A Gender Analysis of Theories of Coping with Stress

In this article, various feminist theories are used to critique selected psychological theories of coping with stress, a reformulated coping theory is outlined, and recommendations for future research are made. To date, theories of coping often portray women as less able copers than the samples of men with whom they are compared. A reformulated theory, based on different women's experiences, explicitly examines the role of social forces (sexism, racism) and access to power as variables in the coping process rather than solely focusing on the individual. Selected examples of research that contribute to such a revision are given. Revised theories and methodologies will encourage the more accurate appraisal of women's coping abilities and generate information vital to the creation of more inclusive and representative theories of coping.     

Searching for signs, symbols, and icons: effects of time of day, visual complexity, and grouping

Searching for icons, symbols, or signs is an integral part of tasks involving computer or radar displays, head-up displays in aircraft, or attending to road traffic signs. Icons therefore need to be designed to optimize search times, taking into account the factors likely to slow down visual search. Three factors likely to adversely affect visual search were examined: the time of day at which search was carried out, the visual complexity of the icons, and the extent to which information features in the icon were grouped together. The speed with which participants searched icon arrays for a target was slower early in the afternoon, when icons were visually complex and when information features in icons were not grouped together to form a single object. Theories of attention that account for both feature-based and object-based search best explain these findings and are used to form the basis for ways of improving icon design.     

The effects of exergaming on physical activity among inactive children in a physical education classroom

Childhood obesity, which is due in part to lack of physical activity, is a serious concern that requires the attention of the behavioral community. Although excessive video game play has been noted in the literature as a contributor to childhood obesity, newer video gaming technology, called exergaming, has been designed to capitalize on the reinforcing effects of video games to increase physical activity in children. This study evaluated the effects of exergaming on physical activity among 4 inactive children in a physical education (PE) classroom. Results showed that exergaming produced substantially more minutes of physical activity and more minutes of opportunity to engage in physical activity than did the standard PE program. In addition, exergaming was socially acceptable to both the students and the PE teacher. Exergaming appears to hold promise as a method for increasing physical activity among inactive children and might be a possible intervention for childhood obesity.     

Transference occurs across group boundaries

Transference occurs when a perceiver's representation of a significant other is activated and applied to a new target person (Andersen & Chen, 2002). Extending past research, it was hypothesized that transference occurs even when a target person possesses a core feature—namely, group membership status—that is inapplicable to the relevant significant-other representation. Supporting this, transference led perceivers to make representation-consistent memory and evaluation judgments about a target—regardless of whether the target's political (experiment 1) or ethnic (experiment 2) group membership was the same or different from that of the relevant significant other. Moreover, in experiment 2, perceivers undergoing transference involving a positively evaluated significant other behaved more positively toward the target even when the target was from an ethnic out-group. The results represent initial evidence of transference processes occurring across group boundaries. Implications for transference and the reduction of out-group bias are discussed.     

The change-of-standard effect: Distorted standards and adjusted impressions

Previous accounts of the memory distortion known as the change-of-standard effect hypothesize that participants form a relative impression of a target at encoding and later use that impression with the average of all items to recall the target (Higgins & Lurie, 1983). In three experiments, we investigated the standard and the integration of the standard with the relative impression. Experiments 1 and 2 show that participants’ subjective average at recall is distorted toward recent stimuli: It is computed when required and is therefore affected by the items’ accessibility at that time. Furthermore, the impression’s influence on recall is relatively small when the context changes between encoding and decoding. Experiment 3 shows that this change in the impression’s influence occurs only when the participant integrates information across sessions, suggesting that such tasks make participants aware of the changed context and cause them to adjust the use of their impression in recalling the target.     

Personality variables and problem‐construction activities: An exploratory investigation

Problem‐construction and problem‐finding activities have been shown to have a marked impact on creative achievement. Although cognitive operations play an important role in problem construction, there is reason to suspect that personality variables might influence effective process application. In the present study we constructed measures of personality characteristics that might influence adaption to novel, ill‐defined tasks. These measures were administered to 250 undergraduates who were also asked to complete a problem‐construction task. A series of discriminant analyses indicated that personality variables could be used to identify individuals who generated high‐quality, original problems. The implications of our findings for understanding exactly how personality variables interact with cognitive operations in the problem‐construction process are discussed.