Gender-Role Attitudes in University Students in the United States, Slovenia, and Croatia

Determinants of gender-role attitudes were examined in samples of university students from Pittsburgh in the United States, Ljubljana in Slovenia, and Osijek in Croatia. Surveys including items from the Attitudes Toward Women Scale and the Neosexism Scale were administered to a total of 1,544 U.S. students, 912 Slovene students, and 996 Croatian students between the years of 1991 and 2000. As predicted, men held less egalitarian or more sexist attitudes about the appropriate roles for women and men, and those with more frequent attendance at religious services held more sexist attitudes. No changes in attitudes were found for women over time, but Slovene males were found to become more traditional over time.     

Finger localization and finger praxis

The relations between finger localization and various types of finger praxis were assessed by estimates of the inter-correlations among the performance of 100 six-year-old children. Finger localization was related significantly to those types of finger praxis which involve movements of the individual fingers with respect to each other. Right-left discrimination was related to finger localization, but not to the measures of finger praxis.

The findings are interpreted in terms of the construct of the finger schema, which can be viewed as a determinant of performance in both the localization and praxis tasks. This construct can also serve as an explanation of the observed concurrence of finger agnosia and finger apraxia as a consequence of cerebral disease.     

Paired associate learning: Data on pair difficulty and variables that influence difficulty

Two hundred pairs of five-letter words were produced randomly from all five-letter words in Thorndike and Lorge (1944). The difficulty of each pair was established for paired associate learning by having 50 subjects learn lists of 20 pairs. The difficulty of a pair was found to be highly reliable and was not influenced by the particular list in which it was learned. Frequency of response terms was positively related to learning, but the frequency of the stimulus terms was not. Two-syllable five-letter words were learned more rapidly than one-syllable five-letter words. Two 20-pair lists were constructed, one consisting of homogeneous pairs of average difficulty and the other of 10 very easy pairs and 10 very difficult pairs. As anticipated, performance on the latter list was initially better than that on the former, with the performance on the two lists converging over trials. The difficulty of the pairs as determined by paired associate learning was unrelated to misses on a recognition test, but the false alarms decreased as difficulty decreased.     

Online implementation of an event history calendar with formr: A tutorial

Event history calendars (EHCs) are popular tools for retrospective data collection. Originally conceptualized as face‐to‐face interviews, EHCs contain various questions about the respondents' autobiography in order to use their experiences as cues to facilitate remembering. For relationship researchers, EHCs are particularly valuable when trying to reconstruct the relational past of individuals. However, although many studies are conducted online nowadays, no freely available online adaptation of the EHC is available yet. In this tutorial, detailed instructions are provided on how to implement an online EHC for the reconstruction of romantic relationship histories within the open‐source framework formr. Ways to customize the online EHC and provide a template for researchers to adapt the tool for their own purposes are showcased.     

When a grandiose self-image is threatened: narcissism and self-concept clarity as predictors of negative emotions and aggression following ego-threat

Two studies examined the relation between narcissism, self-concept clarity, negative emotions, and aggression based on theoretical assumptions proposed by Baumeister, Smart, and Boden (1996). Narcissism and self-concept clarity were examined as predictors for anger, depression, and verbal aggression following ego-threat, which was operationalized by a bogus performance feedback on an intelligence test. The second study also examined the mediating effects of participants' negative emotions to provide an additional explanation for the aggressive reactions after failure. As expected, narcissism and self-concept clarity were significant predictors of negative emotions and aggression after failure. In accordance with our hypothesis, high narcissists with low self-concept clarity reacted with anger and aggression after failure, whereas less narcissistic individuals with high self-concept clarity showed feelings of depression and no aggression. The results also indicated that aggression was always directed toward the source of the ego-threatening feedback. Additionally, anger and depression could predict the aggressive response after failure but they did not mediate the relation between narcissism, self-concept clarity, performance feedback, and aggression.     

Stress and mood: the moderating role of activity inhibition

The present research tested the hypothesis that activity inhibition (as measured by the picture story exercise) moderates the relationship between stress and mood. Based on prior research that shows that (a) individuals high in activity inhibition restrain emotional and motivational impulses and (b) inhibiting negative emotion may lead to further emotional impairments, we assumed that individuals high in activity inhibition show evidence of increased negative mood when they are confronted with stressful events. Study 1 found evidence of increased negative mood-relevant thought among individuals high in activity inhibition who were confronted with the threat of social rejection. Study 2 found high negative mood among individuals high in activity inhibition who experienced many daily hassles. Also, participants high in activity inhibition reported a disproportionally higher amount of daily hassles in the middle (but not at the beginning) of a university semester. We suggest that this pattern of results can be accounted for by Wegner's (1994) theory of ironic effects of the suppression of thought and emotion.     

Enhanced priming for trauma-related material in posttraumatic stress disorder

Intrusive reexperiencing in posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has been linked to perceptual priming for trauma-related material. A prospective longitudinal study (N = 69) investigated perceptual priming for trauma-related, general threat, and neutral words in assault survivors with and without PTSD, using a new version of the word-stem completion task. Survivors with PTSD showed enhanced priming for trauma-related words. Furthermore, priming for trauma-related words measured soon after the trauma was associated with subsequent PTSD severity at 3, 6, and 9 months. The enhanced priming effect was specific to trauma-related words. Enhanced perceptual priming for traumatic material appears to be one of the cognitive processes operating in PTSD.