Vita Rabinowitz
Social Personality Psychology
phone: 212.772.4330
email: vrabinowitz@gc.cuny.edu
My current research interests are in the areas of basic processes in helping
relationships, sex and gender issues in behavioral and biomedical research,
and women's health. I am also beginning a new program of research in social
memory. I would love to involve students in any of the following projects:
1. Sex and Gender Bias in Psychology and Related Fields. Concern grows
daily about the possibility that psychology and medicine have failed women
by ignoring sex and gender issues throughout the research process. With
Florence L. Denmark and Jeri A. Sechzer, I surveyed leading psychological
and biomedical journals to document the nature and extent of sex and gender
bias is research with humans and animals. We are focusing our inquiry
on four major disorders affecting both men and women: AIDS/HIV infection,
depression, coronary heart disease, and cancer. We hope to contribute
to an understanding of the problems inherent in sex and gender bias in
subject selection, choice of independent variables, and in the generalization
of findings across sex and gender.
2. Models of Helping and Coping. I am newly inspired to begin work again
on the models of helping and coping I developed with Phil Brickman and
other colleagues from Northwestern. Our analysis suggests that four fundamentally
different forms of helping and coping are associated with key attributions
about how much responsibility an individual is assigned for causing and
solving problems. I am eager to apply this analysis to virtually any set
of problems but particularly to those involving sexual harassment, AID
S/HIV infection, depression, and stress-related disorders.
3. Issues in Measuring the Models. I plan to develop new quantitative
and qualitative techniques for measuring model endorsement, and would
love to share my ideas with interested students.
4. Forgetting of Stimulus Attributes. I am beginning a new line of research
on how loss of memory for stimulus attributes (the particular details
of an individual or event) can lead to paradoxical shifts in cognition,
attitudes and judgments. I welcome some help launching this new laboratory
research program. I am especially interested in studying social memory
as it relates to social stereotypes.