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.     

Definitional deficit: a model of senile dementia in context

This article presents some general theoretical concepts that can be used to consider processes of reality construction in interpersonal contexts. I developed a model of family context that taps affective dimensions of reality construction and used this model to explore these processes as highlighted by the labeling of symptoms of senile dementia. Ethnographic observations of 45 families with aged members were used to sketch a dichotomous typology of family-context patterns that promote symptom identification versus patterns that do not. The model suggests that the categorization of behavior as symptomatic or normal in context may be related to the extent to which reality construction processes are shared among members.     

Phonological coding in word reading: Evidence from hearing and deaf readers

The ability of prelingually, profoundly deaf readers to access phonological information during reading was investigated in three experiments. The experiments employed a task, developed by Meyer, Schvaneveldt, and Ruddy (1974), in which lexical decision response times (RTs) to orthographically similar rhyming (e.g., WAVE-SAVE) and nortrhyming (e.g., HAVE-CAVE) word pairs were compared with RTs to orthographically and phonologically dissimilar control word pairs. The subjects of the study were deaf college students and hearing college students. In Experiments 1 and 2, in which the nonwords were pronounceable, the deaf subjects, like the hearing subjects, were facilitated in their RTs to rhyming pairs, but not to nonrhyming pairs. In Experiment 3, in which the nonwords were unpronounceable, both deaf and hearing subjects were facilitated in their RTs to both rhyming and nonrhyming pairs, with the facilitation being significantly greater for the rhyming pairs. These results indicate that access to phonological information is possible despite prelingual and profound hearing impairment. As such, they run counter to claims that deaf individuals are limited to the use of visual strategies in reading. Given the impoverished auditory, experience of such readers, these results suggest that the use of phonological information need not be tied to the auditory modality.     

An evaluation of the family adaptability and cohesion evaluation scales and the circumplex model

Two basic assumptions of the Circumplex Model of family systems were evaluated: (1) Healthy families evidence balanced degrees of cohesion and adaptability, whereas problem families evidence extreme degrees, and (2) families with balanced degrees of cohesion and adaptability possess more positive communication skills than families with extreme degrees. Subjects were 58 mother-son dyads from father-absent families. In 29 of the families the adolescent was a juvenile offender, while in the remaining families there was no history of arrest or psychiatric referral. The dyads completed the Family Adaptability and Cohesion Scales (FACES) and an unrevealed differences interaction task. FACES was highly proficient at differentiating delinquent from nondelinquent families. Moreover, in families with balanced degrees of cohesion and adaptability, the mothers' communication was significantly more supportive and explicit, and the dyads evidenced significantly greater warmth and affection than dyads with extreme degrees.This research was supported by funding to the Department of Psychology at Memphis State University granted through the Centers of Excellence Program of the State of Tennessee. We thank the staff of the Memphis-Metro Youth Diversion Project for their consideration and assistance.     

Access to spoken language and the acquisition of orthographic structure: Evidence from deaf readers

Sensitivity to two types of orthographic structure was investigated: linguistically based orthographic regularity and summed single letter positional frequency. Deaf college students were found to make use of positional frequency information no less than hearing college students; however, the extent to which they made use of orthographic regularities in word recognition was related to their speech production skills. In one task, subjects were presented nonword letter strings for short durations, each followed by a masking stimulus and a target letter. They were asked to indicate whether or not the target had been present in the letter string. It was found that the accuracy of deaf subjects with good speech, like that of hearing subjects, was considerably greater for orthographically regular than irregular strings. In contrast, the accuracy of deaf subjects with poor speech was much less related to orthographic regularity. In a second task, in which subjects made judgements about how word-like various letter strings appeared, the judgements of the hearing subjects were more influenced by regularity than those of deaf subjects with poor speech. These results are discussed in terms of how expertise in speech relates to appreciation of orthographic regularity.     

On the basis of early transitivity judgments

This research had two aims. The first was to test three explanations of performance on N-term series tasks by young children: the labeling model of B.DeBoysson-Bardies and K. O'Regan (1973), Nature (London), 246, 531–534, the sequential-contiguity model of L. Breslow (1981, Psychological Bulletin, 89, 325–351), and the ordered array or image model of C. A. Riley and T. Trabasso (1974, Journal of Experimental Child Psychology, 17, 187–202). In the first experiment, 5-year-old children were taught additional premises which would interfere with labeling and sequential-contiguity processes, but not with forming an ordered array. Reasoning performance was essentially comparable to previous results with the paradigm, thus supporting the ordered array model. The second aim was to reexamine children's ability to learn sets of premises which can be assembled into an ordered array, since there was reason to believe that previous studies had created false positives. In the second experiment, 3- to 7-year-old children were taught either overlapping (a > b, b > c, …) or nonoverlapping (a > b, c > d, …) premises. Overlapping premises can be integrated into an ordered array (a, b, c, d, e), but nonoverlapping premises cannot. However, the overlapping condition proved more difficult, and the success rate for preschoolers ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-olds}$) was of zero order. This raises doubts about their ability to learn a set of premises of the kind required for transitive inference. These doubts were strengthened by the third experiment which showed that when premises were not presented in serial order, preschool ($\text{3}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-}\text{to 4}\text{1}\text{2}\text{-year-old}$) children could not learn the premises of an N-term series task.     

Why do males and females differ? Children's beliefs about sex differences

The present paper focuses on children's beliefs about sex differences and how these are related to age and gender. Seven, ten, and fifteen year olds (N=427) were asked to give explanations for their beliefs about sex differences. In strong agreement with previous research and the cognitive-developmental theoretical framework, marked age differences were found: younger children were more likely than older children to emphasize biological and physical factors. Significant gender differences were also found, especially for 15 year olds. Girls were much more likely to attribute sex differences to social factors, and boys to biological factors. These gender differences were interpreted as being indicative of different life experiences of males and females, with females being more likely to have experienced conflicts between their own values about sex-role behavior and those of society. Findings were also interpreted as being consistent with the recent emphasis on gender schema. Nevertheless, it was argued that theories of gender schema need to take more account of content—of the beliefs that people hold about sex roles—and, in particular, that more attention be given to exploring gender differences in beliefs.