Karen K. Dion

Gender and Cultural Adaptation in Immigrant Families

The study of immigration and immigrants’ experiences benefits from examining the contribution of gender. In this article, we focus on the importance of gender for understanding different aspects of family functioning. Conditions associated with immigration and settlement in the receiving society may challenge expectations about gender-related roles, resulting in the renegotiation of these roles in immigrant families. Also, there is evidence of different socialization demands on daughters compared to sons in immigrant families, a difference that has potential implications not only for parent-child relationships, but also for the development of ethnocultural identity among adolescents and young adults.

Social-psychological correlates of experienced discrimination: Test of the double jeopardy hypothesis

Abstract Social-psychological correlates of the experience of discrimination, such as stress, self-esteem, and ingroup attitudes, were explored in a survey questionnaire study involving 90 Chinese students at the University of Toronto. Reported experience of discrimination was found to be related to heightened stress and more positive attitudes towards the Chinese group. Self-esteem was a function of both the respondents sex and the experience of discrimination: that is, of those who had reportedly confronted discrimination, women exhibited lower self-esteem than did men. These findings generally support prior research concerning the social psychological effects of discrimination. Perhaps most important, the finding that, of those who indicated having experienced discrimination, Chinese women reported lower self-esteem than Chinese men supports the double jeopardy hypothesis. According to the double jeopardy hypothesis, the self-esteem of women from visible minority groups, such as the Chinese, may be especially vulnerable to the experience of discrimination by the majority group. There is some weak evidence to suggest that men from such groups, on the other hand, may show slightly higher self-esteem in response to experiencing discrimination.

Physical attractiveness and interpersonal influence

Abstract The relative success of influence attempts undertaken by attractive vs. unattractive fifth- and sixth-graders was investigated by giving subjects a monetary incentive contingent upon their influencing a peers behavior. Compared to a control group which was not subject to peer pressure, three groups were successful: attractive males and attractive females with opposite-sex peers and unattractive males with same-sex peers. Attractive girls tended to be more successful than their unattractive counterparts in influence attempts directed toward peers of the opposite-sex. Unattractive males were more effective than attractive males with same-sex peers. Analysis of the influence strategies employed revealed markedly different styles of interpersonal influence, particularly between attractive males and attractive females. The former made considerably more influence attempts and were judged to be more persistent. This type of behavioral difference was not found for unattractive males compared to unattractive females.

The Incentive Value of Physical Attractiveness for Young Children

To test the hypothesis that from an early period of social development physical attractiveness has reward properties, young children were individually observed at a task where they illuminated a slide of either a physically attractive or unattractive stimulus child. As predicted, subjects made more stimulus exposures in the attractive versus the unattractive condition. Also, females made more stimulus exposures than males, suggesting that at least certain classes of social stimuli have greater incentive value for females.

Stereotyping Physical Attractiveness: A Sociocultural Perspective

Why does stereotyping based on physical attractiveness occur? We proposed a sociocultural hypothesis that physical attractiveness is less likely to be a salient evaluative cue in cultural contexts where collectivism, rather than individualism, is the basis for the dominant system of values. In collectivist cultures, the group rather than the individual is stressed, suggesting that social judgments, such as first impressions of others, are more likely to be based on group-related attributes (e.g., family, position in a social network), rather than personal or individuating elements, such as physical attractiveness. From this perspective, we predicted that individuals of Chinese ethnicity, who were mostly from Asian Pacific Rim countries and cities and were attending university in Canada, would be less prone to physical attractiveness stereotyping if they reported high involvement in Torontos Chinese community, rather than low involvement. We suggested that high Chinese community involvement would reinforce and maintain a more collectivist value orientation, which should reduce the likelihood of stereotyping of own-group members based on physical attractiveness for the reasons discussed above. To test this hypothesis, subjects were asked to complete a measure of participation in various aspects of the Chinese community and to rate the personality traits and expected life outcomes of stimulus persons who varied in physical attractiveness. Our sociocultural hypothesis was supported in the case of personality trait ratings (the principal measure in attractiveness stereotyping research), but not on expected life outcome ratings. Implications of these findings for understanding attractiveness stereotyping are discussed.

Love, Liking, and Trust in Heterosexual Relationships

The construct validity of Rubins love scale and Driscoll, Davis, and Lipetzs distinction between romantic and conjugal love were assessed by administering love, liking, and trust scales to casual dating, exclusive dating, engaged and married couples. Discoll et als (1972) finding that love and trust are more strongly related for married than unmarried couples was replicated, though only when couples served as the unit of analysis. Also, the construct validity of Rubins love scale received additional confirmation against criteria of the known groups method by a rough correspondence between type of relationship and love scale scores. Individuals in casual dating couples had lower love scores than the other three categories and expressed more liking and trust than love for their partners. The implications of these findings and the issue of behavioral correlates of the love scale are discussed.

GENDER AND ETHNOCULTURAL COMPARISONS IN STYLES OF LOVE

Ethnocultural background and gender were investigated as correlates of love styles in an ethnically diverse sample of university students in Toronto. Women viewed love as more friendship oriented, more pragmatic, but less permissive than did men, findings consistent with previous research with American college students. Ethnocultural differences or Gender x Ethnocultural Background interactions were also found. In line with an expected contrast between Asian and Western cultural traditions regarding love, Chinese and other Asian respondents of both sexes were more friendship oriented in their love relationships than were respondents of Anglo-Celtic or European ethnocultural backgrounds. Expectations of greater gender role differentiation among Asians were partly supported by finding that women from Asian ethnocultural backgrounds other than Chinese were less likely to view “love as a game” than were either their female or male counterparts. Women from Asian ethnocultural backgrounds other than Chinese also expressed a more altruistic view of love than did Anglo-Celtic women.

The Honi phenomenon revisited: Factors underlying the resistance to perceptual distortion of one's partner.

An individual being viewed in an Ames room usually appears considerably altered in physical size to an observer. However, some married persons perceive less size distortion of their spouses than a stranger. This instance of selective perceptual distortion, known as the Honi phenomenon, could perhaps reflect differential familiarity and/or emotional involvement toward these stimulus persons. Using heterosexual couples as subjects, we investigated familiarity (i.e., length of the relationship), type of relationship (i.e., dating, engaged, or married), and positive cathexis (i.e., love, liking, and trust of ones partner) as possible mediators of this effect and also explored the impact of some judgemental variations. Neither familiarity nor type of relationship influenced relative perceptual distortion of partner versus stranger. Rather, selective perceptual distortion was directly related to the strength of positive cathexis, principally among females. Only women high in positive cathexis exhibited the Honi phenomenon and perceived a stranger as being more distorted than their partners. In contrast, size judgements by men were affected only by the sequence in which stimulus persons were observed. Implications and interpretations of these findings are discussed.