Gender bias in student evaluation of teaching or a mirage?

In a recent small sample study, Khazan et al. [1] examined SET ratings received by one female teaching (TA) assistant who assisted with teaching two sections of the same online course, one section under her true gender and one section under false/opposite gender. Khazan et al. concluded that their study demonstrated gender bias against female TA even though they found no statistical difference in SET ratings between male vs. female TA (p = 0.73). To claim gender bias, Khazan et al. ignored their overall findings and focused on distribution of six “negative” SET ratings and claimed, without reporting any statistical test results, that (a) female students gave more positive ratings to male TA than female TA, (b) female TA received five times as many negative ratings than the male TA, and (c) female students gave “most low” scores to female TA. We conducted the missing statistical tests and found no evidence supporting Khazan et al.’s claims. We also requested Khazan et al.’s data to formally examine them for outliers and to re-analyze the data with and without the outliers. Khazan et al. refused. We read off the data from their Figure 1 and filled in several values using the brute force, exhaustive search constrained by the summary statistics reported by Khazan et al. Our re-analysis revealed six outliers and no evidence of gender bias. In fact, when the six outliers were removed, the female TA was rated higher than male TA but non-significantly so.

Risk analysis of factors in clinical anxiety among undergraduate and postgraduate students in dentistry

BACKGROUND: When anxiety is persistent among dental students, the consequence could be poor academic performance, ill health, lack of empathy, and exhaustion. OBJECTIVE: This study aimed to determine the level of anxiety along with anxiety-provoking factors among clinical dental students. METHODS: This study included dental undergraduate and postgraduate clinical students from a public university. A modified version of the self-administered Moss and McManus questionnaire, which consisted of 50 items, was utilized to evaluate the levels of anxiety. The results were analyzed using SPSS ® version 24. The significance level was set at p < 0.05. RESULTS: Within 180 participants, 140 (77.77%) were undergraduate students, while 40 (22.22%) were postgraduate dental students. Overall, the top clinical anxiety-provoking factor included failure to pass the final examination, whereas the least clinical anxiety-provoking element was communicating with the opposite gender. Significant differences existed among male and female participants in the seven anxiety-provoking factors among the participants namely dealing with elderly patients, fail to pass finals, arresting post-extraction bleeding, patients asking difficult questions, fear of accidental pulp exposure, dealing with a child or non-cooperative patient, and fear of taking an incorrect impression. Postgraduate students showed lower anxiety scores in various clinical tasks as compared to undergraduate students. CONCLUSIONS: Postgraduate dental students share largely the same perspectives with undergraduate dental students on the clinical anxiety-provoking situations with slight variations. Being the future healthcare providers, dental students must learn techniques to help them manage their dental anxiety and fear as well as deal with anxiety related to treating patients

Nonverbal Synchrony in Couple Therapy Linked to Clients’ Well-Being and the Therapeutic Alliance

Nonverbal synchrony between individuals has a robust relation to the positive aspects of relationships. In psychotherapy, where talking is the cure, nonverbal synchrony has been related to a positive outcome of therapy and to a stronger therapeutic alliance between therapist and client in dyadic settings. Only a few studies have focused on nonverbal synchrony in multi-actor therapy conversations. Here, we studied the synchrony of head and body movements in couple therapy, with four participants present (spouses and two therapists). We analyzed more than 2000min of couple therapy videos from 11 couple therapy cases using Motion Energy Analysis and a Surrogate Synchrony (SUSY), a procedure used earlier in dyadic psychotherapy settings. SUSY was calculated for all six dyads per session, leading to synchrony computations for 66 different dyads. Significant synchrony occurred in all 29 analyzed sessions and between the majority of dyads. Complex models were used to determine the relations between nonverbal synchrony and the clients’ well-being and all participants’ evaluations of the therapeutic alliance. The clients’ well-being was related to body synchronies in the sessions. Differences were found between the clients’ and therapists’ alliance evaluations: the clients’ alliance evaluations were related to synchrony between both dyads of opposite gender, whereas the therapists’ alliance evaluations were related to synchrony between dyads of the same gender, but opposite to themselves. With four participants present, our study introduces a new aspect of nonverbal synchrony, since as a dyad synchronizes, the other two participants are observing it. Nonverbal synchrony seems to be as important in couple therapy as in individual psychotherapy, but the presence of multiple participants makes the patterns more complex.

Sexual Double Standards: Contributions of Sexual Socialization by Parents, Peers, and the Media

Abstract(Hetero)sexual double standards (SDS) entail that different sexual behaviors are appropriate for men and women. There is large variation in whether people endorse SDS in their expectations about the sexual behavior of women and men (i.e., SDS-norms). To explain these individual differences, we examined associations between SDS-norms of Dutch adolescents (aged 16–20 years, N = 566) and what parents, peers, and the media teach adolescents about appropriate sexual behavior of boys and girls (i.e., SDS-socialization). Adolescents completed an online survey at school. Regarding SDS-socialization, more traditional SDS-norms conveyed by the media and peers, but not of parents, and less perceived sexual activity of female peers, were associated with more traditional SDS-norms. Only for boys, exposure to sexy girls/women on social media and sexual music videos of female artists were associated with more traditional SDS-norms. Thus, SDS-socialization by peers and the media and opposite gender models (for boys) are important in light of adolescents’ SDS-norms.

Watching, being watched, and human interactions: evidence from trust games

Face-to-face communication increases human trust, which is crucial for making important decisions with others. Due to technological breakthroughs and the COVID-19 pandemic, human interactions now predominantly occur online, leading to two situations: other peoples’ faces cannot be seen, but yours can, and vice versa. However, the relationships among watching, being watched, and face-to-face interaction are unclear in existing papers. This paper separately measures the effects of both watching and being watched on human interactions using a trust game. I derive the optimal behaviors of senders and receivers in the trust game and empirically validate it through a controlled experiment. The results show that more than half of the participants perform the optimal behavior. They also indicate that both watching and being watched enhance human trust and reciprocity, while the synergy effect of face-to-face is not observed. Additionally, women reciprocate more when they are watched, and trust increases when participants are paired with the opposite gender and can watch their partner. This paper theoretically concludes that the former comes from women’s social pressure that they should be reciprocators, and the latter from participants’ beliefs that the opposite gender reciprocates more than the same gender does. These results propose a framework based on watching and being watched affecting human behaviors and emphasize the importance of face-to-face communication in online human interactions.

http://habibiaislamicus.com/index.php/hirj/article/view/189

Gender distribution in all creatures is a sign of Nature. For human guide it seems to realize the gender division that is found distinctive in physical nature, man and woman with entirely different physique, that all other religions admit the difference but their societal customs have counted on equal gesture. That is the reason modern societies are now viewing no problem at homosexual contact in the west, without ascertaining the results of failures in saving their nation from a purgatory desire in their youth, who have forgotten how to quench their natural thirst from the right way, of having marriage with opposite gender. This study will explain how west has allowed doing homosexuality, contrary to which no religion has allowed freedom against the natural way. Islamic teachings are proactive in restricting these kinds of illegal trails for the safety human folk. Conclusively it is clarified that due to denial of religious teachings, there are arising big issues of gender-wise sins in the world that is also arresting Muslim youth too. Therefore, only the religious theories are advisable to all humankind for safety of human-identity. Thus, Islam teaching can never allow promoting the western’s theories of ‘sexuality’ amongst Muslim community.

Fading Affect Bias in Intergroup Relations

Negative affect associated with autobiographical events fades faster over time than positive affect. This Fading Affect Bias (FAB) has been established in the individual and interpersonal domains. Two studies tested the FAB in intergroup relations with Muslims ( N= 76 White British non-Muslim) and opposite gender ( N = 242 women and men) as target outgroups. The results indicated that the FAB exists in an intergroup context, for both ingroup and outgroup memories. Mediation analyses showed that intergroup contact is related to a lower fading of positive affect associated with the outgroup memory, through greater memory strength and a more positive outgroup member evaluation. The findings are important for understanding affect associated with intergroup memories and the buffering effect of positive contact.

Identifying the Dietary Patterns and Chronic Disease’s Effective Factors on the General Health Condition of Tehran’s opposite Gender Adult Twins in 2017

Introduction: The incidence of multiple births in the world has increased significantly .There are few studies on the nutritional status of twins, to our knowledge, no study has been conducted in this field in Iran. These are among many reasons that make this study, which aims to identify major dietary patterns and Chronic Disease’s Effective Factors on the General Health Condition of Tehran’s Opposite Gender Adult Twins, valuable. Materials and Methods: 128 people (64 pairs) of Opposite Gender Twins participated in this study. After completing the general information questionnaires, International Physical Activity, Semi-quantitative food frequency, and general health, anthropometric indices, and their blood pressure were measured. Dietary patterns were identified by factor analysis. The relationship between dietary patterns and factors affecting chronic diseases with general health was calculated using the logistic regression method. Results: Two western and healthy dietary patterns were identified. There was a significant relationship between the Western dietary pattern and age, gender, and father's education. Twin participants who scored higher in a quarter of the Western dietary pattern were younger than those with lower scores, with men increasing and women decreasing. There was a significant difference in the distribution of healthy dietary pattern with age, economic status, and systolic blood pressure. An increasing relationship was observed in age. The results showed that in first Twins, only Birth Weight, and Physical Activity, whereas, in second Twins besides Birth Weight, gender and Marital status were among the most significant factors in determining the general health of participants. Conclusion: The present study shows that there are two major dietary patterns: healthy and western. The Western dietary pattern has the most variance and this indicates the nutritional transition and prevalence of the Western dietary pattern in Iran. The main finding of this study is the association of birth weight with general health in both twins. Birth weight is directly related to health. Those with low birth weight have more health problems in contrast to those with normal birth weight.

Online Textual Symptomatic Assessment Chatbot Based on Q&A Weighted Scoring for Female Breast Cancer Prescreening

The increasing number of female breast cancer (FBC) incidences in the East predominated by Chinese language speakers has generated concerns over women’s medicare. To minimize the mortality rate associated with FBC in the region, governments and health experts are jointly encouraging women to undergo mammography screening at the earliest suspicion of FBC symptoms. However, studies show that a huge number of women affected by FBC tend to delay medical consultation at its early stage as a result of factors such as complacency due to unawareness of FBC symptoms, procrastination due to lifestyle, and the feeling of embarrassment in discussing private matters especially with medical personnel of the opposite gender. To address these issues, we propose a symptomatic assessment chatbot (SAC) based on artificial intelligence (AI) designed to prescreen women for FBC symptoms via a textual question-and-answer (Q&A) approach. The purpose of our chatbot is to assist women in engaging in communication regarding FBC symptoms, so as to subsequently initiate formal medical consultations for early FBC diagnosis and treatment. We implemented the SAC systematically with some of the latest natural language processing (NLP) techniques suitable for Chinese word segmentation (CWS) and trained the model with real-world FBC Q&A data obtained from a major hospital in Taiwan. The results from our experiments showed that the SAC achieved very high accuracy in FBC assessment scoring in comparison to FBC patients’ screening benchmark scores obtained from doctors.