Questions of scientific responsibility: the Baltimore case

A number of cases of questionable behavior in science have been extensively reported in the media during the last two or three years. What standards are upheld by the scientific community affect the community internally, and also affect its relations with society at large, including Congress. Here I wish to address questions of scientific responsibility, using the Baltimore case as a concrete instance where they came up. The first part containing historical background is necessary to provide readers with documentation so that they can have some factual bases on which to evaluate respective positions and my conclusions that follow -- based on further but more succinctly summarized documentation. I have reproduced many quotes because I firmly believe people are entitled to be represented by their own wording. Conversely, I hold people accountable for their official positions. Some of these are reproduced in footnotes, and some longer ones are reproduced in appendices. I also do not ask to be trusted. By providing numerous references, I hope that readers who find my documentation insufficient can follow up by looking up these references.... The article is in six parts: Part I. Historical Background. This part gives mostly a historical background of the early phases of the Baltimore case. Part II. The First Issue of Responsibility. This part presents a discussion of certain scientific responsibilities based on that background, specifically: the responsibility of answering questions about one's work, and the responsibility whether to submit to authority. Part III. The NIH Investigations. This part summarizes the two NIH investigations. Part IV. The Dingell Subcommittee. This part deals with the responsibilities of a Congressional Committee vis-à-vis science. Part V. Further Issues of Responsibility. This part goes into an open ended discussion of many issues of responsibility facing scientists, vis-à-vis themselves and vis-à-vis society at large, including Congress. The list is long, and readers can look at the section and paragraph headings to get an idea of their content. Part VI. Personal Credibility, a Shift at the Grass Roots, and Baltimore's Persistence.     

Loneliness and emotional intelligence

The possible associations of loneliness with Emotional Intelligence (EI), 2 of its correlates (life satisfaction and a sense of meaning), and several background variables were tested on a sample of 134 young adults attending college in northern Israel. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) analysis provided support for the model, suggesting that the presence of meaning, EI, and size and availability of an individual's social network are the strongest correlates of loneliness. EI therefore emerges as a potentially important factor in our understanding of loneliness, and the model provides a framework for future studies. The results are discussed vis-à-vis existing findings in the literature and possible directions for approaching loneliness as a theoretical concept and a social phenomenon.     

Social class, solipsism, and contextualism: how the rich are different from the poor

Social class is shaped by an individual's material resources as well as perceptions of rank vis-à-vis others in society, and in this article, we examine how class influences behavior. Diminished resources and lower rank create contexts that constrain social outcomes for lower-class individuals and enhance contextualist tendencies--that is, a focus on external, uncontrollable social forces and other individuals who influence one's life outcomes. In contrast, abundant resources and elevated rank create contexts that enhance the personal freedoms of upper-class individuals and give rise to solipsistic social cognitive tendencies--that is, an individualistic focus on one's own internal states, goals, motivations, and emotions. Guided by this framework, we detail 9 hypotheses and relevant empirical evidence concerning how class-based contextualist and solipsistic tendencies shape the self, perceptions of the social environment, and relationships to other individuals. Novel predictions and implications for research in other socio-political contexts are considered.     

Winnicott on Jung: destruction, creativity and the unrepressed unconscious

This paper considers Winnicott's critique of Jung, principally expressed in his review of Memories, Dreams, Reflections, which asserts that Jung's creative contribution to analysis was constrained by his failure to integrate his 'primitive destructive impulses', subsequent to inadequate early containment. It is argued that although Winnicott's diagnosis illuminates Jung's shadow, particularly his constraints vis-à-vis the repressed Freudian unconscious, it fails to appreciate the efficacy of the compensatory containment Jung found in the collective unconscious. This enigmatic relationship between destruction and creativity-so central to late Winnicott-is illuminated by Matte Blanco's bi-logic, and further explored in relation to William Blake. Winnicott's personal resolution through his Jung-inspired 'splitting headache' dream of destruction-previously considered in this Journal by Morey (2005) and Sedgwick (2008)-is given particular attention.     

Losing a father all over again: the termination of an analysis of an adolescent boy suffering from father loss

Criteria for beginning and conducting the termination phase of psychoanalysis have provoked debate and confusion from the early days of psychoanalysis. Gabbard (2009) has recently pointed to the field's tendency to cling to idealized versions of these criteria as a way to deal with disagreements. The situation becomes more complicated for child and adolescent psychoanalysts because their patients are in the midst of a developmental process at the very time they are engaged in a psychoanalytic process. The termination phase of an adolescent male suffering from father loss is presented in depth in order to provide clinical data toward further consideration of the vexing questions surrounding termination in psychoanalysis. His termination is used to examine the relative importance of losing the analyst as a transference object as against a developmental object; the meaning of action during termination; the complicating role of trauma vis-à-vis termination; and the importance of the post-termination phase of analysis. It is suggested that his termination phase demonstrates that a "good enough" termination involves the development of a self-analyzing capacity that continues to evolve and develop after termination.     

Development of a measure of experiential avoidance: the Multidimensional Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire

Experiential avoidance (EA) has been conceptualized as the tendency to avoid negative internal experiences and is an important concept in numerous conceptualizations of psychopathology as well as theories of psychotherapy. Existing measures of EA have either been narrowly defined or demonstrated unsatisfactory internal consistency and/or evidence of poor discriminant validity vis-à-vis neuroticism. To help address these problems, we developed a reliable self-report questionnaire assessing a broad range of EA content that was distinguishable from higher order personality traits. An initial pool of 170 items was administered to a sample of undergraduates (N = 312) to help evaluate individual items and establish a structure via exploratory factor analyses. A revised set of items was then administered to another sample of undergraduates (N = 314) and a sample of psychiatric outpatients (N = 201). A 2nd round of item evaluation was performed, resulting in a final 62-item measure consisting of 6 subscales. Cross-validation data were gathered in 3 new, independent samples (students, N = 363; patients, N = 265; community adults, N = 215). The resulting measure (the Multidimensional Experiential Avoidance Questionnaire, or MEAQ) exhibited good internal consistency, was substantially associated with other measures of avoidance, and demonstrated greater discrimination vis-à-vis neuroticism relative to preexisting measures of EA. Furthermore, the MEAQ was broadly associated with psychopathology and quality of life, even after controlling for the effects of neuroticism.     

Fechner as a pioneering theorist of unconscious cognition

Fechner remains virtually unknown for his psychological research on the unconscious. However, he was one of the most prominent theorists of unconscious cognition of the 19th century, in the context of the rise of scientific investigations on the unconscious in German psychology. In line with the models previously developed by Leibniz and Herbart, Fechner proposes an explanative system of unconscious phenomena based on a modular conception of the mind and on the idea of a functional dissociation between representational and attentional activity. For Fechner, the unconscious is a state of consciousness resulting from the isolation of representational activity from the rest of psychical life. Unconscious mental phenomena are unattended mental states that behave autonomously while remaining able to act on consciousness. This paper aims to revisit Fechner's contribution to the history of the unconscious, but also the theoretical significance of the Fechnerian unconscious vis-à-vis current research on the cognitive unconscious.     

Reminders of an agentic ingroup buffer disease uncontrollability

Chronic illness has negative impacts beyond those on physical health. In particular, because it is often experienced as uncontrollable, chronic illness might reduce people's general sense of personal control and, subsequently, personal well-being. Drawing on recent theory and research, we proposed and tested in four experiments (N_total = 1323) a potential buffer to these negative effects: thinking about an agentic social ingroup in one's life. In Study 1, patients suffering from a chronic illness that was either high or low in medical disease controllability were asked either to think about an agentic ingroup or a personal issue. Low perceived disease-related control was associated with low perceived personal control only when participants' personal self, but not when their ingroup, was salient. In three follow-up vignette studies, we asked participants to take the perspective of a person who suffered from a health problem of low medical disease controllability and attended a self-help group that was described as either high or low in agency. The findings supported the predicted buffering effect: participants who reflected on a target suffering from a low control disease thought that the target would experience more personal control when the agentic (vs. the nonagentic) self-help group was salient. These findings suggest ingroups can serve as a source of personal control in the context of health-related threats to the extent that they are perceived as agentic. Thus, focusing on agentic properties of (health-related) ingroups might be a promising novel strategy when designing effective group-based interventions to cope with chronic illness.     

STRUGGLING WITH A NONTRADITIONAL PAST

This article reports findings from a qualitative study that explored the educational experiences of women who were academic high achievers and who were disadvantaged as children. An interesting result was that most participants, if not all, believed that one reason they were successful was because they never revealed their personal histories to education professionals. This article describes the participants' relationship to the concept of disadvantage and the process they went through to have a voice in a system that rewarded them for their silence. It also addresses the question of when it is appropriate to disclose personal information in educational settings. Some believe there should be a separation between the personal and the professional. Others argue that women and disadvantaged students need education that is connected to their life experiences. If this is true, we must ask how this connection can be made when people from disadvantaged backgrounds believe they must hide who they are to succeed.     

Suttie's influence on Fairbairn's object relations theory

It is suggested here that Ian Suttie influenced W. R. D. Fairbairn directly through a 1939 reprint of his The Origins of Love and Hate, a heavily underlined copy of which was found by the author in Fairbairn's library in the University of Edinburgh Library Special Collections in October 2009. Underlined sections of the book are compared with significant aspects of Fairbairn's post-1940 theorizing, and the similarities are argued to be due to Fairbairn's adopting many of the underlying attitudes and ideas that Suttie developed. This leaves Fairbairn's structural theory, which he began to develop as a rational reconstruction of Freud's structural theory as early as 1927, dependent in part on such theory but independent of direct influence by Suttie. It is argued that Suttie's importance vis-à-vis British object relations thinking needs to be reassessed.     

社会排斥促进亲群体行为意向：权力感的调节作用

亲群体行为在个体的成长与发展中具有重要的适应价值。三个研究探讨了社会排斥对亲群体行为意向的影响以及权力感的调节作用。研究1采用问卷法考察社会排斥与亲群体行为意向的关系,发现社会排斥能够正向预测亲群体行为意向;研究2与研究3采用实验法操纵社会排斥,并分别通过回忆法启动个体状态权力感（研究2）、测量特质权力感（研究3）,发现在社会排斥下,相比于低权力感者,高权力感者的亲群体行为意向更高,结果证实了权力感能够调节社会排斥对亲群体行为意向的影响。     

Perceived discrimination as worldview threat or worldview confirmation: implications for self-esteem

In 3 studies, the authors tested the hypothesis that discrimination targets' worldview moderates the impact of perceived discrimination on self-esteem among devalued groups. In Study 1, perceiving discrimination against the ingroup was negatively associated with self-esteem among Latino Americans who endorsed a meritocracy worldview (e.g., believed that individuals of any group can get ahead in America and that success stems from hard work) but was positively associated with self-esteem among those who rejected this worldview. Study 2 showed that exposure to discrimination against their ingroup (vs. a non-self-relevant group) led to lower self-esteem, greater feelings of personal vulnerability, and ingroup blame among Latino Americans who endorsed a meritocracy worldview but to higher self-esteem and decreased ingroup blame among Latino Americans who rejected it. Study 3 showed that compared with women informed that prejudice against their ingroup is pervasive, women informed that prejudice against their ingroup is rare had higher self-esteem if they endorsed a meritocracy worldview but lower self-esteem if they rejected this worldview. Findings support the idea that perceiving discrimination against one's ingroup threatens the worldview of individuals who believe that status in society is earned but confirms the worldview of individuals who do not.     

Personal and Political: Post-Traumatic Stress Through the Lens of Social Identity,Power, and Politics

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) has always been controversial and highly politicized. Here, using a social identity approach, we review evidence that trauma and its aftermath are fundamentally linked to social position, sociopolitical capital, and power. We begin this contribution by demonstrating how a person's group memberships (and the social identities they derive from these memberships) are inherently linked to the experience of adversity. We then go on to consider how it is through group memberships that individuals are defined by their trauma risk and trauma histories—that is, a person's group memberships and their trauma are often inherently linked. Considering the importance of group memberships for understanding trauma, we argue that it is important to see these, and group processes more generally, as more than just “demographic” risk factors. Instead, we argue that when groups are defined by their trauma history or risk, their members will often derive some sense of self from this trauma. For this reason, attributes of group memberships are important in developing an understanding of adjustment and adaptation to trauma. In particular, groups' status, their recourse to justice, and the level of trust and solidarity within the group are all central to the impact of traumatic events on individual-level psychological resilience. We review evidence that supports this analysis by focusing on the exacerbating effects of stigma and social mistrust on post-traumatic stress, and the value of solidarity and strong identities for resilience. We conclude that because of these group-related processes, trauma interweaves the personal with the political and that post-traumatic stress is fundamentally about power, positionality, and politics.     

Why aren’t all deep superior colliculus neurons multisensory? A Bayes’ ratio analysis

Multisensory neurons in the deep superior colliculus (SC) show response enhancement to cross-modal stimuli that coincide in time and space. However, multisensory SC neurons respond to unimodal input as well. It is thus legitimate to ask why not all deep SC neurons are multisensory or, at least, develop multisensory behavior during an organism's maturation. The novel answer given here derives from a signal detection theory perspective. A Bayes' ratio model of multisensory enhancement is suggested. It holds that deep SC neurons operate under the Bayes' ratio rule, which guarantees optimal performance-that is, it maximizes the probability of target detection while minimizing the false alarm rate. It is shown that optimal performance of multisensory neurons vis-à-vis cross-modal stimuli implies, at the same time, that modality-specific neurons will outperform multisensory neurons in processing unimodal targets. Thus, only the existence of both multisensory and modality-specific neurons allows optimal performance when targets of one or several modalities may occur.     

The Impact of Social Comparisons After Failure: The Moderating Effects of Perceived Control

It was proposed that the impact of upward and downward social comparisons on affect and behavior following failure is moderated by perceived control. Subjects who failed an initial test were led to believe that it was either possible or impossible to improve performance on a second test and were exposed to information indicating that others either had done better or had done worse on the first test. As predicted, those who believed that they had little control over their subsequent outcomes and who were exposed to upward comparisons reported greater depressive and hostile affect and persisted less on the second task relative to other subjects. In addition, subjects who had low perceived control showed more interest in additional comparison information when they believed that others had done worse than when they believed that others had done better. Those who believed that they had high control did not show this preference. Findings suggest that upward comparison is debilitating only when accompanied by low perceived control. Further, exposure to downward comparison information may prevent some of the negative effects that have previously been associated with low personal control.     

The role of user resistance in the adoption of a mobile data service

While prior research has focused predominantly on enabling factors such as perceived usefulness in shaping users' information technology (IT) adoption/usage behaviors, this research explores the role of inhibiting factors such as user resistance to change, and their resultant impact on organizations' methods and systems. We elaborate on the interdependent and asymmetric effects of resistance to usage vis-à-vis usage enablers by postulating that resistance not only has a direct negative effect on IT usage, but also biases enabling factors such as perceived usefulness and intention to use in a negative manner. The resulting model is empirically validated with a longitudinal survey of mobile data service that supports real estate title claim processing by administrators and staff personnel at an Eastern European governmental agency. Our study advances IT usage research by demonstrating the salience of previously ignored inhibiting factors, establishing user resistance as an important construct to consider in IT usage research, and by elaborating the nomological relationships between resistance and current predictors of IT usage. We expect that these findings will provide the basis for a more comprehensive investigation of IT usage inhibitors and for building a theoretical model of user resistance.     

社会困境中合作行为的阶层差异：自我与他人的双重视角

为了探究个体自身与他人的社会阶层对个体在社会困境中合作行为的影响及其作用机制,本研究通过问卷和实验研究来考察自身阶层的行为效应、互动对象阶层的调节效应以及信任有中介的调节作用。研究发现：（1）低阶层者倾向于比高阶层者表现出更多的合作行为;（2）感知到的互动对象阶层对不同阶层个体的合作行为存在显著的调节效应;（3）个体对互动对象的信任水平（即对他人合作行为的预期）对此调节效应起到中介作用。     

集体自恋：群际冲突的催化剂

集体自恋是将自恋延伸到群体水平的一个经典构念, 目前被界定为对于“自身所属群体是卓越的并值得优待, 却未充分被他者承认”的信念。现有研究发现它对群际敌对性有较强解释力, 因为集体自恋者对内群体形象、地位或身份所受威胁高度敏感, 容易高估威胁和怀疑外群体, 而缺乏自我价值感及控制感是集体自恋的重要根源。鉴于现有研究一般都预设了集体自恋的脆弱性和消极性, 而集体自恋的属性不必然如此, 未来研究应在充分厘清集体自恋内涵及结构的基础上探索其消极与积极后效, 揭示其多元成因及干预方法, 并推进跨文化研究。     

Party over policy: The dominating impact of group influence on political beliefs

Four studies demonstrated both the power of group influence in persuasion and people's blindness to it. Even under conditions of effortful processing, attitudes toward a social policy depended almost exclusively upon the stated position of one's political party. This effect overwhelmed the impact of both the policy's objective content and participants' ideological beliefs (Studies 1-3), and it was driven by a shift in the assumed factual qualities of the policy and in its perceived moral connotations (Study 4). Nevertheless, participants denied having been influenced by their political group, although they believed that other individuals, especially their ideological adversaries, would be so influenced. The underappreciated role of social identity in persuasion is discussed.