Gender-Role Attitudes in University Students in the United States, Slovenia, and Croatia

Determinants of gender-role attitudes were examined in samples of university students from Pittsburgh in the United States, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Osijek in Croatia. Surveys including items from the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and the Neosexism Scale were administered to a total of 1,544 U.S. students, 912 Slovene students, and 996 Croatian students between the years of 1991 and 2000. As predicted, men held less egalitarian or more sexist attitudes about the appropriate roles for women and men, and those with more frequent attendance at religious services held more sexist attitudes. No changes in attitudes were found for women over time, but Slovene males were found to become more traditional over time.     

SOCIALIZATION IN TRADITIONAL SOCIETY: A CHALLENGE TO PSYCHOLOGY

This paper discusses problems of Third-World psychology and its potential relevance for development. Child socialization in the traditional society is discussed as an example of a problem area where psychology could have an impact in the Third World. Specifically, the concept of autonomy is analyzed within the context of socialization as an illustration of the difficulty faced in the unquestioned application of Western psychology in non-Western society. Some of the findings of the cross-cultural Value of Children Study are examined as a case in point. On the basis of the above discussions, a challenge to psychology is put forward both for its own sake as a science of human behavior and also for the sake of humanity.     

Personality and context-related factors of helping and helping-related affect during early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic

COVID-19 pandemic led to introduction of lockdown measures in many countries, while in Serbia the Government also introduced the curfew by which vulnerable groups of citizens were prohibited from leaving their homes at any time. In such a situation many citizens organized to voluntarily offer their help to those in isolation, which offered a unique opportunity to examine prosocial behavior in the natural setting of global crisis. This study examined the differences between non-helpers and helpers, as well as groups of helpers who provided their help to close or unknown others, in personality (prosocial tendencies, selfishness and communal narcissism) and context-related factors (situation specific empathy and fear) of prosocial behaviors. Additionally, the study also analyzed the helping-related affect among helpers, depending on the recipient of help and personality characteristics. Results revealed that groups of helpers with different recipients of help (close persons, unknown persons or both) were not different among each other, but they were different from non-helpers. Non-helpers were more selfish and had self-focused prosocial tendencies, and they showed less empathy towards people in isolation, compared to helper groups. However, the helping-related affect depended on the recipient of help and helper's personality traits. This study confirmed some previous findings and offered novel insights into factors related to helping in crises.     

Persistent crying and parenting: Search for a butterfly in a dynamic system

The risks and causes of persistent crying in early infancy are discussed on the basis of a study of 61 infants referred to the Munich Interdisciplinary Research and Intervention Program for Fussy Babies for persistent crying between 1 and 6 months of age, and of a community sample of 51 infants of the same age. Particular attention was paid to pre-verbal parent-infant communication, the development of which was interpreted in terms of a dynamic interactional system including both regulatory and communicative predispositions in infants and intuitive competence for supporting infant predispositions in parents. Neither a gut problem nor any other single causal factor was identified for persistent crying in the majority of cases. In contrast, persistent crying was significantly associated with multiple biological and psychosocial risk factors for both parents and infants. Neurological immaturity, difficult temperament and sleep problems in infants, and impaired psychological conditions, limited resources and failures of intuitive competences in mothers were found to threaten the developmental process in infants and give rise to ‘vicious circles’ which were destabilizing the interactional systems. Increased attention to intuitive parental competences is recommended as one effective model for therapeutic interventions.     

Melodies in caregivers' speech: A species-specific guidance towards language

The author reports on a series of integrated studies on melodic contours in infant-directed (ID) speech. ID melodies in speech are taken as an instructive example of intuitive parenting in order to review current evidence on its forms, functions and determinants. The forms and functions of melodic prototypes are compared in terms of universal properties and individual and/or cultural variability across samples of German, Chinese and American mothers, and German mothers and fathers with their 2- and 3-month-old infants. Microanalyses of interactional contexts show that forms and functions of ID melodies are intimately related to typical dimensions of intuitive caregiving–arousing/soothing, turnyielding/turn-closing, approving/disapproving. The communicative functions of ID melodies as both categorical and graded signals are discussed with respect to the current knowledge on infant responses to ID speech and on early speech perception. According to a comprehensive longitudinal study of ID speech in relation to stages of infant vocalization, ID speech results from fine-tuned adjustments in various prosodic and linguistic features to developmental changes in infants' perceptual and vocal competence. ID melodies evidently have the potential to draw infant attention to caregivers' speech, to regulate arousal and affect in infants, to provide models for imitation, to guide infants in practising communicative subroutines and to mediate linguistic information. Current evidence suggests that the melodies in caregivers' speech provide a species-specific guidance towards language acquisition.     

Sensorimotor synchronization: Motor responses to pseudoregular auditory patterns

Musically trained and untrained subjects (N=30) were asked to synchronize their finger tapping with stimuli in auditory patterns. Each pattern comprised six successive tonal stimuli of the same duration, the first of which was accented by a different frequency. The duration of interstimulus onset intervals (ISIs) gradually increased or decreased in constant steps toward the end of the patterns. Four values of such steps were used in different trials: 20, 30, 45, and 60 msec. Various time-control mechanisms are hypothesized as being simultaneously responsible for subjects’ incorrect reproduction of the internal temporal ratios of the stimulus patterns. The mechanism of assimilation (of a central tendency) led subjects to enforce a regular (isochronous) structure on the patterns. The influence of other time-control mechanisms (distinction, subjective expression of an accent, sequential transfer) was expressed mainly in differences between intertap onset intervals (ITIs) and the corresponding ISIs at the beginning of the patterns. The duration of the first two ITIs was in the majority of the trials in an inverse ratio to the ratio of the respective ISIs. The distortions resulting from the timing mechanisms concerned were more pronounced in the performance of nonmusicians than in that of musicians.     

A.R. Luria's role in the development of soviet psychology

Summary A.R. Luria is one of the most outstanding Soviet psychologists. He played a great role in the development of Soviet psychology and in the formulation of psychological problems on the basis of dialectical materialism. Together with L.S. Vygotskij and A.N. Leont'ev, he put forward a theory of the socio-historical genesis of higher, specifically human, mental functions. Luria carried out numerous investigations into the ontogenetic and historical development of these functions, as well as their disturbance with local brain lesions. As the founder, in the Soviet Union, of the new discipline of neuropsychology, he made a very significant contribution to the study of the cerebral mechanisms of mental activity.Originally published in Voprosy Psichologii 28 (4), 106–115 (1978), and translated by E. Scheerer. The translator gratefully acknowledges the help of Eunice and Josef Broek and Sonia Argyle     

Recollecting the Religious: Augustine in Answer to Meno’s Paradox

Studies in Philosophy and Education - Philosophers of education often view the role of religion in education with suspicion, claiming it to be impossible, indoctrinatory or controversial unless...