When self-prioritization crosses the senses: Crossmodal self-prioritization demonstrated between vision and touch

The investigation of self-prioritization via a simple matching paradigm represents a new way of enhancing our knowledge about the processing of self-relevant content and also increases our understanding of the self-concept itself. By associating formerly neutral material with the self, and assessing the resulting prioritization of these newly formed self-associations, conclusions can be drawn concerning the effects of self-relevance without the burden of highly overlearned materials such as one’s own name. This approach was used to gain further insights into the structure and complexity of self-associations: a tactile pattern was associated with the self and thereafter, the prioritization of the exact same visual pattern was assessed – enabling the investigation of crossmodal self-associations. The results demonstrate a prioritization of self-associated material that rapidly extends beyond the borders of a sensory modality in which it was first established.     

A COMPARISON OF TWO COHORTS OF COLLEGE STUDENTS IN RESPONSES TO THE MALE-FEMALE RELATIONS QUESTIONNAIRE

Two cohorts of male and female introductory psychology students from the same university, tested in 1978 and 1992, were given the male or the female form of the Male-Female Relations Questionnaire (MFRQ; Spence, Helmreich, & Sawin, 1980), which assesses respondents' personal gender-role preferences and behaviors in interpersonal situations. In both genders, the means of the majority of MFRQ items decreased significantly from 1978 to 1992, but item means were still fairly close to the midpoint of the response scale. Women tended to be less willing than men to assign leadership roles to men but in social interactions with the other gender, they admitted to deliberately acting "feminine" as much or more than men admitted to acting "masculine." Correlations between the MFRQ and the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1978) were also determined and found to be substantial. Psychometric differences between the instruments suggested, however, that the MFRQ provides unique information and may often be more useful than the AWS in detecting relationships with other variables.     

Spatial modulation of repetition blindness and repetition deafness

When two identical visual items are presented in rapid succession, people often fail to report the second instance when trying to recall both (e.g., Kanwisher, 1987). We investigated whether this temporal processing deficit is modulated by the spatial separation between the repeated stimuli within both audition and vision. In Experiment 1, lists of one to three digits were rapidly presented from loudspeaker cones arranged in a semicircle around the participant. Recall accuracy was lower when repeated digits were presented from different positions rather than from the same position, as compared to unrepeated control pairs, demonstrating that auditory repetition deafness (RD) is modulated by the spatial displacement between repeated items. A similar spatial modulation of visual repetition blindness (RB) was reported when pairs of masked letters were presented visually from either the same or different positions arranged on a semicircle around fixation (Experiment 2). These results cannot easily be accounted for by the token individuation hypothesis of RB (Kanwisher, 1987; Park & Kanwisher, 1994) and instead support a recognition failure account (Hochhaus & Johnston, 1996; Luo & Caramazza, 1995, 1996).     

DO THE BSRI AND PAQ MEASURE THE SAME OR DIFFERENT CONCEPTS?

The present article assesses Frable's (1989) contention that the Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) measures only desirable instrumental and expressive characteristics, whereas the Bem Sex Role inventory (BSRI) measures gender schema and related gender concepts. Comparison of the two instruments indicates, first, that they are similar in content and that the parallel M and F scales are substantially correlated. Further, the results obtained with the two instruments in three areas (self-esteem, sex-role attitudes, and gender-schematic processing) suggest that both are valid measures of desirable instrumental and expressive traits. Sexrole attitudes, however, tend to have small and typically nonsignificant relationships with both sets of scales, whereas few studies of gender schematic processing have produced replicable results even with the BSRI. However, Bem and her associates have reported positive results using other designs that have yet to be replicated using either the BSRI or the PAQ. Thus, in response to Frable's (1989) assertion, it seems at best premature to come to any conclusion about whether one, both, or neither of the questionnaires measure broad gender constructs.