What is the Role of Culture in the Association of Relationships with Health?

There is now widespread recognition that relationships have important implications for health. To better understand this linkage, scholars have called for greater bridging between relationship science and the study of health. The goal of this paper is to raise awareness of another factor that needs to be incorporated into this area of study: culture. I recommend three steps that researchers can take to systematically incorporate culture into the study of relationships and health. First, I suggest four possible culture patterns to study: similarity, moderation, mediation, and novel constructs. Second, I suggest that theoretically meaningful cultural variation and multiple cultures be concurrently studied. The value of this strategy is highlighted via examples from three contexts that emphasize distinct approaches to self and emotion in relationships. Third, I suggest that key relationship processes in families and couples, two relationships with extensive implications for health, be studied. Selected studies of four relationship processes known to be relevant for health – expectations, formation and maintenance, emotions, and social support – are briefly reviewed to highlight the value of this focus. The theoretical and applied benefit of incorporating culture into the study of the association of relationships with health is discussed.     

What Is the Role of Quaker Education in a Time of Terror?

Abstract

This article presents not only the distinctive pedagogical philosophy of Quaker education, but discusses the special relevance of Friends values and educational methods in a time when America is at war. The article also includes a listing of print resources on Quaker values and education.     

What Is the Role of Transparency in Cancellation?

A series of experiments is reported in which the cancellation axiom is investigated by manipulating the transparency of gamble option formulations. The findings suggest that previous demonstrations of violations of the cancellation axiom might not be conclusive. While violations in nontransparent conditions have led to substantial changes in expected utility (EU) theory, the present data suggest that violations in transparent conditions require a fundamental change in the models that have been suggested as alternatives to EU theory.     

What is a Natural Conception of the World?

Continental philosophers such as Heidegger and Nicolai Hartmann and analytic philosophers such as Ryle, Strawson, and Jennifer Hornsby may be interpreted as using competing intellectual strategies within the framework of one and the same research programme, the programme of developing a natural conception of the world. They all argue that the Manifest Image of the world (to use Sellars's terminology) is compatible with, or even more fundamental than, the Scientific Image. A comparative examination of these strategies shows that Hartmann's strategy of stratification is superior to those of Heidegger, Ryle, and Strawson.     

What is a reason to act?

Argues for a conception of reasons as premises of practical reasoning. This conception is applied to questions about ignorance, advice, enabling conditions, “ought,” and evidence.     

What in the world is weakness of will?

At least since the middle of the twentieth century, philosophers have tended to identify weakness of will with akrasia—i.e. acting, or having a disposition to act, contrary to one’s judgments about what is best for one to do. However, there has been some recent debate about whether this captures the ordinary notion of weakness of will. Richard Holton claims that it doesn’t, while Alfred Mele argues that, to a certain extent, it does. As Mele recognizes, the question about an ordinary concept here is one apt for empirical investigation. We evaluate Mele’s studies and report some experiments of our own in order to investigate what in the world the ordinary concept of weakness of will is. We conclude that neither Mele nor Holton (previously) was quite right and offer a tentative proposal of our own: the ordinary notion is more like a prototype or cluster concept whose application is affected by a variety of factors.     

What Is the Role of Tone in the Phonological Similarity Effect?

The Psychological Record - To recall a list of phonologically similar words is more difficult than to recall a list of phonologically dissimilar words; this is the well-known phonological...     

What is a writing group? Dilemmas of the leader

A writing group can serve to reinforce literary and therapeutic goals. The model outlined here assumes a leader with literary and clinical training, including expertise in group dynamics. The group format is adapted to support exploration of the writer's main problem, the absence of the reader at the moment of writing. The group modifies the writer's "mythical" reader through member interactions with writer and writing. Giving and receiving feedback are central to the group process. The leader's dilemma in a bifocal form like this is to know when and how far to interpret group members' psychological issues. The best rule is to interpret "toward" the group (i.e., to bring up material that can be safely and readily processed there), but to be cautious about interpretation of patterns of early character formation.     

What is the role of affect in the spacing effect?

In Experiments 1 and 2, after studying a list containing connotatively neutral words that were presented once or were presented at various spacing intervals, subjects either attempted free recall or made affective judgments of the study-list targets along a pleasant/unpleasant dimension. Spacing effects occurred in recall, and massed items were judged to be more unpleasantthan once-presented and spaced words. In the third experiment, subjects studied homogeneous lists composed of either connotatively good words or connotativelybad ones. Spacing effects were absent in the recall of both types of words because massed-practice words were recalled at a high level, one that was about the same as that for spaced-practice words. Affective judgments were unrelated to presentation condition, and both good and bad massed words were judged to be positive in affect. Although the data suggest that different study conditions can lead to different affective reactions, the results are moot with regard to the relationship between affect and the magnitude of spacing effects.     

What is the Role of the Arts in Medical Education and Patient Care? A Survey-based Qualitative Study

To inform medical education reform efforts, we systematically collected information on the level of arts and humanities engagement in our medical school community. Attitudes regarding incorporating arts and humanities-based teaching methods into medical education and patient care were also assessed. An IRB-approved survey was electronically distributed to all faculty, residents, fellows, and students at our medical school. Questions focused on personal practice of the arts and/or humanities, as well as perceptions of, and experience with formally incorporating these into medical teaching. Of 13,512 community members surveyed, 2,775 responded (21% overall response rate). A majority of respondents agreed or strongly agreed that medical education and patient care could be "enhanced" by the integration of the arts (67% and 74% respectively). There was enthusiastic support for the creation of a formal program in the arts at our medical school (72 %). Integration of the arts into medical education may have a role in improving the quality of medical training and would likely be well received by teachers and learners.     

What is happening in the world of therapeutic communities?

This overview of the contributions to the special edition illustrates something of how the collection of papers reflects the marginal nature of therapeutic communities, and makes parallels as to how they are forever struggling to survive, yet generate a passion of ideas and intellectual resilience that no project-managed health service can extinguish. It briefly describes the theoretical and geographical terrain covered, and signals how the cross-disciplinary incorporation of congruent ideas can be added to the traditional bedrock of therapeutic community practice. It ends by stating the context of the new, and seemingly successful, organization which assembled these contributions into its inaugural conference – and suggests that the journey could, and ultimate should, go further.     

What is the Right to Exclude Immigrants?

It is normally taken for granted that states have a right to control immigration into their territory. When immigration is raised as a normative issue two questions become salient, one about what the right to exclude is, and one about whether and how it might be justified. This paper considers the first question. The paper starts by noting that standard debates about immigration have not addressed what the right to exclude is. Standard debates about immigration furthermore tend to result either in fairly strong cases for open borders or in denials that considerations of justice apply to immigration at all, which results in state discretion positions. This state of debate is both theoretically unsatisfactory and normatively implausible. The paper therefore explores an alternative approach to the right to exclude immigrants from the perspective of recent debates about the territorial rights of states. The right to exclude claimed by states is analysed and it is shown to differ both conceptually and normatively from rights to impose political authority within a territory. The paper finally indicates how this analysis might broaden the focus of debates about immigration and suggest alternative regimes of migration regulation the possibility of which is obscured by traditional justice approaches.