Gender discrimination in Swedish family courts: A quantitative vignette study.

BACKGROUND: Gender discrimination of women is often emphasized in work contexts, whereas less focus is on how men are discriminated against in social relationships. Gender discrimination in decisions of family relations, is essential to study as the contact between parent and child is commonly viewed as the most important relationship in people's life, as well as being the most important aspect of our life. Following separations, decisions on custody disputes are made by social workers. The purpose of this paper is to study gender discrimination in such decisions. METHOD: Participants were instructed to give a recommendation of shared parenting based on a custody case vinjett, where we manipulate the gender of the risk parent. RESULTS: The participants' recommendation of living was mainly dependent on the risk parent's gender, where the mother was considerably more likely to receive shared custody than the father. CONCLUSIONS: Professional social workers show selective gender discrimination against fathers in terms of living recommendations.

What you say and what I hear-Investigating differences in the perception of the severity of psychological and physical violence in intimate partner relationships.

The correct communication of the severity of violence is essential in the context of legal trials, custody cases, support of victims, etc., for providing fair treatment. A narrator that communicates their experiences of interpersonal violence may rate the seriousness of the incident differently than a rater reading the narrator's text, suggesting that there exist perceptual differences (PD) in severity ratings between the narrator and the rater. We propose that these perceptual differences may depend on whether the narrative is based on physical or psychological violence, and on gender differences. Physical violence may be evaluated as more serious by the receiver of the narrative than by the narrator (Calibration PD), whereas the seriousness of psychological violence may be difficult to convey, leading to a discrepancy in the seriousness ratings between the narrator and the rater (Accuracy PD). In addition, gender stereotypes may influence the seriousness rating (Gender PD), resulting in violence against women being perceived as more serious than the same violence against men. These perceptual differences were investigated in 3 phases using a new experimental procedure. In Phase 1, 113 narrators provided descriptions and seriousness ratings of self-experienced physical and psychological violence in relationships. In Phase 2, 340 independent raters rated the seriousness of 10 randomly selected narrations from Phase 1. In Phase 3, the genders in the narrations were changed to the opposite gender, and seriousness ratings were collected from 340 different raters. Our results confirmed the hypothesized perceptual differences. Violence to male victims was considerably more likely to be seen as severe when the raters were misled to believe the victim was a woman. We propose that these data provide practical guidelines for how to deal with misinformation in the communication of violence. The data also show that mean values and the confidence of such severity ratings need to be adjusted for several factors, such as whether it is self-experienced or communicated, the type of violence, and the gender of the victims and raters.

Transcranial direct current stimulation based on quantitative electroencephalogram combining positive psychotherapy for major depression.

Frontal cortex activity is reduced in the left hemisphere during depression. Transcranial direct current stimulation is a noninvasive neuromodulation technique that can increase frontal cortex activity. Therapy based on transcranial Direct Current Stimulation and positive psychology therapy was applied for improving patients' quality of life. The present study compared three conditions of subjects with clinical depression; (a) transcranial Direct Current Stimulation therapy, (b) positive psychotherapy, and(c) combined treatment. Hamilton Depression Rating Scale, Adult State Hope Scale and Optimism/Pessimism Scale was used at baseline, 2-week, 4-week, and 3-month follow-up. Combined condition participants showed greater reduction in depressed mood, improved hope and optimism after 4-weeks as well as during 3-month follow-up than the other conditions. Results are discussed in terms of additive or synergistic relation between transcranial direct current stimulation and positive psychology treatment.

Rewarded remembering: dissociations between self-rated motivation and memory performance.

People often claim that they perform better in memory performance tasks when they are more motivated. However, past research has shown minimal effects of motivation on memory performance when factors contributing to item-specific biases during encoding and retrieval are taken into account. The purpose of the present study was to examine the generality of this apparent dissociation by using more sensitive measures of experienced motivation and memory performance. Extrinsic motivation was manipulated through competition instructions, and subjective ratings of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation were obtained before and after study instructions. Participants studied a series of words, and memory performance was assessed by content recall (Experiment 1) and source recall (Experiment 2). Both experiments showed dissociation between subjective ratings of extrinsic motivation and actual memory performance, so that competition increased self-rated extrinsic motivation but had no effects on memory performance, including source recall. Inconsistent with most people's expectations, the findings suggest that extrinsic motivation has minimal effects on memory performance.