Interpretation Of Sex Differences Research Articles

Androgyny eliminates sex differences in emotional reactivity: ERP and network coupling evidences

The role of gender role in interpreting sex differences in emotion is unknown. The present study examined how gender role moderates sex differences in emotional reactivity. Event-related potentials (ERP) were recorded in sixty-eight subjects with typical or androgynous gender roles when they passively observed neutral and negative pictures. Behaviorally, typical females (feminine females) reported higher emotional rating than typical males (masculine males), while androgynous males and androgynous females reported no significant differences. Electrophysiologically, we found higher late positive potential (LPP) amplitude in typical females compared to typical males, while this pattern of sex difference was absent in androgynous subjects. The network analysis of EEG data indicates that typical males showed enhanced network coupling strengths between frontal/prefrontal and parietal areas than typical females, which was again absent in androgynous subjects. These findings suggest that gender role is an important determinant in the interpretation of sex differences in emotional reactivity.

Infidelity-Revealing Snapchat Messages Arouse Different Levels of Jealousy Depending on Sex, Type of Message and Identity of the Opposite Sex Rival

Research highlighting sex-differentiated jealousy resulting from imagined scenarios has now been reaffirmed when the infidelity-revealing message is discovered on a social media platform. Participants in the current study were presented with both sexually and emotionally charged infidelity-revealing scenarios featuring a same-sex sibling, a friend and a stranger in the format of a ‘Snapchat’ message. Men indicated significantly higher jealousy to sexual as opposed to emotional messages with the reverse pattern evident in women. Sex differences were also evident in the extent of jealousy elicited by ‘third-party’ identity. Women were significantly more jealous when the imagined infidelity occurred between their sister compared to both a best friend and a stranger with males showing significantly lower jealousy directed towards their brother compared to a stranger. These findings are supportive not only of a parental investment (PI) interpretation of sex differences in jealousy but also an interpretation consistent with aspects of inclusive fitness theory.

Jealousy Levels in Response to Infidelity-Revealing Facebook Messages Depend on Sex, Type of Message and Message Composer: Support for the Evolutionary Psychological Perspective

Sex differences in how and to what extent jealousy manifests have long been documented by evolutionary psychologists with males showing more pronounced responses to sexual infidelity and females to emotional infidelity. With modern technology facilitating the opportunity for extra-pair relations and the means by which inclinations towards infidelity can be monitored, social media is a fertile ground to test hypotheses derived from evolutionarily informed theories. The current study presented male (n = 21) and female (n = 23) undergraduate participants with realistic, unambiguously sexual and emotional messages both sent and received that had been discovered (imagined) on their partner’s Facebook messenger. Distress scores in response to these messages were measured on a scale of 0–10. Broad support for the evolutionary interpretation of sex differences in jealousy was found with more pronounced sexual jealousy in males, and emotional jealousy in females compared to males being evident. Similarly, salient sex differences were observed highlighting the importance of the composer of the infidelity-revealing message. For example, in females, higher distress was found resulting from the discovery of received (female rival) when compared to sent (male partner) messages, and received messages across sex (females higher). The results are discussed in relation to previous findings and in the context of growing concern relating to relationship dissolution and partner-initiated domestic violence.

Age and Sex Effects in Anchoring Vignette Studies: Methodological and Empirical Contributions.

Anchoring vignettes are an increasingly popular tool for identifying and correcting for group differences in use of subjective ordered response categories. However, existing techniques to maximize response consistency (use of the same standards for self-ratings as for vignette-ratings), which center on matching vignette characters' demographic characteristics to respondents' own characteristics, appear at times to be ineffective or to pose interpretive difficulties. Specifically, respondents often appear to neglect instructions to treat vignette characters as age peers. Furthermore, when vignette characters' sex is matched to respondents' sex, interpretation of sex differences in rating style is rendered problematic. This study applies two experimental manipulations to a national American sample (n=1,765) to clarify best practices for enhancing response consistency. First, an analysis of two methods of highlighting vignette characters' age suggests that both yield better response consistency than previous, less prominent means. Second, a comparison of ratings of same- and opposite-sex vignette characters suggests that, with avoidable exceptions, the sex of the respondent rather than of the vignette character drives observed sex differences in rating style. Implications for interpretation and design of anchoring vignette studies are discussed. In addition, this study clarifies the importance of two additional measurement assumptions, cross-respondent vignette equivalence and cross-character vignette equivalence. It also presents empirical findings of significant sex, educational, and racial/ethnic differences in styles of rating health, and racial/ethnic differences in styles of rating political efficacy. These findings underscore the incomparability of unadjusted subjective self-ratings across demographic groups, and thus support the potential utility of the anchoring vignette method.

Discourses on Sex Differences in Medieval Scholarly Islamic Thought

This study explores how medical authorities in medieval Islamic society understood and analyzed Greek authorities on the differences between men and women and their mutual contributions to the process of reproduction. As this research illustrates, such thinkers' interpretations of sex differences did not form a consistent corpus, and were in fact complex and divergent, reflecting, and contributing to, the social and cultural constructs of gender taken up by European authors in the Middle Ages. While some scholars have argued for a "one sex" view of human beings in the medieval period, a close reading of Islamic medical authors shows that the plurality and complexity of ideas about sex differences and the acceptance of the flexibility of barriers between the sexes make it difficult to assume that the biological knowledge about sex differences formed a unitary ideological foundation for a system of gender hierarchy. It is clear, however, that whatever their differences, medieval Islamic discussions of sex differences implicitly or explicitly emphasized the inferiority of the female body.

Ethnic Aesthetics: The Meaning of Ethnic Art for Blacks and Nonblacks

This study examines the importance of ethnic referents and syntactic structure to the aesthetic meaning derived by Black and Nonblack ethnic groups from representational and non-representational art created by Blacks and Nonblacks. Subjects, 102 southern college students from Black, Nonblack, and integrated populations, including 66 Blacks (38 females, 28 males) and 36 Nonblacks (17 females, 19 males); rated representational art styles (figurative, expressive, collage) and nonrepresentational styles (cubistic, abstractions, pattern) on semantic differential scales representing Evaluative, Potency, and Activity factors. Differences between Blacks and Nonblacks were limited to Blacks' higher Evaluative ratings of the representational Black expressive style and the non-representational Black cubistic style suggesting that ethnic identity in art does not ensure aesthetic valuing by ethnic groups, but rather that aesthetic values are a product of the interactions of ethnic referents and syntactic structure. Significant interactions of sex of viewer and art styles were found across Evaluative, Potency, and Activity analyses. The interpretation of sex differences across all three semantic dimensions is consistent with the interaction of Hedonic Tone, Arousal, and Uncertainty from an information processing view of experimental aesthetics, suggesting that greater attention be paid to sex differences in experimental aesthetics and the study and teaching of art.

Identity in vocational development

J. L. Holland's (1985, Making vocational choices: A theory of vocational personalities and work environments, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall) formulation of the new construct vocational identity did not deal with its relation to other developmental constructs in vocational psychology. The present study investigated the association of vocational identity with vocational development by administering the Vocational Identity Scale, the Medical Career Development Inventory, and the Ego Identity Scale to 143 first- and second-year college students with the same career aspiration. The results indicated that vocational identity related to both degree of vocational development and progress in egoidentity achievement. In particular, vocational identity associated most with the task of crystallizing tentative preferences and progressively less with the other tasks in the vocational development continuum. Interpretation of sex differences in the results led to recommendations for research on stability of vocational identity and the identity formation process.

Interpretations of sex differences in work centrality among kibbutz members

Six intervening clusters of variables are identified as explanations for the recurrent finding that work is a less central domain in the life of kibbutz women as compared to men: (a) education; (b) being part-time workers; (c) family-work conflict; (d) frustration from having degrading jobs; (e) socialization and social influences; and (f) natural dispositions expressed in a biogrammar that emphasizes other domains of life. Since the first three variables are not sex differentiated in the Israeli kibbutz, and data are not available for a good test of the fourth, the kibbutz setting is used to test the validity of the remaining two. Data for five male-female age groups from three kibbutz studies are reanalyzed in order to compare cross-age sex differences in reactions toward work and life, and sex differences in the statistical relationship between variables of the work domain and variables of well-being. A widening sex difference, with age, in the relation between work and well-being would seem to indicate support for explanation e, while a decrease in sex differences would indicate support for explanation f. The results seem to support explanation e. Alternative interpretations of the results are discussed.

Organization Properties and Sex-Segregation in the Underworld: Building a Sociological Theory of Sex Differences in Crime

In this report I examine institutionalized sexism in the underworld. Crime in its more organized and lucrative dimensions is virtually a male phenomenon. Still, sexsegregation in the underworld is variable, being more common in some crime groups than in others. To explain this, I offer a series of propositions and hypotheses linking female access to crime groups to their structure and methods of operation. The proposed framework elaborates on Cloward's opportunity theory by discriminating among illegitimate opportunities depending on whether they are for underworld or upperworld crime, for organized or unorganized crime, for lucrative or petty crime. The scheme can be extended, as well, to an interpretation of race and kinship segregation in the underworld and to an interpretation of sex differences in upperworld crime. My purpose in this report is to show how sex differences in crime are a function of underworld culture and organization and to offer a series of propositions which link properties of crime organizations to criminal roles of women. 1 I use the literature on criminal subcultures and crime organizations and also apply theory from the sociology of occupations and organizations2 to explain (1) the existence of sex-segregation in organized criminal enterprise, resulting in (a) the exclusion or underrepresentation of women in organized crime and (b) their allocation to less-valued roles within crime groups when they are allowed to participate; and (2) the variability of sexsegregation across the spectrum of organized crime activities. In examining these two, related issues, I focus mainly on the social and work relations of the underworld by which crime is organized and through which social positions of individual criminals and crime groups become differentiated. Whatever the historical reasons, roles and struc*For their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper I thank Lynne Appleton, Richard Bord, Gilbert Geis, John Hepburn, Roland Pellegrin, Larry Rhoades, Francis Slim Renee Hoffman Steffensmeier, Robert Terry, Mark Warr, and anonymous referees. ?' 1983 The University of North Carolina Press

An interactionist interpretation of sex differences in violence

An interactionist analysis of violence processes is used as a framework to account for sex differences in parameters of violent behavior. Starting with the observation that violence is often an outcome of negotiations of situated identity, sex differences in the extent of violence and the selection of victim are interpreted. In addition, the symmetry of social relationships specifies the processes generating interpersonal violence. The paper argues that interactionist concepts can be used to make theoretical sense of differences in rates of behavior. Strictly structural explanations are thereby informed by an understanding of the processual character of social interaction.

Galton and sex differences: an historical note.

The psychological study of sex differences is a special area of interest within differential psychology. Differential psychology was launched as a scientific field of research in the latter half of the nineteenth century by Sir Francis Galton. Galton's early research on sex differences in psychological traits gives him the distinction of being the "father" of the modern study of sex differences. Galton's empirical findings and his interpretation of sex differences were heavily influenced by his Victorian sexist attitudes. The early history of the modern study of sex differences exemplifies the intimate relation between facts and values.

Perceptions of onsets of young adulthood, middle age, and old age.

Male and female undergraduates and older community volunteers were asked their opinions as to the age of onset of young man- and womanhood, middle-age man- and womanhood, and old man- and womanhood. Data indicated that older respondents generally judged onsets of both middle and old age to occur significantly later than did young respondents and that women retarded middle- and old-age onsets, compared with men respondents. Men were generally seen as reaching transition points at a somewhat later age than women. Both sex and age of perceiver, as well as sex of the perceived, are variables in the perception of onsets of middle and old age, with onset of young adulthood a relatively fixed age for all respondents. The results were not considered compatible with interpretation of sex differences in stage onsets based upon sex-related occupational-role discontinuities.

Sex differences in rats’ stationary-cage activity measured by observation and automatic recording

Rats’ stationary-cage activity was measured using simultaneous observational time sampling and automatic recording via photobeams. Females scored higher than males on the combined observational categories of rearing, ambulating, and sniffing, but lower on grooming, eating, and drinking, with these differences consistent across 9 days of confinement and across time of day of observation. There were no sex differences in the time spent inactive or in the number of photobeam breaks. Beam breaks were related positively to sniffing and inversely to inactivity. The results raise questions regarding the interpretation of sex differences in behavior in novel and familiar environments and provide evidence on the comparability of observational and automatic methods of activity measurement.

More than one execution: who goes first?

To the Editor.— In several studies of the fear of death which used self-report attitude scales, it has been found that women have a higher fear of death than men. 1 This has been interpreted at its face value hitherto. However, in a recent newspaper article, 2 Sgt John Fiano, who worked on death row at Sing Sing for many years, is quoted as saying: Always, when there was more than one to be executed in one night, the weakest went first. The person with the strongest will goes last. In all my years at Sing Sing, women are always the last to go. They were much stronger emotionally than men. This, if a valid and reliable fact, has great importance for the interpretation of sex differences in the fear of death. It suggests that what might be happening is that men deny their fear of death when answering a