Stereotypes

Stereotyping is one of the most important issues in social psychology, but relatively little is known about how and why stereotypes form. This book explores the process of stereotype formation; the way people develop impressions and view social groups. Conventional approaches to stereotyping assume that stereotypes are based on erroneous and distorted processes, but the authors of this unique study have a very different view. They propose that stereotypes form to explain aspects of social groups and; in particular; to explain relationships between groups.

Do women express their feelings more than men? Popular stereotypes say they do, but in this provocative book, Leslie Brody breaks with conventional wisdom. Integrating a wealth of perspectives and research--biological, sociocultural, developmental--her work explores the nature and extent of gender differences in emotional expression, as well as the endlessly complex question of how such differences come about. Nurture, far more than nature, emerges here as the stronger force in fashioning gender differences in emotional expression. Brody shows that whether and how men and women express their feelings varies widely from situation to situation and from culture to culture, and depends on a number of particular characteristics including age, ethnicity, cultural background, power, and status. Especially pertinent is the organization of the family, in which boys and girls elicit and absorb different emotional strategies. Brody also examines the importance of gender roles, whether in the family, the peer group, or the culture at large, as men and women use various patterns of emotional expression to adapt to power and status imbalances. Lucid and level-headed, Gender, Emotion, and the Family offers an unusually rich and nuanced picture of the great range of male and female emotional styles, and the variety of the human character.

Unique among the former Soviet satellite states, Hungary has data from a series of fourteen substantial surveys from the mid-1960s though to 1994. This book presents the data from the surveys, which describe the views of the Hungarian people.