Gentleman bountiful: Repairing the patriarch

Illustrating a patient's use of the transference as a play-ground... an intermediate region between illness and real life through which the transition from one to the other is made (Freud, 1914), the author presents the case of a man in his late fifties attempting to transcend former male role stereotypes. Using the therapist as a transitional object, this patient experimented, both in therapy and in his social activities, with various patterns in relationships with women, becoming increasingly aware of his dominating benevolence and his concommitant denial of dependency needs. Several new ways for viewing both masochistic and acting-out behaviors are proposed, ways that lead to therapeutic responses tending to convert both to reparative regressions.     

The "Positivity Bias" inEvaluations of Public Figures:Evidence Against Instrument Artifacts

The "positivity bias" is a term used to describe the consistentfavorable evaluation of public figures found in surveys overthe past 40 years. This paper explored several possible artifactualexplanations for this bias,focusing on the survey instrumentitself. Two experiments varied the labeling and ordering ofscale endpoints, the affective value of the initial contextevaluated, and the presence or absence of a prestigious jobtitle associated with the nameof the public figure. None ofthe variations produced significantly different levels of positivitythan the standard control condition used in each experiment.RichardR. Lau is a graduate student in social psychology at the Universityof California, Los Angeles. David O. Sears is Professor of Psychologyand Political Science at UCLA. Richard Centers is Professorof Psychology at UCLA. This research was supported in part byGrant #SOC73-09153 A03 from the National Science Foundationto David O. Sears. The authors wish to expess their thanks toMark Williams, who did most of the coding and checking involvedin the survey.     

Human sexuality: the controversy continues

Sex education should be an integrated component of population education programs in the Philippines. There are, however, a variety of objections to this approach, which are linked to proposals that sex education is more relevant to biology and medicine curriculums. The Population Education Program of the Philippines conducted a study of 2093 parents and 4550 teachers to determine who registered objections to teaching certain population education content, what they objected to, and why such objections were raised. Findings show that only 3% of the sample reacted unfavorably to the inclusion of controversial topics, such as sex terms, illustrations of sex organs and the naming of contraceptive devices. The issues remaining to be solved are: content, terminology, teacher competence, parents' involvement, and teaching aids.     

Demographic crisis: The impact of the Bangladesh civil war (1971) on births and deaths in a rural area of Bangladesh

Summary In Matlab Bazaar Thana the Cholera Research Laboratory has registered the births, deaths and migrations in a population of approximately 125,000 since 1966. Although this rural area was not the scene of any significant armed encounters, striking changes in birth and death rates were registered during and after the conflict. Birth rates did not change during the relatively brief period of the civil war, but a small decline was registered for one year after the war. Fertility rates which had been declining slightly and irregularly in the pre-war baseline period may have increased slightly during the war and fell substantially in all age groups in the year following the war. The crude death rate, which rose by 37 per cent during the war, was a very sensitive reflection of the administrative and economic problems. Overall infant mortality rose by only 15 per cent over pre-war levels because all of the increase was observed in the post-neo-natal component, which traditionally accounts for less than one-third of the total infant mortality in Bangladesh. Children and older adults accounted for the majority of excess deaths which were largely attributed to acute diarrhoeas and other gastro-intestinal causes. The death rate at ages 1-4 rose by 43 per cent and at ages 5-9 soared to 208 per cent above pre-war baseline rates. All increases in age-specific mortality rates fell to baseline levels during the year following the war, except the 5-9-year age group, in which rates continued to be high largely because of deaths due to dysentery.     

Females and illness: recent trends in sex differences in the United States.

Data from the national Health Interview Survey for 1957-72 show that females have higher age-standardized rates of acute conditions, chronic conditions, and disability due to acute conditions, compared to males. More males, however, suffer limitations of activity or mobility due to chronic conditions, Females' excess morbidity for acute conditions persists when reproduction-related events are excluded. From 1957-72, females' disadvantage for acute conditions continues unchanged. But for chronic conditions, males are "catching up" to females in overall prevalence, and their conditions are becoming more severe relative to females'. These trends are compatible with trends in sex mortality differences over the same period. Four types of explanation are advanced to account for females' excess morbidity: interview behavior, illness behavior, acquired health risks, and inherited health risks. Empirical evidence suggests the first two factors inflate female rates compared to males; the last two do the opposite. It is hypothesized that excess female morbidity is due primarily to social and psychological factors, and a procedure to test this is stated.     

A LOOK AT THE SEMANTIC DIFFERENTIAL AS A TOOL TO ASSIST FACULTY TEACHING EVALUATIONS

The evaluation of the effectiveness of faculty teaching is a difficult process. This paper presents the results of an experimental empirical investigation into the possibility of using a psycho-linguistic measurement technique, the Semantic Differential, to measure faculty communication of terminology to students. This measurement could be used to supplement other teaching evaluation devices. The paper determines a set of “key concepts,” derives a set of S.D. meanings from a Faculty to act as a standard, and measures student meanings at the beginning and end of an introductory course. These sets of meanings are then compared.