INTEGRATING GENDER AND ETHNICITY INTO PSYCHOLOGY COURSES

In this introduction to the special issue on teaching about gender and ethnicity in psychology, we consider the assumptions underlying an inclusive curriculum that pays attention to gender and ethnicity and address why such a curriculum has merit. We review empirical studies, assessing whether existing curricula are inclusive, and present an overview of the articles and the recurrent themes. These themes include the complexity of the interaction between ethnicity and gender; the difficulty of deciding which of the many possible ethnic groups to include in course material; the dominance of evaluative comparison in discussions of differences among groups; the interdisciplinary nature of research on ethnicity; and the tendency in psychology to ignore the importance of the power differences that confound analyses of the effect of ethnicity and gender.     

Stress-induced Fos-like Immunoreactivity in the Pons and the Medulla Oblongata of Rats

Immunoreactivity of the immediate early gene c-fos was used to investigate changes in the activity of brainstem neurons in response to acute stressors like immobilization, formalin-induced pain, cold exposure, hemorrhage and insulin-induced hypoglycemia. Different stressors induced Fos-like immunoreactivity in different pontine and medullary neurons. A single, 3 hour immobilization was found to be a very strong stimulus that activated brainstem catecholaminergic (tyrosine hydroxylase-immunopositive) neurons and cells in the raphe and certain pontine tegmental nuclei, as well as in the reticular formation. Pain, induced by a subcutaneous injection of formalin was also effective on catecholamine-synthesizing neurons and on others cells in the nucleus of the solitary tract. Cold exposure activated cells mainly in the sensory spinal trigeminal and parabrachial nuclei and in the so-called "pontine thermoregulatory area". Moderate Fos-like immunoreactivity was induced by a hypotonic (25%) hemorrhage in medullary catecholaminergic neurons, the nucleus of the solitary tract and the Barrington nucleus. Among stressful stimuli used, insulin-induced hypoglycemia elicited the smallest Fos activation in the lower brainstem. The present observations indicate that different stressors may use different neuronal pathways in the central organization of the stress response.     

MATERNITY LEAVE AND WOMEN'S MENTAL HEALTH

The Wisconsin Maternity Leave and Health Study addresses an important policy issue, parental leave, by investigating the work status, maternity leave, and mental health of 570 women. In the longitudinal design, the women, all of whom were living with a husband or partner, were interviewed during the fifth month of pregnancy, 1 month postpartum, and 4 months postpartum. At 4 months postpartum, full-time workers, part-time workers, and homemakers did not differ in depression or anger, but full-time workers showed elevated anxiety compared with the other two groups. In multiple regression analyses, length of leave interacted significantly with marital concerns when predicting depression; women who took a short leave (6 weeks or less) and were high on marital concerns had the highest depression scores. Short maternity leave can be conceptualized as a risk factor that, when combined with other risk factors such as marital concerns, places women at greater risk for depression.     

Fear of Success,Need Achievement,and Fear of Failure: A factor analytic study

Several tests of Fear of Success (FOS), Fear of Failure (FOF), and Need Achievement (nAch), plus Taylor's Manifest Anxiety Scale and a social desirability scale were administered to 104 males and 101 females. FOS, FOF, and nAch did not show factor validity. Results for predictive validity were also poor. Anxiety defined the first factor in the factor analysis. All first-factor tests negatively predicted female grade point average and American College Test scores. All the first-factor tests showed sex differences, with females scoring higher. A clarifying role for anxiety in the study of sex differences in achievement is indicated.     

The effect of syntactic encoding on sentence comprehension in aphasia.

This study compared two levels of syntactic encoding with respect to their effect on aphasics' auditory comprehension. The same informational content was presented either as an embedded sentence or as two contiguous simplé propositions. A similar contrast was utilized to compare sentences containing relational terms of time, comparison, instrumentality, as well as sentences involving conjunction reduction, with parallel messages expressed in expanded, simplified form. A picture-verification paradigm was used. Comprehension was significantly enhanced only in the case of embedded sentences, with a tendency for Broca's aphasics to show the maximum effects.     

Sequelae of cesarean and vaginal deliveries: psychosocial outcomes for mothers and infants

Mother-infant dyads grouped according to whether the infants had been delivered vaginally (n = 74) or by planned (n = 37) or unplanned cesarean (n = 56) were compared on psychosocial outcomes at 4 and 12 months postpartum. Hypotheses were that unplanned cesarean delivery would be related to less optimal outcomes and that this relationship would be mediated by mother's appraisal of the delivery and would attenuate over time. No delivery-related differences in mother-infant interactions were found at 4 or 12 months postpartum with one exception: Women low in neuroticism who delivered by unplanned cesarean showed less positive affect toward their infants at 4 months than did women high in neuroticism who delivered by unplanned cesarean or women in any other group. There was some evidence of the mediating role of maternal appraisal of the delivery on these effects. In general, the results indicate little cause for concern about the quality of mother-infant interactions following cesarean deliveries.     

Brains that are out of tune but in time

It is estimated that about 4% of the general population may have amusia (or tone deafness). Congenital amusia is a lifelong disability for processing music despite normal intellectual, memory, and language skills. Here we present evidence that the disorder stems from a deficit in fine-grained pitch perception. Amusic and control adults were presented with monotonic and isochronous sequences of five tones (i.e., constant pitch and intertone interval). They were required to detect when the fourth tone was displaced in pitch or time. All amusic participants were impaired in detecting the pitch changes, and showed no sign of improvement with practice. In contrast, they detected time changes as well as control adults and exhibited similar improvements with practice. Thus, the degraded pitch perception seen in the amusic individuals cannot be ascribed to nonspecific problems with the task or to poor hearing in general. Rather, the data point to the presence of a congenital neural anomaly that selectively impairs pitch processing.     

Helping parents to motivate adolescents in mathematics and science: an experimental test of a utility-value intervention

The pipeline toward careers in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) begins to leak in high school, when some students choose not to take advanced mathematics and science courses. We conducted a field experiment testing whether a theory-based intervention that was designed to help parents convey the importance of mathematics and science courses to their high school-aged children would lead them to take more mathematics and science courses in high school. The three-part intervention consisted of two brochures mailed to parents and a Web site, all highlighting the usefulness of STEM courses. This relatively simple intervention led students whose parents were in the experimental group to take, on average, nearly one semester more of science and mathematics in the last 2 years of high school, compared with the control group. Parents are an untapped resource for increasing STEM motivation in adolescents, and the results demonstrate that motivational theory can be applied to this important pipeline problem.     

Developmental Precursors of Moral Disengagement and the Role of Moral Disengagement in the Development of Antisocial Behavior

The purpose of the study was to advance our understanding of the developmental precursors of Moral Disengagement (MD) and the role of MD in the development of antisocial behavior from early risk among an ethnically diverse sample of 187 low-income boys followed prospectively from ages 1.5 to 17. Results indicated associations between early rejecting parenting, neighborhood impoverishment, and child empathy and later MD. The link between some of these early constructs and later antisocial behavior was mediated by MD. Finally, in an exploratory path model both MD and biases in social information processing were found to mediate separate paths from early risk factors to later antisocial behavior. Results were partially consistent with the notion that adolescent MD was predicted by a combination of early family, neighborhood, and child risk factors, and that MD may be a mechanism underlying some boys’ risk of antisocial behavior.