for assistance, and Nora Newcombe and Elliott Blass for advice and comments on the manuscript. Above all, I am grateful to Ariel Grace and Kristin Shutts for their unending support and after-hours labor on this project. Draft, 4/20/05. This paper has not yet been peer reviewed. Please do not copy or cite without author's permission. This report considers three prominent claims that boys and men have greater natural aptitude for high-level careers in mathematics and science. According to the first claim, males are more focused on objects and mechanical systems from the beginning of life. According to the second claim, males have a profile of spatial and numerical abilities that predisposes them to greater aptitude in mathematics. According to the third claim, males show greater variability in mathematical aptitude, yielding a preponderance of males at the upper end of the distribution of mathematical talent. Research on cognitive development in human infants and preschool children, and research on cognitive performance by students at all levels, provides evidence against these claims. Mathematical and scientific reasoning develop from a set of biologically based capacities that males and females share. From these capacities, men and women appear to develop equal talent for mathematics and science.

The analysis of agency, a very close concept to presence, is of great help for acquiring insights into how the sense of presence is acquired in the developing child and also about the experience of presence itself. Empirical evidence coming from Cognitive Developmental Research together with the positive outcome of people with autism (who are not generally able to act “as if”) when participating in Virtual Environments suggests that presence is more about ‘experiencing agency ’ than ‘Pretending to be there ’ or than constructing and reconstructing mental models in real time. It is considered that these phenomena shed some light on the current issues of Presence Research and open up new fascinating philosophical and psychological ones, both in relation to

ABSTRACT: This article highlights the overlapping and converging goals and challenges of autism research and affective computing. We propose that a collaboration between autism research and affective computing could lead to several mutually beneficial outcomes—from developing new tools to assist people with autism in understanding and operating in the socioemotional world around them, to developing new computational models and theories that will enable technology to be modified to provide an overall better socioemotional experience to all people who use it. This article describes work toward this convergence at the MIT Media Lab, and anticipates new research that might arise from the interaction between research into autism, technology, and human socioemotional intelligence.

This dissertation is dedicated to the fourteen women in this study group. May the sun shine on you. 3 ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I thank my family for their support throughout this process, especially my husband, Ken, who has been so generous and loving. I hope that my work on this project helps instill in my children, Nora and Kip, an appreciation for education, as my parents, Marian and Ralph Manco, have inspired in me. I thank my dissertation supervisor, Dr. Ursula Wagener, for her unwavering support and tireless counsel throughout the numerous drafts of this dissertation. Additionally, I thank my committee members, Dr. Marvin Lazerson and Dr. Norman Badler, for their interest in my work and their expert guidance and insight throughout this process. I am indebted to Dean Eduardo Glandt, the faculty, administrators, staff and students in the School of Engineering and Applied Science of the University of Pennsylvania, who gave generously of their time and perspectives on the issues in women’s persistence in computer science. I thank, especially, Jackie Caliman for sharing with me her substantial knowledge of the undergraduate programs and students in computer science, and Fernando Pereira, Chair of the Dept. of Computer and Information Science, for making this study possible. Finally, I thank the fourteen women participants in this study for sharing openly and honestly their experiences with me. You are talented, passionate and energetic individuals who will be successful in whatever you choose. I have the greatest admiration and respect for each one of you.

Previous research suggested that sex differences in personality traits are larger in prosperous, healthy, and egalitarian cultures in which women have more opportunities equal with those of men. In this article, the authors report cross-cultural findings in which this unintuitive result was replicated across samples from 55 nations (N � 17,637). On responses to the Big Five Inventory, women reported higher levels of neuroticism, extraversion, agreeableness, and conscientiousness than did men across most nations. These findings converge with previous studies in which different Big Five measures and more limited samples of nations were used. Overall, higher levels of human development—including long and healthy life, equal access to knowledge and education, and economic wealth—were the main nation-level predictors of larger sex differences in personality. Changes in men’s personality traits appeared to be the primary cause of sex difference variation across cultures. It is proposed that heightened levels of sexual dimorphism result from personality traits of men and women being less constrained and more able to naturally diverge in developed nations. In less fortunate social and economic conditions, innate personality differences between men and women may be attenuated.

Researchers have argued that individuals with autism spectrum disorders (ASDs) use an effortful “systematizing ” process to recognize emotion expressions, whereas typically developing (TD) individuals use a more holistic process. If this is the case, individuals with ASDs should show slower and less efficient emotion recognition, particularly for socially complex emotions. We tested this account by assessing the speed and accuracy of emotion recognition while limiting exposure time and response window. Children and adolescents with ASDs showed quick and accurate recognition for most emotions, including pride, a socially complex emotion, and no differences emerged between ASD and TD groups. Furthermore, both groups tended toward higher accuracy when responding quickly, even though systematizing should promote a speed-accuracy trade-off for individuals with ASDs.

Abstract not found