fruitful for further study.     

Diaphragmatic spasm: A neglected cause of dyspnoea and chest pain

The study included 17 patients, 12 women and 5 men, with a recurrent symptom complex involving chest pain and dyspnoea characterized by inability to get a full breath. Some attacks had subsided spontaneously. Others had lasted hours or days. When examined by fluoroscopy during an attack, each subject was found to have a nearly maximally contracted (flat) diaphragm. In some of them the attack was promptly interrupted by a small intravenous injection of sodium amytal. In others it could be aborted by a conscious effort at full expiration. The syndrome associated with diaphragmatic spasm is discussed in comparison with other noncardiac sources of chest pain and dyspnoea.     

BODY IMAGE AND SOCIOCULTURAL NORMS

Internalization of sociocultural norms about the body has been theorized to be an important factor in fostering body dissatisfaction in women. Some theorists have suggested that a lesbian identity may buffer or immunize lesbians from the damaging effects of society's pressure to be thin by reducing this internalization. This study was designed to test this claim empirically. Questionnaires were completed by 108 lesbians and 115 heterosexual women recruited through snowball sampling. Lesbians felt more fit, reported less negative attitudes toward their lower bodies, and internalized sociocultural norms less than heterosexual women. For all women, internalization of sociocultural norms significantly predicted body attitudes. Lesbians and heterosexual women appear to be similarly exposed to and aware of society's messages, and as such their body attitudes substantially overlap. However, lesbians are buffered from these views in some specific areas. These differences appear to be primarily the result of differential internalization of sociocultural norms.     

Laterally induced impedance effects in vision

A linear integral equation for a system of mutually impeding points is developed and solved explicitly. Particular solutions are shown to be subharmonic functions for a large class of stimuli. Specialized forms of the general equation presented in this paper occur within a number of mathematical models of Mach bands. In addition to these known spatial properties, our results also show that the time course of this basic equation may be useful in developing models of transient neural activity as well as of temporal psychophysical phenomena, such as the Broca-Sulzer effect. Further, a spatial transfer function much like the low-frequency cutoff of empirically derived modulation transfer functions follows directly from our basic integral equation if the additional assumption of spatial homogeneity is imposed.