Sex differences in depression

The role of housewife has been hypothesized as the source of excess mental illness among married women as compared with married men. The present study found both housewives and working wives significantly more depressed than working husbands. Although working wives report that they do more housework than husbands, this factor was not significantly related to depression for either wives or husbands. It is suggested that the risk factors for depression, including marriage for women, may be better understood in the context of clinical theories of depression, especially the learned helplessness model.     

Theorizing Gender for Experimental Game Theory: Experiments with “Sex Status” and “Merit Status” in an Asymmetric Game

In experimental game-theoretic research, to the extent that sex has been considered at all, the approach has been to focus on the individual level of analysis. This paper reports the results of experiments designed to focus on sex/gender and to expand the level of analysis to include the institutional level. An asymmetric game was designed such that players in the male and female institutional locations had 3 and 2 alternatives, respectively. Players earned the institutional locations based on a test, so that top and bottom scorers respectively merited the 3- and 2-alternatives locations. Game-theoretic understandings of sex-of-player were compared to the expectations states theory concept of sex status; that is, men expect and are expected to perform more competently than women. Results indicated that top-scorer men and women behave similarly; bottom-scorer men resist their low merit status (behaving the most rationally of all player groups); bottom-scorer women accept their low merit status (behaving the most irrationally of all player groups). Whereas game theory cannot provide a coherent understanding of these findings, the concept of sex status helps to interpret the behavior of all four player groups and shows how judgments about rationality and irrationality depend critically on the interpretive framework used.     

Fallacies and moral dilemmas

The continuing debate between utilitarians and deontologists often takes the form of disagreement over how particular moral dilemmas are to be resolved, but protagonists on both sides tend to overlook the possibility of resolving a dilemma with remainder, such as regret. The importance of remainder is also overlooked by critics of some absolutist ways of resolving or slipping between the horns of certain moral dilemmas. Moreover, deontologists, if not utilitarians, can be criticised for overlooking the possibility that, according to their theory, some dilemmas may be irresolvable. Virtue ethics, with its concentration on the agent, readily accommodates both mention of remainder and irresolvable dilemmas, and yields a specification of tragic dilemmas which the other two theories might like to take on.     

The artist as transgressor in Mandel'štam's poetry

In Mandel'tam's writing, artistic creativity is described as based on the indispensable yet contradictory modes of compliance and deviation. The artist, by his artistic nature, must be an obedient disciple to the tradition that inspires him, and, at the same time, a violator who renders what inspires him in an individual form. Thus, art implies iterability through novelty. In the totalitarian state, this double nature of art acquires a sinister context and brings the artist to an unavoidable conflict with the state. He has a choice between a servile compliance with the state's command and artistic independence. If the artist complies, he loses his ingenuity; if, on the other hand, he has the courage to break away from the established order, his fate is martyrdom. The criteria of truth and falsehood, the issue of loyalty, of compromise and collaboration or resistance become most relevant. Such words as outcast or non-contemporary acquire the meaning of non-collaborationist or enemy of the people. In the totalitarian state a genuine artist is viewed as a law-breaker, and his art leads him to crime. The notions of compliance and deviation cease being merely aesthetic terms and assume in Mandel'tam's poetry complex, subtle and tragic overtones.I would like to express my gratitude to John Barnstead, Thomas Blakeley, James Doull, Elena Glazov-Corrigan, Gregory Glazov, Leonard Kazdan, Peter Kussmaul, Malcolm Ross, Detlev Steffen, and Ieva Vitins for their valuable criticism, suggestions, and revisions of my English.     

Biasing of hyperkinetic behavior ratings by diagnostic reports

Two preschool children, one hyperkinetic and one normal, were observed by 4 pairs of raters over a 10-day interval Raters who were given diagnostic reports suggesting hyperkinesis in the child they observed produced significantly higher ratings of hyperkinesis on a published, somewhat objective, rating scale than raters who were not provided with diagnostic reports. In addition, it was found that the level of perceived hyperkinesis decreased over successive ratings. The results of the study are discussed in terms of the potential impact of diagnoses on hyperkinetic children and the implications for intervention studies.The authors would like to extend their appreciation to the students who so ably served as raters in the present study and the staff of the Precision Positive Early Education Program, in which the research was conducted.     

Computer content analysis of sex differences in the language of children

This study presents empirical procedures for the collection and content analysis of the oral language of kindergarten children. The analysis technique used material and machines available to most researchers. The results of the analysis of language samples of 144 randomly selected children from the entire kindergarten class of the Ithaca, New York, school system showed that boys produced significantly more language than did the girls as well as significantly more references to aggression, self, time, space, quantity, fears, good, act of oral communication, negation, and affirmation, and asked more questions of the examiner than did the girls. The girls made significantly more female references than did the boys. Implications for future research are discussed.     

On seeing oneself as “left out”: The chronically complaining patient in psychotherapy

A clinical observation regarding patients who complain about feeling left out and/or second best provides the framework for this paper. What is expressed is a form of separation anxiety coupled with a loser self-concept. It is suggested that these patients represent a milder form of the moral masochism. Early theoretical formulations include Freud and his emphasis on the superego and Reich's emphasis on the masochist's fear of being left alone. Kramer's little man phenomenon is an example of a more current theoretical formulation which takes account of the complexities of the ego, and composite self and identity in the clinical phenomena observed. A case of a latency-aged child is provided.     

The responsive order: A new empiricism

The uniqueness of logic is upheld and contrasted with twenty roles of a wider responsive order that includes us and our procedures. Empirical responses are precise, but different in different approaches. Procedures and findings are independent of (not separable from) their concepts. Two-way feedback obviates a top-down derivation of findings from assumptions, hypotheses, history, or language. The postmodern problems of interpretation, conditions of appearances and relativism involve the ancient error of making perception the model-instance of experience. Instead, bodily interaction functions in language and precedes perception and interpretation. Logic, space time locations and individuated referents involve positional relations derived from comparing. Beyond Kuhn, Feyerabend, Newton and Einstein, if we can give interaction priority over comparing, the responsive objectivity of both can be upheld. A new empiricism, neither naive nor constructivist, uses the words order, explication, truth, and exactly to build on Wittgenstein and on Dilthey's hermeneutic. Natural language is metaphor-like, originally crossed. Logic must ignore its assumptions. It must render everything as a machine and drop humans and animals out. A new discipline is proposed, to move between the logical and the responsive orders, to deal with the machine/human interface and the social uses of science such as bioengineering.     

Confirmation holism and semantic holism

Fodor and Lepore, in their recent book Holism, maintain that if an inference from semantic anatomism to semantic holism is allowed, certain fairly deleterious consequences follow. In Section 1 Fodor and Lepore's terminology is construed and amended where necessary with the result that the aforementioned deleterious consequences are neither so apparent nor straightforward as they had suggested. In Section 2 their Argument A is considered in some detail. In Section 3 their argument attributed to Quine is examined at length and a shorter and more perspicacious argument suggested which avoids their charge that the Quinean argument is guilty of an equivocation on the word statement.     

From I: A/M to “Who am I?”—Aggregation/Massification and Trauma-Based Affects and Object Relations in Groups: A Response to Earl Hopper

Hopper's portrayal of the fourth basic assumption of Incohesion: Aggregation/Massification has two components: (1) a revision of Turquet's theory of BA Oneness to incorporate the polarity of aggregation and massification stemming from annihilation anxiety; and (2) a conception of the difficult patient as having an encapsulated psychosis. Hopper's theory of the encapsulated psychosis offers an important but incomplete perspective in explaining borderline and narcissistic pathology, as well as psychological trauma. In this response to Hopper, I suggest that the fourth assumption is in fact a still more primitive state of boundary opening and closing. I also see a need to differentiate trauma as such from borderline pathology, and further hold that the relationship between Hopper's British Independent theory and trauma theories based on dissociation needs to be clarified.     

The Client Is the Most Important Common Factor: Clients' Self-Healing Capacities and Psychotherapy

I first briefly review the dodo bird verdict and suggest that we should be responding to it by looking for a new way to conceptualize how therapy works. Then I describe the dominant medical or treatment model of psychotherapy and how it puts the client in the position of a dependent variable who is operated on by supposedly potent therapeutic techniques. Next I argue that the data do not fit with this model. An alternative model is that the client is the most important common factor and that it is clients' self-healing capacities which make therapy work. I then argue that therapy has two phases—the involvement phase and the learning phase—and that the involvement phase is the most important. I next review the five learning opportunities provided by therapy. Finally, I argue that a relational model of therapy focused on consultation, collaboration, and dialogue is better than a treatment model.     

Violence as Secular Evil: Forensic Evaluation and Treatment of Violent Offenders from the Viewpoint of Existential Depth Psychology

Violence is the preeminent evil of our day. Though the causes of destructive violence in our society are complex, the troublesome human emotions of anger and rage play a central role in the genesis of violent behavior and psychopathology in general. In this paper, the author discusses forensic evaluation and psychotherapeutic treatment via existential depth psychology—a synthesis of Freudian, Jungian, and existential theory—focusing on the overlooked links between repressed anger or rage, pathological narcissism, antisocial personality, and violent behavior.     

Structuring argumentation in a social constructivist framework: A pedagogy with computer support

What we usually think of as higher order skills in argumentation can be profitably viewed as systematic structures for organizing and representing information. Standard terms like line of argument, synthesis, analysis and draft can be viewed as ways of constructing, storing, and accessing data in a social context — data structures for social communication. What makes argument difficult are the multiple structures that arguers have to construct and negotiate when reading and composing. In this paper, we describe the WARRANT project, a project designed to identify data structures of written argument and to design and implement computer tools to aid in the reading and design of argument.     

“Some more” notes,toward a “third” sophistic

Historians of rhetoric refer to two Sophistics, one in the 5th century B.C. and another c. 2nd century A.D. Besides these two, there is a 3rd Sophistic, but it is not necessarily sequential. (The 3rd is counter to counting sequentially.) Whereas the representative Sophists of the 1st Sophistic is Protagoras, and the second, Aeschines, the representative sophists of the 3rd are Gorgias (as proto-Third) and Friedrich Nietzsche, Jean-François Lyotard, Michel Foucault, Jacques Lacan, and Paul de Man.To distinguish between and among Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and then Protagoras, Gorgias, and Lacan, the author determines how far each of these personages can count. The model of counting, used semiotically across the topoi of possible/impossible, is that of the people of New Guinea: one thing, two things, many things. It is determined (generally) that the philosophers, including Aristotle, count to one; the Sophists to two; and Gorgias, Lacan, and Lyotard, et al. count to many things, thereby breaking up a monism or binarism. The ancient philosophers employ a substratum of probability to hold together the contraries of possible/impossible; the Sophists employ anti/logic, which keeps the contraries/antitheses separate and therefore without synthesis, but which eventually threatens the integrity of the substratum, or the law of non-contradiction; and Gorgias, Lacan, Lyotard et al. theorize about the impossibility/Resistance of the Logos (reason, logic, law, argumentation, history) to Theory/Totalization, because of the Gorgian Kairos and the Lacanian Real — both of which enter the Logos and break up the cycle of the antitheses and create something new, irrational (Untersteiner).This breaking up has a negative/positive influence on Protagoras's man-measure doctrine, which in turn has a similar influence on the problem of the ethical subject. The subject/agent not only no longer knows (by way of Logos) but also no longer acts (as independent agent); the subject becomes a function of Logos as determined by Kairos/Real; it moves from a hypotaxis/syntaxis of one and two to a radical parataxis/paralogy of some more.From the Impossibility/tragedy of knowledge, however, comes the Possible, or Possibilisms, which allows for the new (though divided) ethical subject to reclaim its position as individual. Such a reclamation of the subject, however, has a profound effect on argumentation, and especially the notion of consensus. What is wanted, then, in a Third Sophistic ethical — as opposed to a political — rhetoric is dissensus through radical parataxes and paralogies.     

Isotonic ordinal probabilistic models (ISOP)

The concept of an ordinal instrumental probabilistic comparison is introduced. It relies on an ordinal scale given a priori and on the concept of stochastic dominance. It is used to define a weakly independently ordered system, or isotonic ordinal probabilistic (ISOP) model, which allows the construction of separate sample-free ordinal scales on a set of subjects and a set of items. The ISOP-model is a common nonparametric theoretical structure for unidimensional models for quantitative, ordinal and dichotomous variables.Fundamental theorems on dichotomous and polytomous weakly independently ordered systems are derived. It is shown that the raw score system has the same formal properties as the latent system, and therefore the latter can be tested at the observed empirical level.I wish to thank 3 reviewers and 2 editors who contributed a lot to the readability and precision of the article.     

Aspects of language pragmatics and the social perception of lying

Two experiments were conducted in order to examine the influence of linguistic and extralinguistic variables on the attribution of lying. In the first experiment, one of two tape recordings of a target person, who responded either true or false to a list of adjectives, was evaluated by 83 subjects. The subjects' task was to attempt to discover when the target person was not telling the truth. The stimulus tapes were constructed such that the time between the adjective and the target person's response was systematically varied and the adjectives varied on the likability of a person possessing that trait. Overall, it was found that if the target person responded either too quickly or too slowly the subjects attributed his response as a lie more often than if the delay was more intermediate in duration (p<0.01). The adjective likability value in combination with the true or false response of the target person also contributed to the attribution of lying (p<0.01). In the second experiment, the adjectives were rescaled on another dimension thought to influence the attribution of lying: the degree to which the adjective is true of the general population. The results suggest that this new scale is related to the degree to which lie attributions are made.This research was supported in part by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development under Research Grant 1 P01 HD-01762-01 and the National Institute of Mental Health under Research Grant MN 08260.     

Sex roles and the link between fertility and employment

Using a sample of Toronto women, we reexamine the relationship between employment and fertility with the aim of clarifying whether employment status is negatively related to the birth rate only among certain categories of women as defined by sex roles. Especially noteworthy is the finding that employed wives who rate their performance as a spouse and mother as better than most have a birth rate which is as high as that for women who are not in the labor force.The authors are indebted to David Johnson, Susan Welch, and Lynn White of the University of Nebraska, and Gordon Irving of Carleton University for their comments on an earlier version of this article. The views expressed here are the authors' and not those of the Ministry of State for Urban Affairs, Government of Canada, which provided funds to conduct the study of urban crowding from which the data reported here were drawn.     

Race and the construction of Jewish identity in French and American Jewish fiction of the 1920s

In both the United States and France, Jewish-fiction writers of the 1920s often invoked the idea of Jewish racial unity as a non-rational, uncontrollable force separating Jews from mainstream society irrespective of their desire for integration. This genre of fiction reveals an ambivalent attitude towards race-thinking. The notion that there are intractable physical differences between groups threatened the Jews status as fully privileged co-citizens. Yet a racialized self-understanding provided them with a way to articulate the intangible bonds of community, which their official status as a purely religious group normally held them back from expressing openly. The common trope of the failed Jewish-Gentile romance best expresses the dual desire of French and American Jews for acceptance and distinctiveness. A sense of racial identity often leads protagonists to reject a non-Jewish lover or spouse and draw strength from a renewed sense of connection with the Jewish people. More often than not, however, these figures are left with feelings of ambivalence and regret, as they realize that their universalist dream of uniting with someone from a different racial background is not possible in the real world, where their Jewish particularism inevitably dooms such relationships to failure.I would like to thank Hasia Diner, Laura Lee Downs and Bonnie S. Anderson for reading and commenting on previous versions of this article.     

Distinctions between subgroups of asthmatic children: Parental reactions to experimental separation

Parental reactions to experimental separation were analyzed for two groups of asthmatic children, those for whom behavioral factors were judged highly relevant to asthma and those for whom such factors appeared unimportant. The former group of 13 (predicted positives) had shown a highly significant improvement in asthma during separation from their families; the latter group of 12 (predicted negatives) had not. Coding of standardized interviews conducted around the time of separation disclosed that parents (mothers, especially) of predicted positives scored significantly higher than parents of predicted negatives on such scales as fussing over the child at the time of leave taking, missing child, experiencing pain and discomfort during the separation, being anxious over child's welfare, etc. Psychological test data did not discriminate between the parents' or childrens' groups as clearly as the more focused separation interviews but the test results were consistent with interview differences. The separation elicited very strong emotional reactions from several mothers.This study was supported by United States Public Health Service Grant No. HD01060 from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development. Kirk Brady, John Means, loan Muser, and Claire Purcell contributed to data collection and/or data analysis.     

Interpretations of the first-order theory of diagonalizable algebras in peano arithmetic

For every sequence |p _n } _n of formulas of Peano ArithmeticPA with, every formulaA of the first-order theory diagonalizable algebras, we associate a formula ⁰ A, called the value ofA inPA with respect to the interpretation. We show that, ifA is true in every diagonalizable algebra, then, for every, ⁰ A is a theorem ofPA.