What You Can Change _. And What You Can't - Martin E. Seligman [152]
22. See the Sedney and Huston reviews (cited immediately above) for good coverage of the studies that try and fail to coax young children into androgyny.
23. H. Meyer-Bahlburg, J. Feldman, P. Cohen, and A. Ehrhardt, “Perinatal Factors in the Development of Gender-Related Play Behavior: Sex Hormones Versus Pregnancy Complications,” Psychiatry 51 (1988): 260–71; S. Berenbaum and M. Hines, “Early Androgens Are Related to Childhood Sex-Typed Toy Preferences,” Psychological Science 3 (1992): 203–6. J. Money and A. Ehrhardt, Man and Woman, Boy and Girl (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1972), is an excellent general reference for the precursor studies.
24. J. Reinisch, unpublished study cited in C. Gorman, “Sizing Up the Sexes,” Time (20 January 1992), 45–46.
25. The most comprehensive recent overview is J. Hyde, “Meta-analysis and the Psychology of Gender Differences,” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 16 (1990): 55–73.
The spatial score may have a biological component. Astonishingly, women’s scores go up by between 50 and 100 percent when their estrogen level is low, and men’s scores go up when their testosterone level is low. See I. Silverman and M. Eals, “Sex Differences in Spatial Abilities: Evolutionary Theory and Data,” in J. Barko, L. Cosmides, and J. Tooby, eds., The Adaptive Mind: Evolutionary Psychology and the Generation of Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), 487–503. It is also intriguing that while men are better at rotating three-dimensional objects (perhaps related to navigating the savannah while hunting), women are apparently better at the spatial task of remembering the place of objects (perhaps related to foraging).
26. J. Hall, Nonverbal Sex Differences: Communication Accuracy and Expressive Styles (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984).
27. Alan Feingold of Yale University has written a landmark article on this topic, containing exhaustive data reanalysis of the major ability tests: “Sex Differences in Variability in Intellectual Abilities: A New Look at an Old Controversy,” Review of Educational Research 62 (1992): 61–84.
28. A. Feingold, “Sex Differences in Variability in Intellectual Abilities.”
29. There is an alternate explanation of the narrowing of sex differences: renorming. Every few years, the big test makers (ETS, California Achievement, etc.) renorm their tests to try to make them better and “fairer.” To do this, they sometimes throw out items on which there is a sex difference or a race difference and substitute items that do not differ empirically. If this is what is going on in the reduction of the ability-score differences, it is sheer artifact. The ability differences remain, but we can no longer see them as clearly.
30. W. Masters and V. Johnson, Human Sexual Inadequacy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), is a classic, but too technical to be a good read. H. Kaplan, The New Sex Therapy (New York: Brunner-Mazel, 1974), is a better choice for the layman. For a skeptical view, see B. Zilbergeld and M. Evans, “The Inadequacy of Masters and Johnson,” Psychology Today 14 (1980): 28–43.
31. I adopt the usage of acedia from Robertson Davies’s essay “The Deadliest Sin of All,” in One Half of Robertson Davies (New York: Viking, 1977), 62–68. Much of what follows derives from this brilliant essay.
CHAPTER 12 Dieting
1. This is a truly voluminous subject, full of articles that contradict one another, and peopled by scientists and clinicians caught in a conflict between an emerging truth about the ineffectiveness of dieting on the one hand, and making a living on the other.
I want to single out two major pieces of work about dieting, both unpopular: The first is J. Polivy and P. Herman, Breaking the Diet Habit (New York: Basic Books, 1983). Although a decade old now and out of print, its basic contentions on the ineffectiveness and dangers of dieting continue to be borne out in this fast-moving field. The second is the most up-to-date,