Gender Identity and Adjustment in Middle Childhood

This article has two purposes. The first is to present a brief (and speculative) account of the developmental origins of the several components of gender identity featured in the multidimensional model of gender identity proposed by Egan and Perry (2001). The second is to offer additional empirical support for the construct and discriminant validity of the various gender identity dimensions. Children (M age = 11.5 years) were assessed for 4 components of gender identity: (a) felt gender typicality, (b) contentment with gender assignment, (c) felt pressure for gender conformity, and (d) intergroup bias (the sentiment that one's own sex is superior). Gender typicality, gender contentedness, and felt pressure (but not intergroup bias) related to indexes of psychosocial adjustment in specific and theoretically meaningful ways. The case for a multidimensional approach to gender identity is strengthened.     

Using words instead of jumbled characters as stimuli in keyboard training facilitates fluent performance

Keyboarding skill is an important target for adult education programs due to the ubiquity of computers in modern work environments. A previous study showed that novice typists learned key locations quickly but that fluency took a relatively long time to develop. In the present study, novice typists achieved fluent performance in nearly half the time when words rather than jumbled characters were used as stimuli. This suggests that using real words in the keyboarding program can enhance the efficiency of training.     

Measuring implicit attitudes of 4-year-olds: the preschool implicit association test

The Preschool Implicit Association Test (PSIAT) is an adaptation of an established social cognition measure (IAT) for use with preschool children. Two studies with 4-year-olds found that the PSIAT was effective in evaluating (a) attitudes toward commonly liked objects (flowers = good) and (b) gender attitudes (girl = good or boy = good). The gender attitude PSIAT was positively correlated with corresponding explicit attitude measures and also children’s actual sex. The new implicit and explicit measures of gender attitudes demonstrated discriminant validity; each predicted variance in children’s gendered play activities beyond that predicted by the other. Discussion describes potential uses of the PSIAT to investigate development of societally significant attitudes and stereotypes at younger ages than are achievable with currently available methods.     

植入前组织配型孕育“救星同胞”的伦理思考

应用植入前遗传学诊断技术在胚胎植入母体子宫前,对人类白细胞组织相容性抗原配型检测,选择与现存患儿相同HLA配型的胚胎进行受孕,孕育一个组织配型相同的脐带血干细胞供者。在某种意义上说,该项技术的应用是创造人来获得移植组织,由此引发系列伦理争议。讨论孕育"救星同胞"这一医学实践内在需要的伦理规范。     

When a product takes on characteristics of the person who created it: Sometimes it sounds sweeter

We investigated when consumers' judgments about a product reflect information about its product source (the person who creates the product). Three experiments manipulated congruence between the source's gender and the gender-typing of the source's product. When congruent with expectations (a male conductor played male-typed music), pre-trial source information had the same effect on post-trial product judgments as when source information was absent. Incongruence (a female conductor played male-typed music) distorted product attribute judgments when the source's competence was questioned. Her music was judged to be more delicate, less powerful and worse quality than his. This process of product experience being assimilated into incompetence stereotypes required minimal cognitive resources. When the incongruent source was undoubtedly competent, the amount of experiential evidence about an attribute influenced distortion. Consumers judged powerful music as powerful regardless of conductor gender, but, lacking much evidence about its delicacy, judged hers as more delicate than his. The selective effect of source gender information reflects consumers' cognitively effortful hypothesis testing of beliefs that gender expresses itself in a person's output against experiential evidence.     

Observing behavior in a computer game.

Contingencies studied in lever-pressing procedures were incorporated into a popular computer game, "Star Trek," played by college students. One putative reinforcer, the opportunity to destroy Klingon invaders, was scheduled independently of responding according to a variable-time schedule that alternated unpredictably with equal periods of Klingon unavailability (mixed variable time, extinction schedule of reinforcement). Two commands ("observing responses") each produced stimuli that were either correlated or uncorrelated with the two components. In several variations of the basic game, an S-, or bad news, was not as reinforcing as an S+, or good news. In addition, in other conditions for the same subjects observing responses were not maintained better by bad news than by an uninformative stimulus. In both choices, more observing tended to be maintained by an S- for response-independent Klingons when its information could be (and was) used to advantage with respect to other types of reinforcement in the situation (Parts 1 and 2) than when the information could not be so used (Part 3). The findings favor the conditioned reinforcement hypothesis of observing behavior over the uncertainty-reduction hypothesis. This extends research to a more natural setting and to multialternative concurrent schedules of events of seemingly intrinsic value.     

A transfer of functions through derived arbitrary and nonarbitrary stimulus relations

During Experiments 1 and 2, subjects were trained in a series of related conditional discriminations in a matching-to-sample format (A1-B1, A1-C1 and A2-B2, A2-C2). A low-rate performance was then explicitly trained in the presence of B1, and a high-rate performance was explicitly trained in the presence of B2. The two types of schedule performance transferred to the C stimuli for all subjects in both experiments, in the absence of explicit reinforcement through equivalence (i.e., C1 = low rate and C2 = high rate). In Experiment 2, it was also shown that these discriminative functions transferred from the C1-C2 stimuli to two novel stimuli that were physically similar to the C stimuli (SC1 and SC2, respectively). For both these experiments, subjects demonstrated the predicted equivalence responding during matching-to-sample equivalence tests. In Experiments 3 and 4, the conditional discrimination training from the first two experiments was modified in that two further conditional discrimination tasks were trained (C1-D1 and C2-D2). However, for these tasks the D stimuli served only as positive comparisons, and ND1 and ND2 stimuli served as negative comparisons (i.e., C1 × ND1 and C2 × ND2). Subsequent to training, the negatively related stimuli (ND1 and ND2) did not become discriminative for the schedule performances explicitly trained in the presence of B1 and B2, respectively. Instead, the ND1 stimulus became discriminative for the schedule performance trained in the presence of B2, and ND2 became discriminative for the schedule performance trained in the presence of B1. All subjects from Experiment 4 showed that the novel stimulus SND1, which was physically similar to ND1, became discriminative for the same response pattern as that controlled by ND1. Similarly, SND2, which was physically similar to ND2, became discriminative for the same response pattern as that controlled by ND2. Subjects from both Experiments 3 and 4 also produced equivalence responding on matching-to-sample equivalence tests that corresponded perfectly to the derived performances shown on the transfer of discriminative control tests.     

Function transformation without reinforcement

In studies of function transformation, participants initially are taught to match stimuli in the presence of a contextual cue, X; the stimuli to be matched bear some formal relation to each other, for example, a relation of opposition or difference. In a second phase, the participants are taught to match arbitrary stimuli (say, A and B) in the presence of X. In a final test, A often displays behavioral functions that differ from those of B, and can be predicted from the nature of the relation associated with X in the initial training phase. Here we report function-transformation effects in the absence of selection responses and of their reinforcers. In three experiments with college students, exposure to relations of difference or identity modified the responses given to later stimuli. In Experiment 1, responses to a test stimulus A varied depending on preexposure to pairs of colors that were distinct from A but exemplified relations of difference or identity. In Experiment 2, a stimulus A acquired distinct functions, depending on its previous pairing with a contextual cue X that had itself been paired with identity or difference among colors. Experiment 3 confirmed the results of Experiment 2 with a modified design. Our data are consistent with the notion that relations of identity or difference can serve as stimuli for Pavlovian processes, and, in compound with other cues, produce apparent function-transformation effects.     

Gender differences in burnout: A meta-analysis

The literature on male-female differences in burnout has produced inconsistent results regarding the strength and direction of this relationship. Lack of clarity on gender differences in organizationally relevant phenomena, such as work burnout, frequently generates ungrounded speculations that may (mis)inform organizational decisions. To address this issue, we conducted a meta-analysis of the relationship between gender and burnout using 409 effect sizes from 183 studies. Results challenge the commonly help belief that female employees are more likely to experience burnout than male employees, revealing instead that women are slightly more emotionally exhausted than men (δ = .10), while men are somewhat more depersonalized than women (δ = −.19). Although these effects are small, they are practically noteworthy when translated into a percent overlap statistic. Moderator analyses further revealed some intriguing nuances to the general trends, such as larger gender differences in the USA compared to the EU. In contrast, gender differences did not vary significantly in male-typed vs. female-typed occupations. Our analyses also suggest discontinuation of the use of overall burnout measures because they are highly consistent with the emotional exhaustion dimension of burnout only.     

Bridging Curry and Church's typing style

There are two versions of type assignment in the λ-calculus: Church-style, in which the type of each variable is fixed, and Curry-style (also called “domain free”), in which it is not. As an example, in Church-style typing, ${\lambda }_{x:A}.x$ is the identity function on type A, and it has type $A\to A$ but not $B\to B$ for a type B different from A. In Curry-style typing, ${\lambda }_x.x$ is a general identity function with type $C\to C$ for every type C. In this paper, we will show how to interpret in a Curry-style system every Pure Type System (PTS) in the Church-style without losing any typing information. We will also prove a kind of conservative extension result for this interpretation, a result which implies that for most consistent PTSs of the Church-style, the corresponding Curry-style system is consistent. We will then show how to interpret in a system of the Church-style (a modified PTS, stronger than a PTS) every PTS-like system in the Curry style.