Aggression in toddlers: Responses to the assertive acts of boys and girls

Sex Roles - Forty-eight toddler boys and girls, 18 to 36 months of age, were observed in play groups. The assertive acts of each child and the responses of peers and teachers were recorded. The...     

Book reviews

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -     

Relationship of parental education,race, and gender to sex role stereotyping in five-year-old kindergartners

This study examined the relationship of parental education, race, and gender to sex-role stereotyping in five-year-old kindergartners. A significant effect for race and parental education level was noted. White children gave more stereotyped responses than did black children, and children whose parents were in the middle- and high-educational levels gave more stereotyped responses than did children whose parents were in the low-educational level. A significant interaction was also found between educational level of parents and race. White children tended to give more stereotyped responses as the educational level of their parents increased; this trend was not evident for black children. No significant differences in stereotyping were noted between the sexes.To whom requests for reprints or information concerning the Bardwell-Sietsema Sex Stereotype Scale should be addressed at Department of Elementary Education, East Texas State University, Commerce, Texas 75428.     

Vasopressin prolongs bradycardiac response during orientation

Adult male rats were implanted with transcutaneous ECG electrodes and habituated to a dark chamber with elevated background noise levels. ECG was recorded prior to, immediately after, and 3 min after sudden elimination of background noise. The orienting response to the stimulus offset was accompanied by transient bradycardia. Neither AVP (1 microgram/rat) nor oxytocin (1 microgram/rat) injected subcutaneously 1 hr prior to testing altered baseline heart rate or the immediate bradycardiac response to stimulus offset. However, AVP, and to a lesser extent oxytocin, prolonged the bradycardia induced by stimulus offset. The results show that neurohypophyseal peptide hormones enhance the cardiovascular component of orienting to stimulus change.     

Early judgments of semantic and syntactic acceptability by children

Judgments of the acceptability of correct, word order reversed, and semantically anomalous sentences were elicited from 2- and 3-year-old children in a game played with hand puppets. All of the sentences used were simple imperatives and each child was asked to correct those he called wrong. Performance on the judgment task was correlated with each child's mean length of utterance and with his comprehension of reversible active and passive sentences. Only the linguistically most advanced children were able to make a significant number of appropriate judgments and corrections of reversed word order imperatives. Less developed children could appropriately judge and correct semantically anomalous but not incorrect word order imperatives. The importance of semantic as opposed to syntactic factors in children's judgments of the acceptability of sentences is stressed.This research was supported in part by PHS Grant HD-02908 from the National Institute of Child Health and Development. Roger Brown is the principal investigator.     

Transformation in Counselling

The view is put forward that counselling appears to be undergoing a transformation which renders the old distinction between counselling and therapy no longer meaningful or practical. This transformation reflects the psychic backdrop of our times; it has come about because the needs of people seeking help, as well as the needs of those counselling, have altered and developed. Increasingly, clients are acknowledging the need for radical change which involves exploration of all levels of their being. This transformative work, a moving across inner barriers and coming into wholeness, necessarily involves active awareness of spirit. Thus it is no longer possible to be a client-centred counsellor without being willing to address the spiritual dimension ofhuman-beingness.     

Maintaining social identity in a mixed-gender setting: Minority/majority status and cooperative/competitive feedback

This study tested the applicability of Tajfel and Turner's (1986) Social Identity Theory (SIT) to cooperative behavior in a mixed-gender setting. SIT suggests that as a “socially subordinate” group in a male-dominated society, women, when their gender is in the numerical minority, will engage in social competition in an attempt to enhance social identity. However, gender-based socialization may encourage men toward competition and women toward cooperation, regardless of group gender composition. In this study, male and female subjects were assigned to a six-person mixed-gender group in which their gender was either in the numerical minority or majority, and performed an interactive task under either cooperative or competitive feedback. An interaction of sex and feedback showed males in the cooperative feedback condition responded more competitively than did males in the competitive feedback condition, while females were equally cooperative in both feedback conditions. Feedback also interacted with the numerical ingroup/outgroup gender balance. While competitive feedback elicited little variation in subjects' responses across the ingroup/outgroup balance variable, the cooperative condition elicited greater competition from subjects in the numerical minority and greater cooperation from those in the numerical majority. Results were interpreted as partial support for SIT, while stressing the need for further investigation into gender as a unique influence on intergroup behavior.