DEFINITIONS

• Gender
• The behaviors and attitudes associated with being male or female
• Gender Identity
• A person’s beliefs about which sex he or she is and will always be
• Gender Preference
• A person’s attitudes about which sex he or she wishes to be
• Gender Constancy
• The belief that a person’s sex is biologically determined and permanent

• Freud
• Erikson
• Deutsch

• Psychosexual Stages
• Oral (0-18 months)
• Pleasure centers on the mouth
• sucking, biting, chewing
• Anal(18-36 months)
• Pleasure focuses on bowel/bladder elimination
• Coping with demands for control
• Phallic (3-6 years)
• Pleasure zone is the genitals
• Coping with incestuous sexual feelings
• Oedipus Complex
• First Love Object
• Goal
• to begin to redirect love to the appropriate sex AND
• to identify with the parent of the same sex so that appropriate behaviors are learned and integrated into personality
• MALES
• Oedipal Wishes
• Castration Anxiety
• Resolution
• Poor Outcomes or Neuroses
• FEMALES
• Castration Anxiety
• Oedipal Wishes
• Poor Outcomes/Neuroses
• Frigidity
• Lesbianism or Manifest Homosexuality
• Normal Outcomes
• Passivity
• Motherhood
• Narcissism
• Vanity
• Modesty
• Latency (6 to puberty)
• Repressed sexual feelings
• Genital (puberty on)
• Maturation of sexual interest
• Critique
• Not grounded in empirical science
• Deprecates females
• BUT
• and Mitchell

• The Use Of Space
• Girls
• Boys
• Feminine Core = Care of human infancy OR motherhood
• Inner Space represents
• potential fulfillment (via motherhood), and when it is not fulfilled, it leads to
• despair--"Such hurt can be experienced in her menstruation; it is crying to heaven in the mourning over a child; and it becomes a permanent scar in the menopause." (1968)
• Critique
• Although Erikson argues it reflects different genital modes, it is as likely that it reflects different socializations.
• Many children do not build gender appropriate scenes.
• It is appropriate to use as a tool for understanding the child
• BUT it is not appropriate as an explanation of cause.
• Paula Caplan argues
• "The most important physiological factor to take into account is that there is no inner space. The walls of the uterus touch each other, as do the walls of the vagina. They are open only when separated by and filled with substances, as in intercourse or pregnancy. If girl’s play constructions were to represent their uteri…they should look more like folded flapjacks."

• Background
• Key Revisions
• Penis Envy
• Oedipal Complex
• The Feminine Core
• Passivity
Attitude of receptive waiting and expectancy
• Narcissism
• Definition according to Deutsch: taking oneself as the libidinal object; loving and valuing the self
• Freud: preoccupation with self reflected by a strong need to be loved
• Masochism
• ONLY attraction to suffering
• Differs from traditional psychodynamic definition which defines masochism as punishment inflicted by oneself or others
• Woman = Mother

• Importance given to woman's body as a determinant of her personality and behavior
• Double Standard used to explain behavior

• Based on observations.
• Proposed at a time when STRICT BEHAVIORISM was "king" of American Psychology

Classical Conditioning--In its simplest form

• Certain stimuli cause an automatic response or a reflex action.
• EXAMPLE: food in mouth leads to salivation.
• Unconditioned Stimulus or UCS is food
• Unconditioned Response of UCR is salivation
• NO LEARNING HAS OCCURRED
• If present a light (neutral stimulus or NS) at the same time or contiguous with the food, the organism will learn to salivate to light (now the conditioned stimulus or CS).
• Model
• Sex-typing Example
• Higher Order Conditioning
• NOW

• Organism engages in behavior; experiences certain consequences
• Smile, get cookie
• Stick finger in electrical outlet, get shocked
• Consequences determine behaviors learned and performed
• Smile more, stick finger in socket less
• Behavior is instrumental in producing the consequences that lead to learning
• Subject must operate on the environment.
• Sex-Typing Example
• Boy throws ball, other boys join in
• Boy plays with doll, other boys make fun of
• Thus boys will throw ball more and play with dolls less

• IMPORTANT: Learning and Performing a behavior are two different processes
• Necessary conditions for learning a modeled behavior
• attention to the person (model) performing the behavior
• ability to remember what the model has done
• motoric reproduction of mental practice of the behavior
• NOTE: reinforcement is NOT necessary to learning as it is in operant conditioning)
• Necessary conditions for performing a behavior
• Learning
• Reinforcement
• Direct
• Vicarious
• Self

• CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
• Learn to associate specific sex with specific feelings,
• female with nurturing, warmness, comfort
• male with power, largeness, aggressiveness
• OPERANT CONDITIONING
• Obtain reinforcement for sex-typed behaviors
• Smiles for girls playing with a doll
• Censure for boys playing with a doll
• OBSERVATIONAL
• females become more like their mother once they have children

• Dependency On Mother
• Differential Reinforcement By Gender
• Stimulus Generalization
• Imitation
• Observation
• Anticipation Of Consequences
• Higher-order Conditioning

• Social Learning Theory argues that gender-typing results from differential rewards and punishments as well as learning in the absence of direct reinforcement, e.g., by imitation of same-gender models and by observational learning.

• Although intuitively satisfying, social learning theory's role in sex-typing is NOT supported by the evidence
• Views child as passive-assimilator
• Evidence indicates parents do not directly reinforce behaviors according to gender appropriateness
• Children do not consistently imitate same-sex models
• Social learning predicts increased sex-typing with increased age

• Were the popular media examples you chose of heterosexual or nonheterosexual interaction?
• What is predominant in popular media?
• Does representativeness vary across different types of media?
• One criticism of social learning theory is that it fails to explain the wide within-sex variation in sexual patterns and preferences.
• Do popular media only portray dominant sexual scripts or are various scripts available?
• Do sexual scripts vary across different types of media?
• Has the representation of sexual scripts changed in recent times?

Basic Premises

• We have a generalized readiness to encode and to organize information according to the culture's definitions of maleness and femaleness.
• Cognitive-development theory is right in that sex-typing is mediated by the child's own cognitive processes AND
• Social learning theory is right in that sex-typing is a learned phenomenon and thus is neither inevitable nor unmodifiable.

• Definition: cognitive structures that represent organized knowledge about a given concept or type of stimulus.
• Structure
• Anticipatory
• Categorizing
• Contents
• attributes of a stimulus
• relationships among attributes
• NOTE: Information is stored in abstract form NOT just a collection of all encounters with the general case.
• Functions
• We process and organize incoming information as it fits into the schema
• Guides an individual's perceptions
• Allows us to sort incoming information into categories and attach the categorical meaning to this information
• Determines what information is attended to and remembered
• Guides 3 types of processes
• Perception
• Memory
• Inferences
• Important Points
• Schema focus on how general information is represented in memory
• AND on how new information is assimilated with existing knowledge
• BUT they are BOTH STRUCTURES and MOTIVATORS.

• Assimilation of self-concept to the gender-schema
• Learn the content's of SOCIETY'S gender-schema and which attributes are linked to our own sex and, thus, to ourselves.
• We learn the deeper lesson that the dimensions are differentially applicable to each sex.
• We learn to evaluate adequacy as a person according to our gender-schema.
• Theory of process, NOT of content
• You can be gender-aschematic
• Gender-schema is not the structure you use to distinguish appropriate behavior for yourself.
• Being gender-aschematic is not the same as being androgynous.
• Antecedents To Gender-Schema
• Only becomes a schema when
• social context makes the category the nucleus of a large associative network AND WHEN
• The social context assigns the category broad functional significance.
• People who are gender-schematic
• are quick to respond to like/not like me on feminine/masculine descriptive adjectives
• write complete behavioral evidence for themselves as feminine or masculine
• predict feminine or masculine behaviors for themselves with more certainty than do those without gender-schemas

• Markus
• Helmrich
• Spence