An examination of racial bias in the Beck Depression Inventory-II.

Historically, many psychological measures were developed and standardized based on a primarily Caucasian population. These tests are subsequently applied to minorities and may be inappropriate and possibly even pathologizing. The widely used Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) was initially standardized on a sample of Caucasian university students and its use with minorities has only recently been investigated. This study examined the possibility of racial bias in the BDI-II by comparing Caucasian and African American Midwestern university students. A hierarchical multiple regression compared the scores of the BDI-II with a similar measure of depression that is standardized for use with African Americans. There was no evidence of racial bias discovered in the BDI-II in this sample. Implications and future directions of research are discussed.

The influence of length of marriage and fidelity status on perception of marital rape.

To what extent does the length of the marriage or the wife's faithfulness to the husband influence the perception of responsibility or trauma in marital rape? In the current study, each participant was presented with one of four marital rape vignettes. The vignettes varied only in the length of the marriage (3 years or 15 years) and the fidelity status of the wife (continuously faithful or involved in an ongoing sexual affair with another man). Results indicate that both length of marriage and fidelity status significantly influence perceptions of marital rape. Specifically, participants assigned greater responsibility for the rape to unfaithful wives than to faithful wives. This finding is particularly salient for wives in long-term marriages as compared to wives in short-term marriages. Additionally, participants perceived rapes within long-term marriages as more traumatic than rapes within short-term marriages.

Of gnomes and leprechauns: the recruitment of recent and categorical contexts in social judgment.

Participants rated schematic faces from two categories, gnomes and leprechauns, on feature widths and pleasantness of facial configuration. Three target faces shared critical facial features across categories while two contextual faces extended the range for that category to include either very wide or very narrow features. In Experiment 1a, results indicated contextual effects on judgments of target faces when they were rated in separate categorical blocks [Wedell, D. H., & Pettibone, J. C. (1999). Preference and the contextual basis of ideals in judgment and choice. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 128, 346-361], but not when faces from both categories were rated together in Experiment 1b. Two additional experiments explored this failure to use categorical information. Categorical context was found to produce contrast effects on descriptive ratings of feature width when participants were forced to rely on name cues rather than actual faces in Experiment 2. In Experiment 3, both contrast effects on descriptive ratings and assimilation effects on ideals for pleasantness were found when the names for the faces were learned separately for each category. These results identify constraints on the nature of category-based stereotyping effects on judgment while isolating the influence of recent and categorical context.