The Wolf: An Ecological Case Study

The wolf, more than any other animal, profoundly reflects our conflict with our unconscious internal world, and our disavowal of our aggressive nature towards other people and the environment in which we and a host of other species live. Wolves have borne the burden of an intense hatred and misunderstanding that has brought their populations to near extinction. The drama of our relationship to wolves is being played out today in critical ways. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has delisted most wolves from the endangered species list, and the outcome of wolf recovery or extinction is once more in a very precarious place. This article reviews some of the psychological and ecological aspects of our relationships with wolves and their place in the natural world, an animal that is brutally assaulted by some and embraced and returned to its natural habitat by others.     

Induction,indifference and guessing

Pragmatism in semantics is hampered by its proponents' tendency to tie understanding too closely to our mastery of epistemic practice. Both Brandom's inferentialist semantics and the anti-realist semantics championed by Dummett and Tennant amply illustrate this tendency. As a consequence, neither theory can successfully handle cases of the innocuously unknowable in which two sentences, though mutually consistent, nonetheless cannot be known to be true together. On Brandom's account, such sentences are treated as being mutually inconsistent after all. According to both Dummett's and Tennant's version of anti-realist semantics, we cannot know that there are any true sentences of this kind. Neither result is the least acceptable, whence either theory fails. The lesson to be learnt from this failure is that understanding should not be identified with the ability to reach warranted verdicts, but with the ability to think, where thinking is constitutively involved in, but nonetheless distinct from judging.     

Attachment style,communication patterns,and satisfaction across the life cycle of marriage

Questionnaire measures of attachment, communication patterns, and relationship satisfaction were administered to 361 married couples, sampled across the life cycle of marriage. Individuals who were secure in attachment (defined in terms of comfort with closeness and low anxiety over relationships) tended to be paired with secure spouses. Security of attachment was associated with one's own relationship satisfaction, although husbands' satisfaction was related primarily to the anxiety dimension. The most consistent effect of partners' attachment was an inverse relationship between wives' anxiety and husbands' satisfaction. The negative effect of wives' anxiety on perceived relationship satisfaction (for both partners) was evident primarily for couples in which husbands were uncomfortable with closeness. The association between attachment dimensions and relationship satisfaction was largely mediated by communication patterns for wives, but only partially mediated by communication patterns for husbands; for both husbands and wives, a measure of mutually constructive communication emerged as the strongest correlate of satisfaction. These findings were generally consistent across the life cycle of marriage, and they are important in clarifying the nature of the link between attachment and satisfaction in a broad sample.     

Behavioral ephemera,difficult discriminations,and behavioral stability

Every species possesses abilities for successfully interacting with its environment. These result from phylogeny. In the laboratory, one may arrange artificial conditions that thwart an organism's abilities. The result may be a “phenomenon.” With sufficient training, however, the phenomenon may prove to be ephemeral, as the organism's basic abilities reassert themselves. Pigeons respond extremely well to differences and nondifferences in rate of obtaining food. This ability may be thwarted in a variety of ways, but the results tend to be ephemeral. An example is an experiment that pitted pigeons' preference for unimpeded responding against their ability to respond to food rate. In a concurrent-chains procedure, the terminal links were identical variable-interval schedules, but in one terminal link, every response produced a timeout. The duration of the timeout varied, and preference varied with it, but the relation vanished with training, in keeping with the equality of food rate across the 2 terminal links. Some other examples of “phenomena” that tend to disappear with sufficient training and sufficient variation in experimental parameters are behavioral contrast, conditioned reinforcement, resistance to extinction, and suboptimal choice. These “phenomena” depend on pigeons' failing to make difficult discriminations. They appear to be behavioral ephemera.     

Sport,nature and worldmaking

Many philosophers of sport maintain that athletics can contribute to our understanding of ourselves and the environments in which we live. It may be relatively easy to offer accounts of how athletes might acquire self-knowledge through sport; however, it is far more difficult to see how sport could add to the general understanding of human individuals, cultural frameworks or the material world. The study of sport as a way of worldmaking is helpful in understanding how sport can contribute to the pursuit of knowledge in such areas.

The position I present is based on arguments made by Gunter Gebauer in his 1993 presidential address to the Philosophic Society for the Study of Sport, ‘Sport, theater, and ritual: Three ways of worldmaking’, and in my explanation and interpretation of Gebauer's position, I rely heavily on Nelson Goodman's Ways of worldmaking. Gebauer's work is focused on traditional sports, and he argues that such sports create worlds that represent fundamental attitudes and values of the cultures that produce them. I argue that alternative sports are well suited to create new and original worlds that instantiate value systems in opposition to mainstream culture. I argue further that nature sports such as climbing and surfing represent relationships between humans and natural features, and that such sports, as a subcategory of alternative sports, are in a position to create new and original frameworks that can help us to better comprehend our relationships with natural environments.     

Nishida,Agency, and the ‘Self-Contradictory’ Body

In this essay, I investigate Kitarō Nishida's characterization of what he refers to as the ‘self-contradictory’ body. First, I clarify the conceptual relation between the self-contradictory body and Nishida's notion of ‘acting-intuition’. I next look at Nishida's analysis of acting-intuition and the self-contradictory body as it pertains to our personal, sensorimotor engagement with the world and things in it, as well as to our bodily immersion within the intersubjective and social world. Along the way, I argue that Nishida develops a rich and exceedingly current way of thinking through different facets of embodiment and interpersonal relatedness. I further argue that Nishida's work provides compelling reasons to foreground the mutually implicative, co-emergent nature of embodied self and world in our theorizing about the nature of self and experience.     

Lesbian Partner Abuse: Implications for Therapists

Silence surrounds the issue of lesbian battering. Lesbian victims of partner abuse are even less likely than are their heterosexual counterparts to seek help in shelters or from counselors because of the overlay of homophobia that exists both in the battered women's movement and among mental health professionals. In addition, many lesbian and many lesbian-supportive therapists hold an idealized and unrealistic picture of the nature of lesbian relationships, leading them to deny the existence of buttering among lesbian couples. The nature, severity, and prevalence of abuse in lesbian relationships is addressed; current counseling and treatment models dealing with battering relationships are analyzed; and a counselor advocacy model for working with lesbian partner abuse, drawing from the experience of activists in the battered women's movement and our clinical experience, is suggested.     

Separation Versus Connection,The Gender Controversy: Implications for Counseling Women

Traditional developmental theories hold that separation is the primary goal of human emotional development. Numerous current theorists question this notion. They propose that a girl's development of self is dependent on mutually empathic relationships with primary caretakers. This revision of developmental theory has implications for counseling. The counseling relationship with a woman should provide validation for her relational skill and opportunity to practice relational competence within the counseling relationship. Boys and men may also have the need to develop relational competence to secure a strong sense of self. If so, a relational model of counseling would apply to them as well.     

Watching,waiting, and wondering: Applying psychoanalytic principals to mother-infant intervention

There is general acceptance that the intergenerational repetition of relational patterns is transmitted within the interactions between mother and infant. The highly invested nature of the mother-infant relationship makes it a prime arena for the playing out of unresolved relational conflicts of the mother. This occurs through the mother's responses to her infant in which she projects into the infant certain disavowed but highly invested positive or negative attributes. This leads to the interactional re-creation of a whole relational system reflecting the mother's current and past relationship experiences. When a mother's conflictual past is unresolved and unmitigated by current relationships, her interactions with her infant are more driven by such perceptions than by real appraisal of the infant's actual attributes. The sleeping, eating, and behavioral management problems of infancy are often manifestations of such situations. A deceptively simple set of instructions to the mother, to become a nonintrusive observer of her infant and only interact at the infant's initiative, allows a role for the infant's initiative in changing interactions and thus potentially changing a relational system.     

Introspection,mindreading, and the transparency of belief

This paper explores the nature of self‐knowledge of beliefs by investigating the relationship between self‐knowledge of beliefs and one's knowledge of other people's beliefs. It introduces and defends a new account of self‐knowledge of beliefs according to which this type of knowledge is developmentally interconnected with and dependent on resources already used for acquiring knowledge of other people's beliefs, which is inferential in nature. But when these resources are applied to oneself, one attains and subsequently frequently uses a method for acquiring knowledge of beliefs that is non‐inferential in nature. The paper argues that this account is preferable to some of the most common empirically motivated theories of self‐knowledge of beliefs and explains the origin of the widely discussed phenomenon that our own beliefs are often transparent to us in that we can determine whether we believe that p simply by settling whether p is the case.     

The Limits of Social Construction: Commentary on Paper by Cynthia Dyess and Tim Dean

The insufficiencies that Joan Copjec finds in the work of Judith Butler are the same kind Dyess and Dean want to alert us to in relational psychoanalysis. Two dangers of this nature are reification (that is, the relational position's becoming “the Book”) and a flirtation with superficiality (a potential outcome of believing that all experience can be understood in the terms of social relatedness). Theorizing “the impossibility of meaning” may be a first step in addressing these problems without having to limit the terms of the discussion to nature and nurture, or essence and social construction. But the idea of the Real is inextricably interrelated with, and mutually defined by, other parts of Lacan's theory. And so, if we simply import into relational psychoanalysis Lacan's conception of the Real, we are mixing apples and oranges and thereby risking conceptual confusion. We should instead use Lacan's idea as inspiration for the construction of a conception of “the impossibility of meaning” that can be used in theorizing the particular kind of problems relational psychoanalysis sets itself.     

Maternal representations: A clinical and subjective phenomenological view

The relationship — as represented — is proving to be of growing value in our thinking about clinical problems such as “intergenerational transfer.” It is also an extremely positive influence in our thinking about how the interpersonal world is remembered, abstracted, and lived. Yet, the nature of a “represented relationship” remains unclear. This paper is an attempt to clarify some of the problems and areas for needed study regarding this concept. The mother's representation of her infant and of the people in her own life who have played “maternal roles” will be taken as the model. First, we will explore the richness and complexity of these representations and conclude that, for clinical purposes, different models are used to simplify this richness and render it therapeutically useful. Three models will be discussed. The first is the disfortion model which measures the distance between the mother's subjective experience of her interaction or relationship with another and some objective, observable “reality.” The model of overdeter-mining themes is a second model, largely the inspiration of psychoanalysis but inclusive of Bowlby's theory of attachment. Here psychobiological and/or psychodynamic themes organize the clinical material. Finally, a coherence model is discussed. Here the motive is goodness of the narrative construction rather than the historical “truth.” A second issue discussed is the capacity to represent dyads vs. triads and actual vs. second-hand narrated relationships. These issues are crucial for notions not only about the nature of such representations but also their limitations in understanding family interactions and relationships, i.e., where many members are concerned. A third issue concerns the nature of the subjective experience for a mother when a representation of her infant or herself in relation to the infant is “activated.” There exists here an unknown typology of experience. Finally, we will discuss what all of the above have to contribute to our further understanding of the nature of represented relationships.     

Psychological Health and Change in Closeness in Platonic and Romantic Relationships

Abstract

The authors investigated (a) whether increased closeness and decreased closeness of a relationship are associated with better and poorer psychological health, respectively; and (b) whether poorer psychological health is related to perceiving oneself or to perceiving the other person as primarily responsible for decreased closeness. A sample of English undergraduate students (52 female, 52 male; 16–23 years of age) completed M. Rosenberg's (1965) Self-Esteem Scale, D. P. Goldberg's (1972) 12-item General Health Questionnaire, and a 6-item scale developed for this study to measure change in closeness and to identify the initiator(s) of the change. Decreased closeness was related to poorer psychological health in male participants' platonic relationships and in female participants' romantic relationships. Poorer psychological health was associated with (a) perceiving the other person as responsible for decreased closeness in male participants' platonic relationships and (b) perceiving both parties as mutually responsible for decreased closeness in female participants' romantic relationships.     

Children's trust: Theory,assessment, development,and research directions

Trust is a significant variable in children's personality, social, and intellectual development. Although trust research has primarily explored adult behavior, there is a growing body of research on children, with a particular emphasis on trust development within friendship relationships. This paper reviews the extant literature on children's trust. After summarizing historical theoretical perspectives, noting particularly Rotter's influence on the field, we offer a theoretical model of trust that synthesizes previous models. We describe various methods for assessing trust and argue for a multimethod approach consistent with our synthetic model. We review three research areas: antecedents to trust, the developmental course of trust in friendships, and correlates of trust. Implications for future research are indicated, and the absence of studies of practical applications is noted. Several programmatic applications for enhancing children's trust are presented.     

Social Density,Interpersonal Relationships,and Residential Crowding Stress1

Research has suggested that tripled rooms may be characterized by a coalition of two roommate(s) and a third, left-out rommate (i.e., the isolate) who is more vulnerable to crowding and control-related problems. The present study sought (1) to confirm the existence of two person coalitions in tripled rooms and (2) to further explore the mediating effects of interpersonal relationships on crowding stress and related problems. Thirty intact groups of roommates from doubled rooms (n= 60) and 39 intact groups of roommates from tripled rooms (n= 117) completed a set of surveys concerned with residential experiences. Results suggested that crowding stress previously associated with tripled residential settings may be mediated by interpersonal relationships; tripled residents who had negative interpersonal relationships with their roommates reported being more bothered by crowding, at both the beginning and end of the semester, than doubled residents who expressed negativity towards their roommate. Satisfaction with privacy was also influenced not only by the number of people with whom a resident shared a room, but also by the nature of the resident's interpersonal relationships with his/her roommate(s). Data also suggest that control-related problems may be a direct outcome of poor interpersonal relationships among inhabitants. Results also indicated that only a small percentage of tripled rooms were characterized by reciprocal, two person coalitions.     

Response production during extinction training is not sufficient for extinction of evaluative conditioning

Two high-powered experiments examined the role of evaluative response production in the extinction of evaluative conditioning (EC) by positioning EC in the procedural and conceptual framework of classical conditioning (CC). According to Rescorla's response inhibition hypothesis, more frequent responding during extinction training results in larger extinction during testing. Experiment 1 used three extinction conditions following response acquisition in an EC procedure: evaluative responses were measured only after extinction; after acquisition and after extinction; or were continuously measured after acquisition, during extinction and after extinction. Based on Rescorla's response inhibition hypothesis, we predicted that extinction of EC would be the highest in the third condition. Experiment 2 was aimed at further facilitating extinction of EC by encouraging participants to experience that their evaluation may change over the course of the experiment. To this end, half of the participants completed pre- and post-acquisition ratings prior to practicing continuous response expression in the extinction phase. Contrary to our predictions, no extinction of EC was observed in either of these experiments. We conclude that Rescorla's inhibition response hypothesis may not apply to EC and discuss the theoretical implications of this finding.     

The Spirit,Creaturehood and Sanctification: On Avoiding Theological Overcompensation

Talk of the Spirit's work of sanctification often leads to a number of different conclusions, ones that often appear mutually exclusive. Under such conditions, their espousers often make cases for their views in overcompensatory ways by highlighting their approaches over and against other views that may be complementary in their own way. This article contends that behind this diversity are often competing claims within different domains of inquiry surrounding the Creator–creation interface. These commitments lurk in the background of these debates, and their exposure may help in the ongoing task of speaking of the Spirit's endeavoring in and among creatures.     

Priming and trial spacing in extinction: Effects on extinction performance,spontaneous recovery,and reinstatement in appetitive conditioning

Previous research in this laboratory suggests that priming of the conditional stimulus (CS) in short-term memory may play a role in the trial-spacing effects in appetitive conditioning. For example, a nonreinforced presentation of a CS 60 s before a reinforced trial with the same CS produced slower acquisition than a CS presentation that occurred 240 s before the reinforced trial. The results were consistent with the self-generated priming mechanism proposed by Wagner (e.g., Wagner 1978, 1981). The present experiments extended the earlier work by examining the effects of trial spacing in extinction rather than acquisition. After conditioning with a mixture of intertrial intervals (ITIs), rats received extinction with ITIs of 60 or 240 s, longer or shorter values, or different ways of “chunking” extinction trials in time. Although trial spacing produced effects on extinction performance that were consistent with our previous research on acquisition, there were few long-term differences in spontaneous recovery or in reinstatement. Short ITIs in extinction appear to affect extinction performance more than they affect extinction learning. Mechanisms of trial spacing in conditioning and extinction are discussed.     

Transmission of ideas about love: Filial piety,love attitudes,and romantic satisfaction

This study examined the relations between filial piety, attitudes about romantic relationships (love attitudes), and satisfaction in romantic relationships in the Chinese cultural context. The following research questions were investigated: How are adult children's filial piety beliefs connected to their love attitudes, and how do these contribute to their satisfaction in romantic relationships? A total of 412 college students in Taiwan who were currently involved or had been involved in romantic relationships participated in the study. Structural equation modeling showed that filial piety contributes to satisfaction in romantic relationships through the mediating effects of love attitudes. The findings advance our understanding of filial piety and its implications for young adults' romantic relationships.     

Priming and trial spacing in extinction: effects on extinction performance, spontaneous recovery, and reinstatement in appetitive conditioning

Previous research in this laboratory suggests that priming of the conditional stimulus (CS) in short-term memory may play a role in the trial-spacing effects in appetitive conditioning. For example, a nonreinforced presentation of a CS 60 s before a reinforced trial with the same CS produced slower acquisition than a CS presentation that occurred 240 s before the reinforced trial. The results were consistent with the self-generated priming mechanism proposed by Wagner (e.g., Wagner 1978, 1981). The present experiments extended the earlier work by examining the effects of trial spacing in extinction rather than acquisition. After conditioning with a mixture of intertrial intervals (ITIs), rats received extinction with ITIs of 60 or 240 s, longer or shorter values, or different ways of “chunking” extinction trials in time. Although trial spacing produced effects on extinction performance that were consistent with our previous research on acquisition, there were few long-term differences in spontaneous recovery or in reinstatement. Short ITIs in extinction appear to affect extinction performance more than they affect extinction learning. Mechanisms of trial spacing in conditioning and extinction are discussed.