Some correlates of women's Self-Image and Stereotypes of Femininity

An expanded version of the Gordon Self-Image and Stereotypes of Femininity scale was administered to a sample of 362 female nursing personnel. Factor structure of the scale was found to closely approximate that of the Gordon sample. Numerous significant relationships of self-image dimensions to affective responses, experienced role stresses, demographic measures, and personality indices were isolated. However, perceptions of males' image, doctors' image, and own image of a feminine woman were generally unrelated to these measures. Further, examination of discrepancies between self-image dimensions and self and others' stereotypes of a feminine woman along these dimensions did not aid in explaining variance in affective responses or experienced role stresses. Implications of the findings are discussed and suggestions for future research are presented.     

Author Index

Authors Index

Author Index     

Validation of Catalan version of BRIEF-P

The BRIEF-P is one of the most used instruments to measure Executive Function (EF). This report is aimed at showing the psychometric properties of the Catalan version of it. To do this, a random cluster sampling was carried out in Osona (Catalonia), recruiting 417 teachers and 408 parents of children aged 3 to 6 years. As with the original instrument, results show that reliability is excellent and that girls have a better EF than boys in the following areas: Working Memory, Plan/Organize, and Inhibit. Since in some areas Catalonia's preschool children show EF values slightly better than those of the reference sample, a new scale for using it in this population is provided.     

The proximate memory mechanism underlying the survival-processing effect: Richness of encoding or interactive imagery?

Nairne and collaborators showed that assessing the relevance of words in the context of an imagined survival scenario boosts memory for these words. Although this survival-processing advantage has attracted a considerable amount of research, little is known about the proximate memory mechanism mediating this effect. Recently, Kroneisen and Erdfelder (2011) argued that it is not survival processing itself that facilitates recall but rather the richness and distinctiveness of encoding that is triggered by the survival-processing task. Alternatively, however, it is also conceivable that survival processing fosters interactive imagery, a process known to improve associative learning. To test these explanations we compared relevance-rating and interactive imagery tasks for survival and control scenarios. Results show that the survival advantage replicates in the relevance-rating condition but vanishes in the interactive imagery condition. This refutes the interactive imagery explanation and corroborates the richness-of-encoding hypothesis of the survival-processing effect.     

Can a Flow-Network Approach Shed Light on Children's Problem Solving?

A complete theory of human behavior must capture both the apparent randomness of behavior (its strong context dependence) as well as its stability (a surprising resistance to changes in behavior despite salient changes in the context). Recent efforts in cognitive science have made important discoveries toward such a theory, emphasizing the idea that skilled behavior seeks to balance overregular tendencies with tendencies that are overrandom. The hallmark of these efforts is the idea of self-organized criticality, the state of a system poised toward maximally adaptive behavior, characterized by pink-noise pattern of variability. In this article, we expand these efforts, looking for a new measure to capture the balance between order and disorder, one that can be applied to small data sets of categorical performance. The proposed measure borrows ideas from information theory, previously applied to the stability of energy flow in an ecosystem. Using published data on a problem-solving task with preschoolers, we describe ways in which this measure could be applied. Results are promising, opening the possibility for studying the trade-off between randomness and stability in children's reasoning.     

Towards a ‘manifesto’ for super‐recognizer research

This article provides a response to five excellent commentaries on our article ‘Super‐recognizers: From the lab to the world and back again’. Specifically, the response summarizes commonalities between these commentaries. Based on this consensus, we propose a flexible framework for the assessment of superior face recognition and outline guiding principles to advance future work in the field.