What do men want? Male rituals of initiation in group psychotherapy

Men in mixed-gender psychotherapy groups form male subgroups that serve the cause of gender identity development. The resulting enhancement of masculine identifications allows men to more fully participate in the interactional work of the whole group. The author details four stages in the evolution of the male subgroup, and compares these stages to the structure and function of initiation ceremonies in traditional societies.     

A Comparative Analysis of Entrepreneur and College Business Student Values

ABSTRACT Both entrepreneurs and senior-level college business students were surveyed to determine similarities and differences in their values, under the premise that students who share similar values with those held by entrepreneurs may have promise of entrepreneurial potential. All respondents were administered the Rokeach Value Survey which, through a process of rank-ordering, is used to determine two hierarchies of value importance for individuals. The first hierarchy reflects an individual's terminal value system, or those values associated with end-states of existence. The second hierarchy reflects an individual's instrumental value system, or those values associated with modes of conduct. The resulting data provided a tabulation of medians, rank order composites and levels of significance for the terminal and instrumental values, respectively, of both samples. Rank order composites were used as general indices in comparing the position of a particular value in the total hierarchy of values and for comparing the position of a particular value across the two groups. Emphasis was placed on those values which were ranked very low or very high by the entrepreneurs. Comparisons of student value rankings relative to those values the entrepreneurs held highest and lowest were then conducted. The findings indicated that there were value differences between the total sample of entrepreneurs and students, as well as between female entrepreneurs and female student values, but there were few differences between male entrepreneur and male student values. In addition to the above comparisons, median analysis between entrepreneur and student terminal and instrumental values were conducted. An examination of the general population of entrepreneurs and students revealed that twelve of the eighteen terminal values of the entrepreneurs and students were significantly different at the (.05) level Only four of the eighteen instrumental values were significantly different (.05) level between the entrepreneurs and students. The median analysis between male entrepreneurs and male student values showed no significant differences. However, the median analysis between female entrepreneur and female student values showed that seven of the eighteen instrumental and eleven of the eighteen terminal values were significantly different at the (.05) level. Although not examined, it is likely that individual students in the sample do share the value profiles of the entrepreneurs. If so, and if generally accepted value profiles are established for entrepreneurs, such students might be counseled to consider the entrepreneurial life.     

Children's understanding of private keys in referential communication

A private key is a referential utterance used to inform selectively. The ambiguity of the utterance conceals meaning from nonselected audience members. The purpose of this study was to examine three aspects of children's understanding of the use of private keys. Experiment 1 concerned children's sensitivity to information in the context of utterance (i.e., the common ground). Experiment 2 examined appreciation of audience design and the speaker's intent. Experiments 3, 4, and 5 explored some reasons for children's problems in understanding private keys. The results show that even first graders are sensitive to common ground information and the speaker's intent. However, audience design is troublesome even for second graders in some situations, probably because they fail to assess the knowledge of the audience members. Private keys are important theoretically because they represent an aspect of referential communication involving the uses of ambiguous utterances that have been ignored by developmental researchers.     

Short-term memory differences between children predict imagery effects when sentences are read

Children in Grades 4 through 6 read concrete sentences that they were asked to learn. Half the subjects were instructed to construct images representing the sentence meanings. The remaining participants were provided no strategy instructions (control condition). Individual differences in short-term memory were more highly associated with performance in the imagery than in the control condition. There was a clear positive effect of imagery instructions on learning efficiency among students with relatively greater short-term memory; there was no difference in learning efficiency between the imagery and control conditions among students below the median for short-term memory performance. All relevant analyses supported the conclusion that imaginal coding of sentences that are read is demanding of short-term memory capacity.     

Subsyllabic units in computerized reading instruction: onset-rime vs. postvowel segmentation

Previous studies suggest that adults and children divide spoken syllables into subsyllabic onset-rime units more readily than into any other kind of subsyllabic unit. We asked whether this same onset-rime segmentation might also be beneficial in teaching children to read. That is, can children learn more words segmented at the onset-rime boundary (e.g., CL-AP, D-ISH) than words segmented after the vowel (CLA-P, DI-SH)? In three experiments, first-grade students studied single words presented by a computer connected to a high-quality speech synthesizer. Experiment 1 used words of four letters but only three phonemes apiece (e.g., WHIP, DISH). In some of these words the onset-rime segmentation corresponded to the initial bigram (e.g., WH-IP); in some it did not (e.g., D-ISH). Experiments 2 and 3 used words of four letters and four phonemes (e.g., CLAP, CORN). In all three experiments, onset-rime segmentation proved more helpful than postvowel segmentation in short-term learning of the words.     

Social Interactions of Obese and Nonobese Women

The stigma associated with obesity is likely to limit the opportunities obese women have to develop social skills. This hypothesis was tested by having obese (n = 15) and nonobese (n = 22) women converse on the telephone with college students who were unaware of the women's weights. Ratings made by judges who listened to the women's contributions to the conversations but who were unaware of their weights showed that obesity was negatively related to judgments about the women's likability, social skills, and physical attractiveness. The telephone partners of obese women rated the women and themselves more negatively than did the partners of nonobese women. Obese and nonobese women generally did not differ in their evaluations of their own and their telephone partners' behavior, and they also did not differ on a measure of social self-esteem. These findings suggest that there are real differences in the social behavior of obese and nonobese women and that these differences affect the impressions formed by those with whom they interact.     

Gender patterns in social touch: the impact of setting and age

This study examined the impact of age of participants and the setting in which touch occurred on gender patterns in 799 instances of observed intentional touch. Gender asymmetry, a pattern in which men are more likely to touch women than vice versa, was observed when touch between adults was examined but not when touch involving children was examined. Adult touch interactions occurring in public, nonintimate settings showed gender asymmetry, but adult touch interactions occurring in greeting or leave-taking settings did not. Cross-sex touch was more prevalent among adults, whereas same-sex touch was more prevalent when a child was involved. Implications for theoretical perspectives on gender and touch are discussed.     

Suspicion of ulterior motivation and the correspondence bias

Three studies examined the hypothesis that when perceivers learn of the existence of multiple, plausibly rival motives for an actor's behavior, they are less likely to fall prey to the correspondence bias than when they learn of the existence of situational factors that may have constrained the actor's behavior. In the first 2 studies, Ss who learned that an actor was instructed to behave as he did drew inferences that corresponded to his behavior. In contrast, Ss who were led to suspect that an actor's behavior may have been motivated by a desire to ingratiate (Study 1), or by a desire to avoid an unwanted job (Study 2), resisted the correspondence bias. The 3rd study demonstrated that these differences were not due to a general unwillingness on the part of suspicious perceivers to make dispositional inferences. The implications that these results have for understanding attribution theory are discussed.     

Imagery vividness, hypnotic susceptibility, and the perception of fragmented stimuli

Two experiments were conducted to determine the role of hypnotic susceptibility level (high or low) and imaging ability (vivid or poor) in the performance of gestalt closure tasks. In Experiment 1, subjects were required to identify fragmented stimuli in the Closure Speed Test and in the Street Test. In Experiment 2, subjects reported on fragmented stimuli that were projected to the right eye and subsequently produced an afterimage. Individuals were asked to identify the composite if possible and to report on the duration of the afterimage. In both experiments, hypnotic susceptibility level and imaging ability affected reports of gestalt closure. The greatest number of correct closures was reported by those who were both high in hypnotic susceptibility and vivid in imaging ability. In addition, in the second experiment, this group also reported the longest enduring afterimage. These results are discussed in terms of the processes required to perform in a gestalt closure task.