Relationships Between Sex-Role Attitudes, Division of Household Tasks, and Marital Adjustment

Relationships between sex-role attitudes, household tasks, and marital adjustment were explored. Eighty-five married couples completed the Osmond-Martin Sex Role Attitude Scale (Osmond & Martin, 1975), the Krausz Household Task scale (Krausz, 1986) and the Dyadic Adjustment Scale (Spanier, 1976). Modern husbands reported greater marital adjustment than traditional husbands. Traditional spouses reported more traditionally male household tasks being completed by husbands and traditionally female tasks being completed by wives. Spouses reported greater marital adjustment when husbands completed male tasks. Sex-role attitudes and household tasks related independently to marital adjustment. The results support assessing husbands and wives separately. Clinicians are advised to assess couples' sex-role attitudes while maintaining neutral attitudes themselves. Several clinical techniques are offered.     

Experiential Tasks and Therapist Bias Awareness

All therapists have values, assumptions, and beliefs about groups of people who are different from the dominant culture. How the therapeutic process is shadowed by therapists' assumptions and attitudes toward ethnic minorities is discussed. The author provides experiential techniques such as visualization, role playing, role reversal, family sculpturing, and a written assignment as a vehicle to heighten a family therapists' awareness of underlying assumptions and biases toward clients of an ethnic minority.     

Postural stabilization for the control of touching

We attempted to distinguish between task-related (supra-postural) and perceptual influences on postural motions. Two groups of participants had to make very light tactile contact with an adjacent pliable surface while standing with their eyes closed. In the absence of vision, such light touching with a finger is known to reduce sway. For one group, tactile contact with the surface was merely the result of extending the right forearm. For the other group, variability in the point of tactile contact had to be kept to a minimum. Touching reduced postural sway relative to non-touching only for participants in the latter group. The present results, in combination with others addressing similar task differences, question the assumption that information detected haptically and/or visually is used solely to reduce postural fluctuations. It seems that postural fluctuations are modulated to facilitate performance of tasks over and above the task of standing upright and still.     

Sexually dimorphic effect of an acute smoking manipulation on skin resistance but not on heart-rate during a cognitive verbal task

In a two-day, two-session experiment where smokers male and female college-student subjects worked on a cognitive verbal task during either the first or second day, and on a cognitive spatial task on the second or first day, smoking was manipulated as an acute independent variable by requiring 10+ hours of pre-experimental abstention, and providing a cigarette during the 15-minute rest period between the two sessions. Non-smoker female and male subjects underwent the same experiment, and hence served as controls for the effects of this acute-smoking manipulation. Overall adaptation (decreased arousal) to the experiment was manifested in a significant increase in skin resistance level (SRL) in all subjects, but when this adaptation effect was statistically controlled, there was a significant smokers by sex interaction during the verbal task only, such that SRL was increased by the cigarette in males, but decreased in females. In contrast, the same analysis indicated only a marked increase in heart-rate (HR) due to smoking, which was unaffected either by sex or by whether the task was the verbal or the (easier) spatial one. We interpret the SRL results as reflecting a sex difference in the direction of transient psychological arousal, and discuss it in relation to evidence in the literature based on self reports, and to evidence (based on HR in this study and on blood pressure in other studies) on physiological (cardiovascular) arousal.     

Judgment in a dynamic task: Microburst forecasting

The major goals of this research are to (a) study professionals engaging in dynamic, representative task conditions, (b) apply lens model theory to these conditions, (c) learn how judgments are changed in response to changing conditions, and (d) utilize a hierarchical judgment model to investigate the judgment process from perception of data to final judgment. The results indicate that (a) agreement regarding inferred cue values is modest, not because of differences in perception of proximal, directly observed cue values but because of differences in inferences drawn from them, (b) agreement in probability judgments is higher when inferred cue values are specified, (c) little change in judgments occurred over time, and (d) confidence increased over time. The results regarding agreement and accuracy over time were ambiguous.     

THE RELATION BETWEEN CHOOSING AND WORKING PREVOCATIONAL TASKS IN TWO SEVERELY RETARDED YOUNG ADULTS

This study investigated the relation between prevocational preference, as measured by the client's selection of a task object, and the work that followed that choice. After selecting a task object, the clients worked a task previously assessed to be more or less preferred than the one indicated by the object. The results indicated that when the selection represented a task that was less preferred than the one actually worked, choices for that object increased on subsequent trials. Conversely, when the selection represented a task that was more preferred than the task subject actually worked, choices for the object decreased on subsequent trials. The work that followed object choices reinforced or punished subsequent selections. These findings indicated that the clients' object choices were valid indicators of their preference for working different tasks. They were also consistent with Premack's principle that one class of responses may reinforce or punish a different class of responses for the same individual.     

Gender Roles: An Examination of the Hopes and Expectations of the Next Generation of Managers in Canada and China

Through a survey of 214 Canadian and 160 Chinese business students, we investigated students hopes and expectations regarding their future spouses employment and family roles relative to their own. The results of this exploratory study show that a large proportion of the students from both countries hope for equality between spouses, especially in the distribution of domestic tasks. However, significant discrepancies exist between their ideal hopes and their expectations of what will actually happen in reality. Many men and women of both countries expect that the wives will do more of the domestic work and have less prestigious jobs and lower earnings than their husbands. The between-sex and cross-national differences in gender role hopes and expectations were also explored.     

Mothers' beliefs and children's long-term cognitive change: A developmental task interpretation

A longitudinal study was used to explore the following hypotheses concerning the relation between mothers' beliefs, their use of high distancing utterances and children's cognitive development: (1) beliefs moderate the impact of high-distancing utterances on children's development, and (2) beliefs reflect mothers' normative expectations that motivate themselves and their children to try to satisfy them. The participants consisted of 34 children and their mothers and teachers. Results for the motherchild dialogues indicated that the distancing–cognitive performance relationship was strongest for children whose mothers had the most positive beliefs. In addition, mothers' beliefs about a 4-year-old child were more strongly related to children's cognitive performance at ages 6 and 10 than to cognitive performance at age 4. Characteristics of both verbal parent–child and verbal teacher–child interactions at age 4 supported a developmental task interpretation of these findings.     

高等师范院校公共课心理学整体改革建议

本文作者在实践的基础上,针对我国高等师范院校公共课心理学存在的问题,提出三点整体改革建议;1.在思想上明确认识该课程的双重任务;2.在教材建设方面,强调按照认知因素、非智力因素、社会心理因素和教师心理因素建构新的教材体系,教材内容突出应用性和可读性;3.教学过程教师要结合学生的专业特点。采用多种教学形式与方法传授教材内容。