Researcher Aurora Sherman (left) and graduate student Pamela Lundberg use a Mrs. Potato Head toy to study girls' attitudes about female identity and roles. (Photo: Jeff Basinger)

Sex may sell everything from magazines to perfume, but the effects of pervasive sexuality in marketing and consumer products go far beyond the cash register.

In 2007, the American Psychological Association released a report — APA Report on the Sexualization of Girls — on the impacts of media displays of women as sexual objects. It summarized what psychologists know about how exposure to sexualized images harms children and teens — depression, lowered aspirations, eating disorders, lack of assertiveness, unhealthy sexual behavior, dissatisfaction with their own appearance — and offered recommendations to counteract them.

Two developmental psychologists at Oregon State University are exploring the consequences of sexualization for child development. A team led by Aurora Sherman is delving into girls’ career aspirations. She is asking how exposure to the impossibly proportioned but ever popular Barbie™ might affect their career choices. At OSU-Cascades in Bend, Elizabeth Daniels has focused on media portrayals of women in sports. Her studies contrast the effects of sexualized images with those that show women engaged in athletics.

Taken together, their results have implications for parents and youth organizations. They suggest that it takes media savvy and strong role models to promote healthy development in the face of what the APA calls “the massive exposure to portrayals that sexualize women and girls and teach girls that women are sexual objects.”

Choices for Girls

Among successful dolls, Barbie™ tops the list. The manufacturer, Mattel Inc., estimates that one is sold somewhere in the world every three seconds. According to the website barbiemedia.com, the doll’s inventor, Ruth Handler, wanted a doll that would expand opportunities for girls. “Barbie always represented the fact that a woman has choices,” she said.

When the APA report came out, Sherman remembers being startled on reading that so little research had been done on the influence of dolls on girls’ development. “If we’re going to have this conversation about sexualization, how can we overlook the most widely sold plaything on the planet?” she says.

Surprisingly, psychologists are only beginning to look closely at how dolls affect girls’ psychological health — their aspirations, self-confidence, body image and mood. And dolls are just one element of the popular culture that helps to shape attitudes and personality. TV, video games, movies, magazines and websites blare messages about what it means to be a woman or a man and what social expectations stem from gender.

“Toys are just one part of the socialization process,” says Sherman, an assistant professor in OSU’s School of Psychological Science. “But they are a very important part. Barbie displays adult features, and girls love to imagine what it would be like to be an adult.”

So, in looking at how dolls affect girls’ career choices, Sherman chose to use Barbie™ in her research. She and her collaborator, Eileen Zurbriggen of the University of California, Santa Cruz, (and chair of the APA task force that produced the 2007 report) designed an experiment in which 37 4- to 7-year-old girls were randomly assigned to play with either a Barbie™ or a Mrs. Potato Head doll for five minutes. The girls then answered a series of questions about career choices in 10 fields, five typically held by men and five by women.

The results showed that playing with Barbie™ had a clear impact on girls’ career perceptions. Girls who played with the Potato Head doll did not make a distinction between the number of jobs that girls and boys could do. However, those who played with Barbie™ tended to think that more careers are open to boys than to girls. “It’s difficult in social science to find an effect with this kind of treatment,” Sherman says. “I was astounded that after so short a time, the girls who played with the Barbie reported such an effect.” The team’s paper has been submitted to the journal Sex Roles.

The focus on youth is a change for Sherman who has specialized in health, social relations and aging. To find girls willing to participate, she worked with Corvallis-area families to explain the nature of the project. “Parents run the gamut from a strong dislike of Barbie to strongly liking her,” she says. “I was careful to remain neutral, so I didn’t inadvertently bias the pool.”

Sherman is continuing her work on the influence of dolls with support from the John C. Erkkila, M.D. Endowment for Health and Human Performance at Good Samaritan Hospital in Corvallis. Her focus is on the impact of sexualized dolls — Barbie™ as well as Bratz™ dolls (a more sexualized line of dolls made by MGA Entertainment) — on body satisfaction and self-esteem.

Sherman hopes to promote thoughtful discussion about the issues raised by these dolls. “Barbies are here to stay,” she says. “They’re a very loved, more than 50-year-old cultural icon. They’re very engaging dolls. They’re serving some kind of need for girls. So what can we do with kids and parents to minimize whatever the detrimental impact might be? If we’ve got a very well-beloved plaything, what can we do to make it work for us?”

Women in Sports

Athletics can build girls’ self-esteem and confidence, says Elizabeth Daniels, but media portrayals of female athletes can have the opposite effect. They fall into two categories: images of women performing a sport and images of female athletes in sexy poses. “Over the past four decades or so, researchers have studied how female viewers are affected by idealized images of women (i.e., thin, airbrushed, ‘sexed-up,’ etc.),” Daniels explains. “In general, these images make female viewers feel bad about their own bodies. Almost no research has investigated how female viewers respond to alternative images of women, e.g., female athletes depicted as athletes.”

At OSU-Cascades in Bend, Elizabeth Daniels (standing) leads an undergraduate research team of Brent Reynolds (left), Desiree Jackson, Taylor McGowan and Emily Clark. (Photo: Steve Gardner)

Sports is an important domain for youth and increasingly for girls. Since passage of Title IX in 1972, the participation of high-school girls in athletics has skyrocketed. Today, girls comprise 42 percent of all high-school athletes, and about 180,000 women play college sports.

Unfortunately, media often emphasize female athletes’ sexual, rather than athletic, qualities. For example, just before the winter 2010 Olympics, the Sports Illustrated swimsuit edition featured skiers Lindsay Vonn and Lacy Schnoor as well as snowboarders Hannah Teter and Claire Bedez in bikinis. Swimmer Amanda Beard appeared nude in Playboy. Tennis player Anna Kournikova is the only athlete to be named by For Him Magazine as the sexiest woman in the world.

Daniels speculates that profitable endorsement deals may influence some athletes. “Athletes have limited opportunities to gain endorsements, which are far more lucrative than their salaries,” she says. “The few endorsement opportunities that do exist for elite female athletes might require a focus on the athletes’ sexual appeal. Some female athletes may agree to participate in a sexualized photo shoot because of a lack of alternatives.”

In her studies, Daniels worked with high-school and college-age students. She showed them images of female athletes performing their sports, photos emphasizing their sexual qualities and sexualized images of models who are not athletes. She asked participants to respond in an open-ended format to elicit their opinions and feelings about the images. “An open-ended format opens up the possibility of responses that I could not have predicted,” she says.

Daniels found that both boys and girls tend to dismiss or devalue the athletic abilities of female athletes portrayed in sexualized images. In contrast, performance images of strong female athletes elicited a positive response. Both boys and girls respected these women’s strength and skills. Girls recognized the athletes as strong role models.

Taking Action

Images of women performing their sport “could be a powerful counterweight to the overly thin standard portrayal of females currently dominating the media,” Daniels wrote in the Journal of Applied Developmental Psychology. “As educators, parents, and social activists call for a change in the content of problematic media,” she adds, “there is a need to suggest alternative imagery such as female athletes depicted as athletes. My research provides the evidence that these images have a positive impact on youth.”

To help girls understand and counter sexual stereotypes, Daniels has shared her results with community and professional groups. She has worked with the Bend chapter of Girls on the Run, an international organization that pairs running with information about nutrition, emotional heath and other elements of healthy youth development.

Daniels has expanded her research beyond athletics. She has found, for example, that boys and girls make positive evaluations of images of accomplished women in business and the military.

She is currently examining how girls are judged on social media sites such as Facebook. To date, she has found that girls who use sexy profile photos are perceived negatively by other girls. They are in a tough position, she explains. “They’re inundated with all these media telling them to be sexy and hot, but they are still developing the cognitive skills to understand what happens if they do that.

“We need to have a counterweight to the negative idealized images that create so much dissatisfaction,” she adds. “We need to do a much better job educating youth and families about how to manage media in their lives and to cultivate positive attitudes toward the body.”

Students run the Beaver Emotional Intelligence Project, a five-year effort to understand the basis for judging personality and behavior. Top, Jordan Clark; middle, Jill Brown; bottom, Joshua Landin. (Photos: Frank Miller)

Call it gut instinct, intuition, street smarts or sixth sense. Good poker players need it. Success in business, politics and athletics demands it. Psychologists call it emotional intelligence, but unlike the myriad tests available to assess verbal and quantitative intelligence, a well-validated test for emotional intelligence has yet to be established, according to Frank Bernieri, an associate professor in the Oregon State University Department of Psychology.

For the last five years, Bernieri has led the Beaver Emotional Intelligence Project, which is identifying the basic components of emotional intelligence and attempting to validate the tests that measure them. What makes this project unusual in the behavioral sciences is that it is run almost exclusively by undergraduates. For 10 weeks, research subjects socialize, take personality tests and get videotaped in interpersonal activities (e.g., acting, working, deceiving) that reveal their skills in both reading others and influencing them. Groups eat together, clean together, have debates and play games. The idea is to simulate all the important things we do with others that enable us to know them. And over the course of the term, they fill out personality scales about themselves and make judgments about the other members of their group.

“It’s a really cool, unique experience,” says OSU master’s student Jill Brown, who worked with Bernieri to direct the project as an undergraduate. She and two undergrads — Jordan Clark and Joshua Landin — manage a team of 13 students who schedule activities, collect data and keep their peers on track.

Nature or Nurture?

Emotional intelligence can be viewed as either an inherent personality trait or as something you can develop, Brown says. “It’s like extroversion. It can be something you have, that is stable and inherent. Or it’s something you can develop, like math ability.

“Some people are good at regulating their emotions, and some people aren’t,” she adds. “Can you use them? Can you manage them? Can you perceive emotions in others?”

Unpublished results from the project don’t settle those questions yet, but they do show that people are better at detecting some personality traits than others. It turns out, for example, that people can see whether a stranger is an introvert or extrovert just by looking at them. However, it takes a full 10 weeks of working, socializing and traveling with someone before people can accurately determine how nice they are. This project will enable researchers to figure out precisely when, where and how people discover these traits in others, and whether some are doomed to always be fooled.

True Colors

Brown is working with Bernieri to prepare the first paper to emerge from the project while Clark and Landin are pursuing their own related projects. Clark, a senior from Medford, Oregon, is taking a look at a trait known as “self-monitoring.”

“Self-monitoring means one is motivated to create a good impression. So if you’re at a job interview, you might try to hold back a burp or something,” he says. “In other words, high self-monitors are skilled at hiding their true colors, whereas a low self monitor who is not a nice person will be exposed right away.”

Current theory assumes that each of us self-monitors (or not) chronically, whether in a job interview or out for a drink with friends. However, Clark believes that emotionally intelligent individuals self-monitor only when they need to and otherwise let their hair down. “That hasn’t been looked at before. It’s contrary to 40 years of research on this topic,” he says.

Meanwhile, Landin, a senior raised in Walla Walla, Washington, is evaluating a highly marketed test of emotional intelligence known as the MSCEIT (pronounced “mesquite”). He is seeing how well it predicts how accurately people can decode the nonverbal behavior and emotions of others. “Amazingly, the publishers of emotional intelligence tests haven’t actually checked to make sure that their tests predict how well people can do this,” says Bernieri.

“Our weekly lab meetings are a sight to behold,” he adds. “Imagine 13 undergraduates crammed into a conference room listening to one of their peers present research results and/or a proposal for a paper that is derived from the data set we are generating. It’s pretty cool.”

You’ve heard of scout camp, church camp, even fat camp. But spit camp? That’s where scientists like Sarina Rodrigues go to study the practical applications of using saliva in the lab. A company called Salimetrics, a spin-off from Pennsylvania State University, offers workshops on using oral fluids as biological specimens for the behavioral, social and health sciences.

“It’s a boot camp on how to study biomarker fluctuations in people’s saliva — the best way to collect it, best time of day, best way to store it, best way to measure it — so I can get it just right,” she explains. “These are tricky things to get from saliva.”

Rodrigues signed up for the Salimetrics Spit Camp because, in her quest to unravel the mysteries of oxytocin, saliva has several advantages over blood (“I don’t want to be pricking people”) and cadavers (“I don’t want to be in the business of collecting fresh human brains”). First, needles aren’t needed. Second, subjects must be alive. And third, people can spit in a cup anytime, anywhere, making it handy and practical.

Saliva diaries are another tool Rodrigues is sharpening up for her research program. She wants to track biochemical changes occurring during varying emotional states. “I want people to take a little saliva sample when they feel really depressed and when they feel really warm and fuzzy to see how that might correlate how the body and brain react to various emotions.”

]]> http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/04/the-saliva-diaries/feed/ 1 http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/02/the-stress-paradox/ http://oregonstate.edu/terra/2010/02/the-stress-paradox/#comments Wed, 24 Feb 2010 16:12:05 +0000 Nick Houtman http://blogs.oregonstate.edu/terra/?p=50

Illustration by Santiago Uceda

Carolyn Aldwin has been privy to countless untold secrets, heartbreaking stories from war zones, hospital wards and prisoner-of-war camps. People from all walks of life have confided their everyday problems and their worst nightmares to her.

“I talked to someone who was a lawyer at the Nuremberg Trials,” she says. “I’ve talked to people who’ve committed murder. I’ve talked to people who’ve lost children to cancer. I’m very humbled by the things people tell me.”

Aldwin, a professor in OSU’s Department of Human Development and Family Sciences, has interviewed thousands of people across the United States, many of them combat veterans, for longitudinal studies of aging. Her findings have shaken up conventional notions about stress and trauma across the lifespan.

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As part of a cadre of research assistants in OSU’s Department of Psychology, they are getting the kind of nuts-and-bolts experience in social science that typically comes along only for graduate students. They are helping to design questionnaires and “protocols” for observing and rating kids’ behaviors, interviewing students and their parents, measuring physiological responses to stress in the laboratory, and collecting and analyzing data.

“Working in the lab has given me a chance to really understand what goes into developing the knowledge base in psychology,” says Quest, who started college as an engineering major. “It’s given me a whole new perspective on my education because I’m taking an active part in what I’m learning, compared to cramming for a midterm and then forgetting everything afterward.”

Cellerini, who entered OSU in pre-med before switching to psychology, says her strong science background has been a big plus. “Genetics and chemistry are really helpful in psychology,” she says.

This work has helped both young women solidify their career goals. Quest (who completed her degree requirements last spring) rounds out the 30 hours she spends in the psych lab each week with a graveyard shift at the Children’s Farm Home, where she works as a treatment specialist for troubled youths. A Northwesterner born in Anchorage and raised in Eugene, Quest plans to counsel children and families after earning her Ph.D. in clinical psychology. “I want to make a difference,” she says. “Working with younger kids is best — the earlier, the better.”

Cellerini, an Oregonian from the rural community of Colton, also aspires to a doctorate in clinical psychology, with an emphasis in child development. “I feel that I’m at my best,” she says, “when I’m working with kids.”