Women of the fifties: Their past sexual experiences and current sexual attitudes in the context of mother/daughter relationships

As part of a study on sexual communication between mothers and daughters, 141 college-educated mothers of college-age daughters completed a questionnaire on their past sexual activities (including high school and college experiences, first love experience, first experience of intercourse, first and successive pregnancies, and birth of first child). Mothers also indicated the degree to which they had experienced 14 sex-related fears during college and at present. Several questions tapped present sexual attitudes concerning themselves and their daughters. Mothers were asked how they would feel if their daughters never married, never had children, or had a homosexual relation. The majority reported that their sexual attitudes had become more liberal since college and indicated that their daughters had influenced these attitudes. The majority also indicated they were satisfied with the current sexual communication with their daughters and with the mother/daughter relationship in general.This work was supported by a grant from the Ford Foundation. Please address correspondence to Marilyn Yalom, Center for Research on Women, Serra House, Stanford, California 94305.     

Illusions of Control: How We Overestimate Our Personal Influence

Illusions of control are common even in purely chance situations. They are particularly likely to occur in settings that are characterized by personal involvement, familiarity, foreknowledge of the desired outcome, and a focus on success. Person-based factors that affect illusions of control include depressive mood and need for control. One explanation of illusory control is that it is due to a control heuristic that is used to estimate control by assessing the factors of intentionality and connection to the outcome. Motivational influences on illusory control and consequences of overestimating one's control are also covered.     

Children of Incarcerated Mothers

We review the literature on children whose mothers are incarcerated in jails or prisons. These children typically experience a great many risk factors besides their mothers' incarceration, including poverty, drug and alcohol problems in their families, community violence, and multiple changes in caregivers. Children's lives are greatly disrupted when mothers are arrested, and most children show emotional and behavioral problems. The impact this has depends on the age of the child, the alternate caregiving arrangements, and the course of the mother's incarceration. Children of incarcerated mothers experience internalizing (fear, withdrawal, depression, emotional disturbance) and externalizing (anger, fighting, stealing, substance abuse) problems, as well as heightened rates of school failure and eventual criminal activity and incarceration. Research in this area is scarce and often of poor quality. A research agenda which is guided by a transactional, ecological, and developmental model, and which examines children's well-being over the course of the mothers' incarceration is suggested.     

Anticipating the consequences of social behavior

Some forms of psychological theory explain behavior in part by its consequences. The consequences are called reinforcing if the behavior is strengthened; punishing if the behavior is weakened. Through repetition, the consequences eventually become generalized or anticipated. While social psychology has used consequences extensively in its manipulations, this has been implicit rather than explicit. This paper reviews ten such manipulations over ten areas of social psychology for the first time and shows how implicit consequences can determine social behavior. The problems with executing and interpreting these manipulations are extensively discussed. It is concluded that the notion of “anticipating the consequences of social behavior” can bring unity to many areas of social psychology and provide a sound motivational basis.     

Effects of background music on the remembering of filmed events

The use of background music within films provides a naturalistic setting in which to investigate certain issues of schematic processing. Here, the relative placement of music was manipulated such that music either accompanied a scene's outcome, and thereby accentuated its affective meaning, or foreshadowed the same scene, and thereby created expectancies about the future course of events. In addition, background music was either congruent or incongruent with the affect of an episode's outcome. When subjects were later asked to recall the series of filmed episodes, results showed that expectancy violations arising from mood-incongruent relations led to better memory in the foreshadowing condition, while mood-congruent relations led to better performance in the accompanying condition. Results from a recognition task further revealed that scenes unavailable for recall could be recognized when cued by background music. These overall findings are discussed in terms of selective-attending processes that are differentially directed as a function of background music.     

Experimental design as a source of sex bias in social psychology

In order to determine whether there is evidence for sex bias in experimental design, abstracts of 312 experiments on interpersonal attraction and 244 experiments on aggression which used only male or only female subjects were coded according to types of variables studied. Results indicate that when females are subjects in experiments the independent variable manipulation is less likely to involve the active treatment or arousal of the subject and the dependent variable measurement is less likely to involve the active behavior of the subject, than when male subjects are used. These findings are discussed in terms of their implications for how sex differences should be studied.Portions of this article were presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, New Orleans, September 1974. The authors would like to thank Howard Ehrlichman for his valuable comments.     

A developmental exploration of the fear of success phenomenon as cultural stereotype

Given prior research suggesting that fear of success may be a function of cultural expectations rather than an intrapsychic motive held by women, this cultural phenomenon was placed in juxtaposition with reactions to women and men failing. It was expected that women would not be rated negatively for failure. It was also expected that in a sample of third, sixth, ninth, and twelfth graders, younger children would be more dogmatic than older children in applying cultural stereotypes to these situations. The children responded on semantic differential scales to the cue of Anne (John) succeeding (failing) in medical school. The children rated a successful person much happier than one who failed, and the sex of the person succeeding or failing was entirely irrelevant. However, the results were as predicted for niceness: A woman was somewhat less nice than a man when they both succeeded, but a man was much less nice when they both failed. In addition, there were no interactions with the age or sex of the respondents. Thus, sex-role expectations are relevant to some attributes of individuals but not others, and these expectations are well established and easily applied as early as third grade.The authors gratefully acknowledge the assistance of the students, staff, and parents of the DeForest, Wisconsin, school district. The following students were experimenters and coders: Susan Artz, Mark Bouril, Lisa Braun, Debby Callan, Joanne Carlson, Mary Draeger, Linda Fibich, Sam Freedman, Tom Frieder, Patti Gorsky, Mark Jaeger, Cheryl Kent, Rich Nagel, Dave Novak, Jon Olson, Jean Phillips, Jeff Richter, Becky Rogers, Roy Strasburg, Peggy Vlasak, and Rod Witwer. An earlier version of this article was presented as a paper at the biennial meeting of the Society for Research in Child Development, Denver, April, 1975.     

An examination of encoding and retrieval processes in reading disabled children

A choice reaction time experiment was performed in order to assess the information processing characteristics of 12-year-old reading disabled children. Eight reading disabled children were compared to a sample of nondisabled readers. The stimuli consisted of consonants presented in three memory load conditions. A Stimulus Quality manipulation was included in the design in order to assess the encoding process. The results of the research indicated that the rate of encoding differed between disabled and nondisabled readers. In addition, support for the hypothesis that disabled and nondisabled readers do not differ in terms of central processes was also obtained.