Attitudes toward women physicians in medical academia.

To determine attitudes toward women physicians within medical academia, we administered a survey to a probability sample of male and female senior medical students, faculty, and top-level administrators in a randomized, stratified subset of ten medical schools. Of the 984 respondents (65% response rate), men were much less supportive overall than women of female leaders. While women strongly disagreed with the idea that women physicians who spend long hours at work neglect home and family, men were almost equally divided on this issue. Each group rated the "typical" faculty member as "strong, fair, and progressive," but male faculty also were characterized as "egotistical" while female faculty were rated more "sensitive and altruistic." Male students were least likely to support a search for a female dean, hiring more female faculty members, or accepting an incoming class in which the majority were women.

Vicarious effects on the creative behavior of retarded and nonretarded children.

The effects of observing a model's overt display of a creative drawing response and hearing a description of these actions were assessed with 54 retarded and 68 nonretarded children. The modeled creative strategy was designed to be high in the dimension of elaboration. A multivariate research design was employed to assess the target dimension of elaboration, as well as to determine transfer to tasks of varying degrees of similarity to the model's task and to creative dimensions other than elaboration. The overt modeling of a creative strategy was most effective in improving elaboration, although verbal descriptions also aided performance. Retarded children were less able than nonretarded children to discriminate the essential elements of the model's elaboration strategy and displayed less acquisition of the elaboration strategy but showed comparable gradients of transfer.