This article describes the construction of the Conformity to Feminine Norms Inventory (CFNI), which was designed to assess women’s conformity to an array of feminine norms found in the dominant culture in the United States. In addition, we present four studies in which the psychometric properties of the CFNI were examined. In Study 1, factor analysis indicated that the CFNI is comprised of eigh...

A model of masculine gender identity development is presented that demonstrates how a male's sense of his masculinity and the ambiguities of his gender are being reworked throughout his life. Of factors shaping the boy's sense of masculinity early on, particular emphasis is placed on the role of the involved father, the nature of the parental relationship, and the mother's recognition and affir...

Several studies have recorded color emotions in subjects viewing uniform color (UC) samples. We conduct an experiment to measure and model how these color emotions change when texture is added to the color samples. Using a computer monitor, our subjects arrange samples along four scales: warm–cool, masculine–feminine, hard–soft, and heavy–light. Three sample types of increasing visual complexit...

Human voice pitch research has focused on perceptions of attractiveness, strength, and social dominance. Here we examine the influence of pitch on selection of leaders, and whether this influence varies by leadership role. Male and female leaders with lower-pitched (i.e., masculine) voices are generally preferred by both men and women. We asked whether this preference shifts to favor higher-pit...

In the mid eighteenth century, Enlightenment debates about women's social role prompted a flurry of discussions about motherhood. Advice manuals, images of mothers, and women's personal writings highlighted breastfeeding as one of the most important maternal duties. This thesis argues that by the end of the eighteenth century advice manuals developed a new focus on the emotional and physical pl...

A UK soap opera was recently designed to present the life, loves and (occasionally) work of an attractive female re s e a rch scientist. The explicit aim in this was to persuade British teenage girls to view science as a potentially 'feminine' and charismatic career. In taking such an initiative, science planners were saluting a fundamental principle of advertising that if you wish to reach an ...

This study examines the lexical representation and processing of noun-noun compounds and their grammatical gender during speech production in German, a language that codes for grammatical gender (masculine, feminine, and neuter). Using a picture-word interference paradigm, participants produced determiner-compound noun phrases in response to pictures, while ignoring written distractor words. Co...

Previous studies on face preferences have found that online and laboratory experiments yield similar results with samples from developed countries, where the majority of the population has internet access. No study has yet explored whether the same holds true in developing countries, where the majority of the population does not have internet access. This gap in the literature has become increa...

The gender of the adjective and the participle depends on the gender of the noun. Green can be feminine, neuter, or masculine; which gender it has depends on the noun it modifies. As Pesetsky & Torrego (2007) (PT) note, the dependence of the gender value of adjectives and participles on the syntactic context in which they occur can be easily captured if they are lexically unvalued for gender: t...