Benevolent Sexism Toward Men and Women: Justification of the Traditional System and Conventional Gender Roles in Spain

The present study aimed to explore sexist attitudes in young people and to investigate the role of these ideologies in the contribution of boys and girls to housework. For this purpose, 139 Spanish high school students (67 females and 72 males) responded to the ASI and AMI scales (Glick and Fiske in Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70:491–512, 1996, Psychology of Women Quarterly 23:519–536, 1999) and assessed their contribution to housework in tasks considered traditionally done by women (highly gender-typed) or more neutral tasks (sex-neutral). Results showed that girls contributed significantly more to housework than boys. In addition, correlation analyses showed that benevolent sexism toward women, men and hostility toward men were significant related to highly gender typed tasks only in the female sample. This result shows the relevance of sexist ideologies in maintaining established differences between genders.     

Emotions,Public Opinion,and U.S. Presidential Approval Rates: A 5‐Year Analysis of Online Political Discussions

This article examines how emotional reactions to political events shape public opinion. We analyze political discussions in which people voluntarily engage online to approximate the public agenda: Online discussions offer a natural approach to the salience of political issues and the means to analyze emotional reactions as political events take place in real time. We measure shifts in emotions of the public over a period that includes 2 U.S. presidential elections, the 9/11 attacks, and the start of military action in Afghanistan and Iraq. Our findings show that emotional reactions to political events help explain approval rates for the same period, which casts novel light on the mechanisms that mediate the association between agenda setting and political evaluations.     

Is it Morally Wrong to Defend Unjust Causes as a Lawyer?

The question I address in this article is whether it is morally wrong for a lawyer to represent a client whose purpose is immoral or unjust. My answer to this question is that it is wrong, prima facie. This conclusion holds, even accepting certain traditional principles of lawyer's professional ethics, such as the right of defence and the so‐called principle of ‘adversarial’ litigation. Both the adversarial system and the right of defence are sufficient to support or justify the right of potential clients (and citizens in general) to defend their interests in the judicial system and to do so with the technical assistance of a lawyer. This right includes a right to pursue unjust or immoral purposes (within the law). However, having a right to do X does not mean that it is morally permissible to do X. We can have a right to do something morally wrong. This being so, the fundamental moral reason for a lawyer not to accept representation for a client with an immoral purpose is that it is, prima facie, morally wrong to help someone do something wrong.     

Doctors' decision-making on giving information to cancer patients

Abstract

A major focus in the literature about doctor-patient communication is information-giving. In the case of cancer patients, one significant issue is which factors determine whether and how, general practitioners and oncologists give information to their patients. Whatever may be the content of information, the most important choice for the doctor is to give information or not. Our research group at the Department of Health Psychology has conducted investigations in order to identify the significant determinants of decisions concerning giving information to cancer patients. A sample of 60 doctors from Alicante province in Spain were asked their criteria for giving information about a cancer diagnosis. Results showed that perceived intelligence and emotional control in the patients were the best predicotrs of the decision by doctors to give information. Age and socio-economic status were also significantly associated with the doctors' information-giving practices. These data suggest that the criteria for giving information to cancer patients are subjective and show a strong cultural influence.     

Does the type of judgement required modulate cue competition?

According to the comparator process hypothesis (Matute, Arcediano, & Miller, 1996), cue competition in the learning of between-events relationships arises if the judgement required involves a comparison between the probability of the outcome given the target cue and the probability of the outcome given the competing cue. Alternatively, other associative accounts (the Rescorla-Wagner model: Rescorla &Wagner, 1972) conceive cue competition as a learning deficit affecting the target cue-outcome association. Consequently, the comparator process hypothesis predicts that cue competition occurs in inference judgements but not in contiguity ones, for only the first type of judgement implicitly involves such a comparison. On the other hand, the Rescorla-Wagner model predicts cue competition in both inference and contiguity judgements, because it establishes no relevant role for the type of judgement in producing cue competition. In Experiments 1 and 2 we manipulated the relative validity of cues and the type of question (inference vs. contiguity) in a predictive learning task. In both experiments we found a cue competition effect, but no interaction between the relative validity of cues and the type of question, suggesting that the Rescorla-Wagner theory suffices to explain cue competition.