Self-disclosure reciprocity,liking and the deviant

Conflicting predictions were derived from social exchange theory about the role of social attraction and the reciprocity norm on mutual self-disclosure in dyadic relationships. Sixty-six female subjects were exposed to one of three levels of disclosure input: conventional-low disclosure, conventional-high disclosure, or devianthigh disclosure. In support of the reciprocity norm prediction, willingness to disclose personal information was a positive function of the amount of disclosure input from another person, regardless of the degree of liking for the initial discloser.     

THE ROLE OF REFERENTIAL SPEECH IN SIGN LEARNING BY MENTALLY RETARDED CHILDREN: A COMPARISON OF TOTAL COMMUNICATION AND SIGN-ALONE TRAINING

We conducted two experiments to assess the role of referential speech during sign training in which the spoken words corresponding to signs were receptively known to the participants. An alternating treatments design was used to compare sign acquisition across two teaching conditions in which referents were presented either with or without the corresponding verbal label. During the first experiment, signs were taught concurrently; during the second experiment, signs within each of the respective conditions were taught in a serial fashion. In both experiments, signs taught by total communication were acquired faster than those taught by sign-alone training.     

A cross-linguistic study of the processing of causative sentences

The comprehension of sentences expressing instigative causation (e.g., The horse makes the camel run) was investigated in children between the ages of 2;0 and 4;4, speaking English, Italian, Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. Cross-linguistic differences in development reveal the roles of morphological (causative particle, case inflection) and syntactic devices (periphrasis, word order) in guiding children's processing of such constructions. It is suggested that local cues (inflectional suffixes, particles, specialized causative verb forms) contribute to the more rapid development of sentence processing strategies in Serbo-Croatian and Turkish. The word order systems of English and Italian, which require that the listener hold the entire sentence pattern in mind in order to determine underlying semantic relations, contribute to slower development on this task.     

The “feminine mystique” in male-dominated jobs: A comparison of attitudes and background factors of women in male-dominated versus female-dominated jobs

This paper examines various background factors plus success and work-related atttudes of 324 women as aggregated into one of three groups: those women working in male-dominated jobs, those in female-dominated jobs, and those in relatively sex-ratio balanced jobs. Overall results show that women holding male-dominated jobs are more likely to be older, better educated, have fathers with higher educational levels, and are more likely to be childless as compared to women in female-dominated jobs. Holding age and education constant, women in male-dominated jobs usually rated definitions of success as more important to their feelings of well-being than did women in female-dominated jobs. With these same constants, there were few differences in work attitudes among the three groups, but contrary to expectations, women in female-dominated jobs rated the importance of their work higher than did women in male-dominated jobs. The variables best predicting whether a woman held a male-dominated job were college attainment, problems related to sex discrimination, the age of the participant, her feelings toward achieving a very high salary, her feelings of the importance of her work, and her feelings about becoming an authority in her job.     

Symbolization, language, and chimpanzees: A theoretical reevaluation based on initial language acquisition processes in four young Pan troglodytes

The emergence of symbolic use of word-lexigrams is traced through the course of four experiments with four chimpanzees. The results indicate that it is ill advised to begin language training by introducing the names of objects or their attributes. Training which allowed the subjects to have the machine vend foods, the names of which were on keys, facilitated the discrimination of the lexigrams moreso than did training which called for the labelling of foods held by the experimenter; however, the discriminations so established seemed to be basically associationistic—subjects were not able to use the word symbols appropriately in a communicative manner or to use the words contingent upon the presence or absence of a given food in the dispenser. Subsequent training with verb-object phrases, where the chimpanzees were able to observe all steps in the delivery of foods and drinks contingent upon correct choices among the lexigrams and the formulation of correct requests, fostered the decontextualization of lexigram usage and the symbolic uses of the words used in training. Errorless training procedures were ineffective. By the end of this training the chimpanzees were able to reintegrate and reorganize skills which, initially, had been only partially mastered, and their learning rates of new words and their extended, appropriate use thereof became strongly evidenced. Caution is extended regarding the use of “word” to a response of an ape, be it with a sign of Ameslan, a plastic token, or a lexigram. There are levels of “wordness” and the symbolic, decontextualized level is achieved only through the course of experiences which serve to emphasize the symbol-referent relationship.     

Body Hair Removal: The ‘Mundane’ Production of Normative Femininity

Although womens body hair removal is strongly normative across contemporary Western cultures, only two studies of mundane depilation have been published, and they were based on data from the US (Basow, 1991) and Australia (Tiggemann & Kenyon, 1998), respectively. The present survey, comprised of a sample of 678 women, extends this work. We investigated UK practices, a wider array of body regions and removal methods, and the relationship between depilation and age. Over 99% of participants reported removing some hair, most commonly from the underarms, legs, pubic area, and eyebrows. Shaving and plucking were the most common removal methods. Significant relationships between age and leg, pubic, and facial depilation were found. Results document the normativity of hair removal, and we argue that hair removal is part of the taken-for-granted work of producing an acceptable femininity.     

Auditory--visual cross-modal perception of communicative stimuli in tufted capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella)

Research on cross-modal performance in nonhuman primates is limited to a small number of sensory modalities and testing methods. To broaden the scope of this research, the authors tested capuchin monkeys (Cebus apella) for a seldom-studied cross-modal capacity in nonhuman primates, auditory-visual recognition. Monkeys were simultaneously played 2 video recordings of a face producing different vocalizations and a sound recording of 1 of the vocalizations. Stimulus sets varied from naturally occurring conspecific vocalizations to experimentally controlled human speech stimuli. The authors found that monkeys preferred to view face recordings that matched presented vocal stimuli. Their preference did not differ significantly across stimulus species or other stimulus features. However, the reliability of the latter set of results may have been limited by sample size. From these results, the authors concluded that capuchin monkeys exhibit auditory-visual cross-modal perception of conspecific vocalizations.     

Counselling supervision in organisational contexts: New challenges and perspectives

The need for a shared understanding of supervision is explored in relation to the supervisory role and organisational culture. It is argued that supervisors can be change agents within an organisational context but that the working contract needs to be negotiated carefully to safeguard the ethical interests of all parties.     

Cultural Dimensions,Gender, and the Nature of Self-concept: A Fourteen-country Study

Ratings of the importance of and satisfaction with 20 areas of the self were obtained from 3604 first or second year social science undergraduates from 14 countries (15 cultures). Factor analysis at the culture by gender level supported four factors for both sets of ratings. The resulting factor scores were analyzed for mean differences according to the cultural dimension of Individualism-Collectivism by Gender and by correlations with other cultural dimenions and economic indicators. It was found that participants from the 10 collectivist cultures placed greater salience for their self-concepts on “family values” than did those from the individualist cultures. However, this cultural difference was not found for “social relationships”. The expected gender differences, with females valuing “family values” and “social relationships” more highly, were found only for the individualist countries. The findings indicate that there may be a strong cultural level interaction effect between gender and Individualism-Collectivism on the nature of self-conceptions, and that the “family” and “social” aspects of self-concept in collectivist countries need to be considered separately.