The stability of status orientations among young,white, rural women from three southern states

This paper reports the results of a panel study of young, white, rural women from Georgia, South Carolina, and Texas (N = 138). The study was primarily concerned with how social origin variables affected early educational and occupational orientations and how early states of these orientations affected the orientations themselves at a later point in time. The results indicated that mother's education had a greater effect than father's education, but in either case the effect is mediated by intervening influences such as early aspirations and expectations. These young women held very traditional status orientations (with 60% projecting the occupations of beautician, nurse, stenographer, or school teacher), and their orientations were quite stable between their sophomore and senior years in high school. Since there has been so little work reported on the status attainment process for women, and rural women in particular, this study does offer a limited insight into this phenomenon.     

Transformations. II. Latency of generation

This study tested the hypothesized relationship between the rules of sentence transformation and preresponse processing time in a short-term memory and transformation task. The transform instruction was placed either before or after the stimulus sentence, and verbal responses were made with immediate or delayed auditory feedback. The data showed conclusively that the amount of processing required by different grammatical transformations does not relate, to the theoretical linguistic derivation, even when transformations are grouped into an ordinal ranking of difficulty rated by the number of nominal transform rules required. An instruction prefix facilitates information processing and interacts with the grammatical task. Sentence generation was retarded significantly by the imminent onset of delayed auditory feedback. This effect of imminentDAF appears to be a new finding.     

Transformations. I. The effect of DAF on sentence generation

A hypothesis based on the psycholinguistic derivation of sentences was tested. The task required that sentences temporarily stored in memory be transformed and spoken with delayed auditory feedback. An instruction to repeat the stimulus sentence verbatim or grammatically transform it was placed either immediately before or immediately after the sentence. Two measures of interference were obtained based on the syllable rates for the response times. The different grammatical forms showed significant variation in the amount of interference, but the amount of interference appeared to relate primarily to the length of the transformed sentence rather than to its derivational complexity. Interaction between the position of the instruction and the sentence generation task is discussed in terms of the underlying memory functions involved. A further test was proposed.     

Toward a Critical Race Psychology

Critical Race Theory (CRT) emerged as an identity‐conscious intervention within critical legal studies and has subsequently developed an interdisciplinary presence. We draw upon CRT perspectives to articulate five core ideas for a Critical Race Psychology (CRP). CRT perspectives (1) approach racism as a systemic force embedded in everyday society (rather than a problem of individual bias); (2) illuminate how ideologies of neoliberal individualism (e.g., merit, choice) often reflect and reproduce racial domination; (3) identify interest convergence as the typical source of broad‐based support for reparative action; (4) emphasize possessive investment in privileged identities and identity‐infused realities that reproduce racial domination; and (5) propose practices of counter‐storytelling to reveal and contest identity‐infused bases of everyday society. In summary, we propose a CRP that consider race not as one domain (among many) for psychological investigation but instead as a conceptual lens through which to analyze all of psychological science.     

MY BEST LEARNING EXPERIENCE WAS …

These selections are responses from recent enrollees of one Employability Development Team of the Concentrated Employment Program to the question: “What is your best or most important learning experience, and under what circumstances did it come about?” The words are theirs, the format is the writer's.     

The effect of gender, ethnicity, and income on college students' use of communication technologies

Because campus officials are relying on personal communication technologies to communicate with students, a question arises about access and usage. Although communication technologies are popular among college students, some evidence suggests that differences exist in ownership and use. We examined patterns of student ownership and use of cell phones and use of instant messaging, focusing on three predictors of digital inequality: gender, ethnicity, and income. Logistic and hierarchical linear regression analyses were used to analyze results from 4,491 students. The odds that female and white students owned cell phones were more than twice as high as for men and African-American students. Students in the $100,000-$149,000 per year income bracket were more than three times as likely to own a cell phone than those from the median bracket. However, being female, African-American, and/or from the highest income brackets was positively predictive of the number of text messages sent and the amount of time spent talking on a cell phone per week. We found no differences between students on the use of instant messaging. Implications of these results, as well as areas for further research, are provided.     

Maintaining recency despite a stimulus suffix

Two processes of information retrieval were considered in the context of the logogen model. The aim was to establish whether information about the final items of an auditory short-term memory list is held exclusively in precategorical acoustic storage at presentation or whether these items are automatically registered in a cognitive store as well. Error data for a final heterogeneous item in alphanumeric lists showed significantly better recall, despite the addition of a stimulus suffix. Although these results demonstrated that coding had proceeded further than a precategorical stage, which maintains only physical features, the possibility remained that the effect was due to a bias in focal attention and selective coding at list presentation. A second experiment increased the difficulty of the retrieval task, and effectively precluded the possibility of a bias in attention. The results confirmed the findings in the first experiment. It was concluded that information about the final item(s) is registered automatically in the cognitive system, and that responses are made available from this source when information about physical features of the item is degraded by a stimulus suffix.     

Evidence for a time constant in rate of speech under delayed auditory feedback

This experiment investigates an apparent discrepancy in experimental measurements of the effect of texture predictability upon reading disruption under delayed auditory feedback (DAF). By measuring relative DAF decrement in three different ways, it is shown that the previous findings can be related; Fillenbaum's hypothesis of increased disruption by DAF with an increase in predictability of the material is rejected, less disruption being obtained after practice on a particular passage. Almost identical ratios of DAF rate divided by normal rate are found irrespective of the type of reading material and stage in practice. This has not been reported previously and suggests that behaviour under DAF may be related to behaviour under normal conditions by a multiplicative constant. These results are also consistent with the notion of limited channel capacity and the partitioning of attention between two sources of information.