Women's role portrayals in magazine advertising: 1958–1983

Content analysis was used to study the changing nature of women's role portrayals. Advertisements appearing in eight general interest periodicals during November 1983 were compared with data from similar studies of magazines published during 1958 and 1970. Results indicate that current advertisements in some ways more accurately reflect the true diversity of women's social and occupational roles than do those of earlier time periods.     

Cautiousness,Stereotypy, and Variability in Older and Younger Adults

The Psychological Record - Older adults and college students were tested with two procedures that measure stereotypy and response variability In Experiment 1 subjects guided a marker through a 6 by...     

THE "FRESHMAN 15"Facts and Fantasies About Weight Gain in College Women

This research tested the hypothesis that the "freshman 15" may be more fantasy than fact. The "freshman 15" refers to the belief that college students, particularly women, gain an average of 15 pounds during their first year of college. Female college students were weighed during their first month at college and again 6 months later. They also completed measures of self-esteem, body image, locus of control, and self-monitoring. Findings indicated that the majority of women remained the same weight during the first 6 months of college. A favorable body image was related to less weight loss among those who lost weight, but none of the other characteristics were related to weight change.     

Nostalgia for America's past can buffer collective guilt

This research examined when, and for whom, American collective nostalgia can relieve feelings of collective guilt. In the Pilot Study, path analyses revealed that national glorification is associated with collective nostalgia, and collective nostalgia is associated with lower collective guilt. Our experimental studies test the role of these variables in determining responses to the elevated salience of past ingroup harm doing. Collective nostalgia was associated with lower collective guilt especially after reminders of America's harm doing in Study 1 . In Study 2 we predicted and showed that reminders of American harm doing would evoke spontaneous collective nostalgia for participants high in national glorification. The remaining studies tested the hypothesis that collective nostalgia serves to buffer collective guilt. Collective guilt was lower after reminders of past harm doing for participants who engaged in collective nostalgia ( Study 3 ), and this was especially pronounced for participants high in national glorification ( Study 4 ).     

Characteristics of single-case designs used to assess intervention effects in 2008

This article reports the results of a study that located, digitized, and coded all 809 single-case designs appearing in 113 studies in the year 2008 in 21 journals in a variety of fields in psychology and education. Coded variables included the specific kind of design, number of cases per study, number of outcomes, data points and phases per case, and autocorrelations for each case. Although studies of the effects of interventions are a minority in these journals, within that category, single-case designs are used more frequently than randomized or nonrandomized experiments. The modal study uses a multiple-baseline design with 20 data points for each of three or four cases, where the aim of the intervention is to increase the frequency of a desired behavior; but these characteristics vary widely over studies. The average autocorrelation is near to but significantly different from zero; but autocorrelations are significantly heterogeneous. The results have implications for the contributions of single-case designs to evidence-based practice and suggest a number of future research directions.     

Forming State Collaborations to Diversify the Nation’s Health Workforce: The Experience of the Sullivan Alliance to Transform the Health Professions

Diversifying the nation’s health professions is essential in order to maintain a vigorous health workforce, able to respond to the needs of all Americans. The inability of the health workforce to keep pace with the changing demographics of the nation is a major cause of the persistent inequities in access to quality health care for ethnic and racial minorities in the U.S. Ethnic and racial minorities have been underrepresented in the genetic counseling profession since its inception, despite vigorous professional initiatives to remedy this situation. Mittman and Downs published a critical review of these initiatives detailing recommendations for change in this journal in 2008. One of their major recommendations was the need to learn from, and join, efforts with other health professions in seeking to increase professional diversity in genetic counseling. This paper reviews new findings on issues impacting health workforce diversity in the nation, presents a case study of a national best practice to diversify the health workforce and illuminates actions that can be taken by the genetic counseling profession. The Sullivan Alliance to Diversify the Health Professions is a culmination of two historic initiatives for addressing the dearth of minority health professionals and is a national catalyst for increasing diversity within the health professions by forging state collaborations among institutions of higher education, health professions schools and other key stakeholders.     

Unique characteristics of neonatal classical conditioning: The role of the amygdala and locus coeruleus

The central nervous system of altricial infants is specialized for optimizing attachments to their caregiver. During the first postnatal days, infant rats show a sensitive period for learning and particularly susceptible to learning an attraction to their mother’s odor. Classical conditioning appears to underlie this learning that is expressed behaviorally as anincreased ability to acquire odor preferences and a decreased ability to acquire odor aversions. Specifically, in neonatal rats, pairing an odor with moderately painful shock (0.5mA) or milk produces a subsequent relativepreference for that odor. The neural circuitry supporting theincreased ability to acquire odor preferences appears to be the heightened functioning of the noradrenergic pontine nucleus locus coeruleus. Indeed, norepinephrine from the locus coeruleus appears to be both necessary and sufficient for learning during the sensitive period. On the other hand, thedecreased ability to acquire odor aversions seems to be due to the lack of participation of the amygdala in at least some aversive learning situations. The site of plasticity in the pup’s brain appears to be limited to the olfactory bulb. This neonatal sensitive period for learning ends around postnatal day 9–10, at which time pups make the transition from crawling to walking and classical conditioning becomes “adultlike”. The neonatal behavioral and neural induced changes are retained into adulthood where it modifies sexual behavior.