How do people evaluate social sexual conduct at work? A psycholegal model.

The authors tested a psycholegal model of how people evaluate social sexual conduct at work with videotaped reenactments of interviews with alleged complainants, perpetrators, and other workers. Participants (200 full-time male and female workers) were randomly assigned to evaluate the complaints with either the reasonable person or reasonable woman legal standard. Participants answered questions about sexual harassment law and completed the Ambivalent Sexism Inventory. Participants who took the reasonable woman perspective, as compared with those who took the reasonable person perspective, were more likely to find the conduct harassing; this was especially the case among participants high in hostile sexism. Medium-sized gender effects were found in the severe case but were absent in the weaker, more ambiguous case. The implications of these findings for hostile work environment law are discussed.

Gender differences in evaluating social-sexual conduct in the workplace.

Qualitative interviews exploring gender differences in perceptions of sexual harassment were conducted with 100 full-time St. Louis area employees. Women more than men reported that telling dirty/sexual jokes was a non-harassing behavior, qualified behaviors as harassing when they happened in the workplace, and considered behaviors as non-harassing when the man's intentions were not harmful. Men more than women reported that requesting a date was a non-harassing behavior, qualified behaviors as harassing when the woman did not welcome the behavior, and considered behaviors as non-harassing when they did not violate workplace norms. Logistic regression analysis predicted the respondent gender with 86% accuracy. Finally, concept mapping suggested that when women think about harassers they are concerned with power and social aptitude, while men seem to be more concerned about the responsibility and psychological adjustment of perpetrators of sexual harassment. When women think about victims of harassment they are concerned with a woman's assertiveness and work effectiveness, while men are more concerned with the psychological state of the woman and how provocative she is when they think about victims of sexual harassment.

A preliminary analysis of medical futility decisionmaking: law and professional attitudes.

Judicial decisions reviewed in this article indicate that courts have taken two disparate approaches to disputes over futility of treatment. To explore whether a consensus on medical futility is developing among hospitals, the authors conducted a nationwide survey of health care professionals at hospitals. Respondents assigned importance ratings to factors used in recent futility decisions made at their institutions. The resulting importance ratings showed significant variation by characteristics of the institution (comparing respondents from for-profit, not-for-profit, and government hospitals) and by profession of the respondent (comparing physicians and nurses). The respondents' judgments endorsed three distinct strategies for making futility decisions (i.e., emphasis on the patient's decision preferences, providing for the patient and family, and adhering to objective medical and social norms).

Perceptions of sexual harassment: the effects of gender, legal standard, and ambivalent sexism.

This research tests the possibility that the reasonable woman as compared to the reasonable person test of hostile work environment sexual harassment interacts with hostile and benevolent sexist beliefs and under some conditions triggers protectionist attitudes toward women who complain of sexual harassment. We administered to a sample of undergraduates the ambivalent sexism inventory along with the fact patterns in two harassment cases and asked them to make legally relevant decisions under either the reasonable woman or person standard. We found that those high in hostile sexism, and women, found more evidence of harassment. However, those high in benevolent sexism did not exhibit the hostile sexism effects. Although men were less sensitive to the reasonable woman standard than women, under some conditions the reasonable woman standard enabled both genders to find greater evidence of harassment. The results are discussed from the perspectives of law and psychology.

Depression and pain behavior in patients with chronic pain.

OBJECTIVE: Previous studies of pain behavior in patients with chronic pain have shown that depressed patients exhibit more pain behavior than nondepressed patients. This study sought to extend these findings and to examine the possible causes of the observed differences. DESIGN: Patients completed the short form of the Beck Depression Inventory, and their pain behavior was simultaneously rated by themselves and trained observers. PATIENTS: Subjects were 37 inpatients in a chronic pain program. RESULTS: Both depressed and nondepressed subjects rated themselves as exhibiting more pain behavior than did nurse ratings. While nurses rated pain behaviors as similar among the depressed and the nondepressed groups, patient ratings indicated significantly more pain behavior among depressed than nondepressed patients. CONCLUSIONS: These results suggest that cognitive factors may influence self-ratings of pain behavior by depressed subjects.

Perceived parental characteristics of patients with obsessive compulsive disorder, depression, and panic disorder.

It has been hypothesized that parents of patients with obsessive compulsive disorder exhibit specific traits. 320 consecutive inpatient admissions who met criteria for OCD, depression, and panic disorder checked a list of adjectives to describe their parents. Patients with OCD were 1) less likely to perceive their mothers as disorganized than depressives, 2) more likely to perceive their mothers as overprotective than depressives and 3) less likely to perceive their fathers as demanding than patients with panic.

Reexamination of the relationship between birth order and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

In order to examine the hypothesis that being a firstborn or only child is specifically associated with obsessive-compulsive disorder, the birth order positions and sibship sizes of 62 patients with obsessive-compulsive disorder were compared with those of 60 agoraphobic and 92 depressed patients. No significant group differences were found for men, women, or both sexes combined. Results conflict with earlier findings which supported the hypothesized relationship between birth order status and development of obsessive-compulsive patterns in men. In addition to possible differences in methodology, discrepancies between the present findings and those of earlier studies may reflect a decline over the past 20 years in the percentage of male obsessive compulsives that were either firstborn or only children.

A reconsideration of the Willoughby Personality Schedule with psychiatric inpatients.

Although the Willoughby Personality Schedule appears to be widely used to assess interpersonal anxiety, there are few studies of its clinical validity or psychometric properties. The purpose of this study was to investigate the factor analytic structure of the Willoughby Schedule in an inpatient psychiatric population. It also explored the relationship of the Willoughby Personality Schedule to the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Gambrill-Richey Assertion Inventory and patient perception of treatment outcome. In contrast to three Willoughby Schedule factors previously reported in research with outpatients, six factors were found in this study. These were moderately correlated with scores on the BDI and the Assertion Inventory discomfort scale. Two Willoughby factors were related to the Assertion Inventory probability of assertive response scale and only one Willoughby factor was related to patient perception of treatment outcome. The overall results raise questions as to the usefulness of the Willoughby Schedule with inpatient populations.