Chapter 12. What I Have Learned

SUMMARY

In this chapter I revisit the goals of TANF in light of the findings of this research study and present recommendations for policy change.     

The Murderer at the Door: What Kant Should Have Said

Embarrassed by the apparent rigorism Kant expresses so bluntly in 'On a Supposed Right to Lie,' numerous contemporary Kantians have attempted to show that Kant's ethics can justify lying in specific circumstances, in particular, when lying to a murderer is necessary in order to prevent her from killing another innocent person. My aim is to improve upon these efforts and show that lying to prevent the death of another innocent person could be required in Kantian terms. I argue (1) that our perfect Kantian duty of self-preservation can require our lying to save our own lives when threatened with unjust aggression, and (2) that Kant's understanding of moral duty was that duties are symmetrical , such that if one has a duty to perform a given action on one's own behalf or to protect one's own rational nature, then one also has a duty to perform similar acts on other's behalf or to protect their rational nature. Thus, that the individual protected against aggression by means of deception is not oneself should be of no consequence from a Kantian perspective. Lying to the murderer is thus an extension of the Kantian requirement of self-defense.     

Culture and Terror Management: What is “Culture” in Cultural Psychology and Terror Management Theory?

Cultural psychology underscores the importance of culture in understanding human psychology. More recently, Terror Management Theory (TMT) also advanced the importance of culture from a perspective that regards culture as a tool for coping with existential concerns. This paper compares these two perspectives with respect to the focus of their theoretical inquiries and the conceptualizations of culture. A brief review of relevant TMT research is provided to familiarize readers to this literature. Theoretical implications and directions for future research are presented.     

The Effects of Terrorism: The Aftermath of the London Terror Attacks1

The July 2005 London bombings highlight prevailing terrorist threats to the UK. The present study addressed the psychological response of a community indirectly exposed to the attacks. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), specific hypotheses examined associations between coping mechanisms (resilience, religious faith), emotions, and risk outcomes. Qualitative content analysis demonstrated the complexity of responses to terrorism. SEM analysis showed that resilience helped attenuate the effect of negative emotions; negative emotions heightened risk judgments; and respondents higher on religious faith displayed more positive emotions regarding the attacks. The content analysis supplemented quantitative results. Combined, these results highlight the importance of conveying accurate risk appraisals proportionate to the threat, as well as consideration of psychological operations, including resilience and religious faith.     

Missed Opportunities: Speculation on What Japanese Psychology Could Have Been

Takasuna (Integr. Physiol. Behav. Sci. 41, 2007) mentioned the ease with which evolutionary theory was accepted by Japanese psychologists, and certainly this is admirable. He also mentioned the stubborn force which had to be used to gain an understanding of the (thoroughly Western) subjective–objective distinction. Alas, during the formative years of Japanese psychology, there was much philosophical work afoot attempting to destroy that distinction. It is speculated that only a small change of which books were translated, or with which Americans early Japanese psychologists trained under, would have made Japan into a haven for these still underdog theories.     

I Have Loved: Reply to Commentaries

In replying I explore in more depth the journey of reclaiming the lost love and the mourning of a relationship that could not be publicly or privately grieved. Disavowed love, in its melancholic haunting, compels identity. In agreement with the model of multiplicity proposed by Harris and Hill I delve further into our hybridic racialized identities. I also come to an understanding of our differences, including our experience of whiteness and our processes of racialization. Finally, I engage with the complex issues of anger and forgiveness.     

The Theater of Terror

Summary

Modern terrorists became aware of the new opportunities for exerting mass psychological impact using the latest means of mass communications. Academic observers remarked increasingly on the theater-like nature of terrorist operations. According to this notion, modern terrorism can be understood in terms of the production requirements of theatrical engagements. Several terrorist organizations realized the potentials of media-oriented terror, in terms of effectively reaching huge audiences. This article examines the strategies and tactics of this new pattern of media-oriented terrorism and their impact on the audiences who, through the media's mediation, join the widening circles of victims of terrorism.     

The Left Hand Doesn't Know What the Right Hand Is Doing: The Disruptive Effects of Attention to the Hands in Skilled Typewriting

ABSTRACT— Everyone knows that attention to the details disrupts skilled performance, but little empirical evidence documents this fact. We show that attention to the hands disrupts skilled typewriting. We had skilled typists type words preceded by cues that told them to type only the letters assigned to one hand or to type all of the letters. Cuing the hands disrupted performance markedly, slowing typing and increasing the error rate (Experiment 1); these deleterious effects were observed even when no keystrokes were actually inhibited (Experiment 3). However, cuing the same letters with colors was not disruptive (Experiment 2). We account for the disruption with a hierarchical control model, in which an inner loop controls the hands and an outer loop controls what is typed. Typing letters using only one hand requires the outer loop to monitor the inner loop's output; the outer loop slows inner-loop cycle time to increase the likelihood of inhibiting responses with the unwanted hand. This produces the disruption.     

Reinforcement Without Awareness: I. Voice Level

Although some studies have reported that reinforcement can strengthen people's behaviour without their awareness, most studies that have incorporated adequate procedures for assessing awareness have been unsuccessful. Using rigorous procedures, we report two studies designed to provide more scope for learning without awareness by making the reinforcement contingency as unobtrusive as possible. Subjects were told that the experiment was on ESP, and that they were to say which of two words the experimenter was thinking about. In fact, reinforcement was contingent on the loudness of the subject's voice when responding. Even though subjects reported no awareness of a relationship between trial outcomes and their behaviour, the probability of the reinforced responses increased significantly over trials in both experiments. These results support the view that reinforcement can occur without awareness.     

On Becoming What We Might Have Been: Counterfactual Thinking and Self-efficacy

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that, in the aftermath of a performance event, upward counterfactuals reinforce feelings of self-efficacy toward similar future events, whereas downward counterfactuals decrease feelings of self-efficacy. Using a scenario methodology, the first two experiments confirmed this hypothesis: upward counterfactual thinking enhanced feelings of self-efficacy relative to downward counterfactual thinking. In a third experiment, conducted in a more real-world context, upward counterfactuals again led to greater feelings of self-efficacy than downward counterfactuals. However, there were important limiting conditions: the effect of counterfactual thinking on self-efficacy was more or less pronounced depending on both situational and dispositional factors. Whereas the pattern of results provided little support for a self-protection explanation for these limiting conditions, the results were consistent with a depth of processing explanation.     

Disclosure of Divorce Plans to Children: What the Children Have to Say

Divorce has become a common experience for children. One part of the process that children of divorcing parents experience is the time when they are informed of their parents' approaching separation or divorce. In this study, 20 adults from eight families who had experienced the divorce of their parents when they were younger were interviewed using a guided interview format. At least two siblings from each family except one was interviewed. Qualitative analyses of data revealed interesting themes around the questions of how the participants were told about the impending separation or divorce, who told them, whether or not siblings were present, how they reacted to the news, and how they would have preferred being told.     

The Appeal of Tragedy: A Terror Management Perspective

The experiment reported in this article assessed the terror management explanation of the appeal of tragedy. From this perspective, vicarious experience of tragedy, such as through film and literature, provides a safe way of approaching the fear associated with one's own mortality. Thus, we hypothesized that reminding participants of their mortality would increase liking for and emotional response to a tragic excerpt from a novel. Participants were randomly assigned to answer open-ended questions about either their own death or a neutral topic and then read two excerpts from Ernest Hemingway novels, one tragic and one nontragic in content. In support of the terror management hypothesis, participants in the mortality salience condition responded more emotionally to, and were more touched by, the tragic excerpt, found the nontragic excerpt less enjoyable, and cared less for the female character in the nontragic passage than did the control participants.     

What I Was Doing Versus What I Did: Verb Aspect Influences Memory and Future Actions

ABSTRACT— This research examined whether describing past actions as ongoing using the imperfective aspect (rather than describing them as completed using the perfective aspect) promotes memory for action-relevant knowledge and reenactment of these actions in a future context. In Experiment 1 , participants who used the imperfective aspect to describe their strategy on a prior interpersonal task were more likely to use this strategy on a later task than were participants who used the perfective aspect to describe their prior strategy. Experiment 2 demonstrated that describing behaviors on a task using the imperfective rather than the perfective aspect increased willingness to resume that task by improving memory for task contents. The last two experiments showed that the effects of the imperfective aspect on memory decayed over time and that the imperfective aspect facilitated performance of a future behavior only when the described past behavior was relevant to the future behavior. Thus, the effects of aspect are moderated by memory decay and are behavior-specific.     

What I like is How I Am: Impact of Alexithymia on Aesthetic Preference

Aim of this work was to explore the impact of alexithymia on art works appreciation, to examine the influence of emotion regulation on art judgment. While observing a painting, the viewer's cognitive structure contains several types of information (semantic, episodic, and strategic) and is the repository of personal traits, motivations, and emotional dispositions that are involved in this interaction. The study of how personal traits influence work of art appreciation, and especially the study of the way emotion regulation impacts on art judgment, was aimed at improving the comprehension of the aesthetic experience costruct. One hundred adults, divided into 2 groups (high and low scores in alexithymia), observed 20 works of art and were then asked to give an evalutative judgment on three dimentions: cognitive, emotional, aesthetic. As hypothesized, the two groups had significant differences in their aesthetic preferences. Although subjects without affective regulation disorders preferred excitation related pictures, subjects with alexithymia appreciated works evoching emotions of pleasure inhibition. These results confirm the impact of personality traits on aesthetic preference and support the need to include emotional regulation in a comprehensive model of aesthetic experience.