Sex role stereotyping in the sunday comics: Ten years later

The present research replicates Brabant's (Sex role stereotyping in the Sunday comics. Sex Roles, 1976, 2(4), 331–337) analysis of sex role stereotyping in family-oriented Sunday comics. Cartoons were collected for the same six-month period and compared to the 1974 data. Females continue to appear less frequently and to remain in the home more often than males. They also continue to be protrayed in stereotypical roles.     

Comparison between Oral and Written Spelling in Alzheimer's Disease

Written and oral spelling were compared in 33 patients with Alzheimer's disease (AD) and 25 control subjects. AD patients had poorer spelling results which were influenced by orthographic difficulty and word frequency, but not by grammatical word class. Lexical spelling was also more deteriorated than phonological spelling. Moreover, oral spelling was more impaired than written spelling in AD patients, whereas no difference was present between oral and written spelling of controls. Analysis of spelling errors showed that, for controls, errors were predominantly phonologically accurate in both spelling tasks. Significantly, AD patients produced more phonologically accurate than inaccurate errors in written spelling, whereas these errors did not differ in oral spelling. In contrast to controls who produced more constant than variable responses in oral and written spelling, AD patients made more variable responses (words correctly spelled in one task but incorrectly in the other) and they showed many instances of variable errors (different misspellings from one spelling task to the other). Two stepwise regression procedures showed that written misspellings were specifically correlated with language impairment, whereas oral spelling errors were correlated with attentional and language disorders. These results suggest that AD increases the attentional demands of oral spelling process as compared to written spelling. This dissociation argues, either for a unique Graphemic Buffer in which oral spelling requires more attentional resources than written spelling or for the hypothesis of separate buffers for oral and written spelling.     

Gender Differences in Adolescent Depression: Gender-Typed Characteristics or Problem-Solving Skills Deficits?

This study explored gender differences indepressive symptoms during adolescence in relation withgender-typed characteristics, problem-solving abilities,and stressful life events. Participants were 306 white French-speaking adolescents (142 men and164 women) from upper middle-class families enrolled ina high school in the Trois-Rivières area ofQuebec. Participants ranged in age from 14 to 17 years, with a mean age of 15.3 years (SD = .95). Theycompleted the French versions of the Beck DepressionInventory (BDI), the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), theProblem-Solving Inventory (PSI), and the Life Event Questionnaire (LEQ) during a regularclass. Depressed participants distinguished themselvesfrom nondepressed participants on all variables exceptfor expressivity. Instrumentality was negatively correlated with depression for boys and for thetotal sample. Scores on all three subscales of the PSIcorrelated with depression, and with scores on the LEQ,with the exception of In the Last Yearsubscale for boys. A path analysis was conducted usingscores on the BDI as the dependent variable. Subjectiveproblem-solving abilities act as a mediating variablebetween instrumentality and depression. Instrumentality, expressivity, and problem-solving abilitiesexplained a significant portion of the variance of theBDI.     

Deviance,deference, and demeanor: Birthday cards as ceremonial tokens

The present paper examines the incidence of deviant messages and images in one of the most widely used modes of interpersonal communication, i.e., birthday cards. The sample consists of 535 birthday cards randomly selected from fourteen retail outlets in a metropolitan (SMSA) area. Each outlet represented a geographically distinct high‐traffic area varying in type of establishment (discount, drug, dime, department, grocery and card stores) and socioeconomic level of the community. Both the incidence and type of deviance, the characteristics of cards in which deviance is represented, and the characteristics of the sender/receiver population are discussed within the context of Goffman's concept of ceremonial activity.     

Two martinis and a rested woman: “Liberation” in the sunday comics

Six family-oriented Sunday cartoons were collected over a six-month period and analyzed for content. In three of the cartoons, the wife was a full-time homemaker; in the other three, she worked outside the home at least part time. Working women and their husbands differed from non working women and and their husbands in activities, speaking appearances, and image portrayal. Implications are discussed.This paper was presented at the Southern Sociological Society meetings in Atlanta, Georgia, April 1987.     

Sex Role Stereotyping in the Sunday Comics: A Twenty Year Update

In 1994, six months of Sunday comic strips (N = 78) were collected and coded for gender stereotypical images. Each of the family-oriented cartoons was analyzed for frequency of male and female appearance, location of appearance, major activities, and the presence or absence of reading material and the traditional symbol of domestication—the apron [S. Brabant (1976) Sex Role Stereotyping in the Sunday Comics, Sex Roles, Vol. 2, p. 336]. Results were compared to earlier findings from comparable samples in 1974 and 1984. The present research indicates two trends: 1) a movement away from some stereotypical images over the twenty years studied, while, at the same time, 2) a return to 1974 levels of gender stereotyping for other images. Implications are discussed.