Factors Related to the Social Adjustment of College Girls

Summary

In three experiments (N = 271), involving three different sets of nouns and adjectives, and one set of CVC trigrams, women consistently made significantly more extreme positive ratings than men. There were no significant differences in the use of extreme negative responses. The results suggested the hypothesis that relatively mild, positive stimuli evoke a greater, more differentiated range of reactions in women than in men. The hypothesis received support from a comparison of the relative consistency of men and women in rating positive and negative CVC trigrams and Rorschach cards. A fourth experiment (N = 196) found that women did better than men on a paired comparisons task of positive stimuli, thus adding further support to the hypothesis.