Despite wide acceptance of the stereotype that women apologize more readily than men, there is little systematic evidence to support this stereotype or its supposed bases. In the present research, I explored whether gender differences in apology behaviour occur and, if so, why they occur. In Study 1, I used daily diaries to assess everyday apologies and found that women indeed apologized more frequently than men did. I found no difference in the proportion of offenses for which men and women apologized, however, suggesting that women may apologize more often than men do because they have a lower threshold for what constitutes offensive behaviour. In Studies 2 and 5, I replicated a gender difference in apology behaviour using hypothetical offenses and obtained evidence that this difference is mediated by different judgments of offense severity. In Study 3, I adapted a signal detection paradigm and demonstrated that women exhibit a more liberal response bias in the direction of remembering an apology. In Study 4, I found that women and men similarly associate apologies with positive outcomes, and that only women endorse the stereotype that women apologize more often than men do. Finally, in Study 6, I conducted a daily diary study with romantic couples and found that, as in Study 1, women and men apologized for a similar proportion of the offenses they reported. Together, these studies suggest that a gender difference in apology frequency is caused by different judgments of severity rather than by a difference in willingness to apologize.

<p>Commuting is becoming more and more important in every day life in the world of complex labour markets. If for hundred years ago most workers lived less than one hour walking distance from their workplace, then today they commute daily outside the cities and villages they live. Often is it a trade off between unemployment and employment. The subject of this thesis is to investigate if there are differences in female and male commuting behaviour. Especially it studies to what extent their spatial interaction is affected by variables such as labour in origin municipality, jobs in destination municipality and the distance between these two. Gravity models are used, and six different versions are estimated. The commuting data used in thesis comes from SCB (Statistics Sweden) and data about travel time collected by the Swedish Road Administration. Commuting data includes 1 003 771 people in Sweden who commute to a job located in another municipality than he or she was settled. The results imply that men are less sensitive to distance between two locations. Moreover, the amount of labour in origin and the amount of jobs in destination have higher effect on male commuting.</p>

When examinees with the same ‘ability’ take a test, they should have an equal chance of responding correctly to an item irrespective of group membership. This logic in assessment is known as measurement invariance. The lack of invariance of the item-, bundle-, and test-difficulty across different subgroups indicates differential functioning (DF). The aim of this study is to advance our understanding of DF by detecting, predicting and explaining the sources of DF by gender in a mathematics test. The presence of DF means that the test scores of these examinees may fail to provide a valid measure of their performance. A framework for investigating DF was proposed, moving from the item-level to a more complex random-item level, which provides a theme of critiques of limitations in DF methods and explorations of some advances. A dataset of 11-year-olds of a high-stakes National mathematics examination from England was used in this study. The results are reported in three journal publication format papers. The first paper addressed the issue of understanding nonuniform differential item functioning (DIF) at the item- level. The nonuniform DIF is investigated because it is a possible threat when common DIF statistics sensitive to uniform DIF may indicate no significant DIF. This study differentiates two different types of nonuniform DIF, namely crossing and noncrossing DIF. Two commonly used DIF detection methods, namely the Logistic Regression (LR) procedure and the Rasch measurement model were used to identify crossing and noncrossing DIF. This paper concludes that items with nonuniform DIF do exist in empirical data; hence there is a need to include statistics sensitive to crossing DIF in item analysis. The second paper investigated the sources of DF via differential bundle functioning (DBF) because this way we may get a substantive explanations of DF - without which we do not know if DF is ‘valid’ or ‘biased’. Roussos and Stout’s (1996a) multidimensionality-based DIF paradigm was used with an extension of the LR procedure to detect DBF. Three qualitatively different content areas: test modality, curriculum domains and problem presentation were studied. This paper concludes that DBF in curriculum domains may elicit construct-relevant variance, and so may indicate 'real' differences, whereas problem presentation and test modality arguably includes construct-irrelevant variance and so may indicate gender bias. Finally, the third paper considered item-person responses as hierarchically nested within items. Hence a two-level logistic model was used to model the random item effects, because otherwise it is argued that DF might be over-exaggerated and may lead to invalid inferences. This paper aimed to explain DF via DBF comparing single-level and two-level models. The DIF effects of the single-level model were found to be attenuated in the two-level model. A discussion of why the two different models produced different results was presented. Taken together, this thesis shows how validity arguments regarding bias should not be reduced to DF at item-level but can be analysed on three different levels.

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Thesis advisor: Scott D. Slotnick / Sex differences exist in both brain anatomy and neurochemistry (Cahill, 2006). Many differences have been identified in brain regions associated with long-term memory including the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex, hippocampus, and visual processing regions (Andreano & Cahill, 2009). There is, however, a paucity of research investigating whether and how these differences translate into differences in functional activity. Part 1 investigated sex differences in the patterns of functional activity in the brain during spatial long-term memory, item memory, memory confidence, and false memory. In addition, a meta-analysis was conducted to identify whether there were consistent sex differences in the brain across different long-term memory types. Part 2 determined whether there were sex differences in the patterns of functional connectivity in the brain during spatial long-term memory. Specifically, differences in functional connectivity between the hippocampus and the rest of the brain in addition to the thalamus and the rest of the brain were investigated. Finally, Part 3 investigated whether the observed differences in the patterns of activity (identified in Chapter 1) had sufficient information to classify the sex of individual participants. The results of Part 3 argue against the popular notion that the average female brain and average male brain are not significantly different (Joel et al., 2015). More broadly, the studies presented in this dissertation argue against the widespread practice of collapsing across sex in cognitive neuroscience. / Thesis (PhD) — Boston College, 2021. / Submitted to: Boston College. Graduate School of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Psychology.

We hypothesized that HIV-related stigma would be related to poorer HIV-related quality of life (HIV-QOL) in people living with HIV (PLWH), and that this relationship would be stronger in women living with HIV (WLWH) than in men living with HIV (MLWH). 105 PLWH completed an online survey including measures of demographics, HIV-related stigma, and HIV-QOL. Results suggest that higher levels of HIV-stigma were associated with poorer HIV-QOL, and that in some cases, this relationship was stronger for WLWH than for MLWH. It is possible that WLWH have unique HIV-related experiences affecting their quality of life that are not shared by MLWH.

The purpose of this study was to investigate the choice behavior and achievement of male and female high school students who are given an option of taking a 36 week American History course in either a game-based format or a web-based format. It was hypothesized that (a) males would enroll more frequently in the game-based course than females, (b) there would be no significant difference in achievement between males and females in the game-based course or across course formats, and (c) there would be no significant interaction between gender and the selection of course format. The study consisted of a sample of 7,962 11th grade students who enrolled in American History during the 2009/2010 school year at the Florida Virtual School (FLVS). Students planning to take 11th grade American History at FLVS were given the choice of enrolling in a game-based class format or a standard web-based online class format. A chi-square test of independence was used to analyze enrollment rates. An independent t test was used to analyze achievement based on gender in the game-based course. A two-way factorial analysis of variance (ANOVA) was used to analyze achievement data based on gender across course formats, enrollment, and the interaction of gender and enrollment. The chi-square results indicated that there is a relationship between gender and enrollment. Males chose to enroll in the game-based format of the course more frequently than females and females chose to enroll in the web-based format of the course more frequently than males. The independent t test results indicated that there is no significant difference in achievement based on gender in the game-based course. The ANOVA results indicated that there are significant differences in achievement based on gender as well as enrollment, but there are no significant differences in achievement based on the interaction of gender and enrollment. Implications for researchers, teachers, administrators, game developers, and funders are provided.

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