Gender Differences in Reactions to Mental Illness Labeling: The Role of Agency and Communion

Numerous individual characteristics influence responses to receiving a mental health diagnosis, including gender. This study sought to determine how gender influences reactions to being labeled as depressed or not depressed, which were categorized as falling into themes of communion or agency. Using the themes developed by Niedzwienska (2003), 168 college students’ responses to depression labels were coded as a part of a laboratory experiment. The results indicate that the expected sex differences do exist, but multivariate analyses indicate that the choice of communal themes was influenced by sex but the use of agency themes was not influenced by sex.     

Rhesus Monkeys (Macaca mulatta) Maintain Learning Set Despite Second-Order Stimulus-Response Spatial Discontiguity

The Psychological Record - In many discrimination-learning tests, spatial separation between stimuli and response loci disrupts performance in rhesus macaques. However, monkeys are unaffected by...     

A Stroop-like effect in color-naming of color-word lexigrams by a chimpanzee (Pan troglodyte)

The Stroop effect (J. R. Stroop, 1935) reflects the difficulty in ignoring irrelevant, but automatically processed, semantic information that is inherent in certain stimuli. With humans, researchers have found this effect when they asked participants to name the color of the letters that make up a word that is incongruent with that color. The authors tested a chimpanzee that had learned to associate geometric symbols called lexigrams with specific colors. When the chimpanzee had to make different responses that depended on the color of stimuli presented to her, she showed a Stroop-like effect when researchers presented to her the previously learned symbols for colors in incongruent font colors. Her accuracy performance was significantly poorer with these stimuli than with congruent color-referent lexigrams, noncolor-referent lexigrams, and nonlexigram stimuli, although there were not any significant differences in response latency. The authors' results demonstrated color-word interference in a Stroop task with a nonhuman animal.     

Rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta), video tasks, and implications for stimulus-response spatial contiguity

Recent reports (Iwai, Yaginuma, & Mishkin, 1986; Yaginuma & Iwai, 1986) have supported the earlier conclusion by Meyer, Treichler, and Meyer (1965) and by Stollnitz (1965) that the efficiency of primate learning is compromised to the degree that there is spatial discontiguity between discriminanda and the locus of response. The research reported in this article calls for a reconsideration of this conclusion. Two rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) easily mastered precise control of a joystick to respond to a variety of computer-generated targets despite the fact that the joystick was located 9 to 18 cm from the video screen. We hold that stimulus-response contiguity is a significant parameter of learning only to the degree that the monkey visually attends to the directional movements of its hand in order to displace discriminanda as in the Wisconsin General Test Apparatus. If, instead, attention is focused on the effects of the hand's movement rather than on the hand itself, stimulus-response contiguity is no longer a primary parameter of learning. The implications of this work for mirror-guided studies are discussed.     

The Heuristic and Motivational Value of Video Reinforcement

Four rhesus monkeys (Macaca mulatta) were tested on joystick-based computer tasks in which they could choose to be reinforced either with pellets-only or with pellets + video. A variety of videotapes were used to reinforce task performance. The monkeys significantly preferred to be rewarded with a pellet and 10 s of a blank screen than a pellet plus 10 s of videotape. When they did choose to see videotaped images, however, they were significantly more likely to view video of themselves than video of their roommate or of unfamiliar conspecifics. These data support earlier findings of individual differences in preference for video reinforcement, and have clear implications for the study of face-recognition and self-recognition by nonhuman primates.     

Some aspects of the interpersonal phenomenology of heterosexual dyads with respect to sex-role stereotypes

A technique based upon recently developed Boolean calculi for interpersonal phenomenology was used to study sex-role attributions within 59 heterosexual dyads. The interpersonal and intrapersonal variables studied include perceived similarity, validation of self-concept, expectations of agreement, feelings of being understood, predictions that the partner expects agreement, understanding, accurate perception of understanding/misunderstanding, and accurate perception of expectations on agreement/disagreement. All variables were studied in relation to each member of the dyad and in relation to male and female sex-role stereotypes. Analyses of all variables are consistent with two conclusions: (1) Phenomenal disparity in a relationship is more likely to be generated around male sex-role stereotypes than around female sex-role stereotypes; (2) phenomenal disparity in a relationship is most likely to occur in connection with counter-sex-role attributions to the female. Increased uncertainty regarding counter-sex-role attributions about women and lowered validation of self-concept for women who adopt counter-sex-role attributes are shown to contribute to these effects. These conclusions are seen as a reflection of an asymmetry which seems to be consistent in the literature: Counter-sex-role choices and attitudes seem to be less discordant for males than for females in this culture. Evidence of this asymmetry is discussed.     

In Godlessness We Distrust: Using Social Psychology to Solve the Puzzle of Anti‐atheist Prejudice

Most people believe in a god of some sort. Nonetheless, there are hundreds of millions of atheists in the world, and they face considerable discrimination and prejudice. This is a puzzling form of prejudice: Atheists do not form a coherent group, they are individually inconspicuous, and they are not, in general, oppositional or threatening. Recent research in social, evolutionary, and cultural psychology, however, offers suggestions for solving the puzzle of anti‐atheist prejudice, in terms of both uncovering its psychological causes and also suggesting interventions for reducing it. Antipathy towards atheists derives specifically from moral distrust – to many people, belief in a watchful, moralizing god is seen as a uniquely powerful and perhaps necessary component of morality. Without religious belief, atheists are viewed as moral wildcards who cannot be trusted. This unique basis in turn implies specific ways in which distrust of atheists might be ameliorated.