Controlling the uncontrollable: effects of stress on illusory perceptions of controllability.

Individuals' failure to exercise actual control over an event might be compensated for by trying to bolster a generalized, subjective sense of control. Control might then be sought by undertaking acts the effect of which on the environment is illusory. This observation led to the hypothesis that stress, which undermines persons' sense of control, would engender illusory perceptions of controllability. The hypothesis was tested in 3 experiments that required Ss to choose between 2 gambling forms. Although the 2 forms were essentially identical, 1 was designed to instill an illusion of control. The results showed that highly stressed Ss, compared with those who experienced low stress, preferred gambling forms that heightened perceptions of controllability.     

Giving Credit Where Credit Is Due: A Case of No Sex Bias in Attribution1

This study examines the effects of informational cues on the attribution of success in a masculine task. Israeli managers (subjects) first evaluated the performance of a fictitious male/female manager and then attributed a cause to his/her success in attaining the managerial position. As predicted, performance evaluation affected the attribution and manager sex did not. An unexpected association between leadership style and attribution was found. Implications of these findings for female managers and for further research are considered.     

The origins of levels-of-processing effects in a conceptual test: evidence for automatic influences of memory from the process-dissociation procedure

In three experiments, we explored automatic influences of memory in a conceptual memory task, as affected by a levels-of-processing (LoP) manipulation. We also explored the origins of the LoP effect by examining whether the effect emerged only when participants in the shallow condition truncated the perceptual processing (the lexical-processing hypothesis) or even when the entire word was encoded in this condition (the conceptual-processing hypothesis). Using the process-dissociation procedure and an implicit association-generation task, we found that the deep encoding condition yielded higher estimates of automatic influences than the shallow condition. In support of the conceptual processing hypothesis, the LoP effect was found even when the shallow task did not lead to truncated processing of the lexical units. We suggest that encoding for meaning is a prerequisite for automatic processing on conceptual tests of memory.     

Still Marginal: Women in Israel's 1996 Television Election Campaign

The underlying assumption of our study was thatimages of women in election campaigns reflect parties'ideological stance toward women's role in society and,at the same time, perpetuate worldviews, granting them further legitimization. In view of changeswhich took place recently in the Israeli politicalsystem, in the media environment, and in the socialstatus of women, the study examines gender equality issues expressed in the 1996 campaign comparedto the first Israeli TV election campaign in 1988. Thestudy presents detailed quantitative and qualitativeanalyses of all the TV broadcasts included in the campaign. The results indicate that changeswhich took place in Israeli society were not reflectedin the 1996 campaign. Contrary to expectations,persistent biases typical of traditional genderrepresentations in the media prevailed. Moreover, women'sissues were marginal. Factors related to women's statusin Israeli society, the nature of Israeli politics, andthe changing media environment which may account for these results are discussed.     

Cue-type manipulation dissociates two types of task set inhibition: backward inhibition and competitor rule suppression

Backward inhibition (BI) reflects the suppression of a recently abandoned task set to allow for smooth transition to a new task even when the rules do not generate a response conflict. Competitor rule suppression (CRS) reflects the inhibition/suppression of irrelevant task rules when these rules generate a response conflict even if they have not recently been abandoned. We assessed whether BI and CRS are differentially affected by the difficulty in retrieving category-response mappings from memory. Retrieval demands were manipulated via the information provided by the task cues, which either indicated the relevant dimension (dimension cues; “color”) or the relevant dimension with its category-to-key mapping (mapping cues; “red green”, indicating that “red” and “green” go with the left/right responses, respectively). CRS was larger with dimension compared to mapping cues when cue-type varied between groups and was larger after trials involving dimension cues when cue-type varied on a trial-by-trial basis. In contrast, BI was not influenced by cue-type. These results suggest that task switching involve at least two distinct inhibitory processes, with CRS being related to the ease of retrieval of category-response mappings from memory.     

Right visual-field advantage in the attentional blink: Asymmetry in attentional gating across time and space

When two targets are presented in a rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP), recognition of the second target (T2) is usually reduced when presented 150–500 ms after the first target, demonstrating an attentional blink (AB). Previous studies have shown a left visual-field (LVF) advantage in T2 recognition, when T2 was embedded in one of two streams, demanding top-down attention for its recognition. Here, we explored the impact of bottom-up saliency on spatial asymmetry in the AB. When T2 was spatially shifted outside from the RSVP, creating an abrupt onset of T2, right T2s showed a right visual-field (RVF) advantage. In lag-1 trials, right T2s were not only better recognized, but also showed a low T1-T2 order error rate. In contrast, recognized left T2s exhibited high order error rate. Without abrupt onset, symmetrical AB was found and order error rate was similarly low in both sides. Follow-up experiments showed that, while RVF advantage was related to bottom-up saliency, order errors were affected by T1 mask. The discrepancy between LVF and RVF advantage in the AB could be resolved in terms of two mechanisms of attentional gating: top-down attentional gating, which is biased towards LVF, and bottom-up attentional gating, which is biased towards RVF.     

The neural reality of syntactic transformations: evidence from functional magnetic resonance imaging

The functional anatomy of syntactic transformations, a major computational operation invoked in sentence processing, was identified through a functional magnetic resonance imaging investigation. A grammaticality judgment task was used, presented through a novel hidden-blocks design. Subjects listened to transformational and nontransformational sentences in which a host of other complexity generators (number of words, prepositions, embeddings, etc.) were kept constant. A series of analyses revealed that the neural processing of transformations is localizable, evoking a highly lateralized and localized activation in the left inferior frontal gyrus (Broca's region) and bilateral activation in the posterior superior temporal sulcus. The pattern of activation associated with transformational analysis was distinct from the one observed in neighboring regions, and anatomically separable from the effects of verb complexity, which yielded significant activation in the left posterior superior temporal sulcus. Taken together with neuropsychological evidence, these results uncover the neural reality of syntactic transformations.     

“Girls Can Wrestle Too”: Gender Differences in the Consumption of a Television Wrestling Series

Gender differences associated with viewing,modeling and talking about a particular televisionwrestling series (WWF) were studied inelementary-schools in Israel. Discussion is based on ananalysis of 901 completed questionnaires and 254 personalinterviews with Jewish children of varioussocio-economical backgrounds and geographical locations.Survey and interview evidence suggested that themajority of the girls were less interested in viewingWWF than boys, and hardly ever joined in the fights atschool. For most girls, opposing WWF served to reinforcetheir gender identity and to separate them from the world of violence and force. For othergirls, WWF provided an opportunity to explore themasculine body and occasionally to safely explore malenorms of behavior. As a whole, girls in this studyappreciated violence less and were much more critical of itthan boys.     

Student self-selection for specializations in engineering

The general hypothesis that students self-selecting themselves for different occupational fields differ in relevant values and interests was tested for specializations within engineering. Industrial engineers were found to be different in work values and in their image of their subfield from students of other engineering specializations. The study concludes that in terms of type of student selecting engineering, the profession cannot be treated as an undifferentiated entity. It is suggested that in future research engineering students may be regarded as relatively homogenous with respect to work values only if their area of specialization is duly considered.