in schools could benefit from focusing on those attributions. This was the ap-
proach taken by one team of investigators (Metropolitan Area Child StudyResearch Group, 2007). The researchers first identified elementary school
children who were at risk for acting violently. Beginning in Grades 2 and 3,
some of these children attended 40 one-hour sessions over a 2-year period
in which they learned, among other things, how to respond in effective, non-
violent ways to conflict and threats. Other children were randomly assigned
to a control group that did not attend the sessions. At the beginning and atthe end of the 2-year study, the researchers presented the children with sce-
narios and asked the children how they would probably react to the situa-
tions. Among the children who came from moderate-income neighborhoods,there was a tendency for those in the control group to become more aggres-
sive as they became older. However, the children in the intervention condi-
tion showed a decrease in aggressive tendencies over the same periodof time.
GENDER, MEMORY, AND SELF-CONSTRUAL
The next time you want to stir things up at a dull social gathering, raise thisquestion: Do men or women have better memories? Inevitably, I find peoplecome to the defense of their own gender. Men complain about times their
spouses forgot to pay bills or fill the gas tank, and women point out the way
their husbands overlook anniversaries and the names of in-laws. Although
these responses reflect more than an ounce of stereotype, they also highlight
observations psychologists make about gender and memory. Research sug-
gests men and women do not differ in their general ability to memorize andrecall information. However, investigators often find differences in what men
and women remember.
Consider a study in which men and women were asked to recall several
different kinds of information (Seidlitz & Diener, 1998). Participants first
were given 3 minutes to list as many positive and negative events as they
could recall from the previous 3 years of their lives. Later the participantswere asked to recall, among other things, emotional events from the previous
year and from a randomly selected 1-hour interval from the previous week.
Participants were also given a limited amount of time to recall events fromAmerican history.
Who had the better recall? As shown in Figure 16.3, the answer depends
on what kind of information the participants were asked to remember. Thewomen recalled significantly more personal events than the men. This was
true for both negative events and positive events. On the other hand, men
did better recalling the impersonal information about American history. In
short, women were better able to remember happy occasions with friends
and times they embarrassed themselves, whereas men recalled better the facts
they had learned in school or read about.
Psychologists explain these differences in memory by pointing to the way
people process self-relevant information. Specifically, investigators identify
two differences in the way men and women organize information in memory.440 CHAPTER 16 The Cognitive Approach