Analysis of Studies about Sexism and Gender Inequality - Literature review Example

Research Article Review Research Article Review The first research article for this review is the research on the response of many people to creativity. After using reliable methods in conducting this research, it has been perceived that many people will express the desire for being creative but will not want to exercise actual creativity and will always reject creative ideas. It does not help to keep desires for creativity and fail to participate practically in exercising it. This simply makes no change in one’s life and may end up never enjoying what they fantasize about. This reveals that there is a huge barrier between people who have a negative attitude towards creativity and sectors that are based on creativity. These sectors include novel writing, which requires a lot of creativity to survive in it. Actors too find this as the greatest challenge in what they do. For one to survive in most areas, acceptance of creativity is very much required. For discoveries to take place in science related sectors, including technology, a lot of creativity has to be exercised and people assume some of these facts. Heads of institutions will emphasize on the importance of creativity in growth and development of their organizations. For technology to be advanced, a lot of attention has to be offered to creativity as the main tool in making the achievement. However, when plans and ideas based on creativity are presented before them, they happen to reject them. This is due to the fact that implementation of creativity appears expensive. Many forget that cheaper plans stand out to be the more expensive in the end. Creative plans may consume a lot of time and money, but will end up paying it back with security of your success in business and other sectors. This means that where there is creativity there is success and where success stands out strong creativity is the foundation. Two studies using two different methods have been conducted to measure and control uncertainty. These methods are the discrete uncertainty feelings and the uncertainty reduction prime. These methods have revealed that the negative attitude towards creativity has hindered participation in recognizing, prioritizing and implementation of creative ideas. To test this, in the first method, participants were randomly assigned to either uncertainty condition or baseline condition. Participants in the uncertainty condition were promised additional payments while those in the baseline condition were not promised anything. This perfectly helped to test the participants’ attitude. In the second method, participants were randomly assigned to either high tolerance uncertainty condition or low tolerance uncertainty condition. Both sides were asked to write essays supporting the statement. As for the high tolerance side, for every problem there is more than one correct solution. In the opposite side, low tolerance uncertainty condition, for every problem there was to be only one correct solution. Results showed that the participants in the low tolerance were not significantly different in their levels as per the test, against creativity as compared to those in the high tolerant. In conclusion of this research, I agree with the findings that uncertainty contributes to creation of negative attitude towards creativity and hinders people from realizing and recognizing a creative idea (Mueller et al., 2011). In the second research, the relation between sexism and gender inequality is evaluated across fifty-seven societies. Prediction that led to this research is the fact that an individual’s sexism behavior may end up leading to gender inequality in the whole society. This research provided statistical evidence to the hypothesis. In the study, data collected from fifty-seven representative societies was analyzed and conclusions were drawn out of the findings. These findings expressed that sexism characters in a society are actually the root cause for gender inequality within the society. This is where the whole practice begins. These sexism ideologies in most societies come along with practices such as discouragement in voting for women in leadership positions, failure to support education for women according to customs in society, discrimination of women in occupations and putting of public policies that weaken women offering to them degrading roles in the society. This therefore means that sexism and gender inequality move hand in hand and solutions should be found for sexism so as to tackle gender inequality. In other societies, though sexism plays part in strengthening gender inequality, it happens not to be the dominant cause for it. The different levels of education and economic development happen to stimulate gender inequality in these societies. In this research, data was collected from the World Values Survey Association, which entailed samples from fifty-seven representative societies. This method contained two items to help in assessment of the levels of hostile treatment cases in the representative societies. These items stated, “On the whole, men make better political leaders than women do” and “On the whole men make better business executives than women do” (Brandt, 2011). A scale was used to determine the nature of the responses and was labeled as one, representing a strong agreement in support, and four, representing a strong disagreement. In this measure, higher scores indicated more sexism. From the research method, results showed that men were more participants than women were in creation of a sexism attitude. This means that women are in most cases the victims of sexism and gender inequality. As compared to the previous research, sexism and gender inequality levels in societies have not been controlled over the last few years. This therefore means that members in many societies are challenged to take Gender Empowerment Measures in as an effort to control the chronic problem of gender inequality, which goes hand in hand with sexism. Over the past few years, this study has been recognized as the first to make analytical representations that show the trend in terms of sexism and gender inequality in societies today. The study has shown an increment in the rate at which sexism and gender inequality cases have been experienced. It has gone further than other research studies represented before and shown a great association between sexism and gender inequality. The author’s findings are very much connected to the reality. According to me, these results are the exact experiences that members of many societies go through in the recent days. Evaluation of as many as fifty-seven societies has helped a lot in out bringing the real picture of sexism and gender inequality in almost all societies (Brandt, 2011). The next research article was carried out to show the connection between ethnic identity and mental health. The bridge between these two is found to be the condition of subjection to stress, which interferes with mental health. It is predicted that in most cases depression is brought about by the individual’s social status. This research is to measure the degree of how true this prediction is. The strength of one’s identification with a certain right ethnic group helps to create a sense of ethnic pride, which contributes a lot in relieving one from social related stress in mind. This statement thus draws to a conclusion that act of engaging one-self in ethnic groups greatly helps in protection of the person’s mental health. Discrimination feelings that are bought about by failure to identify ones-self with the right ethnic group brings about symptoms of depression. This suggests that the ethnic identity is one major consideration that should be made in protection of mental health and should never be overlooked. In the United States, the strong relation between ethnic strength and well-maintained mental health has implications on the social psychological theories and assimilations. From the findings, discrimination is regarded as a dominant contributor to the creation of stress conditions and should be fought against at all cost if mental health is to be maintained. However, the debate on this matter is stimulated by the fact that there was a contrary finding earlier. This finding stated that the interaction between ethnic identification and discrimination helps to worsen the relation between discrimination and depressive symptoms. This means that ethnic identity may not in the long run protect mental health but may end up making the situation worse. These past results therefore needed to be critically analyzed to come up with the absolute result. In this research, this was done by evaluating the everyday causes of depression. Some treatments people are subjected to do not help in protection of mental health. These treatments include being approached with less courtesy, being disrespected, receiving poorer services than others, people acting before one as if they are not smart, as if they are better than the victim, as if they are afraid of the victim and so on. Data for this method was collected from the Filipinos who lived in the United States. In the measure, the scale used contained two types of variables, which were the dependent and the independent variables. From the results of this study, it is viewed that depression cases are mostly experienced by females. Many people who have separated suffer more from depression conditions as compared to married people. Interaction effect on these people turn out to be more helpful as it creates a state of forgetting their situations that subject them to intense stress forces that may interfere with their mental health. This means that the relation between ethnic strength and stress is real. On a personal level, I tend to agree with the results of this research, as it is evidently clear in our daily lives that interacting with members of our ethnic groups, those who accept us the way we are, helps in relieving us from much of the stress that we undergo (Mossakowski, 2003). The fourth research was to make an investigation on the relationship between meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. To find out whether this relationship is positive or negative in the way it comes up with impacts. Currently, the interest in supportive meditation practices has been found to be rapidly growing amongst people in different societies. The advantages of using the meditation method in stress reduction have increasingly attracted attention towards efforts of verification. This method has been considered as complementary to the well-known medical and psychological methods of handling stress to contribute to health maintenance. In addition, it is also realized that it is not well comprehended amongst many people how mindfulness and meditation practices contribute in the improvement of the peoples’ physical and psychological well-being. Many people believe meditation and mindfulness are only directly connected to the emotional welfare of a person and not physical or mental welfare. This research therefore specializes in finding out the truth between these believes as well as how meditation and mindfulness end up being related to the cognitive flexibility of a person. In this study, two well-known measures are applied to come up with the findings. These measures are the Strop task and the d2 test of attention. These two methods are useful in testing the ability of the participants to inhibit information that seems to be disrupting, any time it comes their way, thereby taking control over their attention and directing it to different helpful points. People who practice mindfulness meditation are expected to perform well on these skills, as they are characteristics of good cognitive flexibility. This way, the positive association will be approved. From research that has been done earlier, some results show that this relationship exists and is positive. However, these results are not reliable as different researchers came up with different results making the condition remain ambiguous. To break down this, the current research is aiming at comparing different meditators who have experience in mindfulness meditation, to non-meditators on tests of attention. These participants are also required to fill a mindfulness self-report questionnaire. The results of this investigation on how meditation, self-reported mindfulness and cognitive flexibility associate showed that there exists a direct and positive connection between these practices. On all the used measures of attention, meditators performed better than non-meditators. Self-reported mindfulness was also found to be higher in meditators than non-meditators. This made a revelation that the relations of meditation to other attention measures were strong. This shows that mindfulness is closely linked to improvement of attention functions and cognitive flexibility. I find these findings real and true as the method used is reliable and explanations to them are convincing (Moore & Malinowski, 2009). The last research deals with how the stigma gets under the skin. Many studies done earlier agree with the fact stigma leads to psychological distress but do not consider finding out the ways in which this happens. This study helps to show that suppression evidently occurs more during the times when stigma related stress cases are reported than when these cases are not numerously reported. This helps in breaking down the relationship between stigma related stress and psychological distress. This shows there is quite a significant link between the stigma and mental functioning of the body. To make this investigation, fifty students and members of the community were paid to participate in it. Among them were nineteen African Americans, five of whom were males and fourteen females. The rest were Lesbian Gay and Bisexual respondents. Sixteen of these were males, fifteen females, fifteen gays, ten lesbians and six bisexuals. The experience sampling surveys took ten days. If the participants happened to report experiencing stigma stressor, they were required to give a report on their stressor and their psychological distress. Those that did not report with stigma related stressor were helpful in acquiring the psychological state in absence of stigma related stress. This was used in comparison of the emotional regulation when stigma related stress was experienced to the days when it was not experienced. The responses were further divided and classified into various items. This helped to evaluate them deeper to acquire ultimate results for the study. This finally gave results that I find almost closely if not fully closely related to reality. This has helped to break it down for everyone to understand the relationship between stigma-related stress and psychological stress. The statistical analysis displayed showed that there were no significant differences on how both the African Americans and the LGB engaged in suppression following stigma related stress. Stigma related stress was predicted for both groups. This method used two studies for approval and satisfying results. In the two studies, employing distinct methodologies, concrete evidence was perceived proving that emotional regulation is key factor in linking up of these two kinds of distress. Discrimination was underlined as a major cause for psychological distress, among both Africa Americans and LGBs. Though suppression appears as self-defense in the cases of stigma related stress, it is found to cause negative consequences on the mental functioning of the stigmatized. It therefore makes the matter worse by acting as a bridge that links up the stigma stress to the mental functioning leading to alteration in the upstairs. In addition, suppression is also found to be dangerous as it may perpetuate stigma related stress because it does not communicate to other events making the distribution poor. Due to the fact that these findings are connected to reality and critical evaluations have been practiced in coming up with the conclusions of the study, I support the results and feel that the knowledge behind this study would be very much helpful in health maintenance (Hatzenbuehler et al., 2009). References Brandt, M. J. (2011). Sexism and gender inequality across 57 societies. Psychological science, 22(11), 1413-1418. Hatzenbuehler, M. L., Nolen-Hoeksema, S. & Dovidio, J. (2009). How Does Stigma ‘‘Get Under the Skin’’? Psychological Science, 20(10), 1282-1289. Moore, A., & Malinowski, P. (2009). Meditation, mindfulness and cognitive flexibility. Consciousness and cognition, 18, 176-186. Mossakowski, K. N. (2003). Coping with perceived discrimination: Does ethnic identity protect mental health? Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 44(3), 318-331. Mueller, J. S., Melwani, S., & Goncalo, J. A. (2011). The bias against creativity: Why people desire but reject creative ideas. New York: Sage Publications. Read More