Is love a “basic” emotion?

This article documents the neglect of love in many contemporary emotion theories, despite its prominence in the lay psychology of emotion. We argue that love should be considered a basic emotion, like anger, sadness, happiness, and fear. We discuss the criteria that various theorists use to distinguish basic from nonbasic emotions, and we marshal arguments and evidence from a variety of sources suggesting that love fits the criteria for basicness. We conclude that a number of controversies over the status of love can be resolved by distinguishing between the momentary surge form of love, a basic emotion having properties similar to joy, sadness, fear, etc., and relational love, a bond that develops between people, associated with states that include not only surge love, but many other emotions such as distress and anxiety. Finally, we suggest that “love” is the broad, everyday name for emotions related to three interrelated behavioral systems discussed by Bowlby (1979): attachment, caregiving, and sex.     

“Statistical,” “Practical,” and “Clinical”: How Many Kinds of Significance Do Counselors Need to Consider?

The present article reviews and distinguishes 3 related but different types of significance: “statistical,” “practical,” and “clinical.” A framework for conceptualizing the many “practical” effect size indices is described. Several effect size indices that counseling researchers can use, or that counselors reading the literature may encounter, are summarized. A way of estimating “corrected” intervention effects is proposed. It is suggested that readers should expect authors to report indices of “practical” or “clinical” significance, or both, within their research reports; and it is noted that indeed some journals now require such reports.     

Families of Adolescent Drug Abusers Are “Rigid”: Are These Families Either “Disengaged” or “Enmeshed,” or Both?

The FACES instrument, based on Olson's Circumplex Model of family functioning, was administered to 96 adolescent drug-abuse clients and their parents. The majority of these families categorized themselves as "disengaged" (rather than "enmeshed") on the cohesion dimension, and as "rigid" (rather than "chaotic") on the adaptability dimension. These findings were unexpected as they were substantially different from published findings on families with other types of problems. Family therapists, utilizing Olson's Clinical Rating Scale for the Circumplex Model, characterized significantly more of these same families as "enmeshed," rather than "disengaged." Possible explanations for the difference between the therapists' perceptions and the families' self-perceptions are discussed.     

Do We “do”?

A normative framework for modeling causal and counterfactual reasoning has been proposed by Spirtes, Glymour, and Scheines (1993; cf. Pearl, 2000). The framework takes as fundamental that reasoning from observation and intervention differ. Intervention includes actual manipulation as well as counterfactual manipulation of a model via thought. To represent intervention, Pearl employed the do operator that simplifies the structure of a causal model by disconnecting an intervened-on variable from its normal causes. Construing the do operator as a psychological function affords predictions about how people reason when asked counterfactual questions about causal relations that we refer to as undoing, a family of effects that derive from the claim that intervened-on variables become independent of their normal causes. Six studies support the prediction for causal (A causes B) arguments but not consistently for parallel conditional (if A then B) ones. Two of the studies show that effects are treated as diagnostic when their values are observed but nondiagnostic when they are intervened on. These results cannot be explained by theories that do not distinguish interventions from other sorts of events.     

How Do “Religion” and “Spirituality” Differ? Lay Definitions Among Older Adults

Research and public interest in religion and spirituality is on the rise. Consequently, there is an increasing need for rigorously obtained information on what individuals mean when they use these terms. This study examined how 64 older adults living in three retirement communities (including one Christian‐based community), a relatively understudied population, conceptualize religion and spirituality. Participants defined “religion” and “spirituality,” and their narrative definitions were coded and compared using a framework derived from Hill et al.'s (2000) conceptualization of religion and spirituality. Despite considerable overlap, participants' definitions differed on several dimensions. Participants were more likely to associate religion than spirituality with personal beliefs, community affiliation, and organized practices. Moreover, spirituality appeared to be a more abstract concept than religion, and included nontheistic notions of a higher power.     

What's in a Name? The Effects of the Labels “Fat” Versus “Overweight” on Weight Bias1

This research examined the effects of the labels “fat” vs. “overweight” in the expression of weight bias, with the prediction that the label “fat” biases individuals to respond more negatively than does the label “overweight.” In Study 1, participants' attitudes toward people labeled as fat were less favorable than were their attitudes toward people labeled as overweight. In Studies 2 and 3, although participants chose similar‐sized figures to depict fat and overweight targets, weight stereotypes and weight attitudes were more negative toward people labeled as fat than those labeled as overweight. In addition, the endorsement of weight stereotypes mediated the biasing effect of the “fat” label on weight prejudice. Implications of this work for prejudice researchers and for public attitudes are discussed.     

CAN WE STILL TALK ABOUT “TRUTH” AND “PROGRESS” IN INTERDISCIPLINARY THINKING TODAY?

On a cultural level, and for Christian theology as part of a long tradition in the evolution of religion, evolutionary epistemology “sets the stage,” as it were, for understanding the deep evolutionary impact of our ancestral history on the evolution of culture, and eventually on the evolution of disciplinary and interdisciplinary reflection. In the process of the evolution of human knowledge, our interpreted experiences and expectations of the world (and of the ultimate questions we humans typically pose to the world) have a central role to play. What evolutionary epistemology also shows us is that we humans can indeed take on cognitive goals and ideals that cannot be explained or justified in terms of survival‐promotion or reproductive advantage only. Therefore, once the capacities for rational knowledge, moral sensibility, aesthetic appreciation of beauty, and the propensity for religious belief have emerged in our biological history, they cannot be explained only in biological/evolutionary terms. Finally, in this way a door is opened for seeing problem solving as a central activity of our research traditions. As philosophers of science have argued, one of the most important shared rational resources between even widely divergent disciplines is problem solving as the most central and defining activity of all research traditions. As will become clear, the very diverse reasoning strategies of theology and the sciences clearly overlap in their shared quests for intelligible problem solving, including problem solving on an empirical, experiential, and conceptual level.     

The Market as “God”?

This article explores two lines of inquiry. The first is related to the production of human subjectivities in relation to market ideology and practices. What kinds of human subjectivities are produced when people worship the market as “God”? The market and its values of hyper‐competition become idols as people overly direct their energy toward earning and accumulating financial and social capital in order to find meaning and worth. Worshiping the market reflects a perverted anthropology. The second line of inquiry is related to the language of sacrifice intrinsic to both free market logic and Western Christian theology. Could Christian theology, even unwittingly, reinforce the problem of sacrifice in market logic, which justifies forms of human loss (such as chronic poverty) in order to promote long‐term economic growth and greater human wellbeing?      

WHAT IS “MYTHIC REALITY”?

Abstract. The topic of the March 2011 symposium in Zygon is “The Mythic Reality of the Autonomous Individual.” Yet few of the contributors even discuss “mythic reality.” Of the ones who do, most cavalierly use “myth” dismissively, as simply a false belief. Rather than reconciling myth with reality, they oppose myth to reality. Their view of myth is by no means unfamiliar or unwarranted, but they need to recognize other views of myth and to defend their own. Above all, they need to appreciate the grip that any belief aptly labelled myth has—a grip that holds at least as much for a false belief as for a true one.     

A “RESOLUTE” LATER WITTGENSTEIN?

Abstract: “Resolute readings” initially started life as a radical new approach to Wittgenstein's early philosophy, but are now starting to take root as a way of interpreting the later writings as well—a trend exemplified by Stephen Mulhall's Wittgenstein's Private Language (2007) as well as by Phil Hutchinson's “What's the Point of Elucidation?” (2007) and Rom Harré's “Grammatical Therapy and the Third Wittgenstein” (2008). The present article shows that there are neither good philosophical nor compelling exegetical grounds for accepting a resolute reading of the later Wittgenstein's work. It is possible to make sense of Wittgenstein's philosophical method without either ascribing to him an incoherent conception of “substantial nonsense” or espousing the resolute readers' preferred option of nonsense austerity. If the interpretation here is correct, it allows us to recognize Wittgenstein's radical break with the philosophical tradition without having to characterize his achievements in purely therapeutic fashion.