Gender of Personality and Individual Differences (PAID) contributors: An analysis of recent years (2008-2016)

This study aims to identify the gender of researchers who published in Personality and Individual Differences (PAID) during the 2008–2016 period. Of a total of 12,137 authorships, gender could be identified in 11,023 (90.8%). Results show a slight gender imbalance in favor of men that tends to diminish throughout the years, almost reaching parity in the last three years. Data show that: a) gender asymmetry is greater in the number of authorships than in the number of authors (individuals), partly because men tend to publish in a wider range of years during the period studied; b) men are relatively overrepresented in the last (senior) position of the author by-line; and c) in relative terms, women tend to be concentrated in the last years of the period studied. Taken together, these three points suggest that age probably plays a role in the (slight) gender imbalance, as observed in other scientific fields. Regarding the scientific impact of contributors, no gender differences were found in the number of citations received

Perception of Sexual Orientation from Facial Structure: A Study with Artificial Face Models

Research has shown that lay people can perceive sexual orientation better than chance from face stimuli. However, the relation between facial structure and sexual orientation has been scarcely examined. Recently, an extensive morphometric study on a large sample of Canadian people (Skorska, Geniole, Vrysen, McCormick, & Bogaert, 2015) identified three (in men) and four (in women) facial features as unique multivariate predictors of sexual orientation in each sex group. The present study tested the perceptual validity of these facial traits with two experiments based on realistic artificial 3D face models created by manipulating the key parameters and presented to Spanish participants. Experiment 1 included 200 White and Black face models of both sexes. The results showed an overall accuracy (0.74) clearly above chance in a binary hetero/homosexual judgment task and significant differences depending on the race and sex of the face models. Experiment 2 produced five versions of 24 artificial faces of both sexes varying the key parameters in equal steps, and participants had to rate on a 1–7 scale how likely they thought that the depicted person had a homosexual sexual orientation. Rating scores displayed an almost perfect linear regression as a function of the parameter steps. In summary, both experiments demonstrated the perceptual validity of the seven multivariate predictors identified by Skorska et al. and open up new avenues for further research on this issue with artificial face models

Author Gender in The Lancet journals

Despite important advances in recent decades, gender inequality persists in science. In this Comment, the current gender composition of the authors published in The Lancet journals is analyzed briefly. In general terms, women represent about one-third of article authorships, with the noteworthy exception of The Lancet Psychiatry (45.2%). Female representation among first authors is 51.1% in The Lancet Psychiatry and 42.9% in The Lancet Global Health, higher than the overall percentages. A common feature (except for The Lancet HIV and, to a lesser extent, The Lancet Global Health) is a more pronounced gender gap in the last (senior) position, which indicates that age might be a factor (although not the only one) modulating gender asymmetry in The Lancet journals

Men dissociate sexual attraction from moral judgement more than women

Would you find an opposite-sex individual physically less attractive if you knew that he/she was a bad person? Would you feel the same if you were a man or a woman? This study examined whether gender differences exist in the influence of moral judgements on heterosexual physical attraction. In a first Experiment, participants (N = 214) rated on attractiveness photographs of opposite-sex persons. Each photograph was paired with a “good” and a “bad” (from a moral point of view) sentence to depict a quality or activity of the displayed person (i.e., she/he is a defender of human rights in an NGO vs. she/he belongs to a terrorist group). Compared with women, men were significantly less influenced by sentence valence in their attractiveness ratings. A second Experiment (N = 105) using photographs of very attractive people showed the same pattern of results. The data suggest that sexual attraction is relatively less permeable to moral factors in men, and that this sex difference is consistent with an evolutionary approach to human sexuality

Examining talker effects in the perception of native- and foreign-accented speech

Understanding the circumstances under which talker (and other types of) variability affects language perception represents an important area of research in the field of spoken word recognition. Previous work has demonstrated that talker effects are more likely when processing is relatively slow (McLennan & Luce, 2005). Given that listeners may take longer to process foreign-accented speech than native-accented speech (Munro & Derwing, Language and Speech, 38, 289–306 1995), talker effects should be more likely when listeners are presented with words spoken in a foreign accent than when they are presented with those same words spoken in a native accent. The results of two experiments, conducted in two different countries and in two different languages, are consistent with this prediction

Lists of Spanish sentences with equivalent predictability, phonetic content, length, and frequency of the last word

This paper presents a pool of Spanish sentences designed for use in cognitive research and speech processing in circumstances in which the effects of context are relevant. These lists of sentences are divided into six lists of 25 equiva- lent high-predictability sentences and six lists of 25 low-predictability sentences according to the extent to which the last word can be predicted by the preceding context. These lists were also equivalent in phonetic content, length and frequency of the last word. These lists are intended for use in psycholinguistic research with Spanish-speaking listener

Test of Spanish sentences to measure speech intelligibility in noise conditions

This article describes the development of a test for measuring the intelligibility of speech in noise for the Spanish language, similar to the test developed by Kalikow, Stevens, and Elliot (Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 5, 1337–1360, 1977) for the English language. The test consists of six forms, each comprising 25 high-predictability (HP) sentences and 25 low-predictability (LP) sentences. The sentences were used in a perceptual task to assess their intelligibility in babble noise across three different signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) conditions in a sample of 474 normal-hearing listeners. The results showed that the listeners obtained higher scores of intelligibility for HP sentences than for LP sentences, and the scores were lower for the higher SNRs, as was expected. The final six forms were equivalent in intelligibility and phonetic conten

Gender differences in sexual attraction and moral judgement: research with artificial face models

Sexual attraction in humans is influenced by cultural or moral factors and some gender differences can emerge in this complex interaction. A previous study (Author, 2015) found that men dissociate sexual attraction from moral judgement more than women do. Two experiments consisting of giving attractiveness ratings to photos of real opposite-sex individuals showed that men, compared to women, were significantly less influenced by the moral valence of a description about the person shown in each photo. There is evidence of some processing differences between real and artificial computer-generated faces. The present study tests the robustness of Author’s findings and extends the research to an experimental design using artificial face models as stimuli. A sample of 88 young adults (61 females, 27 males, average age 19.32, SD = 2.38) rated the attractiveness of eighty 3D artificial face models generated with the FaceGen Modeller 3.5 software. Each face model was paired with a “good” and a “bad” (from a moral point of view) sentence depicting a quality or activity of the person represented in the model (e.g., s/he is an altruistic nurse in Africa vs. s/he is a prominent drug-dealer). Results were in line with the previous findings and showed that, with artificial faces as well, sexual attraction is less influenced by morality in men than in women. This gender difference is consistent with an evolutionary perspective on human sexuality

Age and Semantic Inhibition Measured by the Hayling Task: A Meta-Analysis

Objective Cognitive aging is commonly associated with a decrease in executive functioning (EF). A specific component of EF, semantic inhibition, is addressed in the present study, which presents a meta-analytic review of the literature that has evaluated the performance on the Hayling Sentence Completion test in young and older groups of individuals in order to assess the magnitude of the age effect. Method A systematic search involving Web of Science, PsyINFO, PsychARTICLE, and MedLine databases and Google Scholar was performed. A total of 11 studies were included in this meta-analysis, encompassing a total of 887 participants; 440 young and 447 older adults. The effect sizes for group differences on four measures of the Hayling test, latency responses and error scores on the Automatic and Inhibition sections of the test were calculated using the Comprehensive Meta-Analysis software package Results The results revealed large age effects for response latencies in both the Automatic (Hedges’ g = 0.81) and Inhibitory conditions (Hedges’ g = 0.98), though the latter two effect sizes did not differ from each other. In contrast, analysis of errors revealed a significant difference between the small effect seen in the Automatic condition (Hedges’ g = 0.13) relative to the moderate effect seen in the Inhibition condition (Hedges’ g = 0.55). Conclusions These results may be important for a better understanding of the inhibitory functioning in elderly individuals, although they should be interpreted with caution because of the limited number of studies in the literature to date.This research was supported in part by research grant FF12014-54088-P (Ministry of Science and Innovation of Spain)

Contemporary psychology and women: A gender analysis of the scientific production

Despite important advances made in recent decades, women are still underrepresented in science (less than 30% of authorships). This study presents a bibliometric analysis of all the Psychology articles published in 2009 included in the Web of Science database (Thomson Reuters) in order to examine the contribution of women in contemporary Psychology, their pattern of research collaboration, the scientific content and the scientific impact from a gender perspective. From a total of 90,067 authorships, gender could be identified in 74,413 (82.6%) of them, being 40,782 (54.8%) male authorships and 33,631 (45.2%) female authorships. These data corresponded to 24,477 (49.9%) individual men and 24,553 (50.1%) women, respectively. Therefore, Psychology presents gender parity in the number of authors, and a gender asymmetry in the number of authorships that it is much lower than in science in general and other specific scientific fields. In relative terms, women tend to be concentrated in the first position of the authorship by-line and much less in the last (senior) position. This double pattern suggests that age probably plays a role in (partly) explaining the slight gender disparity of authorships.This work was supported by the Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (Research Grant FFI2014-54088-P). The authors would like to thank three anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions that helped to improve this work