In two experiments, 195 Canadian undergraduates initially judged a list of 25 names (12 famous men and 13 nonfamous women or 12 famous women and 13 nonfamous men) for familiarity. Contrary to previous research, subsequent estimates of the perceived number of men's and women's names were not higher when the names were famous than nonfamous. When the estimated differences were compared to the true difference (-1), famous names were judged more numerous than nonfamous names, but the size of the effect (d = 0.34) was smaller than in previous research. Reasons for these findings are discussed.
Ninety-two university students (55 women; 37 men) participated in a study of the relationship between authoritarian and socially restrictive attitudes toward mental patients and the variables of trait -anxiety, self-esteem, locus of control, age, and gender. Results of multivariate
analyses showed that individuals who score high in authoritarianism tend to be young, male, and believers in chance and fate (external locus of control). A similar pattern was found for social restrictiveness.
University students (55 women and 37 men) participated in a study of the relationship between multidimensional locus of control and attitudes toward mental illness as measured by the five factors of the Opinions About Mental Illness scale. Semipartial correlations suggested that scores on multidimensional locus of control were related to scores on three of the five factors but that the pattern of relationships is subject to gender differences.
Using the Name Connotation Profile, English Canadian and French Canadian university students rated their impressions of people with English or French first names. Both the English and French students formed a more favorable impression of people who had names from their own linguistic group. These results are consistent with social identity theory, according to which people define themselves in part by groups to which they belong, with the contact hypothesis, according to which people feel more positively towards those with whom they have interacted more, and perhaps with the mere exposure effect, according to which liking for an object increases with the frequency with which it is presented.
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