‘I am–we are’: personal and social pathways to further study, work and family life

This project explores the apparent layers in motivation for young people’s plans in order to extend Pathways Theory. We bring together personal, relational and group motivation to explain the planned pathways to study, work and family life. Location was an Australian town, close to the national socio-economic average, to control broad social factors. Participants (N = 78) were 12 to 18 year-old girls and boys (mean age 14.5 years). Results provide little support for popular explanations based on demographic factors (age, gender, family background) and broad personal indicators of self esteem and mood. Instead, the results support proposed differential explanations for pathways to study, work and family life. In particular, personal aspects of identity and self concepts, social expectations and group identity influence young people’s pathways to further study. Group uniqueness explains pathways to paid work, yet experience of higher education tends to limit plans for family life. Findings support inclusion of personal, relational and group motivations in developing innovative theories of pathways motivation. Ongoing work considers common and distinct explanations across socio-economic contexts.     

Executive function in Parkinson’s disease: contributions of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways to action and motivation

Disruption of the dorsal frontostriatal pathways in Parkinson’s disease (PD) is associated with impairments in motivation, as well as in executive function. The goal of this study was to investigate whether these impairments are related and, if so, whether the disruption of frontostriatal pathways compromises the ability to process the motivational aspects of feedback in such tasks. In Experiment 1, informative feedback improved the performance of young, healthy participants in a task-switching paradigm. This task-switching paradigm was then used in Experiment 2 to test whether feedback would improve the performance of 17 PD patients and age-matched controls. The PD group benefitted from feedback to the same degree as control participants; however, depression scores on the Beck Depression Inventory were significantly related to feedback usage, especially when response selection demands were high. Regardless of feedback, PD patients were more impaired when response demands were high than in an equally difficult condition with low action demands. These results suggest that response selection is a core impairment of insufficient dopamine to the dorsal frontal striatal pathways.     

Patients’ Initial Doubts, Reservations and Objections to the ABC’s of REBT and their Application

This exploratory research set out to develop an initial framework and categorization scheme for understanding patients’ initial doubts, reservations and objections to the ABC’s of REBT and their application. 60 patients were asked to write down their doubts following a pre-therapy “Introduction to REBT” session. Subsequently, an emergent content analysis was carried out to identify main themes. The content analysis revealed five general categories, of which the two largest ones concerned theoretical doubts about the ABC model, and doubts about putting the ABC model into practice. Further sub-categorization revealed a variety of concerns that related to these categories. For example, a large proportion of doubts about putting the ABC model into practice were sub-categorized as concerning the perceived difficulty of doing so. In turn, this sub-category contained further sub-categories of difficulty-related beliefs.

Let’s play the blame game: The distinct effects of personal standards and self-critical perfectionism on attributions of success and failure during goal pursuit

In the present study, we examined whether personal standards and self-critical perfectionism differentially related to how people attributed their success and failures in pursuing their personal goals. In two studies (Ns = 185 and 240), participants set three week-long (Study 1) and semester-long (Study 2) goals, and at the end of the week or semester answered questions about goal status, internal and external attributions, and likelihood to reset the goal. Mulitlevel analyses showed that self-critical perfectionism was related to attributing goal attainment to external sources; this was not the case for failure or abandonment. Conversely, personal standards perfectionism was related to attributing failure more to external sources. Overall, these results highlight differences in how perfectionism influences the use of the self-serving bias.     

A Child Therapist at Work: Playing,Talking, and the Therapist’s Inner Dialogue

The author reflects on his work with a child patient struggling with affect regulation, loss, and his adoption through a detailed process account of the treatment with a focus on the therapist’s inner dialogue in relation to the child’s play and words—how each affects the other. Drawing from his personal use of clinical theory stemming from multiple theoretical influences, the author shows how his associations, identifications, and tentative formulations inform his work and how the various transference/countertransference matrices influence his inner dialogue. Attention is paid to the movement from the therapist as an object within the patient’s closed system to a system that gradually becomes more open, in which the patient is able to take in the therapist’s own person as they come upon various ways to communicate and build a narrative together.     

Passion, Pain, and Purpose: One Man’s Response to the Passion of the Lord

The purpose of this article is to review and comment on the book The Passion of the Lord: African American Reflections. Edited by James A. Noel and Matthew V. Johnson, and published by Facets (an imprint of Fortress Press: Minneapolis), the book explores the unique perspective of African American thought in relation to the story of the Passion of Christ, and the cultural aesthetics which allow Christ’s suffering on the cross to become a powerful agent of spiritual strength, hope, love, and faith. This article records one African American man’s deep personal engagement of, and resonance to, the material as he validates, affirms the important insights of the seven theologians presented. Through personal observation and experience, poetry and relevant cultural idioms, the author honors work which, ultimately, contributes to a vitally important self-understanding of who African Americans are now, where they are now, and how they have come to be the people they are now in America.

Anorexia Nervosa and the Analyst’s Paternal Function: Response to Schoen,Zerbe, and Boulware

To expand upon the commentaries by Schoen, Zerbe, and Boulware (this issue), I clarify my thinking about the entropic body as a defensive structure. I then introduce my own theorizing about the relationship between agency and anorexia nervosa. In agreement with Schoen that these patients relegate their agency to the somatic realm, I highlight the aggressivity of that agency. Amplifying Zerbe’s recognition of the patient’s “father hunger,” I point out the importance of the paternal presence in helping these patients to modulate their aggression and, in the process, develop their agency.     

Introduction to the Symposium on Sabine Roeser’s Risk,Technology, and Moral Emotions

Science and Engineering Ethics -     

Art history, the problem of style, and Arnold Hauser’s contribution to the history and sociology of knowledge

Much of Arnold Hauser??s work on the social history of art and the philosophy of art history is informed by a concern for the cognitive dimension of art. The present paper offers a reconstruction of this aspect of Hauser??s project and identifies areas of overlap with the sociology of knowledge??where the latter is to be understood as both a separate discipline and a going intellectual concern. Following a discussion of Hauser??s personal and intellectual background, as well as of the shifting political and academic setting of his work, the paper addresses one of Hauser??s central questions, viz. how best to square a thoroughgoing commitment to the social nature of art with the reality of successive artistic styles, given that the latter seem to be characterizable on purely formal grounds. This is followed by a discussion of Hauser??s conflicted views on the relation between art, science, and technology. This injects a tension into Hauser??s work, due to his initial reluctance to explain just how the aesthetic and the cognitive realms relate. The final part of the paper, through a closer examination of the analogies and disanalogies that Hauser sees between art history and the history of science, attempts to give a positive answer????on Hauser??s behalf??, as it were??to the question of whether art may be credited with a specific cognitive dimension of its own, and if so, what its contribution to our cognitive enterprise may consist in.     

Causal and Constitutive Relations, and the Squaring of Coleman’s Diagram: Reply to Vromen

We respond to Jack Vromen’s (this issue) critique of our discussion of the missing micro-foundations of work on routines and capabilities in economics and management research. Contrary to Vromen, we argue that (1) inter-level relations can be causal, and that inter-level causal relations may also obtain between routines and actions and interactions; (2) there are no macro-level causal mechanisms; and (3) on certain readings of the notion of routines and capabilities, these may be macro causes.     

Returning to the Infinite—Kohut’s Empathy,Levinas’s Other,and the Ethical Imperative: Discussion of Articles by Doris Brothers and Joseph Lichtenberg

This discussion interweaves the ethics of Emanuel Levinas with the empathic sensibility of Heinz Kohut’s psychoanalytic vision as a unifying lens that brings into sharp focus the ethical message of the articles by Brothers and Lichtenberg. Drawing on Raanan Kulka’s ideas on the permanent oscillation between states of separateness (emergence) and transcendent ethical states of dissolving, the principle of always returning to the infinite state of absolute responsibility to the other is brought forth as a fundamental ethical imperative that captures the ethical/spiritual center of the two articles. Brothers’ account of promise-making and Lichtenberg’s autobiographical account of his activism are seen to be reflections of the latter ethical imperative.     

Gender,age, attendance at a place of worship and young people’s attitudes towards the Bible

This article discusses the outcomes of a questionnaire survey which sought to ascertain the attitudes of young people towards the Bible. One thousand and sixty‐six pupils from Years 6, 9 and 12 in nine English schools participated. The young people’s attitudes are discussed in relation to gender, age and attendance at a place of worship. The research team found that being female, in Year 6 and attending a place of worship very often are factors associated with the most positive attitudes towards the Bible, while being male, in Year 9 and never attending a place of worship are associated with the least positive attitudes. The article also discusses the difficulty of explaining individual correlations regarding age and gender.     

On Latour’s Social Theory and Theory of Society,and His Contribution to Saving the World

Latour is widely considered a critic and renewer of research in the social sciences. The ecologically minded Left has also acclaimed him as a theorist interested in bringing nature back both into sociological theory and into society and politics. To enable a more detailed discussion of Latour’s claims, I will here outline his theory and the ways in which it is related to classical theory, such as Durkheim, and the methodology of the interpretive paradigm, such as Schütz. My thesis is that Latour’s empirical studies may be read as unfolding the methodological consequences of the interpretive paradigm, and that his early work is a brilliant proof of Durkheim’s theory of the morphology of social facts. Latour has now elaborated the insights he gained from concrete laboratory studies toward a general theory of the social, of society, and of politics. These generalizations have made his theory at least partly problematic. The political implication of Latour’s theory of society is a generalization of the call for equality to encompass everything; in other words, Latour criticizes the exclusion of nonhuman entities from political representation. The paper closes by discussing the political consequences of this proposal.