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People readily use social categories in their daily interactions with others. Although many scholars have focused on social categorization, they have largely neglected the cognitive representation of stimuli as a basis of this process. The present work aims to determine what dimensions are commonly used to organize the social world. The main dimensions of the social mental map are extracted from sorting data pertaining to a wide variety of social stimuli. Dimensions reflecting conventionalism, age, gender, physical versus cognitive orientation, warmth, and deviance are revealed. Furthermore, we show important individual differences in the extent to which each of these dimensions are attended to. We also establish the stability and reliability of our findings in a follow-up and a replication study.

The BIOMED II 'Improving Psychiatric Treatment in Residential Programmes for Emerging Dependency Groups' project provided a relatively large sample (n = 863) of men (77%) and women (23%) in therapeutic community treatment in nine European countries. This paper's aim is to search for gender differences in profiles of therapeutic community clients on the basis of the different areas of functioning of the EuropASI. A binary logistic regression model was used to avoid the confounding effects of country and age. Our findings confirm what is found in the American literature: compared to men, women have a much worse profile in various areas of functioning when entering treatment. In response, they may require a gender-adapted set of therapeutic interventions at the moment they enter treatment.

The BIOMED II project, 'Improving Psychiatric Treatment in Residential Programmes for Newly Dependent Groups through Relapse Prevention', provided a large database of characteristics of men and women in European therapeutic communities (TCs). One of the aims of the project was to improve the treatment of 'emerging dependency groups' through better assessment. Although American TC research has shown that there are important differences between men and women that should be taken into account when organising treatment, the BIOMED project failed to report on gender differences. This article tries to fill this gap by presenting an overview of the gender differences in the TC clients and lists the characteristics of the participating European TCs. The two overviews are given for each country separately. Descriptive methods were used. The authors discuss whether the TC programme considers the differences between men and women and whether the 'community as method' approach is gender sensitive.

Although the categorization of novel social stimuli according to general qualities of gender, age, and race is known to be automatic and primordial, categorizing stimuli into more specific social subgroups (e.g., hippies or businesswomen) is much more informative and cognitively efficient. In this paper, we show that social stimuli are more likely to be grouped into subgroups with an intermediate degree of specificity than into broad, general categories or narrow, highly specific categories. Furthermore, we show that category membership at the intermediate subgroup level predicts social judgments more efficiently than category membership at a more general or more specific level. We discuss the consequences of our results for social cognition and cognitive categorization.