Modification of children's gender-stereotyped behavior: General issues and research considerations

This paper reviews some recent studies that have attempted to change gender-stereotyped behavior or attitudes in children. While such efforts have often been successful, at least on a short-term basis, enough inconsistency exists to suggest that more detailed theoretical analyses are required to increase the efficacy of such modification attempts. The review suggested at least four factors that needed additional empirical and theoretical attention as factors in susceptibility to counterstereotyping manipulations. These included: (a) the child's developmental level, (b) the relationship between sex role cognitions and behavior, (c) the degree of situational consistency of gender-stereotyped behavior, and (d) the role of individual initial differences in determining modification outcomes. The importance of these factors are discussed in the context of the existing literature.     

Increasing Community Recycling with Persuasive Communication and Public Commitment

Persuasive communication and public commitment were used to encourage recycling in a citywide program. The persuasive communication was a combination of factors which have been found by laboratory researchers to produce attitude and/or behavior change. The public commitment manipulation involved signing a statement supportive of recycling. Households which did not recycle during a 6-week baseline period were selected for experimental study. Trained Boy Scouts made an oral informational statement and then gave each of 201 experimental households one of three treatments (a written persuasive communication, public commitment, or both). A control group of 132 homes received no treatment. Recycling was observed for 6 weeks following delivery of all treatments. Results indicated that the three treatment groups recycled significantly more than the control group but did not differ significantly from each other. Future directions for applied work in this domain are discussed.     

Affect availability, tolerance, complexity, and modulation in psychoanalysis: followup of a longitudinal, prospective study

Evaluation of 22 patients in supervised psychoanalysis showed that affect availability and tolerance changed in a positive direction during the course of psychoanalysis. In this study, we have defined criteria of change that can be clinically observed. The changes observed were present one year following the completion of psychoanalysis. Ratings of analysts' and patients' interviews, and ratings of psychological tests all revealed that patients had derived "therapeutic benefit" in relation to affect experience and management. Discriminations were made among changes in affect modulation, which reflected both loosening and tightening of controls, changes in affect availability, changes in experience of painful affects, and changes in experience of affect complexity. Analysts' interviews and psychological test data reflected notable changes in affect modulation in the direction of increased control, while patients' interviews more often reflected changes in the direction of increased expressiveness.     

Coping ability, stress, productive load, and symptoms.

A study of 450 college students demonstrated (a) the importance of a distinction between self-produced and externally produced stressors, (b) the usefulness of a construct of productive load, and (c) stronger relations of the Constructive Thinking Inventory than of the Hardiness Questionnaire with productive load and with mental and physical symptoms. Because a major path through which coping ability influences symptoms is negative emotions, the widely recommended practice of partialing self-reported negative affect out of relations among coping, stress, and symptoms is often inappropriate. However, as total daily stressors (e.g., hassles) consist largely of self-produced stressors, it is highly confounded with coping ability, and it is therefore important to partial coping ability out of relations between total stressors and other variables.     

Personality and modulation of the startle reflex by emotionally-toned filmclips

Several researchers have found that pleasant foreground stimuli attenuate the eyeblink component of the startle reflex while unpleasant foreground stimuli potentiate it. The effects of personality factors on such modulation of the eyeblink response, as measured by electromyographic (EMG) activity in reaction to loud acoustic startle probes, were examined in subjects viewing emotionally-toned (pleasant, unpleasant and neutral) filmclips. During the main part of the experiment, introverts had higher baseline EMG activity and lower response probability than extraverts; no differences were observed at the beginning of the experiment, during an acclimatization session. Reflex modulation, as measured by response latency, was influenced by the Psychoticism (P) factor of the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire: subjects high on P showed longer latencies to eyeblink onset when probed during viewing of pleasant filmclips than subjects low on this dimension; no significant differences were observed between subjects low and high on P for neutral and unpleasant filmclips. No influence of personality factors was found on affective modulation as measured by response amplitude/magnitude. The results are discussed in relation to Gray's and Eysenck's theories of personality.     

Identification with aggression vs. turning against the self: An empirical study of turn-of-the-century European Jewish humor

Self-directed demeaning ethnic humor is hypothesized to represent either a means of self-deprecation or a stance of disidentifying with one’s own group of origin. Compendia of published Yiddish humor were examined to empirically test competing conceptualizations of Jewish wit. Results are analyzed in the context of the social milieu of the publication samples.     

Assessing School Academic Productivity: The Case of Chicago School Reform

This paper considers the issues raised in using standardized achievement test scores for purposes of examining the academic productivity of schools. We critique some commonly used practices by urban school districts and suggest an alternative approach – the school productivity profile. This profile is based on an assessment of each school's contribution to student learning, or value-added, rather than just the overall level of student attainment. We illustrate, using 10-year achievement trend data from the Chicago Public Schools (CPS), both the problems with some commonly reported indicators of school effectiveness and the idea of a school productivity profile. While our analyses suggest broad-based improvements in student learning in many Chicago schools over the past 10 years, we also found that the current testing system is not well designed to make such judgments accurately. We conclude that extant standardized testing systems, like the ITBS used in Chicago, do not afford an accurate basis for assessing school productivity and how this might be changing over time. These results have important policy implications. As school districts seek to become more outcome oriented, they will need to invest in better testing and reporting systems in order to know whether they are making genuine progress in this regard.     

Anorexia nervosa: the tyranny of appearances

This paper explores the possibility that many families of anorexics are overly preoccupied with appearances, valuing what other people think of them more than healthier families do, and that this influences the origin and maintenance of anorexia. This‘rule’is simple and should be open to testing more widely through research.     

Desktop flight simulators: Simulation fidelity and pilot performance

Improvements in the computing power and visual resolution of modern desktop computing systems, as well as advances in software technology for displaying high-speed animations, have encouraged the development of relatively sophisticated real-time flight simulators for the PC and Macintosh. We review some of the factors that determine how well such programs capture the actual experience of flight. The most significant factor limiting the quality of performance in flying a simulated aircraft is the “frame rate” problem: at low altitudes and in highly detailed visual environments, as in approaching a runway threshold during landing, the computational demands of the animation may necessitate a reduction in the number of frames displayed per second on the screen. The delayed sensory feedback that results proves to be very detrimental to sustaining smooth control of the aircraft, especially during the flare to touchdown where such control is needed most. This finding parallels the well-known effects of delayed auditory feedback (Lee, 1950) and delayed visual feedback (Smith, 1962).