“I Don’t Need Help”: Gender Differences in how Gender Stereotypes Predict Help-Seeking

Although self-report and correlational studies suggest that gender stereotypes are related to men’s health behavior, particularly in relation to seeking help, there is minimal research that has tested this hypothesis experimentally. The present study examined how two stereotype pathways, personally endorsed gender stereotypes and gender stereotyped attitudes, predicted help-seeking behavior among U.S. undergraduate women (n = 68) and men (n = 72) when they worked on challenging puzzles and recalled previous health help-seeking behavior for physical or psychological problems. Results revealed gender and domain differences in how the two pathways predicted help-seeking. For the puzzle tasks, both attitudinally and personally endorsed gender stereotypes predicted men’s help-seeking, whereas only personally endorsed gender stereotypes predicted women’s help-seeking. For recalled health behaviors, personally endorsed gender stereotypes predicted men’s help-seeking, whereas gender stereotypes did not predict women’s help-seeking. The gender and domain differences in how personal and attitudinal gender stereotypes predicted help-seeking are important to consider when designing interventions to increase help-seeking.     

Are attractive men's faces masculine or feminine? The importance of type of facial stimuli

The authors investigated whether differences in facial stimuli could explain the inconsistencies in the facial attractiveness literature regarding whether adults prefer more masculine- or more feminine-looking male faces. Their results demonstrated that use of a female average to dimorphically transform a male facial average produced stimuli that did not accurately reflect the relationship between masculinity and attractiveness. In contrast, use of averages of masculine males and averages of feminine males produced stimuli that did accurately reflect the relationship between masculinity and attractiveness. Their findings suggest that masculinity contributes more to male facial attractiveness than does femininity, but future research should investigate how various combinations of facial cues contribute to male facial attractiveness.     

Facial experience during the first year

Parents of 2-, 5-, 8-, and 11-month-olds used two scales we developed to provide information about their infants' facial experience with familiar and unfamiliar individuals during one week. Results showed large discrepancies in the race, sex, and age of faces that infants experience during their first year with the majority of their facial experience being with their primary caregiver, females, and other individuals of the same-race and age as their primary caregiver. The infant's age and an unfamiliar individual's sex were predictive of their time spent interacting with one another. Moreover, an unfamiliar individual's sex was predictive of the attention infants allocated during social interactions. Differences in frequency and length of interactions with certain types of faces, as well as in infant attention toward certain individuals, all likely contribute to the development of expertise in processing commonly experienced face types and deficiencies in processing less commonly experienced face types.     

Gender Typicality of Faces Affects Children’s Categorization and Judgments of Women More than of Men

Sex Roles - Most infants display more perceptual knowledge of female than male faces, which is related to their predominant experience with women. If disparities in social experience persist beyond...