The relationships among gender concepts and cognitive maturity in preschool children

Several aspects of gender concept development were investigated in 60 children of mixed socioeconomic background ranging in age from 3 to 6 years. Tasks were designed to assess gender constancy, knowledge of sex stereotypes, differential memory and preference for sex-typed material, and gender categorization. Cognitive maturity was assessed with a conservation task and total recall on a memory task. Performance improved linearly with age on the gender concepts, individual children of both sexes learned the gender concepts in the same sequence, and cognitive maturity measures were positively related to performance on the gender concept tasks.This research was supported by grants from the Graduate School and the Women's Studes Program, Indiana University. An earlier report of this research was presented at the meeting of the American Psychological Association, San Francisco, August 1977. The author thanks John E. Bates and Candace Schau for their advice and help throughout the project.     

Behavioral consequences of song learning: Discrimination of song types by male white-crowned sparrows

The functional significance of learned population differences in male song in the white-crowned sparrow was explored in natural populations using playback tests. Laboratory results have shown that learning of the population-specific song seems to take place in early life and is strongly dependent upon the nature of the auditory experience at that time. However, the varied results of recent studies make it difficult to reach a confident conclusion about the ecological functions of song learning. The present research took advantage of naturally occurring variation in the differences between songs of adjacent populations to determine a function relating degree of difference in song to intensity of territorial singing elicited. Applying a typological evaluation of syllable structure to the four segments of the song allowed a crude quantitative ranking of the differences between local songs and playback stimuli. These results, together with those of other studies, suggest a unimodal aggressive response function of males to songs of other males. A maximum response to songs slightly different from the local song environment suggests that male exclusion based upon acquired song components may contribute to the maintenance of discrete and stable song dialects.     

“mother is not holding competely respect”: Making social sense of schizophrenic writing

This paper provides a phenomenological account of the writing of a young woman diagnosed with schizophrenia. The method of interpretation is to put ourselves in the place of the author drawing upon a combination of sympathy, reason, common-sense, experience, and “an intersubjective world, common to us all” (Schutz, 1945: 536). The result is the recognition of the person as also capable of putting herself in the place of others so as to understand their behavior. This “role-taking success” identifies the limits of the current sociological understanding of insanity's significance in social interaction as an instance of “role-taking failure” (Rosenberg, 1992). The very appearance of a piece of writing often permits one to recognize the presence of schizophrenia. The use of space may be quite bizarre. The varying margins betray the writer's changing mood. The letter may start at the bottom or side of the paper or very close to the top .... Capital letters and all letters are employed without any apparent rules, the former even in the middle of a word. (Bleuler, 1950: 159) What we want to understand is not something hidden behind the text, but something disclosed in front of it. (Ricoeur, 1971: 557) Why do we need an art of guessing? Why do we have to “construe” the meaning? Not only — as I tried to say a few years ago — because language is metaphorical and because the double meaning of metaphorical language requires an art of deciphering which tends to unfold the several layers of meaning.... [But also] because [a text] is not a mere sequence of sentences, all on an equal footing and separately understandable. A text is a whole, a totality. (Ricoeur, 1971: 548)     

A DEVELOPMENTAL DEFICIT IN LOCALIZING OBJECTS FROM VISION

Abstract— We describe a college student, A. H., with a developmental deficit in determining the location of objects from vision. The deficit is selective in that (a) localization from auditory or tactile information is intact, (b) A H reports the identity of mislocalized objects accurately, (c) visual localization errors preserve certain parameters of the target location, and (d) visual localization is severely impaired under certain stimulus conditions, but nearly intact under other conditions. These results bear on the representation and processing of location information in the visual system, and also have implications for understanding developmental dyslexia.     

Nonstranger sexual aggression: A discriminant analysis of the psychological characteristics of undetected offenders

Sex Roles - Rape is an underreported and underconvicted crime. Therefore, many highly sexually aggressive men are missed by research employing judicial identification for sample selection. The...     

An information processing system for the psychiatric emergency room

An information processing system for a psychiatric emergency room is described. Several studies are presented that show the utility of the system. In the first study, variables involved in diagnosis are explicated. The second study attempts to determine the characteristics that distinguish recidivists from nonrecidivists at an emergency room. The third study attempts to find patient variables related to success in short-term treatment programs. The final study is aimed at discovering whether there are psychopathological effects related to the use of inhalants. Together, these studies show the potential of a mental health information system for learning more about the nature of mental disorders and their treatment.     

The effects of stem length and directions on sentence completion test responses

In an investigation of the effects of stem structure and direction set on sentence completion responses, 160 undergraduate males were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: Rotter ISB with "feelings" instructions, Rotter ISB with "speed" instructions, Sacks SCT with "feelings" instructions, Sacks SCT with "speed" instructions. Eight clinical judges derived hypotheses from the completed protocols; two judges evaluated each protocol. Interjudge reliability was measured by Pearson product-moment correlations and percents of agreement. There was a significant effect for amount of stem structure; the structured Sacks SCT stems yielded more clinical hypotheses. Structured stems also elicited significantly more feeling words. No significant effect was found for instructional set, nor was there a significant relationship between stem structure or instruction set and the numbers of words in completions.     

Variations of the Bender-Gestalt Test: implications for training and practice

Although the Bender-Gestalt Visual Motor Test has been a popular and influential clinical assessment instrument for the last half century, authoritative opinion and a substantial research literature are often inconsistent or contradictory. This paper documents variations in designs, administration procedures, forms, and applications to particular populations. A careful review of scoring systems indicates the current status of objective approaches as contrasted with interpretation that is global, intuitive, and subjective. Some implications of these variations and interpretive procedures for training and assessment practice are discussed. The major conclusions of the review are summarized in seven points.     

An automated eye movement laboratory for on-line electrooculography

This paper describes an automated eye movement laboratory that uses electrooculography (EOG) to study people’s eye movements while they read. An on-line minicomputer processes bioelectric potentials that correspond to saccadic eye movements. Horizontal saccades larger than 1.5 deg of visual angle are detected and analyzed in real-time as they occur. The laboratory is designed for prolonged yet unobtrusive observation of human eye movements during sustained reading periods of minutes or hours. All important functions regarding data collection and data reduction are performed automatically, according to simple procedures that can be applied uniformly and without bias to nearly all subjects that we study. Results from three experiments are cited in order to quantify the performance of the laboratory with respect to four criteria: saccade detection accuracy, measurement accuracy, sensitivity, and the uniformity of these measures over different subjects.