Surviving or living? A question of containment

Abstract

This paper explores the establishment of a safe inner representation of a mother as a crucial containing experience that distinguishes surviving and living. A comparison is drawn between a client with a deprived early experience, who is turned into a refugee and is searching for a containing experience, and a refugee who has had a good inner experience and then loses it. The contrast between the two highlights how a refugee may have to shift from living to surviving. Survival is conceptualized in terms of a ‘fugitive state of mind’ which a refugee may come to occupy. Living is thought about as a state in which safety is not only contingent upon an external set of factors but vitally depends on the circumstances which allow for internal containment. In the last part of the paper emphasis is placed on needing to take account of these special needs for containment in addressing management practices and rehabilitation of refugees. It is suggested that doing so establishes the necessary conditions for containment while blindness to these needs impedes further rehabilitation and integration.     

Social categories in the making: construction or recruitment?

Real kinds, both natural and social categories, are characterized by rich inductive potential. They have relatively stable sets of conceptually independent projectable properties. Somewhat surprisingly, even some purely social categories (e.g., ethnicity, gender, political orientation) show such multiple projectability. The article explores the origin of the inductive richness of social categories and concepts. I argue that existing philosophical accounts provide only a partial explanation, and mechanisms of boundary formation and stabilization must be brought into view for a more comprehensive account of inductively rich social categories.

     

To do or to have? That is the question

Do experiences make people happier than material possessions? In two surveys, respondents from various demographic groups indicated that experiential purchases-those made with the primary intention of acquiring a life experience--made them happier than material purchases. In a follow-up laboratory experiment, participants experienced more positive feelings after pondering an experiential purchase than after pondering a material purchase. In another experiment, participants were more likely to anticipate that experiences would make them happier than material possessions after adopting a temporally distant, versus a temporally proximate, perspective. The discussion focuses on evidence that experiences make people happier because they are more open to positive reinterpretations, are a more meaningful part of one's identity, and contribute more to successful social relationships.     

Factors influencing car use for commuting and the intention to reduce it: A question of self-interest or morality?

Car use for commuting contributes to various environmental and traffic problems, such as pollution and congestion. Policies aimed at reducing commuter car use will be more effective when they target important determinants of car use and willingness to reduce it. This study examined whether variables reflecting self-interest (from the theory of planned behavior [Ajzen, I. (1985). From intentions to actions: A theory of planned behavior. In J. Kuhl & J. Beckmann (Eds.), Action control: From cognition to behavior (pp. 11–39). Berlin: Springer]) and variables reflecting moral considerations (from the norm-activation model [Schwartz, S. H. (1977). Normative influences on altruism. In L. Berkowitz (Ed.). Advances in experimental social psychology (Vol. 10, pp. 221–279). New York: Academic Press]) were able to explain self-reported car use for commuting and intentions to reduce it in a sample of Canadian office workers. Car use for commuting was mostly explained by variables related to individual outcomes (perceived behavioral control and attitudes) whereas the intention to reduce car use was mostly explained by variables related to morality (personal norms). The study also found that perceived behavioral control moderated the relation between personal norms and behavioral intentions: stronger personal norms were associated with stronger behavioral intentions, but only when perceived behavioral control was low. Some issues evoked by these results are discussed.     

What Is A Newtonian System? The Failure Of Energy Conservation And Determinism In Supertasks

Supertasks recently discussed in the literature purport to display a failure ofenergy conservation and determinism in Newtonian mechanics. We debatewhether these supertasks are admissible as Newtonian systems, with Earmanand Norton defending the affirmative and Alper and Bridger the negative.     

Are goals or preconditions better explanations? It depends on the question

Recent research on causal inference suggests that common actions tend to be attributed to goals, whereas difficult actions, if obstructed, are attributed primarily to preconditions. The present studies examine the way that the framing of causal questions influences ratings of goals and preconditions for common actions. The studies test the view that ‘why’ questions favour goal explanations, by presenting causal questions framed as ‘why’ questions or ‘explain’ questions. Structured and free-response measures were used. They show that when the question is expressed as asking why an action occurs, goals are rated better than preconditions, regardless of the presence of obstacles, whereas if the question is framed as requesting an explanation of the action, preconditions are deemed better explanations than goals for obstructed actions. Goals remain better explanations when the action is unobstructed. These findings confirm the importance of the framing of causal questions for research on causal explanation, and suggest that the phrasing of causal questions influences the focus of explanations. Copyright © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

On the question of self-disclosure by the analyst: error or advance in technique?

The question of self-disclosure by the analyst and its uses in treatment is an issue widely debated today. In this paper, the author reviews this controversial technique from historical and contemporary points of view, delineates several forms of self-disclosure, and, by means of several clinical examples, discusses the effects on the patient and the analytic process of utilizing one or another kind of self-disclosure in these particular situations.     

Doing Ethics or Changing for the Better?

In this paper, classical pragmatism is used as a method, not as a substantial ethical theory, to develop “moral pragmatics.” Moral pragmatics offers a constructive approach for making progress where traditional ethical theories converge, and it innovates ethical deliberation. Assuming widespread agreement that real moral problems need practical solutions, the paper addresses two related problems: the missing link between ethical theories and moral practice, and the question of who is in charge of finding such solutions. It argues that “conscience” can create a link between ethical knowledge and moral practice, and that this partly discharges “the ethicist” from the task of solving problems that are not really, or not only, hers. Two specific methodological innovations are suggested that go beyond admonitions to render ethics sensitive to context. Instead, a reevaluation of “casuistry” and a sensitivity for “finding the right words” give an idea of how to achieve this goal.     

Where’s the difficulty in standardized reading tests: The passage or the question?

The purpose of this investigation was to examine the extent to which item and text characteristics predict item difficulty on the comprehension portion of the Gates-MacGinitie Reading Tests for the 7th–9th and 10th–12th grade levels. Detailed item-based analyses were performed on 192 comprehension questions on the basis of the cognitive processing model framework proposed by Embretson and colleagues (Embretson & Wetzel, 1987). Item difficulty was analyzed in terms of various passage features (e.g., word frequency and number of propositions) and individual-question characteristics (e.g., abstractness and degree of inferential processing), using hierarchical linear modeling. The results indicated that the difficulty of the items in the test for the 7th–9th grade level is primarily influenced by text features—in particular, vocabulary difficulty—whereas the difficulty of the items in the test for the 10th–12th grade level is less systematically influenced by text features.     

A dilemma for non-naturalists: irrationality or immorality?

Either 1. the non-naturalist is in a state of mind that would treat as relevant information about the existence and patterns of non-natural properties and facts as they make up their mind about normative matters, or 2. the non-naturalist is in a state of mind that would treat as irrelevant information about the existence and patterns of non-natural properties and facts as they make up their mind about normative matters. The first state of mind is morally objectionable, for one should not change one’s normative beliefs to pander to the patterns of some non-natural realm. The second state of mind is irrational, for if you think you are aiming to represent non-natural properties correctly, you should (rationally) be interested to know which actions share a non-natural property and which do not, and you should (rationally) be prepared to change your mind accordingly.

     

Should One Be A Left or A Right Sellarsian? (And is There Really Such A Choice?)

The followers of Wilfrid Sellars are often divided into “right” and “left” Sellarsians, according to whether they believe, in Mark Lance's words, that “linguistic roles constitutive of meaning and captured by dot quoted words are ‘normative all the way down.’” The present article anatomizes this division and argues that it is not easy to give it a nontrivial sense. In particular, the article argues that it is not really possible to construe it as a controversy related to ontology, and goes on to argue that it is also not easy to construe it as one concerning the translatability of the normative idiom into the non‐normative one. The conclusion is that the only coherent interpretation of this disagreement is as a disagreement about the possibility and desirability of assuming a standpoint “inside” our linguistic practices.     

Prosodic disambiguation of syntactic structure: for the speaker or for the addressee?

Evidence has been mixed on whether speakers spontaneously and reliably produce prosodic cues that resolve syntactic ambiguities. And when speakers do produce such cues, it is unclear whether they do so "for" their addressees (the audience design hypothesis) or "for" themselves, as a by-product of planning and articulating utterances. Three experiments addressed these issues. In Experiments 1 and 3, speakers followed pictorial guides to spontaneously instruct addressees to move objects. Critical instructions (e.g., "Put the dog in the basket on the star") were syntactically ambiguous, and the referential situation supported either one or both interpretations. Speakers reliably produced disambiguating cues to syntactic ambiguity whether the situation was ambiguous or not. However, Experiment 2 suggested that most speakers were not yet aware of whether the situation was ambiguous by the time they began to speak, and so adapting to addressees' particular needs may not have been feasible in Experiment 1. Experiment 3 examined individual speakers' awareness of situational ambiguity and the extent to which they signaled structure, with or without addressees present. Speakers tended to produce prosodic cues to syntactic boundaries regardless of their addressees' needs in particular situations. Such cues did prove helpful to addressees, who correctly interpreted speakers' instructions virtually all the time. In fact, even when speakers produced syntactically ambiguous utterances in situations that supported both interpretations, eye-tracking data showed that 40% of the time addressees did not even consider the non-intended objects. We discuss the standards needed for a convincing test of the audience design hypothesis.     

Amnesia or retrieval deficit? Implications of a molecular approach to the question of reconsolidation

Post-retrieval interference with a memory has uncovered a phenomenon known to the field as reconsolidation. In this article, we will review the specific molecular mechanisms that have been implicated in reconsolidation. As a result of numerous studies over the past five years, it can now be said with a fair amount of certainty that reconsolidation is not a recapitulation of the mechanisms underlying consolidation, despite what the term "reconsolidation" may suggest. Therefore, in addition to reviewing the known mechanisms of reconsolidation, we will propose that two experimental approaches involving the targeting of specific molecular mechanisms, and the study of these mechanisms during retrieval, may serve useful to the field as it is now able to advance beyond comparisons between consolidation and reconsolidation.     

Measuring Big-Five personality dimensions with the implicit association test – Implicit personality traits or self-esteem?

We examined whether the implicit association test (IAT) could serve as an implicit measure of the dimensions of the Five-Factor Model of Personality. In the first study (N = 84) IAT-effects of the Big-Five (Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness) were found and the IAT showed good internal consistencies and convergent validity with an explicit Big-Five questionnaire (NEO-FFI-30). In a second study (N = 50), conducted to determine the overlap of the personality-IATs with implicit self-esteem, the Extraversion and the Neuroticism-IAT were shown to correlate with a self-esteem-IAT only moderately.     

Are perfectionism dimensions risk factors for anxiety symptoms? A meta-analysis of 11 longitudinal studies

Background: Over 50 years of theory and research implicates perfectionism in anxiety. However, it is unclear which (if any) perfectionism dimensions are risk factors for anxiety.

Objective: To address this, we conducted a meta-analysis testing whether socially prescribed perfectionism, concern over mistakes, doubts about actions, self-oriented perfectionism, and personal standards predict increases in anxiety.

Method: Our literature search yielded 11 relevant studies for inclusion, composed of children, adolescents, undergraduates, community adults, and psychiatric patients.

Results: Meta-analysis using random-effects models revealed concern over mistakes (r^+?=?.11), doubts about actions (r^+?=?.13), and personal standards (r^+?=?.08), but not socially prescribed perfectionism or self-oriented perfectionism, displayed significant small positive relationships with follow-up anxiety, after controlling for baseline anxiety.

Conclusion: Research is needed to understand the conditions under which the connection between perfectionism and anxiety becomes stronger (e.g., stress).