Alfred B. Heilbrun

Anxiety Correlates of Sex-Role Identity in College Students

The relationships between sex-role adoption, aggression anxiety (AA), and manifest anxiety (MA) were determined by using questionnaire data from 85 college males and 156 college females. Significant negative rs were obtained between masculinity and both anxiety variables which, in turn, were positively correlated. The MF-AA findings were similar to those reported for 12-yr.-old children.

CONFORMITY TO MASCULINITY-FEMININITY STEREOTYPES AND EGO IDENTITY IN ADOLESCENTS

Eriksons theory of ego identity was explored by relating a masculinity-femininity measure to perceived social role consistency (RC), one criterion of identity. Male adolescents whose behaviors tended to conform to cultural stereotypes of masculinity showed higher RC than less masculine males. This was consistent with the hypothesis that social reward for conformity should tend to strengthen interpersonal habits, whereas social punishment for nonconformity should have a weakening effect. Females who were either high or low feminine were more consistent than girls who were only moderately feminine. Combining elements of both the traditional feminine and “modern” masculine roles was considered contributory to lower RC for the latter group.

Sex-Role Identity and Achievement Motivation

The hypothesis tested in this study was that the social role demands of college and feminine sex-typed roles were to some extent incompatible and that this resulted in sex-role confusion among college females and among males with a more feminine identification. Two samples of male and female undergraduates were tested on measures of social value-social behavior consistency, i.e., the measure of role confusion, and identification. It was found that females in general do show greater value-behavior inconsistency in line with the hypotheses, but this was restricted to a class of behaviors relevant to achievement motivation only and not to a wider range of inter-personal roles. The same findings were obtained when more feminine males were compared with more masculine males, but no differences in value-behavior consistency as a function of masculinity-femininity of identification were shown by females. Implications for counseling were examined.

Issues in the Assessment of Organic Brain Damage

In most if not all respects the assessment of organic brain damage is similar to other assessment areas in which psychologists have become professionally and scientifically involved, the assessment of psychiatric stacus and the assessmenc of personality attributes to name two. Thus, the problems of psychological assessmenc can be viewed as general ones with each area providing special variations. This report will focus upon how some of these general problems apply specifically to assessment of organicity. The particular kind of difficulties which face the psychologist in his actempts to relace observable behavior to brain functioning is in some respects tied to the narure of his interest in this set of relationships. W e are generally interested in observed behavior-brain function relationships for one or both of two reasons. One, we wish to increase the ability with which brain pathology can be detected as present or absent and, if possible, to provide information regarding the site and extent of lesion and nature of the pathology. This is a clinical interest and has as its goal the maximizing of diagnostic hits, i.e., the proportion of times diagnostic predictions correspond to neurological verdict. A second focus of interest can be called theoretical and has as its goal the increase in our knowledge of the way that the brain functions. How then do the problems of measurement differ as a function of a clinical versus a theoretical interest in brain damage?

Personality Correlates of Academic Adjustment

College achievement, as indicated by over-all grade-point average (GPA), consists of several more or less well-established variance components. The major component, as demonstrated by over thirty years of research on the prediction of college grades (Harris, 1740; Garrett, 1747; Fishman & Pasanella, 1960), is intellective. Measures of scholastic aptitude and achievemenc and indices of previous performance, such as high school GPA and class rank, correlate in the .50s and .6Os with college achievemenc, which means that they account for approximately 25 to 35% of the total variance in the criterion (Fig. 1 ) . These estimates are based upon relationships between predictors (measures of aptitude and achievemenc) and criteria (GPA) which are continuous variables, unrestricted in range, and linearly related, as specified in the zero-order and multiple regression models. Stern, Stein, and Bloom (1756) have questioned the appropriateness of these models for the prediction of college achievement, because