A Survey of Job Attitudes of Federal Prison Employees

Turner and Johnson attempted to determine the attitudes of federal prison employees regarding job satisfaction and personal safety. They designed a questionnaire to measure these factors and sent it to 147 workers in 19 federal correctional institutions. The results of the questionnaire, which had a return rate of 80%, generally indicate a high level of job satisfaction and relatively little concern about safety among employees who completed the questionnaire.     

Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: Implications and Counseling Considerations

This article presents the special considerations in counseling fetal alcohol syndrome children and their mothers.     

The impact of differentially valued overlapping categorizations upon the differentiation between positively,negatively, and neutrally evaluated social groups

The present study attempted to determine whether the impact of overlapping cate-gorizations upon intergroup differentiation should be attributed to cognitive category differentiation processes or whether motivational social identity processes do also inter-vene. Experimentally created groups were placed in one of four overlapping categor-ization conditions: the overlapping category was either absent or it was affectively positive, negative, or neutral. These groups were also differentially evaluated by providing them with positive, negative, or no feedback. Subjects estimated then the performance of the two groups in an experimental task. Thereupon, their self-esteem and their liking of the groups were also measured. The presence of an overlapping category had no impact upon the performance evaluations of positively evaluated groups. Negatively evaluated groups favoured the outgroup but the presence of an overlapping category led to a reduction of this perceived ingroup inferiority. The groups of the no-feedback condition exhibited ingroup favouritism. The presence of a positive and of a neutral overlapping category reduced this bias but the presence of a negatively evaluated overlapping category strongly enhanced it. The impact of overlapping categories upon the liking measure was less pronounced. Group members' self-esteem was influenced by the experimentally manipulated factors, but these effects did not really support social identity theory. The theoretical implications of the data are discussed.     

Let us talk about sex: Prototype and personal templates

Among laypersons and even among scientists, little agreement exists about the definition of sex. Using the prototype approach, the current research explored the prototypical structure of sex. Further, it examined important intersexual and intrasexual personal templates. In Study 1, 122 participants produced a list of 80 features for the concept sex, which were rated for typicality by 251 participants in Study 2. Important sex differences with respect to the prototype of sex and correlations with sociosexual orientation were also revealed in Study 2. Study 3 (n = 98) extended these findings by showing that response latencies differ for central versus peripheral features, women versus men, and depend on the sociosexual orientation of the participants.     

Mood and the impact of category membership and individuating information

We investigated how individuals in different mood states are influenced by category membership information, by individuating information, and by the relation of the two in an impression formation task. Subjects in different mood states received positive or negative individuating information and positive or negative category information about a target person. Experiment 1 indicates that sad subjects were influenced by individuating but not by category membership information. In contrast, happy subjects' judgments reflected the implications of the category information as long as the individuating information was not inconsistent with the category, replicating previous research. This pattern was eliminated, however, when category-inconsistent information was provided, suggesting that happy subjects related the individuating information to the category membership information. Additional experiments show that instructing neutral mood subjects to relate category and individuating information or to focus on the individuating information result in patterns that parallel the judgments of happy and sad subjects, respectively, and that these effects are only obtained when the category information precedes (rather than follows) the individuating information. Extending previous theorizing, we conclude that being in a happy mood increases the likelihood that information is processed in the light of pre-existing general knowledge structures.