Issues and debates

Chodrow (1968)

• Alpha bias can sometimes favour women in the psychodynamic approach

• Suggested that daughters and mothers have a greater connectedness than sons and mothers because of biological similarities

• As a result of the child’s closeness, women develop better abilities to bond with others and empathise

Taylor et al (2000)

• ‘Tend and befriend’ response - evolved response for looking after others

• Seems that women respond to stress by increasing oxytocin (the love hormone) production

Brescoll and Uhlmann (2008)

• Feminists have objected to the diagnostic category premenstrual syndrome on the grounds it medicalises/pathologises women’s emotions, such as anger by explaining these in hormonal terms

• Men’s anger, in contrast, is often seen as a rational response to external pressures

Joel et al (2015)

• Maccoby and Jacklin presented findings of several gender studies which concluded girls have a superior verbal ability whereas boys have a better spatial ability

• Brain scanning found no such sex differences in brain structure or processing

↳ Possible data popularised because it fitted existing stereotypes

Ingalhalikar et al (2014)

• Suggests the popular social stereotype women are better at multitasking might have some biological truth to it

• Seems that a woman’s brain may benefit from better connections between the right and the left hemisphere than in a man’s brain

Sexism in research

• Although psych’s undergrad intake is mainly of women, the lecturers are more likely to be men (Murphy et al 2014)

• Means that research is more likely to be conducted by men and this may disadvantage female ppts. Eg a male researcher may expect women to be irrational and unable to complete complex tasks (Nicolson 1995) and such expectations are likely to mean women underperform in research studies

Formanowicz et al (2018)

• Analysed more than 1000 articles relating to gender bias

• Found research is funded less often and published by less prestigious journals - fewer scholars become aware or apply in their own work

• Still held true when gender bias was compared with other forms of bias, eg. ethnic bias, and when other factors were controlled such as gender of author and methodology used

Dambrin & Lambert (2008)

• Studied why a women are underrepresented in executive positions in accountancy firms

• Included a reflection on how their gender-related experiences influence their reading of events

Henrich et al (2010)

• Reviewed hundreds of studies in leading psych journals and found that 68% of research ppts came from USA, and 96% from industrialised nations

• Another review found that 80% of research ppts were psych undergrads

Smith & Bond (1993)

Asch-type experiments in collectivist cultures found significantly higher rates of conformity than the original studies in USA, an individualist culture

Takano & Osaka

• Found that 14 out of 15 studies comparing USA and Japan found no evidence of individualism or collectivism

• Described the distinction as lazy and simplistic

Ekman (1989)

• Suggests basic facial expressions for emotions (such as happiness or disgust) are the same all over the human and animal world

  • Criticisms of attachment research should not obscure the fact some features of human attachment (eg, imitation and interactional synchrony) are universal

Roberts et al (2000)

• Looked at adolescents who had a strong belief in fatalism - that their lives were ‘decided’ by events outside their control

• Found that they were at significantly greater risk of developing depression

  • Seems that ppl who exhibit an external, rather than internal locus of control are less likely to be optimistic

Libet et al (1983)

• Ppts chose a random moment to flick their wrist while he measured activity in their brain (‘readiness potential’), had to say when they felt the conscious will to move

• Found that the unconscious brain activity leading up to the conscious decision to move came around half a second before the ppt consciously felt they had decided to move

• May be interpreted as even our most basic experiences of free will are actually determined by our brain before we are aware of it

↳ CP - these findings showing the brain is involved in DM is not surprising. Just because the action comes before the conscious awareness of the decision to act, doesn’t mean there was no decision to act - just that the decision to act took time to reach consciousness.

Soo Rhee & Waldman (2002)

Found that genetic influences accounted for 41% if the variance in aggression

Susser & Lin (1992)

• In 1944 Nazis blocked the distribution of food to the Dutch ppl and 22,000  died of starvation, in what became known as the Dutch Hunger Winter

• Report that women who became pregnant during the famine went on to have low weight babies

  • Whilst this may be unsurprising, what is more interesting is that they were twice as likely to develop schizophrenia when they grew up compared to typical population rates

Nestadt et al (2010)

Put the heritability rate of the mental disorder OCD at .76

Corkin (2002)

• Following HM’s surgery to treat severe epilepsy in 1953, he developed severe anterograde amnesia - could not commit newly learned facts of events to LTM though his STM and events before surgery was intact

• Research with HM demonstrated how he was able to form LT procedural memories for simple motor skills and tasks

• The case has proved invaluable in revealing how different types of LTM are more resistant to forgetting and may be stored in different areas in the brain

Kitzinger & Coyle

Note how research into relationships has been guilty of a form of ‘ heterosexual bias’ within which homosexual relationships were compared and judged against hetero norms