The Social Roles Questionnaire: A New Approach to Measuring Attitudes Toward Gender

Innovative research is constrained by instruments that assume gender to be captured by dichotomous categories. This article presents the results of two studies that document the psychometric properties of the Social Roles Questionnaire (SRQ), a new measure of gender role attitudes. A social constructivist perspective guided the development of the instrument that was designed not only to capture the diversity in people’s thinking about social roles for men and women, but also to identify attitudes that transcend binary categories. The article details the process of assessing reliability and validity based on data from 414 undergraduates. Findings revealed the SRQ is reliable and valid and that women were more likely than men to endorse egalitarian and gender transcendent beliefs. Additional possible uses of the SRQ are discussed.     

From an axiological standpoint

I maintain that intrinsic value is the fundamental concept of axiology. Many contemporary philosophers disagree; they say the proper object of value theory is final value. I examine three accounts of the nature of final value: the first claims that final value is non‐instrumental value; the second claims that final value is the value a thing has as an end; the third claims that final value is ultimate or non‐derivative value. In each case, I argue that the concept of final value described is either identical with the classical notion of intrinsic value or is not a plausible candidate for the primary concept of axiology.     

Searching for Common Ground between Supporters and Opponents of Affirmative Action

Supporters and opponents of affirmative action are often characterized as debating about a single, consensually understood type of affirmative action. However, supporters and opponents instead may have different types of policies in mind when thinking about affirmative action and may actually agree on specific manifestations of affirmative action policies more than is commonly believed. A survey conducted using a student sample and a sample from the broader Chicago-area community showed that affirmative action policies can be characterized into merit-violating versus merit-upholding manifestations. Supporters of affirmative action in general were more likely to think of affirmative action in its merit-upholding manifestations, whereas opponents were more likely to think of the merit-violating manifestations. However, both supporters and opponents showed more support for merit-upholding rather than merit-violating manifestations of affirmative action. The same pattern of results was upheld even when splitting the samples into those who endorsed negative racial attitudes versus those who did not, suggesting that even those who may be considered racist will endorse affirmative action policies that uphold merit values. The results are discussed in terms of the importance of clarifying the political discourse about what affirmative action is and what it is designed to do.     

Assessing inhibitory control: a revised approach to the stop signal task

The stop signal task (stop task) is designed to assess inhibitory control and is a frequently used research tool in clinical disorders such as ADHD and schizophrenia. Previous methods of setting stop signal delay and of assessing inhibitory control are problematic. The current study reports two modifications that improve the task as a measure of inhibitory control. The first modification was to set stop signal delays proportional to go mean reaction time (go MRT) to better account for inter-subject variability in go MRT. Twenty-eight normal children were tested, and all standard, stop task dependent measures were obtained when delays were set by this method. The second modification was to calculate a novel dependent measure called the area of inhibition (AOI) which provides a more complete measure of inhibitory control than the slope of the relative finishing time z-scores (ZRFT-slope). Implications for the assessment of inhibitory control in clinical populations are discussed.     

A rapid technique for visualizing cerebral arteries in rat.

Intracardiac perfusion with cresyl violet acetate dissolved in 0.9% isotonic saline and dimethyl sulfoxide (DMSO) allows one to visualize the arterial blood supply to the central hemispheres. This technique is especially useful in demonstrating the ramifications of and areas supplied by the middle cerebral artery. Many individual differences in the course traversed by the artery and the distal areas supplied were observed. This technique could prove to be a useful adjunct to neurohistological techniques in studies investigating rodent models of stroke.     

Differentiating the N3 and N4 electrophysiological semantic incongruity effects

An event-related potential termed the N4 has been widely studied due to its sensitivity to semantic incongruity. A recent report (Nobre & McCarthy, 1994) indicates there is also an N3 component that is sensitive to semantic incongruity. To differentiate these two components, an existing data set with 65 electrode sites, 78 subjects, and 120 sentences was examined. Instead of the usual procedure of averaging over the stimuli within distinct categories for each subject, a new approach--averaging over subjects--was employed. In this item average approach, 120 averages (one per sentence) were produced. Correlational analyses indicate that the N3 is equally sensitive to cloze probability and sentential constraint. The N4, by contrast, is more sensitive to sentential constraint and less to cloze probability; it is also correlated with familiarity. We interpret these results as evidence that the N3 is more responsive to semantic fit whereas the N4 is more responsive to semantic expectancy.