Psychological Gender Issues Exam 2

Describe the story of Bruce Reimer. According to Diamond, Sigmundson, and Colapinto's version of the story, what was the actual outcome of the attempt to make Bruce a girl?

...

According to a national survey of high school students, what percentage of boys and girls had carried a weapon to school?

27% of boys and 7% of girls.

What was the age bias Block noted in the studies and why is this a problem?

75% of the people involved in the studies were 12 or younger, and 40% of the studies were performed with preschoolers. Sex differences may not appear in younger kids, but may in adolescents and adults.

Why should one be cautious in reading too much into studies that show sex differences in some aspects of the brain?

A sex difference in brain structure doesn't necessarily translate to a difference in brain function or behavior.

What were the findings of the study examining the impact of juggling on the brain?

After three months of juggling, we have a brain difference. there is now a difference in the area of the brain responsible for motion processing. After some time went by with no juggling, the brain returned to where it was prior.

Discuss the meta-analysis findings regarding sex comparisons of the self-serving bias.

Among children, girls display more self-serving bias than boys. Among early adolescents, there is no sex difference. Among older adolescents and adults, boys show more of a self-serving bias.

What are the meta-analytic findings regarding gender differences in physical and verbal aggression?

Baby boys are more likely to display physical aggression than baby girls, and 2.5x more likely to be labeled "very aggressive". Men remain more physically and verbally aggressive than women.

What was Jeanne Block's criticism regarding the quality of studies included in the Maccoby and Jacklin's review of the literature on gender differences?

Block complained that Maccoby and Jacklin didn't censor their studies. Many of the studies included were of poor quality, including poor methology or very small sample sizes.

What concerns did female engineering students express about their future careers?

Conflict between work and family, lack of female role models, lack of confidence, and discrimination

What are demand characteristics?

Cues in an experiment that tell the participant what behavior is expected.

Describe the study by Bem examining the impact of being sex-typed on gender schematic processing. What did she do and what did she find?

During her study, she flashed the 60 attributes of the sex-role inventory on a screen, and the college students were asked to say whether the attribute describes them. Her hypothesis was that sex-typed respondents would be quicker when responding to a sex-typed attribute than someone who is cross-sex-typed or androgynous. This proved true.

What is an effect size and how is it calculated?

Effect size tells us how significant of a difference there is between two variables. It is calculated by using the D-statistic, which is achieved by taking the difference between the means in the two groups and dividing it by the variability in the scores of the members of both groups.

How are effect sizes interpreted?

Effect sizes can range from -1 to 1, with the negatives being women. 0.2 is a small effect size, 0.5 is a medium size, and 0.8 is considered large

Which parent was most likely to treat boys and girls differently?

Fathers were more likely.

What do biological theories identify as causes for sex differences?

Genetics, hormones, and the structure and function of the brain.

What did Horner note were indicators of fear of success?

High fear-of-success women performed worse on tasks when working with men over women, and were more likely to switch from nontraditional to traditional majors.

When is observational learning more likely to occur?

If the model is given positive consequences for their actions.

What were the findings of the review of children's coloring books?

In the review of coloring books, 58% of female characters were depicted in traditional roles, compared to 44% of men. 6% of women were depicted in cross-sex-typed activity, compared to 3% of men.

What were the findings from the review of 83 "Notable Books?"

In the review, it found that male characters had more diverse roles, female characters had more traditional roles, male characters were rarely depicted in domestic or nurturing roles, and males were never depicted doing household chores.

In what area of verbal skills is the largest gender difference found?

In writing, favoring women.

What are the dimensions of attributions? Provide an example of each.

Internal attributes lay within a person. External attributes are caused by the environment. Unstable attributes are subject to change. Stable attributes are not likely to change. Internal stable - Ability. External stable - A teacher who is a difficult grader. Internal unstable - Effort. External unstable - The weather.

What are the problems with Freud's psychoanalytic theory for explaining gender differences?

It isn't a scientific theory; it can't be tested. Freud also created this theory from his patients, so he has a biased sample.

Who did Judith Harris believe had the most effect on children's gender development? Explain Harris's group socialization theory.

Judith Harris believed that parents had little to no effect on the personalities of children. Instead, their peer groups were responsible for it. Children raised in the same home by the same parents can vary widely in personality, possibly due to having different peer groups. Children learn behavior in the home, but test it on their peers, and the repetition of the behavior is dependent upon how their peers react.

In what areas are women more likely to show a lack of confidence compared to men despite equal levels of performance?

Masculine tasks

Why might the file-drawer problem not be as significant in studies of sex comparisons?

Most studies are evaluated for sex differences. if no difference is found, you can ignore sex for the rest of the study.

Overall, what is the conclusion from brain lateralization studies?

Most studies that look at lateralization find no difference. however, studies that do find a difference always find that men are more lateralized than women.

What do more recent studies find regarding parents differential treatment of boys and girls?

Mothers spent more time actively engaging with girls and more time watching boys. Parents think boys can be independent and girls need more assistance.

What were the findings from the longitudinal study of fourth through sixth graders regarding mothers' perceptions of children's competence?

Mothers' perceptions of their children's competence predicted changes in children's view of competence one year later, as well as children's grades one year later. This only held true when mothers subscribed to the entity theory.

What is Nancy Chodrow's object-relations theory?

Nancy Chodrow believed that because women are the primary caretakers, they have the biggest impact on gender identity. Girls get their identities from their mothers, boys get their identities from being unlike their mothers.

In a narrative review of the literature on sex comparisons of brain lateralization for a variety of cognitive tasks, how much of the difference in these abilities was sex found to account for?

Only about 1-2%.

In what ways did parents treat boys and girls different according to the research by Lytton and Romney?

Parents provided sex-typed toys to their children. They also encouraged achievement and independence in boys and were more strict with them, and encouraged dependence in girls but were warmer with them.

What is entity theory?

Parents' beliefs about their children's abilities are likely to influence their children's perceptions and actual ability when parents believe that ability is fixed and not changeable.

Have more recent meta-analyses supported the expectations of the Deaux model? Discuss the findings from this meta-analysis.

Percievers attribute women's success on masculine tasks to unstable causes, and their failure to stable causes. They were less likely to assign different attributions to men and women for feminine tasks.

What is an attribution?

Process of assigning causes to behavior

What are the limitations of meta-analyses?

Researchers can be biased, and may set up criteria to filter what studies they do and don't want to include.

For what types of research methods are sex differences more and less likely to be found? (regarding empathy)

Sex differences are more prominent when self-reporting is used, but smaller when observation is used.

Have crime statistics changed over time for boys and girls? Explain.

Statistics for girls have increased slightly, whereas the statistics for boys have fluctuated much more significantly throughout the years.

What do observational studies of children tell us about sex differences in aggression?

Studies of children show that all throughout childhood, boys are more aggressive than girls, with moderate effect sizes.

In the study by Shaywitz and colleagues examining reading disabilities, what were the findings regarding school reports of reading disabilities versus what the researchers found? What may have been the cause of this difference?

Teachers were 2-4 times more likely to refer boys for reading disabilities than girls, despite the researchers identifying roughly the same number of boys and girls. Teachers may have viewed boys with reading disabilities as overactive and having more behavior problems than boys without reading disabilities.

What is gender intensification? How might it influence findings on sex differences?

Teens tend to become more gender-stereotyped, more concerned with fitting into the norms.

Define empathy.

The ability to understand and share the feelings of another

Define fear of success.

The concern that once we achieve something new, we'll be incapable of sustaining it or may suffer because of it.

What is construct validity?

The extent to which variables measure what they are supposed to measure

What is the file drawer problem?

The fact that studies that fail to detect significant differences are unlikely to get published.

What is necessary in order to have a fear of success?

The individual must believe that achievement is possible and associate achievement with negative consequences.

What is the problem in the theory that males are right-hemisphere dominant and females are left-hemisphere dominant?

The left side of the brain is responsible for verbal skills (which women are generally better at) and the right processes spatial skills (skewed towards men). However, the logic breaks down when you acknowledge that math is also processed on the left side of the brain, and men tend to be better at math.

What research findings support an evolutionary explanation for gender differences in aggression?

The main supporting point that there is an evolutionary advantage to increased aggression is the fact that male aggression peaks in young adulthood. This could potentially be due to men competing with one another for women.

Describe how the Thematic Apperception Test works.

The participant is shown a variety of ambiguous but provocative pictures of people and are asked to create as dramatic a story as they can, including what the person in the story may be feeling, the events that led up to the moment, and what the outcome of the story was. It's meant to invoke an unconscious display of the consciousness.

What were the findings from the original TAT research? What is one of the problems with these early conclusions?

The reliability and construct validity of the test are both quite low.

Discuss the findings from the Voyer, Voyer, and Bryden meta-analysis on spatial skills.

The study found that men pretty much always outperformed women in spatial skills, especially mental rotation.

Why is it that women may appear less confident?

They are reluctant to display confidence when they have outperformed another person because women don't want to threaten another's self-esteem.

What did women do, and what do women do, when they have a high need for achievement but believe achievement conflicts with their gender-role?

They may tell people that they performed worse than they truly did.

What are the advantages of a meta-analyses?

They pool massive amounts of data in one place and can rule out studies that may not be viable. They consider the size of the effect, year the study was written, and sex of author with each study they include.

What does it mean to be gender schematic?

Using their gender category to make decisions about what to wear, what emotions to present, what career to choose, how to behave, etc.

What is a moderating variable? Provide some examples of potential moderating variables.

Variables that alter the relation between the independent and dependent variable. Things like age and gender can be moderating variables.

How do modeling and reinforcement interact to explain gendered behavior?

Very young children may model anyone. However, they will eventually begin to notice how others react to their imitative behavior, and will repeat it if rewarded.

For which sex is reinforcement stricter for? Provide an example. Why might this difference occur?

We are less tolerant of cross-sexed behavior for boys than we are girls. For instance, we may encourage our daughters to pick up sports, but may not do the same if our sons want to learn to do makeup.

Explain Kay Deaux's model of how people's expectancies about women's and men's performance influence the attributions they make.

We attribute behavior to stable, internal causes if it matches our expectations. If a behavior violates our expectancies, we will attribute it to an external, unstable cause.

How do men and women respond to feedback differently?

Women are more influenced because they may lack self-confidence and are more open to others' opinions.

Based on the study of female twelfth graders who aimed to pursue traditionally masculine fields, but switched to neutral or feminine fields seven years later, what were the reasons for their switch?

Women desire a job with greater flexibility, lower time demands, and they had a lower intrinsic interest.

How do age and the type of object influence findings in the spatial domain?

Women do better on these tests if the objects are feminine or neutral. If the objects are masculine, men perform better.

In what spatial domain do women appear to have greater aptitude than men?

Women performed better in object memory.

What is a meta-analysis?

pools data from several studies to come up with a conclusion

In an older meta-analysis of 165 studies that evaluated verbal ability, what was the effect size found and what does it mean? How did the author influence the effect sizes in the meta-analysis?

unsure

What is Bem's advise for raising a gender aschematic child?

- Teach what sex is: a biological distinction, that's it. - Teach what sex is not. Do away with your own stereotypes and traditional roles. - Counter cultural stereotypes. - Teach that society's view of gender is incorrect.