The Role of Sympathy and Altruistic Personality Traits in Helping: A Reexamination

The purposes of this study were (a) to examine the role of social evaluative concerns in the self-report of sympathy and in the relation of sympathy to helping; and (b) to determine the role of "altruistic personality" traits and situationally induced vicarious emotional responses in the intention to help. Dispositional and situational self-reports of sympathy and other vicarious emotional reactions were obtained for persons who also were given the opportunity to assist a needy other. Moreover, dispositional measures of concern with social evaluation and an altruistic orientation were obtained, and a bogus pipeline manipulation was instituted for half the study participants. Both dispositional and situational self-reported sympathy were positively related to helping, as were other personality indices viewed as reflecting altruistic characteristics. The relations for the dispositional indices of sympathy were not due solely to social evaluative concerns or to other egoistic concerns. The effects on intended helping of dispositional sympathy, perspective taking, and the tendency to ascribe responsibility for others to the self appeared to be both direct and mediated by situational sympathetic responding. Finally, situational sadness did not mediate the effects of sympathetic responsiveness.     

The psychophysiology of combat-induced post-traumatic stress disorder in Vietnam veterans

The psychophysiological responses of heart rate (HR), systolic and diastolic blood pressure, skin conductance level and forehead electromyogram were compared during: rest, mental arithmetic and combat sounds of gradually increasing intensity for five groups of Ss: Vietnam veterans with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD); Vietnam veterans without PTSD but with comparable levels of combat experience; Vietnam veterans with other psychiatric disorders; Vietnam-era veterans; and nonveteran phobics. HR response to low-intensity combat sounds provided good discrimination between veterans with PTSD and the other groups and seems to resemble a conditioned emotional response.     

An evaluation of the family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scales and the circumplex model

Two basic assumptions of the Circumplex Model of family systems were evaluated: (1) Healthy families evidence balanced degrees of cohesion and adaptability, whereas problem families evidence extreme degrees, and (2) families with balanced degrees of cohesion and adaptability possess more positive communication skills than families with extreme degrees. Subjects were 58 mother-son dyads from father-absent families. In 29 of the families the adolescent was a juvenile offender, while in the remaining families there was no history of arrest or psychiatric referral. The dyads completed the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scales (FACES) and an unrevealed differences interaction task. FACES was highly proficient at differentiating delinquent from nondelinquent families. Moreover, in families with balanced degrees of cohesion and adaptability, the mothers' communication was significantly more supportive and explicit, and the dyads evidenced significantly greater warmth and affection than dyads with extreme degrees.This research was supported by funding to the Department of Psychology at Memphis State University granted through the Centers of Excellence Program of the State of Tennessee. We thank the staff of the Memphis-Metro Youth Diversion Project for their consideration and assistance.     

Time course of visual information utilization during fixations in reading

College students read short texts from a cathode-ray tube as their eye movements were being monitored. During selected fixations, the text was briefly masked and then it reappeared with one word changed. Subjects often were unaware that the word had changed. Sometimes they reported seeing the first presented word, sometimes the second presented word, and sometimes both. When only one word was reported, two factors were found to determine which one it was: the length of time a word was present during the fixation and the predictability of a word in its context. The results suggested that visual information is utilized for reading at a crucial period during the fixation and that this crucial period can occur at different times on different fixations. The pattern of responses suggested that the first letter of a word is not utilized before other letters and that letters are not scanned from left to right during a fixation.     

Political Ideology Outdoes Personal Experience in Predicting Support for Gender Equality

Indices of gender equality provide an inconsistent picture of current gender inequality in countries with relatively high equality. We examined women's and men's subjectively perceived gender inequality and their support for gender equality in the general population and in politicians, respectively, in three countries with relatively high gender equality: the United States, the United Kingdom, and Germany (total N = 1,612). In both women's and men's perceptions, women were treated more unequally than men. However, the inequality that women perceived was larger than the inequality men perceived. Additionally, women reported they personally experience less inequality than women as a group (person-group discrepancy). Finally, women's and men's left/liberal (vs. right/conservative) political ideology turned out to be a relatively more powerful predictor of support for gender equality than perceived personal and societal inequality. We discuss reasons for why political ideology emerged as the strongest predictor of equality support and sketch out implications for policy efforts toward promoting gender equality.