Individual and sex differences in reminiscence

Abstract

Inverted alphabet printing, rotary pursuit, and mirror tracking tasks were administered to 84 subjects in order to ascertain (a) reproducibility of reminiscence scores within and between tasks and (b) sex differences in reminiscence. With prerest performance levels held constant by second-order partial correlation procedures, reproducibility of individual reminiscence differences within tasks was significant but quite low, while predictability of reminiscence from one task to another was negligible. The sexes reminisced essentially alike on inverted alphabet printing, but females reminisced more than males on the other tasks, presumably because they were relatively more depressed by massed practice on these tasks. Thus, individual and sex differences were essentially task specific. Implications of results for reminiscence theories and for the credibility of alleged relationships between reminiscence and other organismic variables were discussed.

Reminiscence in children as a function of sex

“…The subclass means are given in Tables 1 and 2. Huang and Payne (1975). As shown in Table 1, females were superior to males, as all investigators have found regardless of the age range examined.…”

“…Taken together, and viewed in conjunction with comparable studies of young adults, they conIlIm beyond any reasonable doubt that sex differences in reminiscence depend upon task structure, as Huang and Payne (1975) surmised. The mirror tracking results alone, by virtue of their consistency with Horn's (1975 ) results on rotary pursuit and their contradiction of confirmed fmdings in young adults, lend strong support to the hypothesis that pubescence may reverse sex dominance in reminiscence tendencies.…”

“…One will recall that Huang and Payne (1975) found no general Sex effect, but rather an interaction of Sex by Trial effects in which males gained progresSively over females as trials continued. By contrast, the present analysis revealed a general male dominance [F(1 ,36) = 13.33, P < .001], which grew progressively larger as practice blocks continued [F(2,n) = 4.98, p < .01].…”

“…It was designed as a partial replication of Huang and Payne (1975), except that prepubescent children were employed as subjects.…”

Sex, race, and psychomotor reminiscence

“…For those tasks in which the sex effect has appeared, which sex reminisces more depends upon the developmental status of the subjects. Whereas young adult females reminisce more than young adult males (Buxton & Grant, 1939;Huang & Payne, 1975) , prepubescent females reminisce less than prepubescent males (Ammons, Alprin, & Ammons, 1955;Horn, 1975;Zegiob & Payne, 1977). The reversal of sex dominance in reminiscence across pubertal years is paralleled by observations of the relative gains of the sexes in distributed practice experiments (McCaffrey & Payne, 1977;Resick & Payne, 1978) .…”