Fictional objects, non-existence, and the principle of characterization

I advance an objection to Graham Priest??s account of fictional entities as nonexistent objects. According to Priest, fictional characters do not have, in our world, the properties they are represented as having; for example, the property of being a bank clerk is possessed by Joseph K. not in our world but in other worlds. Priest claims that, in this way, his theory can include an unrestricted principle of characterization for objects. Now, some representational properties attributed to fictional characters, a kind of fictional entities, involve a crucial reference to the world in which they are supposed to be instantiated. I argue that these representational properties are problematic for Priest??s theory and that he cannot accept an unrestricted version of the principle of characterization. Thus, while not refuting Priest??s theory, I show that it is no better off than other Meinongian theories.     

WESTERN LOVE, CHINESE QING A PHILOSOPHICAL INTERPRETATION OF THE IDEA OF LOVE IN ROMEO AND JULIET AND THE BUTTERFLY LOVER

In the Chinese tradition] any kind of romanticism, of idealization, or quasi-mystical ardor is excluded. Love, such as we understand it since our twelfth century does not even have a name in their language. In Chinese the nearest approach to our verb 'to love' is a word which denotes the relationship between a mother and her son.… From the viewpoint of the idea of love, there are really two worlds, the Oriental and the Occidental.     

Young children separate multiple pretend worlds

Each fictional world that adults create has its own distinct properties, separating it from other fictional worlds. Here we explore whether this separation also exists for young children's pretend game worlds. Studies 1 and 1A set up two simultaneous games and encouraged children to create appropriate pretend identities for coloured blocks. When prompted with a situation that required the use of a Game 1 object in Game 2, 3‐ and 4‐year‐olds were reluctant to move pretend objects between games, even when the alternative‐world object was explicitly highlighted as a possible choice. Study 2 found the same effect when the two game worlds were presented sequentially. This suggests that, even for young children, multiple pretend game worlds are kept psychologically separate.     

The narrative worlds of what is and what if

This paper advances the hypothesis that young children use narrative play and stories to construct two types of fiction, the worlds of what is and what if. Heinz Werner's conceptualization of children's spheres of reality, in which actions, symbols, and events are constructed in particular ways, is used as a theoretical framework for understanding children's play and stories. Drawing on examples of children's spontaneous pretend play and story telling, the paper argues that, beginning in their second year, children use pretend play to differentiate the worlds of everyday-lived reality from an alternative pretend sphere; the world of as if. By their third year, children engage in play which hangs on a narrative framework. Such pretend play offers children further options: the fictional world of plausible make believe which simulates everyday life, what is, and the fictional world of more fantastic possibilities, what if. While the child's use of a narrative framework in her pretend play expands her range of psychological worlds, the developmental shift to purely verbal stories, sometimes during the child's third year, significantly adds to her ability to explore such worlds. An examination of the language young children use to accompany their narrative play and to tell stories demonstrates the ways in which children exploit the narrative form to contrast, compare, and traverse the constructed worlds of what is and what if.     

母亲-胎儿关系：概念、测量和影响因素

亲子关系并不仅仅始于出生之后,在怀孕期间孕妇就开始建立与胎儿的关系。母亲-胎儿关系是孕妇在怀孕期间对胎儿所产生的一种对胎儿的认知表征、投入的情感以及与胎儿的互动的关系,具有重要的理论与实践意义。目前用于测量母亲-胎儿关系水平的主要工具为母亲-胎儿依恋量表,母亲孕期依恋量表以及胚胎依恋量表。多种因素会对母亲-胎儿关系产生影响,主要包括孕妇年龄、文化等人口学因素,孕周、孕期检查等怀孕相关因素,以及人格特点、心理健康、社会支持等心理社会因素。未来研究要对研究方法进行整合、更多关注父亲-胎儿关系的发展特点,并尝试探索干预措施来提高这种亲子关系的质量。     

From the “reel” world to the “real” world: subjective experiences of violent fictional entertainment

Fictional violence holds strong appeal for a wide audience. Given this appeal and the public’s concern about it, researchers have extensively investigated whether there is a direct effect of exposure to fictional violence on individuals’ aggressive behaviours. In the present research, we aimed to contribute to the comparatively smaller body of research concerned with factors that motivate individuals to engage with fictional violence. We interviewed 10 adults about their own subjective understanding of the reasons why they engage with fictional violence. We used thematic analysis to explore participants’ talk about their subjective experiences of their motivations. We interpret our findings to indicate that individuals make sense of their engagement with fictional violence as a means to understand the real world, to regulate arousal, and to experience a just world. We discuss the practical implications of these findings and directions for future research.     

Judgments of Aggressive, Withdrawn and Prosocial Behavior: Perceived Control, Anger, Pity and Sympathy in Young Dutch Children

In two studies, we examined first- and second-grade children's judgments of aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial behavior by means of fictional scenarios. In study I, we compared judgments of fictional aggressive children with those of fictional withdrawn children. Aggressive children were perceived as more responsible for their behavior and elicited more feelings of anger, while withdrawn children were more likely to be chosen as a friend and elicited more feelings of pity. In study II, we compared judgments of fictional aggressive, withdrawn, and prosocial children with each other. Again aggressive children elicited the strongest feelings of anger, while withdrawn children elicited the strongest feelings of pity. These withdrawn children were perceived as more similar to the prosocial children. In an attempt to test the ecological validity of our sympathy measure, we asked children to rate their peers on a three-point liking scale and checked the scores of those judged to be aggressive by their teachers. These aggressive children were found to receive the lowest liking scores. The results are discussed.     

Adult attachment and transportation into narrative worlds

Adult attachment affects close bonds, including bonds with fictional characters, but does it also influence the level of engagement with fictional worlds? This article aims to build on previous research on how attachment relates to narrative transportation. In Study 1, attachment anxiety, but not attachment avoidance, predicted a greater tendency to become transported into narratives, even after controlling for broader personality traits related to attachment. In Study 2, attachment anxiety again predicted a greater tendency to engage in narratives but only at high levels of attachment avoidance. In Study 3, this interaction between attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance in predicting narrative transportation was again observed when transportation was measured immediately after viewing a specific narrative.     

Research digest: post-traumatic stress disorder

The onset of weaning is often described as an important early milestone, but it creates considerable emotional turbulence in the motherinfant relationship. The interruption of the breast-feeding relationship, whether gradual or sudden, creates a very special kind of agony for both the mother and baby, especially when a good trusting relationship with the breast has been found. This paper explores some of the hurts and sacrifices made on both sides during weaning, and looks at some of the subtle reactions to mutual feelings of rejection at this time. It also describes some of the difficulties that arise when the work of weaning is compromised by certain anxieties in the feeding relationship. Extracts from several psychoanalytical infant observations are used both to illustrate and to discuss these themes.     

On Associative Stigma: Implicit and Explicit Evaluations of a Mother of a Child with Autism Spectrum Disorder

Individuals with psychiatric problems are subjected to highly damaging stigma. Some research suggests that this stigma may extend to associates (e.g., family, friends), who themselves report being devalued, avoided, and rejected. The research literature on associative stigma is largely qualitative, and extant quantitative research has utilized only explicit measures which are notably weakened by self-presentational motives. In the current study, 95 undergraduates were randomized to hear one of two audio recorded vignettes pertaining to a fictional mother of a child with either autism spectrum disorder (ASD) or severe asthma. Participants then completed an Implicit Association Test capturing implicit evaluations of the fictional mother and two separate measures of explicit stigma. No group differences for either explicit measure emerged. However, the predicted group difference in implicit stigma emerged, such that the mother of the child with ASD was evaluated less positively than the mother of the child with severe asthma. Implicit-explicit correlations were not statistically significant but in the small to medium range according to effect size conventions. This study offers evidence of implicit associative stigma in the psychiatric domain. It also points to a variety of interesting avenues for further illumination of this potentially important phenomenon.     

THE EVOLUTION OF HUMAN BIRTH AND TRANSHUMANIST PROPOSALS OF ENHANCEMENT

Some transhumanists argue that we must engage with theories and facts about our evolutionary past in order to promote future enhancements of the human body. At the same time, they call our attention to the flawed character of evolution and argue that there is a mismatch between adaptation to ancestral environments and contemporary life. One important trait of our evolutionary past which should not be ignored, and yet may hinder the continued perfection of humankind, is the peculiarly human way of bearing and raising children. The suffering associated with childbirth and a long childhood have demanded trade‐offs that have enhanced our species, leading to cooperation, creativity, intelligence and resilience. Behaviors such as mother–infant engagement, empathy, storytelling, and ritual have also helped to create what we value most in human beings. Therefore, the moral, cognitive, and emotional enhancements proposed by these transhumanists may be impaired by their partial appropriation of evolution, insofar as the bittersweet experience of parenthood is left aside.     

The Valuable Allies

The primary reason for a counselor's existence is to foster, through understanding and acceptance, the development of individuals. When the individuals are adolescents the task is trying, because most adults have difficulty identifying with the “real irks” of the adolescent's existence. The personal, educational, and historical reasons for this difficulty are examined. A suggestion, originally made by Freud, is reiterated to help the counselor explore the worlds of youth. The important point is that, for those who would truly know adolescents, psychology and literature ought to be fellow disciplines. The psychologist discovered the adolescent, but it is the novelist who defines him. A bibliography of “proper information” (fictional sources) is included.     

What does Batman think about SpongeBob? children's understanding of the fantasy/fantasy distinction

Young children reliably distinguish reality from fantasy; they know that their friends are real and that Batman is not. But it is an open question whether they appreciate, as adults do, that there are multiple fantasy worlds. We test this by asking children and adults about fictional characters' beliefs about other characters who exist either within the same world (e.g., Batman and Robin) or in different worlds (e.g., Batman and SpongeBob). Study 1 found that although both adults and young children distinguish between within-world and across-world types of character relationships, the children make an unexpected mistake: they often claim that Batman thinks that Robin is make believe. Study 2 used a less explicit task, exploring intuitions about the actions of characters-whom they could see, touch, and talk to--and found that children show a mature appreciation of the ontology of fictional worlds.     

On Traumatically Skewed Intersubjectivity

ABSTRACT

Beginning with his Interpersonal World of the Infant (1985), Daniel Stern suggested that the infant is driven from birth to connect intersubjectively with his caregivers. By the final three months of the first year of life, as the infant begins to use protodeclarative pointing and jointly attends to the outer world, he also begins to jointly attend with his caregiver to their respective intrapsychic worlds, the mental states of his caregiver and himself. Clinically, analysts observe at this crucial point of development of secondary intersubjectivity mothers who, more often than not, respond only selectively and often unpredictably to their infants. In many instances, this may be motivated out of a mother’s own need for regulation of emotion and arousal as we have shown in our empirical research. This article elaborates on clinical observations that, for the infant or young child to feel his traumatized mother’s affective presence, he must try to enter mother’s state of mind, while simultaneously, mother is seeking to self-regulate in the wake or the revival of trauma-associated memory traces, this at the expense of mutual regulation of emotion and arousal. We call this phenomenon traumatically skewed intersubjectivity. We find that children coconstruct with their traumatized mothers a new, shared traumatic experience by virtue of the toddler’s efforts to share an intersubjective experience with a mother who is acting in response to posttraumatic reexperiencing. The problem is that the infant or young child has no point of reference to decipher the traumatized mother’s social communication. And so, what is enacted leads to a new, shared traumatic event. Both the child’s anxiety and aggression can, in this setting, easily become dysregulated, further triggering mother’s anxiety and avoidance, leading thus to a vicious cycle that contributes to intergenerational transmission of trauma. Clinical examples and implications for psychoanalytically-oriented parent-infant psychotherapy will be discussed.     

Evaluation of early relational disturbance in high-risk populations: Borderline personality disorder features,maternal mental state,and observed interaction

Despite the longstanding theoretical association in the attachment literature between maternal trauma history and disturbances in the mother–infant interaction, few studies have investigated mechanisms of transmission of traumatogenic relational patterns in high-risk mother–infant dyads. This study investigated interrelationships among maternal trauma history, distorted maternal representations (DMRs, i.e. disturbed thoughts and feelings about the infant and self-as-parent), maternal mentalisation (i.e. capacity to conceive of self and other's intentions in terms of mental states including thoughts, feelings, and desires), and quality of interaction in a clinical sample of mothers with Borderline Personality Disorder (BPD) features and their infants (N = 61). Measures used included the Childhood Trauma Questionnaire, Parent Development Interview, Mother–Infant Relationship Scale, Borderline Symptom Checklist-23, and the Emotional Availability Scales. The results indicated BPD features mediated the relationship between maternal trauma history and DMRs predicting disturbance in interaction. In addition, analyses showed that maternal mentalisation had a buffering effect between DMRs and maternal non-hostility and yet the severity of BPD features moderated the relationship between mentalisation and DMRs. The findings suggest postpartum borderline pathology may adversely impact the experience of being a parent for women with a relational trauma history including deficits in mentalisation (i.e. hypermentalising) and disturbances in the mother–infant interaction. Implications for research and clinical practice are discussed.     

Infant mental health: Monitoring our movement into the twenty-first century

At a time when our guidance is increasingly sought by parents, courts, and social policy planners, it is critical that infant mental health professionals establish clearer standards for training, engage in more rigorous self-monitoring of our clinical and our research efforts, and recognize the extraordinary risks for bias in all of our work. It is not necessary that we speak with one voice. In fact, our field has been enriched by its transdisciplinary nature and by its many points of view. But it is critical that we offer assessments, engage in treatment, conduct our research, and do our teaching free of uncontrolled contamination by our own unresolved childhood experiences, our idealizations, our needs for control: in short, that we be truly open to the data and truly available to the families. Examples are offered of the risks if we fail, and a call is made for careful transdisciplinary training, supervision, individual psychotherapy, and collegial monitoring for infant mental health clinicians, researchers, and educators, alike.     

The Values of the Virtual

How do we assign values to virtual items, which include virtual objects, properties, events, subjects, worlds, environments, and experiences? In this article, I offer a framework for answering this question. After considering different value theses in the literature, I argue that whether we think these theses mutually exclusive or not turns on our view about the number of value-salient kinds virtual items belong to. Virtual monism is the view that virtual Xs belong to only one value-salient kind in relation to X. Virtual pluralism is the view that they belong to more than one value-salient kind. I argue for two claims. First, virtual monism is mistaken. Minimally some virtual Xs are Xs, while others are not. Second, dualistic virtual pluralism is also mistaken because it is too coarse grained. Instead, I argue for fourfold pluralism: virtual items either represent an original's properties or reproduce essential properties and do so to lesser or greater extents. This gives us four value-salient kinds of virtual X: virtual reproductions, simulations, representations, and simulacra of X. I apply this view to various debates in the literature and conclude with a discussion of less basic hybrid kinds.