Attitudes about Women, Sexuality, and Abortion

This document is a partial submission to Huskie Commons of the required SEF Final Report, submitted in partial fulfillment of the SEF Program of Northern Illinois University Spring 2017 Grant.Abortion currently and throughout history, has been a wide-spread, controversial topic, though one in three women will obtain abortion services by the time they are 45 (Guttmacher Institute, 2014). Even after the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a woman’s right to undergo an abortion in the famous Roe vs. Wade (1973) case, state-wide laws and restrictions continue to be placed on abortion practices (Begun & Walls, 2014). Many Americans support and/or oppose the act of having an abortion based on their personal beliefs and attitudes on how women should conduct themselves in different situations, and Wolf (1991) points out that advocates on both sides of the issue respect human life, though in different ways. According to Livingston (2007), several factors relate to abortion attitudes, including religion, gender role attitudes, and political affiliation. However, less is known about what psychological constructs may be involved in how abortion attitudes are formed. Begun and Walls (2014) explored the relationship between abortion attitudes and sexism and found that individuals who reported a greater level of anti-abortion attitudes also reported greater levels of two kinds of sexism: benevolent sexism, which casts women as pure, but fragile creatures in need of men’s protection; and hostile sexism, which casts women as manipulative harridans who are out to denigrate men. While this work is a start at examining what attitudinal factors may influence individuals’ abortion attitudes, more research is needed. The current project seeks to further investigate how these attitudes are constructed, and what role gender plays in their formation.NIU's Student Engagement Fun

The Impact of Gendered Stereotypes on Perceptions of Violence: A Commentary

The present commentary explores the impact of gender role stereotypes on perceptions of both intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual violence. Two papers published in this issue of Sex Roles explored the influence of gender stereotypes on both IPV (Bates et al., 2019) and rape myths (Klement et al., 2019). An overarching theme of these papers is how gender stereotypes may influence incorrect beliefs in how we view and approach interventions to these two types of violence. Reflecting on this convergence, we have come together as authors to consider how influential and damaging these stereotypes can be to victims of both partner violence and sexual violence. Our paper considers the nature of these stereotypes, who is harmed by them considering both gender and sexuality, and also the impact they have in societal and service responses to violence, as well as policy and practice development

Probing the Halo From the Solar Vicinity to the Outer Galaxy: Connecting Stars in Local Velocity Structures to Large-Scale Clouds

(Abridged) This paper presents the first connections made between two local features in velocity-space found in a survey of M giant stars and stellar spatial inhomogeneities on global scales. Comparison to cosmological, chemodynamical stellar halo models confirm that the M giant population is particularly sensitive to rare, recent and massive accretion events. These events can give rise to local observed velocity sequences - a signature of a small fraction of debris from a common progenitor, passing at high velocity through the survey volume, near the pericenters of their eccentric orbits. The majority of the debris is found in much larger structures, whose morphologies are more cloud-like than stream-like and which lie at the orbital apocenters. Adopting this interpretation, the full-space motions represented by the observed velocity features are derived under the assumption that the members within each sequence share a common velocity. Orbit integrations are then used to trace the past and future trajectories of these stars across the sky revealing plausible associations with large, previously-discovered, cloud-like structures. The connections made between nearby velocity structures and these distant clouds represent preliminary steps towards developing coherent maps of such giant debris systems. These maps promise to provide new insights into the origin of debris clouds, new probes of Galactic history and structure, and new constraints on the high-velocity tails of the local dark matter distribution that are essential for interpreting direct detection experiments.Comment: submitted to the Astrophysical Journal, 40 pages, 13 figure

The Impact of Gendered Stereotypes on Perceptions of Violence: A Commentary

The present commentary explores the impact of gender role stereotypes on perceptions of both intimate partner violence (IPV) and sexual violence. Two papers published in this issue of Sex Roles explored the influence of gender stereotypes on both IPV (Bates et al., 2019) and rape myths (Klement et al., 2019). An overarching theme of these papers is how gender stereotypes may influence incorrect beliefs in how we view and approach interventions to these two types of violence. Reflecting on this convergence, we have come together as authors to consider how influential and damaging these stereotypes can be to victims of both partner violence and sexual violence. Our paper considers the nature of these stereotypes, who is harmed by them considering both gender and sexuality, and also the impact they have in societal and service responses to violence, as well as policy and practice developmen

Altered States of Consciousness during an Extreme Ritual.

Extreme rituals (body-piercing, fire-walking, etc.) are anecdotally associated with altered states of consciousness-subjective alterations of ordinary mental functioning (Ward, 1984)-but empirical evidence of altered states using both direct and indirect measures during extreme rituals in naturalistic settings is limited. Participants in the "Dance of Souls", a 3.5-hour event during which participants received temporary piercings with hooks or weights attached to the piercings and danced to music provided by drummers, responded to measures of two altered states of consciousness. Participants also completed measures of positive and negative affect, salivary cortisol (a hormone associated with stress), self-reported stress, sexual arousal, and intimacy. Both pierced participants (pierced dancers) and non-pierced participants (piercers, piercing assistants, observers, drummers, and event leaders) showed evidence of altered states aligned with transient hypofrontality (Dietrich, 2003; measured with a Stroop test) and flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi, 1990; measured with the Flow State Scale). Both pierced and non-pierced participants also reported decreases in negative affect and psychological stress and increases in intimacy from before to after the ritual. Pierced and non-pierced participants showed different physiological reactions, however, with pierced participants showing increases in cortisol and non-pierced participants showing decreases from before to during the ritual. Overall, the ritual appeared to induce different physiological effects but similar psychological effects in focal ritual participants (i.e., pierced dancers) and in participants adopting other roles

Stroop scores by all roles.

<p>The following participants completed both baseline and during-Dance Stroop task: 35 pierced dancers, 4 piercers, 6 piercing assistants, 3 non-pierced dancers/observers, 3 drummers, 5 spiritual leaders, 3 unknown/missing role. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals. The following upper error bars were truncated at 600: Before Dance/Unpierced dancer/observer, During Dance/Drummer, During Dance/Spiritual leader/support, and During Dance/Not reported. The following lower error bars were truncated at -200: Before Dance/Unpierced dancer/observer, Before Dance/Drummer, Before Dance/Not reported, During Dance/Drummer, During Dance/Spiritual leader/support, and During Dance/Not reported.</p

Self-report Measures and Dance Interpretations in Pierced and Non-pierced Participants.

<p>Self-report Measures and Dance Interpretations in Pierced and Non-pierced Participants.</p

Flow scores by dichotomized role.

<p>The optimal performance factor consists of Challenge-Skill Balance, Clear Goals, Unambiguous Feedback, Concentration on Task at Hand, and Sense of Control. The autotelic absorption factor consists of Action-Awareness Merging, Loss of Self-Consciousness, Transformation of Time, and Autotelic Experience. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals.</p

Stroop scores by dichotomized role.

<p>Stroop scores reflect the difference between the mean latencies on incongruent trials (<i>red</i> in green type) and the mean latencies on congruent trials (<i>red</i> in red type). Included in the analyses were the 35 pierced participants and 24 non-pierced participants who completed both baseline and during-Dance Stroop scores. Error bars are 95% confidence intervals.</p