The unbearable dispersal of being: Narrativity and personal identity in borderline personality disorder

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Borderline personality disorder (BPD) is characterized by severe disturbances in a subject’s sense of identity. Persons with BPD suffer from...     

Approach and avoidance sexual motives: Implications for personal and interpersonal well‐being

This research provides the first empirical investigation of how approach and avoidance motives for engaging in sex in intimate relationships are associated with personal well‐being and relationship quality. A 2‐week daily experience study of college student dating couples tested specific predictions from the theoretical model and included both longitudinal and dyadic components. Whereas approach sex motives were positively associated with personal and interpersonal well‐being, avoidance sex motives were negatively associated with well‐being. Engaging in sex for avoidance motives was particularly detrimental to the maintenance of relationships over time. Perceptions of a partner's motives for sex were also associated with well‐being. Implications for the conceptualization of sexuality in relationships along these two dimensions are discussed.     

Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: going to extremes and being oneself

Study 1 participants' self-integrity (C. M. Steele. 1988) was threatened by deliberative mind-set (S. E. Taylor & P. M. Gollwitzer, 1995) induced uncertainty. They masked the uncertainty with more extreme conviction about social issues. An integrity-repair exercise after the threat, however, eliminated uncertainty and the conviction response. In Study 2, the same threat caused clarified values and more self-consistent personal goals. Two other uncertainty-related threats, mortality salience and temporal discontinuity, caused similar responses: more extreme intergroup bias in Study 3, and more self-consistent personal goals and identifications in Study 4. Going to extremes and being oneself are seen as 2 modes of compensatory conviction used to defend against personal uncertainty. Relevance to cognitive dissonance and authoritarianism theories is discussed, and a new perspective on terror managenment theory (J. Greenberg, S. Solomom, & T. Pyszczynski, 1997) is proposed.     

On being peripheral: effects of identity insecurity on personal and collective self‐esteem

We examined collective self‐esteem and personal self‐esteem as a function of anticipated changes in one's prototypicality within a valued ingroup. In Study 1 (N = 80), all participants received information that they were currently peripheral group members. Expectations for the future were then manipulated, with some expecting to become more prototypical and others expecting they would be even more peripheral in the future. In addition, the source of future movement (either the group or the self) was varied. It was found that when the group was the source of movement, those who expected to shift to a more prototypical position in the future had higher collective self‐esteem than those who expected to change to an even more peripheral position. In contrast, those who anticipated an even more peripheral position had higher personal self‐esteem than those who expected to become more prototypical in the future. In Study 2 (N = 100), intragroup position at present (peripheral versus prototypical) and future intragroup position (peripheral versus prototypical) were manipulated orthogonally. It was found that future expectations only affected self‐esteem among those with an insecure current identity, but not among those who were currently prototypical of the ingroup. In addition, ingroup favoritism was mediated by self‐esteem changes among those whose identity was insecure. The importance of a dynamic framework for investigating group processes is stressed. Copyright © 2002 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Examining the indirect effects of religious orientations on well‐being through personal locus of control

Religiosity often positively correlates with well‐being. Some orientations towards religion may, however, adversely affect well‐being by decreasing perceptions of personal locus of control—a critical antecedent of mental health. We examined this possibility in a New Zealand‐based national sample of religiously identified adults (N = 1486). As predicted, fundamentalism had a negative indirect effect on life satisfaction, but a positive indirect effect on psychological distress. Conversely, people's intrinsic religious orientation had a positive indirect effect on life satisfaction, but a negative indirect effect on psychological distress. Notably, all four indirect effects were transmitted through personal, but not God, locus of control. These results highlight the diversity of religious orientations and show that religious orientations that deemphasize people's personal locus of control have negative consequences for well‐being.     

Religiosity and the value of being moral: Understanding the meaning of morality through a personal values perspective

We demonstrate how religiosity predicts relationships between personal values and perceptions of morality in four studies across two cultures (Jews in Israel and mainly Christians in the US). In Studies 1A (N = 337) and 1B (N = 200), we explored the commonalities and differences between religious and non-religious participants in the association between values and the importance of being moral. In Studies 2A (N = 131) and 2B (N = 250), we tested the role of religiosity in the association between values and evaluations of others’ morality. Power (negatively) and Benevolence (positively) were associated with morality across levels of religiosity. The associations with Conservation were more positive for more religious participants; the associations with Universalism were more positive for less religious participants. Finally, the associations with at least one of the Openness-to-change values were more negative if a person was more religious. Studies 2A and 2B showed these associations existed over and above differences in personal values.     

On being motivated

Merleau-Ponty’s notion of being motivated or solicited to act has recently been the focus of extensive investigation, yet work on this topic has tended to take the general notion of being motivated for granted. In this paper, I shall outline an account of what it is to be motivated. In particular, I shall focus on the relation between the affective character of states of being motivated and their intentional content, i.e. how things appear to the agent. Drawing on Husserl’s discussion of perceptual awareness, I suggest that the intentional content of states of being motivated has a horizonal structure, in which both affective and perceptual features are implied. In states of being motivated, the agent becomes aware of certain possibilities for action, towards which they feel drawn. This structure is what Merleau-Ponty refers to as the “intentional arc” (1962, 136).     

Conformity on a visual task as a function of personal novelty on attitudinal dimensions and being reminded of the object status of self

An experiment was conducted to test the proposition that a person's level of conformity on a visual task was related to his level of personal novelty on attitudinal dimensions and being reminded that he was an object in the world. Subjects were led to believe that either 95, 50, or 5% of a population of 10,000 held the same position as they did on 10 important attitudinal dimensions. Subjects were then asked to participate in an experiment on visual perception. In this portion of the study, subjects were led to believe that two other subjects consistently disagreed with their estimates and were either shown or not shown their live image on a television monitor. The results of the experiment indicated a positive relationship between novelty on the attitudinal dimensions and both frequency and intensity of conformity on the visual task. As novelty increased, conformity increased. In addition, subjects shown their image on a television monitor during the conformity trials conformed to the bogus others to a greater extent than subjects not shown their image on a television monitor.     

On being attached

We often use the term “attachment” to describe our emotional connectedness to objects in the world. We become attached to our careers, to our homes, to certain ideas, and perhaps most importantly, to other people. Interestingly, despite its import and ubiquity in our everyday lives, the topic of attachment per se has been largely ignored in the philosophy literature. I address this lacuna by identifying (a type of) attachment as a rich “mode of mattering” that can help to inform certain aspects of agency and emotion. First, drawing on insights from Ancient stoicism and developmental and clinical psychology, I suggest that the relevant form of attachment involves a felt need for its object and a particular relationship between the object and the attached agent’s sense of security. I then argue that these features serve to distinguish the attitude from the more philosophically familiar notion of caring. Finally, I show that recognizing this form of attachment as a distinct mode of mattering has important implications for understanding grief.     

When time becomes personal. Aging and personal identity

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - Aging is an integral part of human existence. The problem of aging addresses the most fundamental coordinates of our lives but also the ones of the...     

On being liked on the web and in the “real world”: Consistency in first impressions across personal webpages and spontaneous behavior

With recent growth in the use of personal webpages and online social networking, people are changing the way that they meet and form impressions of each other. The current research examines the correspondence in impressions formed from face-to-face interaction and personal webpages. As expected, people liked by interaction partners were also liked on the basis of their Facebook^® pages. Across the two social mediums, social perceivers utilized analogous criteria in forming impressions: interaction partners and webpage viewers liked people who were socially expressive in face-to-face interaction and personal webpages, respectively. Finally, webpage expressivity and webpage self-disclosure were independent constructs, predictive of face-to-face counterparts: nonverbal expressivity and verbal self-disclosure. Implications for the changing landscape of social perception are discussed.