Bad Traits Research Articles

Breeding, genetic and genomic of citrus for disease resistance

Although the citriculture is one of the most important economic activities in Brazil, it is based on a small number of varieties. This fact has contributed for the vulnerability of the culture regarding the phytosanitary problems. A higher number of varieties/genotypes with potential for commercial growing, either for the industry or fresh market, has been one of the main objectives of citrus breeding programs. The genetic breeding of citrus has improved, in the last decades, due to the possibility of an association between biotechnological tools and classical methods of breeding. The use of molecular markers for early selection of zygotic seedlings from controlled crosses resulted in the possibility of selection of a high number of new combination and, as a consequence, the establishment of a great number of hybrids in field experiments. The faster new tools are incorporated in the program, the faster is possibility to reach new genotypes that can be tested as a new variety. Good traits should be kept or incorporate, whereas bad traits have to be excluded or minimized in the new genotype. Scion and rootstock can not be considered separately, and graft compatibility, fruit quality and productivity are essential traits to be evaluated in the last stages of the program. The mapping of QTLs has favored breeding programs of several perennial species and in citrus it was possible to map several characteristics with qualitative and quantitative inheritance. The existence of linkage maps and QTLs already mapped, the development of EST and BAC library and the sequencing of the Citrus complete genome altogether make very demanding and urgent the exploration of such data to launch a wider genetic study of citrus. The rising of information on genome of several organisms has opened new approaches looking for integration between breeding, genetic and genome. Genome assisted selection (GAS) involves more than gene or complete genome sequencing and is becoming an import support in breeding programs of annual and perennial species. An huge information amount can be derivate from genome analysis. The use and benefit of such informations will depend on the genetic basis of the breeding program.

Enhanced memory for the wolf in sheep’s clothing:: Facial trustworthiness modulates face-trait associative memory

Our decision about whether to trust and cooperate with someone is influenced by the individual’s facial appearance despite its limited predictive power. Thus, remembering trustworthy-looking cheaters is more important than remembering untrustworthy-looking cheaters because we are more likely to trust and cooperate with the former, resulting in a higher risk of unreciprocated cooperation. The present study investigated whether our mind adaptively copes with this problem by enhancing memory for trustworthy-looking cheaters. Participants played a debt game, wherein they learned to discriminate among good, neutral, and bad lenders, who respectively charged no, moderate, and high interest on the debt. Each lender had either a trustworthy- or untrustworthy-looking face. A subsequent memory test revealed that participants remembered the bad traits of trustworthy-looking lenders more accurately than those of untrustworthy-looking lenders. The results demonstrate enhanced memory for trustworthy-looking cheaters, or wolves in sheep’s clothing, implying that humans are equipped with protective mechanisms against disguised, unfaithful signs of trustworthiness.

The Seeds of Negativity: Knowledge and Money

This paper studies the tendency to use negative ads. For this purpose, we focus on an interesting industry (political campaigns) and an intriguing empirical regularity (the tendency to “go negative” is higher in close races). We present a model of electoral competition in which ads inform voters either of the good traits of the candidate or of the bad traits of his opponent. We find that in equilibrium, the proportion of negative ads depends on both voters' knowledge and the candidate's budget. Furthermore, for an interesting subset of the parameter space, negativity increases in both knowledge and budget. Using data on the elections for the U.S. House of Representative in 2000, 2002, and 2004, we examine the model and its implications. Using nonstructural estimation, we find that negativity indeed increases in both voters' knowledge and the candidate's budget. Furthermore, we also find that knowledge and budget mediate the effect of closeness on negativity. Using structural estimation, we reinforce these findings. Specifically, we find that the model's parameters are within the subset of the parameter space discussed above. Thus, the evidence implies that the model is not only helpful in identifying variables that were ignored by previous studies (i.e., knowledge and budget) but also in explaining an intriguing empirical regularity.

The Seeds of Negativity: Knowledge and Money

This paper studies the tendency to use negative ads. For this purpose we focus on an interesting industry (political campaigns) and an intriguing empirical regularity (the tendency to “go negative” is higher in close races). We present a model of electoral competition in which ads inform voters either on the good traits of the candidate or on the bad traits of his opponent. We find that in equilibrium the proportion of negative ads depends on both voters’ knowledge and the candidate’s budget. Furthermore, for an interesting subset of the parameter space, negativity increases in both knowledge and budget. Using data on the elections for the US House of Representative in 2000, 2002 and 2004, we examine the model and its implications. Using non-structural estimation we find that negativity indeed increases in both voters’ knowledge and the candidate’s budget. Furthermore, we also find that knowledge and budget mediate the effect of closeness on negativity. Using structural estimation we reinforce these findings. Specifically, we find that the model’s parameters are within the subset of the parameters space discussed above. Thus, the evidence implies that the model is not only helpful in identifying variables that were ignored by previous studies (i.e., knowledge and budget) but also in explaining an intriguing empirical regularity.

Women in Between: Filmic Representations of Gender, Race, and Nation in<i> Ramona </i>(1910) and<i> The Barrier </i>(1917) during the Progressive Era

Women in BetweenFilmic Representations of Gender, Race, and Nation in Ramona (1910) and The Barrier (1917) during the Progressive Era Dominique Brégent-Heald (bio) Since the sixteenth century interracial couplings in the New World have created vibrant new communities. More than biological miscegenation, the mixture of European and indigenous peoples was an amalgamation of culture and tradition. Recently scholars have begun to explore the dynamics of racial and cultural mixture in the literature of the Americas. Comparative analyses of filmic representations of métissage and mestizaje, however, have been largely absent.1 The film industry has regularly included characters with dual Native and European ancestry in its productions, particularly in films set in the border regions that the United States shares with Canada and Mexico. Typically these characters are the offspring of asymmetrical relationships between non-Native male protagonists and Indian or "half-breed" women.2 Whether set in the U.S.-Canadian or -Mexican borderlands and regardless of the actual proportion of Native blood, films referred to characters of mixed Native and European ancestry as "half-breeds," a term that privileges a binary racial merger and adherence to the one-drop rule. Moreover, the hegemonic film industry frequently coded "half-breeds" as "even more vicious and more dishonest, having inherited the worst traits of both Indian and Anglo," than full-blood Native peoples.3 Filmic portrayals of mestizaje and métissage, however, were not always so cut and dried. Progressive-era films set in borderland regions expose the ambivalence of the nation-state concerning sexualized interracial mixing. The following discussion compares the films Ramona (1910) and The Barrier (1917) to shed light on the complex discourses of gender, race, ethnicity, region, and nation in the early twentieth century. Both productions are picturizations of two bestselling place-based literary works that each feature female protagonists, Ramona and Necia, who are apparently the mixed-race daughters of Native women and Anglo-Saxon men. Both narratives unfold on the metaphoric and geographic edges of the United States. Ramona, set in Southern California, [End Page 145] is based on Helen Hunt Jackson's 1884 novel, while The Barrier is an adaptation of Rex Beach's Klondike-themed novel published in 1908.4 From the mid–nineteenth century through the First World War the publishing industry frequently organized fiction around identifiable locales, which tended to concentrate on distant places and eras, branded to appeal to various market segments in search of authentic folkways.5 In light of ongoing pressures to regulate and/or censor films, various U.S. film companies adapted these renowned literary works as part of a broader attempt to elevate the cultural legitimacy of the motion picture industry. An added benefit to this strategy was increased profits; picturizations of notable plays and novels appealed to a middle-class clientele without alienating working-class patronage. Most of these early productions were adaptations of well-known works of fiction that took place in North American settings. Like the novels, the film versions of Ramona and The Barrier respectively portray the topographically and climatologically divergent borderlands of Southern California and the Yukon-Alaska frontier as places unique and rich in local color. In addition the temporal settings of these film adaptations are rooted in the historical period of civilizing frontier societies, as Anglo-American and -Canadian interests from the center consolidated their power in the periphery, thereby destroying the previous social orders established by Native and mixed-race communities as well as by the French and Spanish colonial regimes. At a time when physical boundaries between nations and peoples had become more precise, the marked presence of mixed-race peoples in borderland regions presented a more porous divide. The novels and their film adaptations explore racial and gendered hierarchies within the Southland and Northland in differing ways. Ramona is a tragic tale of the dispossession of Native peoples and Californios in the Spanish Borderlands at the hands of Euro-American settlers.6 By contrast, The Barrier celebrates the regenerative or invigorating qualities offered by the Klondike as a last frontier for Anglo-American and -Canadian men. Furthermore, while the narrative of The Barrier purposefully elides the boundary between U.S. Alaska and...

Regulatory Accessibility and Social Influences on State Self-Control

The current work examined how social factors influence self-control. Current conceptions of state self-control treat it largely as a function of regulatory capacity. The authors propose that state self-control might also be influenced by social factors because of regulatory accessibility. Studies 1 through 4 provide evidence that individuals' state self-control is influenced by the trait and state self-control of salient others such that thinking of others with good trait or state self-control leads to increases in state self-control and thinking of others with bad trait or state self-control leads to decreases in state self-control. Study 5 provides evidence that the salience of significant others influences both regulatory accessibility and state self-control. Combined, these studies suggest that the effects of social influences on state self-control occur through multiple mechanisms.

Frontolimbic activity and cognitive bias in major depression.

In order to explore neural activity that accompanies cognitive bias in mood disorders, the authors had clinically depressed and nondepressed controls complete a self-evaluation procedure in which they indicated whether trait words were self-descriptive. Dense-array (256-channel) electroencephalography was recorded. Greater depression and low Positive Affect were associated with decreased endorsement of favorable (Good) traits, and greater anxiety and high Negative Affect were associated with increased endorsement of unfavorable (Bad) traits. For controls, the event-related potential (ERP) showed an enhanced visual N1 for trials in which Bad traits were endorsed. For depressed participants, this N1 was attenuated, specifically for these endorsed Bad trials. A similar pattern was observed in the P2-medial frontal negativity (P2-MFN) complex, with controls showing an enhanced MFN to the endorsed Bad words, while depressed participants showed an attenuated or absent medial frontal response on these items specifically. Distributed linear-inverse source analysis of the ERP localized the N1 effect to the inferotemporal-occipital cortex and the medial frontal effect to the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex. The altered ERP responses in depressed participants may provide clues to the neurophysiological processes associated with negatively biased cognition and self-evaluation in clinical depression.

Decolonizing Rape Law: A Native Feminist Synthesis of Safety and Sovereignty

Decolonizing Rape LawA Native Feminist Synthesis of Safety and Sovereignty Sarah Deer (bio) A former secretary-treasurer of the Comanche Nation was convicted in Lawton on two counts of first-degree rape and sentenced to 20 years in prison, the prosecutor said. Melvin Ray Kerchee, 57, was found guilty Tuesday of raping two girls in 2002. They were 10 and 13 years old at the time. . . . The girls—now 13 and 15 years old—testified they were raped in the summer of 2002.1 Ramaris Paul Anagal, 32, of Chinle, Ariz., was sentenced here today to 25 years in prison for three counts of Aggravated Sexual Abuse and one count of Assault Resulting in Serious Bodily Injury. Anagal raped a female companion while forcing her to perform sex acts on his then girlfriend who was also traveling with them. Anagal pretended to have a gun during the ordeal. The girlfriend testified that she knew there was no gun but pretended to have one because she was afraid of Anagal. Both victims testified that Anagal told his girlfriend to shoot the friend.2 [End Page 149] The above described cases are but two examples of an ever-increasing epidemic of sexual violence committed against Native women and girls. In these cases, the Native defendants were convicted and received sentences of twenty years and twenty-five years, respectively. Each was prosecuted by a foreign government (the United States, not the respective tribal nations). The question I raise is—should the tribal government itself respond to such crimes? If yes, how—and what might a Native feminist analysis have to offer in addressing this crisis? Many people will argue that such crimes are too serious to be handled by contemporary tribal justice systems.3 Given the numerous legal and financial limitations faced by tribal court systems, they might say, tribal governments must simply rely on the federal (or state) system to prosecute and sentence such rapists. However, this over-reliance on foreign governmental systems has often been to the detriment of Native women. Today, Native women suffer the highest per capita rates of sexual violence in the United States.4 Conservative estimates suggest that more than one of three Native women in America will be raped during their lifetime.5 Rape was once extremely rare in tribal communities.6 Arguably, the imposition of colonial systems of power and control has resulted in Native women being the most victimized group of people in the United States.7 Moreover, statistics indicate that most perpetrators of rape against Native women are white.8 As a result of a 1978 U.S. Supreme Court decision, tribal governments have been denied their authority to criminally prosecute non-Indian perpetrators.9 Rape and sexual violence are deeply embedded in the colonial mindset.10 Rape is more than a metaphor for colonization—it is part and parcel of colonization. Paula Gunn Allen notes that “. . . for many people the oppression and abuse of women is indistinguishable from fundamental Western concepts of social order.”11 Sexual assault mimics the worst traits of colonization in its attack on the body, invasion of physical boundaries, and disregard for humanity. A survivor of sexual assault may experience many of the same symptoms—self-blame, loss of identity, and long-term depression and despair—as a people surviving colonization. The perpetrators of sexual assault and colonization thrive on power and control over their victims. The U.S. government, as a perpetrator of colonization, has attempted to assert long-lasting control over land and people—usurping governments, spirituality, and identity. Paradoxically, today authority over most sexual assaults on Indian reservations falls under the auspices of the federal government.12 Unlike most rapes in the United States, which are prosecuted by the state court systems, rape of Native women on Indian reservations falls within the [End Page 150] purview of the U.S. Attorney’s Offices throughout the nation. However, as noted by Indian legal scholar Kevin K. Washburn, “the system designed to address criminal justice and public safety in Indian country simply does not work.”13 Depending on an outside government, especially a government established and created by the colonizers (the historical perpetrators of rape), is...

The role of Alexander the Great in Livy’s historiography

In spite of the main goal of the annalistic narration of Livy, the description of the history of Rome, Alexander the Great has an important role in the Ab Urbe condita . In this way, Livy composed the first known counterfactual episode of European historiography (IX 17–19). Moreover, Livy compared the courage, knowledge and the fortune of the Macedonian and the Roman military commanders, and the opposing forces. Livy presents Alexander with his bad traits, therefore the historiographer denies the divinity of the Macedonian king. Livy opposes the few Greeks, who rejected the order of Augustus, and hated the princeps himself.

Introduction

Introduction Melvin I. Urofsky When Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner first wrote about the “Gilded Age” in 1883, they certainly did not mean the phrase to be laudatory. The two men sawthe latterpartof the nineteenth century as the expression ofall the worst traits in the nation’s character, and that view has remained with the public ever since. There is no question that in the decades afterthe Civil War, America’s industrialization came accompanied by horrid working condi­ tions for laborers in mines and factories, ex­ ploitation ofwomenand children, and conspic­ uous consumption by the captains of industry that appalled many people besides Twain and Warner. While historians have not denied the truth ofthe “Gilded Age” charges, they have found the erato be farmore complex. The completion of thousands of miles of railroad track helped to tie the various states into a Union, to make men and women whereverthey lived see them­ selves as “Americans” rather than “Kansans” or “Georgians.” While so-calledrobberbarons such as JohnD. Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and J. P. Morgan grew phenomenally wealthy, the industries they created helped to make the American standard of living the highest in the world. The depredations of industrialization also laid the basis for the Populist and Pro­ gressive movements and the birth ofthe mod­ ern political order. And an age that produced the writings of Mark Twain, Emily Dickin­ son, William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Stephen Crane cannot be characterized as a cultural wasteland. In terms of constitutional history, for too long the jurisprudence of the postwar period has been characterized simply as laissez-faire, with the Court erecting the Constitution into a protective wall for property rights. In re­ cent years we have begun to understand that while the Court, like the rest of the country, believed in the protection of property, there were other currents running through this clas­ sicaljurisprudence. Ofcourse, somehave since been outmodedbychanges in oureconomy and society, but if we wish to understand the great jurisprudential changes that took place in the twentieth century, we have to start in the latter part ofthe nineteenth. This is what the contributors to this is­ sue have done, in papers originally given as v vi JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY part of a lecture series on the Court and the Gilded Age. Other than people interested in the Court’s history, few will even recognize the names of Samuel Miller, Stephen Field, Stan­ ley Matthews, and David Brewer, but as you will discover on reading these articles, they played an important role in shaping the Court’s response to the new America. And that re­ sponse, ofcourse, is what progressive reform­ ers like Holmes and Brandeis attacked in their turn. In addition, we have an article by Ross Davies regarding an incident mentioned in the best-selling book about the Court, The Brethren. It is the type of article that results when a careful reader is suddenly pulled up short by something he or she reads and says “That can’t be true!” In this case the ques­ tion came out of a baseball case decided by the Court and written by Harry A. Blackmun, whom everyone knew was a rabidbaseball fan. Could he have deliberately overlooked impor­ tant African-American players, as Bob Wood­ ward and ScottArmstrong charged? The open­ ing of the Blackmun Papers gave Professor Davies a chance to find out the truth. Finally, as always, we are grateful to Grier Stephenson for keeping us up to date on the important books appearing about the Court. ...

Thou Shall not Diversify: Why Two of Every Sort?

The present paper sheds a new light on the notorious question in the evolutionary biology of why the modern species exhibit only the asexual and binary mating systems, with the clear dominance of the latter over the former. We present an in-depth study of the intertemporal propagation of the fundamental distributional properties of phenotypes in general polygenic multi-gender inheritance models with sex- and time-dependent heritability. We further analyze the implications of these models under thick-tailedness of traits' initial distributions. We obtain the results that demonstrate that, under an arbitrary multi-sex mating system with k genders, the Organism's switching to a more uniform mode of heritability leads to an increase in peakedness and concentration of traits with not extremely heavy-tailed initial distributions in its population in all the future periods. However, the decrease in the diversity of the parameters responsible for the different sexes' genetical contributions to the next period's offspring leads to an increase in concentration and peakedness of extremely long-tailed traits in all future generations. From these results it follows that switching to an inheritance system with greater diversity in heritability coeffcients and, thus, an increase in the number of genders under symmetric heritability, is advantageous in the case of extremely long-tailed traits that have negative effects on the population's fitness (say, human medical or behavioral disorders for which inheritance is significant). Such a switching or increase in the number of genders slows down or completely stops the intertemporal spread of the extremely thick-tailed negative traits in the population. On the other hand, a decrease in the number of genders in the symmetric multi-sex inheritance system and, more generally, switching to less diverse heritability parameters is advantageous in the case of not extremely thick-tailed positive traits (e.g., the trait of intelligence). Our theoretical results demonstrate that the intertemporal propagation of distributional properties of traits is, to a large extent, responsible for the dominance of the asexual and binary mating systems in nature. Namely, from the results obtained in the paper it follows that the switching between the asexual and binary inheritance mechanisms allows the population to achieve effectively a relatively fast decline (sharp concentration) of bad traits or a relatively quick spread (decrease of peakedness and concentration) of good traits, regardless of the distributional properties of the phenotypes in the initial period, in particular, regardless of the degree of heavy-tailedness of their initial densities. Furthermore, from our results it follows that, regardless of their initial distributional properties, the propagation of negative traits in a population with three or more genders can be prevented and the wide spread of positive phenotypes can be achieved immediately or in a relatively near future if the population switches to a mating system with only one or two genders. Given the high costs to species of developing and maintaining extra genders, this makes the asexual and binary inheritance mechanisms advantageous comparing to other mating systems.

The Need for New Constructs

One could not ask for a clearer opposition of views on continuity than the articles by Michael Lewis (this issue), on the one hand, and Avshalom Caspi and Brent Roberts (this issue), on the other. The former scholar questions whether any personality traits are preserved, whereas the latter pair celebrates preservation. I suspect that most scientists in this field regard a middle position as the one that matches current data best. There is some preservation, but as Lewis noted, it is modest. I suggest that deeper insights in this domain will not occur if psychologists continue to rely only on self-report instruments to measure personality. Most of the work cited by Caspi and Roberts (this issue) use questionnaires to assess personality categories or dimensions. However, different personality types would emerge if the thousands of people who filled out those questionnaires had been filmed for 24 hr over 6-month period in different contexts and scientists factor analyzed those observations. Advocates of the popular personality constructs assume, without any detailed argument, that a person's semantic judgments about their behaviors, beliefs, and moods are the most valid bases for inferring personality types. This premise is surprising for no biologist would use the reports of informants, even sophisticated ones, to decide on the basic human diseases. No economist would rely only on interviews with consumers to discover the fundamental economic activities of a society. No cognitive psychologist would record participants' careful descriptions of their perceptions, memories, and ways of solving problems to infer the basic cognitive competencies. Self-report instruments have several serious problems. The first flaw is based on the semantic constraints on judgments about self. A woman who affirms on a questionnaire that she likes meeting new people is biased to respond affirmatively to all questions semantically related to that statement to maintain consistency. Second, if a human trait does not have a popular semantic name, personality questionnaires do not contain relevant items. More important, most personality categories describe relatively superficial evaluative dispositions like sociality, conscientiousness, nervousness, and openness to ideas. Each of the four is regarded as either a good or bad trait by most Americans and all four are likely to be characteristics one would ask a friend about when a stranger moved into the neighborhood. By contrast, constructs like chronic feeling tone, ambivalence over goals, nodes of uncertainty, energy level, emotional reactions to individuals with higher status, and intensity of sexual arousal are difficult to measure with questionnaires and may represent sources of variation with significant influences on behavior and major life choices. Finally, answers to questionnaires are influenced by a comparison of past with present, and the accuracy with which the past is retrieved. Sadly, adults often construct judgments about their moods and behaviors on the spot using information that is most accessible. A woman's answers to questions about her sociability represent her sense of meaning of extroversion or introversion, but not the referential meaning. It is the latter that determint s whether the proposition is true or false.

Social dominance orientation and group context in implicit group prejudice.

We tested the joint influence of individual difference and situational factors on implicit group prejudice. Participants in Experiments 1 and 2 were briefly shown in-group or out-group pronouns prior to evaluating good or bad trait adjectives. Under standard conditions (Experiment 1), there was no difference between participants with high and low social dominance orientation (SDO), but when the intergroup context was made more salient (Experiment 2), high-SDO participants alone showed implicit group prejudice. Implications for the malleability and consensuality of implicit prejudice are discussed.

Whose Nation?: Czech Dissidents and History Writing from a Post-1989 Perspective

If there was a time to be hopeful in Czechoslovakia, it was New Year's Day, 1990. Only a few weeks earlier Communism had collapsed more swiftly, peacefully and decidedly than anywhere else in East-Central Europe. Intellectuals of various political leanings, most of them former "enemies of the people," were speedily organizing a democratic form of government and planning a transition from state socialism to a free-market economy. Perhaps most remarkably the country's overwhelming choice for president was Václav Havel, a well-known philosopher/playwright/dissident who had been jailed several times by the Communist regime. Everything seemed turned on its head, and for the better. In addressing the country that day, however, Havel's tone was less than jubilant. The country's new leader spoke of Communism's sad legacy, and most strikingly of the country's "moral contamination." As both victims and perpetrators of the previous system, Czechs, he said, had become selfish, parochial and unable to think in terms of the common good: "Our main enemy today is our own bad traits.... The main struggle will have to be fought on this field." 1

Whose Nation?: <em>Czech Dissidents and History Writing from a Post-1989 Perspective</em>

If there was a time to be hopeful in Czechoslovakia, it was New Year's Day, 1990. Only a few weeks earlier Communism had collapsed more swiftly, peacefully and decidedly than anywhere else in East-Central Europe. Intellectuals of various political leanings, most of them former "enemies of the people," were speedily organizing a democratic form of government and planning a transition from state socialism to a free-market economy. Perhaps most remarkably the country's overwhelming choice for president was Václav Havel, a well-known philosopher/playwright/dissident who had been jailed several times by the Communist regime. Everything seemed turned on its head, and for the better. In addressing the country that day, however, Havel's tone was less than jubilant. The country's new leader spoke of Communism's sad legacy, and most strikingly of the country's "moral contamination." As both victims and perpetrators of the previous system, Czechs, he said, had become selfish, parochial and unable to think in terms of the common good: "Our main enemy today is our own bad traits.... The main struggle will have to be fought on this field." 1

The Jewish Mother: Comedy and Controversy in American Popular Culture

comic stereotype of the Jewish mother, from domineering to grotesque, is a cultural construct developed by male writers in the United States in the 1960s, the era of political turbulence that coincided with the second wave of feminism in this country. Among other objectives, feminists hoped that their efforts to expose the misogyny behind negative stereotypes would help to end them. Yet the representation of the Jewish mother both as a nagging guardian of ethnic identity and the embodiment of its worst traits continued to pour forth in newly minted versions from the pens and comedy routines of Jewish men. Some feminist writers like Erica Jong attempted to fight humor with humor while others in novels, screenplays, and essays tried to add complexity and nuance to the image of the Jewish mother. history of the stereotype thus follows a jagged pattern of vilification and vindication, of male action and female reaction, of call and response, that left the caricature firmly ingrained in popular imagination. Overall, feminist responses to men's comic devaluing of the Jewish mother failed to disrupt the persistence of the image. But in recent decades, as Jews' concerns about assimilation have decreased and new cruxes of female identity and vocation have arisen, the expansion of women's roles outside the family has gradually defused the comic exaggeration of the overprotective mother. Not direct critique by feminists and social commentators, but the indirect effects of shifting social expectations and goals have brought solace to the stigmatized figure of the Jewish mother. Feminist critics of several schools of thought have developed ideas about women's laughter as a means of disrupting the structures of patriarchal discourse and ideology. They stress women's creative energy and humor as distinctive features of feminist writing with the potential to unsettle the logocentrism of male authority. Helene Cixous in The Laugh of the Medusa metaphorically describes women's verbal spontaneity, generosity, and jouissance as part of a defiant, liberating stance. Julia Kristeva, from a psychoanalytic perspective, writes that a pre-Oedipal phase linked to the maternal chora can resurface in texts to interrupt the symbolic order of the father. Similarly, the disruptive power of laughter is treated in Patricia Yaeger's theory of play as having political as well as cognitive effects. Contemporary feminist theory, then, valorizes the transformative potential of humor and language to subvert male dominance and regulation of social norms.(1) When the ranks seem to close in around a personification like the Jewish mother, comedy itself can refurbish and redeem her image. This essay, in tracing the gender wars fought over the stereotype of the Jewish mother, examines how that negative image became rooted in popular culture in the 1960s and the difficulties women writers faced in their attempts to intervene and revise it. myth of the manipulative Jewish mother is a complex formulation, ranging from affectionate to hostile, that grew to color perceptions of Jewish womanhood in a way that shows the triumph of comic expediency over social reality, even within a minority group that generally considered itself tolerant and liberal. Whether the Jewish mother is represented as protecting her children or demanding their loyalty, she is seen as exceeding prescribed boundaries, as being excessive. Her claims to affection, her voicing of opinions, her expressions of maternal worry are perceived as threatening in part because she acts as a free agent, not as a subordinate female according to mainstream cultural ideals. Even when she is represented as self-effacing, cast as the martyr, she is interpreted as being manipulative or passive-aggressive, secretly striving to impose her will on others. Jewish-mother stereotype is fraught with contradictions that have not served to deconstruct it, but rather to let critics of the mother have it both ways. …

Cross‐cultural Variation in the Importance of Psychological Characteristics: A Seven‐country Study

The Psychological Importance (PI) of personality traits is defined as the degree to which they provide information useful in understanding and predicting behaviour. University students from 7 countries (Chile, China, Nigeria, Norway, Pakistan, Portugal, and the United States) rated the PI of each of the 300 items of the Adjective Check List along a 5‐point scale. PI was shown to be a meaningful (i.e. reliable) concept in each country. Comparisons of PI ratings between pairs of countries indicated correlations ranging from 0.23 to 0.73, with a mean of 0.49 among the 7 countries. A variety of additional analyses indicated that six of the seven countries tended to group themselves into two clusters: (1) China, Nigeria, and Pakistan; and (2) Chile, Norway, and the United States. In the second cluster, trait importance had a curvilinear relationship to trait favourability (i.e. both good and bad traits may be important) whereas in the first cluster trait importance and favourability had a linear relationship (i.e. only good traits may be important). The findings were suggestive of substantial cross‐cultural differences in the importance assigned to psychological traits.

The Influence of Affect on Self-Perception in Depression

This study examined the role of affect in the organization of self-relevant thoughts in depression. Depressed and nondepressed college students described themselves by selecting adjectives and organizing these adjectives into categories that represented different aspects of themselves. Individuals also supplied a label to describe the general content or meaning of each category. Each label was coded for whether it expressed predominantly an affective, good-bad theme or themes that reflected more than a simple affective distinction (e.g., social themes). As predicted, the depressed were more likely than the nondepressed to use category labels in which the salient feature was negative or positive affect (e.g., “my bad traits” or “my good traits”) and less likely to use category labels that incorporated additional information (e.g., “how I act with others,” “myself as a student”). These results suggest that the depressed are particularly sensitive to the affective nature of their thoughts and behavior, and that they may develop a self-structure in which affect is a central organizing factor. It is also proposed that the affect associated with self-relevant stimuli acquires special significance in depression because it can give the depressed critical information for resolving or understanding the marked discrepancy between their actual feelings about themselves and how they would like to feel. Several alternative ways in which affect may influence cognition in depression are discussed.

Images of Social Groups: Categorical or Qualified?

This paper makes a direct empirical assessment of way Americans go about describing social groups in three important intergroup contexts-race, gender, and social class. Results from a national survey indicate that when respondents are given opportunity to express themselves in a relatively unconstrained format, qualified images of groups generally prevail over categorical descriptions. Further, amount and pattern of categorical thinking vary considerably across three intergroup contexts, reflecting different kinds of group images that underly race, gender, and social class relations. Mary R. Jackman is an Associate Professor of Sociology and a Faculty Associate of Survey Research Center, University of Michigan. Mary Scheuer Senter is an Instructor in Department of Sociology, Anthropology, and Social Work, Central Michigan University. The authors would like to thank Robert W. Jackman, Joan Huber, Anne Adams, and an anonymous referee for their helpful comments, and Suzanne Purcell and Maria Kousis for their assistance. This research was supported by grants from National Institute for Mental Health (MH-26433) and National Science Foundation (SOC 75-00405). Public Opinion Quarterly ? 1980 by The Trustees of Columbia University Published by Elsevier North-Holland, Inc 0033-362X/80/0044-341/$l 75 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.49 on Mon, 26 Sep 2016 05:06:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 342 JACKMAN AND SENTER thought to be pervasive and widespread (Katz and Braly, 1947; Centers, 1951; Ehrlich, 1962, 1973:32; Williams, 1964:36, 41; Karlins et al., 1969; Eldridge, 1979:22-27), and their analysis has been central to study of intergroup beliefs and stereotypes. Indeed, most definitions of a stereotype include categorical thinking as a critical element (Fishman, 1956; Richter, 1956; Vinacke, 1957; Allport, 1958; Secord, 1959; Koenig and King, 1964; Williams, 1964; Campbell, 1967; Harding et al., 1969; Tajfel, 1969; Cauthen et al., 1971; Brigham, 1971; Mackie, 1973). While categorical description of groups has been a central concern of past research, standard measures have assumed rather than demonstrated its existence. Analysts have constrained respondents to express their beliefs about group traits in categorical terms, and have then inferred that categorical thinking is endemic to intergroup perceptions. In addition, most research on trait attribution to social groups has relied on select subsamples (generally college students), so that we know relatively little about nature of trait attribution among a cross-section of general public. In this study, we report on a new measure of beliefs about group traits that was administered in a national probability survey of United States. A more sensitive reflection than past measures of how personality traits are assigned to social groups, our measure is applied to images of race, gender, and social class groups held by blacks and whites, women and men, and people from four subjectively defined social classes, respectively. The results of our analysis belie common conclusion that categorical images of social groups are pervasive and widespread. Instead, they yield useful and suggestive data on varied extent to which different social groups are described in categorical or qualified terms. Categorical Thinking: Central Issues Many analysts consider tendency to simplify and classify world as fundamental to perception as well as a functional coping mechanism for bringing some order to confusion of reality (Lippman, 1922; Allport, 1958; Tajfel, 1969; Ehrlich, 1973:38). In context of intergroup beliefs, this process is believed to become exaggerated and emotionally invested. The categorical perception of groups mold which gives shape to intergroup attitudes (Tajfel, 1969:91). Stereotype assignmefits become the language of (Ehrlich, 1973:21). The categorical attribution of traits to social groups is regarded as invidious for two reasons. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.49 on Mon, 26 Sep 2016 05:06:15 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms IMAGES OF SOCIAL GROUPS One line of reasoning stresses that any perception that unequivocally lumps all members of a group into one unvaried category is intrinsically invidious because it credits group membership with an overwhelming role in determining individual personality characteristics, and because it provides perfect grounding for discriminatory policies and practices. Most important, however, categorical description of a group represents a closed and insensitive perception that routinely pigeonholes group members and leaves perceiver unreceptive to contrary evidence, which is either overlooked or dismissed as a mere exception. Categorical descriptions of groups are thus seen as inherently inaccurate and irrational (Lippmann, 1922; Richter, 1956; Allport, 1958; Williams, 1964:36; Ehrlich, 1973; Mackie, 1973; Tajfel, 1969; 1978). According to a second line of reasoning, invidiousness of categorical images of groups stems from unqualified attribution of positive traits to one's own group and negative qualities to other groups. Perceptions that reflect ethnocentrism and prejudice assert one group's monopoly of good traits and another group's monopoly of bad traits (Vinacke, 1957; Allport, 1958; Williams, 1964:40; Campbell, 1967; Harding, 1968; Tajfel, 1969; 1978; Eldridge,

Forced Choice—The New Army Rating1

SummaryThe origin of the use of efficiency reports for Officers of the U. S. Army is lost in history, as is the story of the evolution of the formal procedures of reporting. Sometime after the first World War, however, a standard form was adopted and a procedure regularized for accomplishing this report. Thereafter, twice each year—on June 30th and on December 31st—every officer in the Army has been rated by his immediate superior, and this rating submitted to the War Department. Though early recognized as not completely satisfactory, the original rating form remained in force (with sporadic minor amendments) until it was superseded in July of 1947.The new form is the product of many months of concentrated research. It is radically different in many respects from the old form, and from other rating devices currently in use in industry. Its most novel feature is the use of what has been called the “forced‐choice” rating method. Rather than indicating how much or how little of each characteristic an officer possesses, the rater is required to choose, from several sets of four adjectives or phrases, which best characterizes the officer, and which is least descriptive. In other words, it calls for objective reporting and minimizes subjective judgment. And because of the way in which the tetrads—sets of four rating elements—are constructed, it reduces the rater's ability to produce any desired outcome by the choice of obviously good or obviously bad traits. It thus diminishes the effects of favoritism and personal bias.The technique, and the form embodying it, has been tried out on fifty thousand officers—in both experimental and official trials—and the results obtained with it have been compared with independent criteria of efficiency arrived at through group ratings. The new method is superior to all other methods examined. It produces a better distribution of ratings relatively free from the usual pile‐up at the top of the scale. It is less subject to influence by the rank of the officer being rated. It is quickly and objectively scored by machine. And above all, it produces ratings which are more valid indices of real worth.The particular form developed for rating Army officers would probably be of little value for other groups—largely because of the specificity of the rating elements it contains. The technique, however, has already proved of value in other situations and there is every reason to believe that it is even more generally applicable.