Development and validation of the masculine behavior scale: A measure of behaviors stereotypically attributed to males vs. females

The purpose of the present investigation was to develop and validate the Masculine Behavior Scale (MBS), an objective self-report instrument designed to measure four behavioral tendencies stereotypically imputed more to males vs. females: restrictive emotionality, inhibited affection, success dedication, and exaggerated self-reliance. Psychometric analyses confirmed the factorial structure and reliabilities of the subscales on the MBS, and other results provided evidence for the validity of the four MBS subscales. Specifically, it was found that the behavioral measures of success dedication and exaggerated self-reliance were positively correlated with instrumental personality attributes, while restrictive emotionality and inhibited affection behavioral tendencies were negatively correlated with expressive personality attributes. Additional findings indicated that both male and female subjects attributed restrictive emotionality, inhibited affection, success dedication, and exaggerated self-reliance more to males vs. females. However, when males and females were asked to describe themselves, no gender differences emerged for behaviors associated with success dedication and exaggerated self-reliance; females did, however, report engaging in fewer emotionally restricted and affectively inhibited behaviors than did males. The discussion focuses on the distinction between gender-related behavioral tendencies and both gender-related role tendencies and gender-related personality tendencies.     

Predicting a changing taste: Do people know what they will like?

A distinction is made between decision utility, experienced utility, and predicted utility and an experiment is reported addressing people's ability to forecast experienced utility. Subjects in two experiments made predictions of their future liking for stimuli to which they were then exposed daily for one week. The stimuli were ice cream in a pilot study, plain yogurt in the main study, and short musical pieces in both studies. Decreased liking was the modal prediction, even when the true outcome was increased liking, or reduced dislike. There was substantial stability of tastes, but there were also substantial individual differences in the size and even the sign of changes in liking with repeated exposure. There was little or no correlation between the predictions of hedonic change that individuals made and the changes they actually experienced.     

Improving assignment preference through interspersing additional problems: Brief versus easy problems

College students were exposed to a control mathematics assignment containing 16 three-digit by two-digit multiplication (3×2) problems and two experimental assignments that contained 16 equivalent 3×2 problems and six additional interspersed problems. On one experimental assignment, 4-digit plus 4-digit problems (4+4) were interspersed. On the other experimental assignment, 2-digit divided by 1-digit with whole number answers problems (2/1) were interspersed. When given a choice, significantly more students choose the 2/1 assignment over the control and 1+4 assignment. Students also ranked the 2/1 sheet as requiring less time to complete than the control or 4+4 assignment but no differences were found on assignment difficulty rankings between the 4+4 and 2/1 assignments. No differences were found on accuracy levels or rates of responding on the target 3×2 problems across assignments. Results showed that interspersing additional problems that take relatively less time to complete may be more important for altering student preference for assignments than interspersing easier problems. Discussion focuses on schedules of reinforcement and resource efficient procedures for increasing student preference for assignment without compromising curricula integrity.     

Development of the emotional self-disclosure scale

The Emotional Self-Disclosure Scale (ESDS) was developed to assess how willing people are to discuss specific emotions with different disclosure recipients. Internal reliabilities (Cronbach's alpha) and test-retest were consistently high for each of the subscales on the ESDS for three specific disclosure recipients: female friends, male friends, and spouses/lovers. A final set of results indicated that women's and men's emotional disclosures varied as a function of their gender and the personal characteristics of the disclosure recipient. Although men and women reported a similar pattern of willingness to discuss their emotions with their male friends, additional results revealed that women were more willing than men to disclose information about their feelings of depression, anxiety, anger, and fear to their female friends and spouses/lovers. The implications of these findings for men's and women's emotional expressivity are discussed.Portions of this paper were presented at the 33rd annual meeting of the Southwestern Psychological Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 1987.