“Talk and social structure” and “studies of work”

This paper takes up the current discussion and disagreement among ethnomethodologists and conversation analysts concerning how conversation analysis should address questions of social structure. It also discusses the question of whether conversation analysis can address questions concerning the organisation of work as developed in the studies of work program of ethnomethodologists. Five different types of ethnomethodological and conversation analytic studies are delineated in order to show that, altough they differ in problem selection and formulation, methodological preference and foci, they are not incompatible but complementary.Presented at the meetings of the International Institute for Ethnomethodology and Conversation Analysis, Bentley College, August 1992.     

“Exclusive” and “Inclusive” Visions of Heroism and Democracy

Two contrasting visions of heroism and democracy have evolved side by side. An “exclusive” vision presents democracy as involving heroic leadership by exceptional individuals along with relatively limited volunteer participation by ordinary citizens. This “exclusive” vision has been supported by the personalization of politics, as well as the increased importance of elite leaders in an era of candidate-centered democracy. In contrast, an “inclusive” vision depicts heroism as integral to everyday life for ordinary people, and widespread volunteer participation in social life as normative in all democracies. In a study we conducted that involved a nationally representative sample of 4,000 adults in the United States, about a third reported considerable volunteering, and one out of five reported having carried out a heroic act. A detailed analysis of types of volunteering and heroism supports an inclusive vision of heroism and democracy. However, a number of trends associated with globalization and technology suggest increasing challenges to this inclusive vision.     

“Tears of joy” and “tears and joy?” personal accounts of dimorphous and mixed expressions of emotion

In this investigation two distinct theoretical frameworks were applied to personal accounts of experiencing both smiles and crying, informally referred to as “tears of joy.” Dimorphous theory posits that such expressions arise from a positive or negative appraisal, and a single corresponding emotional experience. In contrast, mixed emotions theoretically arise from simultaneous positive and negative appraisals, positive and negative emotions, which might also culminate in two expressions of emotion. Across three experimental studies participants were exposed to a positive story, or a story with mixed positive and negative aspects. Participants reported on their appraisals, emotions, and personal accounts of their expressions. Explicit, freely-written, and implicit measures, as well as participants’ own explanations for their reported smiling and crying all converged on patterns supporting both dimorphous and mixed expressions of emotion. Data suggest the subjective experience of both “tears of joy” and “tears and joy.”     

The Logic of “Most” and “Mostly”

The paper suggests a modal predicate logic that deals with classical quantification and modalities as well as intermediate operators, like “most” and “mostly”. Following up the theory of generalized quantifiers, we will understand them as two-placed operators and call them determiners. Quantifiers as well as modal operators will be constructed from them. Besides the classical deduction, we discuss a weaker probabilistic inference “therefore, probably” defined by symmetrical probability measures in Carnap’s style. The given probabilistic inference relates intermediate quantification to singular statements: “Most S are P” does not logically entail that a particular individual S is also P, but it follows that this is probably the case, where the probability is not ascribed to the propositions but to the inference. We show how this system deals with single case expectations while predictions of statistical statements remain generally problematic.     

Children's judgment and recall of causal connectives: A developmental study of “because,” “so,” and “and”

The present study examined the acceptability judgments and recall performance of children aged 6,9, and 11 years with sentences expressing psychological cause-effect relations. Thirty-two sentences containing because medially, because initially, so, and and were generated from four clause pairs. Both probable and improbable event orders were used. The results indicated that children preferred because to so or and for statements of psychological causality. However, on both tasks, first and third graders frequently failed to attend to the temporal ordering specified by each sentence construction. The younger children also tended to judge all sentences acceptable, suggesting that they were concerned only with the probable association of event pairs, and not with the usual order of the events. Order of mention strategies did not occur in any group, suggesting that they arise only when children cannot make interpretations based on probable order of events. The data also indicated that the recall task is an unreliable index of rules for comprehension and production.This article is based on research conducted by the first author as partial fulfillment of the Ph.D. requirements for the Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Wisconsin.     

Auditory processing and perceptual abilities of “organic” and “functional” stutterers

The present investigation was undertaken to determine whether significant differences in auditory processing and perceptual abilities exist between (1) stutterers as a supposedly homogeneous group when compared with controls, (2) two differentiated subgroups of stutterers, and (3) either of the stuttering subgroups when separately compared with controls. Dichotic listening and masking level difference (MLD) tasks were administered to the two groups of school-age stutterers and an age-matched nonstuttering control group. Stuttering subjects were differentiated into “organic” and “functional” subgroups on the basis of neuropsychological test performances. Organic stutterers performed significantly poorer than did controls on one MLD experimental condition. Functional stutterers performed more like control subjects than like organic stutterers.     

Decision latencies of “same” and “different” judgments

When a subject is asked to judge whether two stimuli are “same” or“different,” the time he takes to reach the decision same is frequently unequal to the time he takes to reach the decision different. We studied this discrepancy as a function of several variables, including stimulus modality, “codability” vs.“noncodability” of test stimuli, interstimulus interval, and discrimination difficulty. Results of four different experiments performed on a total of 111 subjects showed codability and discrimination difficulty to be the most important factors. Stimuli that are codable (i.e., which can be categorized by absolute judgment) yield a shorter latency for decision same, and noncodable stimuli (i.e., those requiring a reference stimulus for categorization) yield a longer latency for decision same. The modality of test stimuli, the prothetic or metathetic nature of the dimension to be judged, and simultaneous vs. successive presentation of the stimuli appear not to be crucial factors.     

Discrimination of “Four” and “Two” by Pigeons

The Psychological Record - Two pigeons learned to respond to four objects while withholding response to two objects. The birds maintained their numerical discrimination when new objects were...     

Comparing the meanings of “if” and “all”

In this study, we compared the everyday meanings of conditionals (“if p then q”) and universally quantified statements (“all p are q”) when applied to sets of elements. The interpretation of conditionals was predicted to be directly related to the conditional probability, such that P(“if p then q”) = P(q|p). Quantified statements were assumed to have two interpretations. According to an instance-focused interpretation, quantified statements are equivalent to conditionals, such that P(“all p are q”) = P(q|p). According to a set-focused interpretation, “all p are q” is true if and only if every instance in set p is an instance of q, so that the statement would be accepted when P(q|p) = 1 and rejected when this probability was below 1. We predicted an instance-focused interpretation of “all” when the relation between p and q expressed a general law for an infinite set of elements. A set-focused interpretation of “all” was predicted when the relation between p and q expressed a coincidence among the elements of a finite set. Participants were given short context stories providing information about the frequency of co-occurrence of cases of p, q, not-p, and not-q in a population. They were then asked to estimate the probability that a statement (conditional or quantified) would be true for a random sample taken from that population. The probability estimates for conditionals were in accordance with an instance-focused interpretation, whereas the estimates for quantified statements showed features of a set-focused interpretation. The type of the relation between p and q had no effect on this outcome.     

A study of the “central life interests” and “work attachments” of male and female workers

This paper reports the results of a survey undertaken to investigate the overall central life interests and attachments to work of a sample of 1112 male and female employees of six Southern California manufacturing firms. The major conclusions suggested by this study are three. First, male employees have a slight tendency to be more work oriented in their overall central life interests than female employees. Second, female employees tend to be more strongly attached to extrinsic work features than male employees. Third, male-female differences in occupational status and perceived mobility opportunities probably account for gender differences in overall central life interests but these variables do not account for the tendency for women to be more strongly attached than men to extrinsic work features.     

Effector Organization and “Gradation” of Effort

It is proposed that an aspect of the effector organization process is the gradation of the response. Gradation was investigated in a hand cranking task by using strain-gauge and electromyographic recording techniques. Criteria of gradation were related to (a) the impulsive force at a particular point in the cycle of movement, (b) an index of the work done per unit of time, (c) the degree of muscle activity in each of the 6 muscles analyzed, and (d) an index of muscle activity based on the pen deflection of an EMG record. Further, two criteria of the organization of the force were employed — the force range and the consistency of the force range. None of the criteria of gradation was closely related to speed of performance, but the organizational criteria showed a trend toward being related to speed. The implications of these findings are discussed.     

Brainwashing and the persecution of “cults”

While the presence of authoritarian cults in our midst raises a number of social control and law and order issues, current controversies over cults contain substantial elements of mystification. Brainwashing is an inherently subjective metaphor that is used as a rationale for persecuting unpopular movements and defining religious converts as nonautonomous zombies who can be coerced for therapeutic purposes. While coercive persuasion models do have some heuristic value for the analysis of indoctrination in some authoritarian groups, assumptions regarding the alleged destruction of the free will of converts and the status of authoritarian religiosity as a medical pathology are not warranted.     

Co-Authoring “We-ness” and Stories of Intimacy

Drawing from narrative ideas and practices, we consider how individuals, couples, and couples with therapists co-author and co-edit stories of “we-ness,” a kind of relational consciousness, and intimacy in the context of research interviews. Adapting the “small story” narrative approach of Michael Bamberg, and recognizing researcher reflexivity, we present details from two separate studies into: (1) how cohabitating couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” in and beyond a research interview; and (2) how young married couples co-authored stories of “we-ness” by describing how they made significant decisions together through difficult yet successful conversations. Inviting such stories of “we-ness” can talk this intimacy into being. We relate the processes and outcomes of these studies to using a narrative approach to help individuals and couples with concerns about intimacy within the context of therapy.     

Semantic and pragmatic factors in the representation of “near” and “far”

The processing of two spatial terms which refer to proximity and distance, near and far, was investigated in a word-picture comparison task. Two alternative hypotheses were tested, one based on the notion of linguistic markedness and supporting the positive status of far, and the other based on semantic-pragmatic factors and proposing that near is the positive member of the pair. An analysis of the true-false decision latencies indicated that near was generally verified faster than far in judgments in which the terms were used to describe both ego-to-object and object-to-object distance. A third experiment addressed the question of whether the advantage obtained in the verification of near may be accounted for in terms of the priority of the interpersonal dimension of representation relative to the objective one. The results are discussed with regard to the semantic representation of the two words.     

Discussion of “Bread and Roses: Empathy and Recognition”

Rachel Kabasakalian McKay’s (this issue) important contribution focuses on a comparison of “empathy” and “recognition.” In her paper, McKay compares the sensibility of responsive attunement that she associates with empathy to the sensibility of distinctiveness that she connects to recognition. This discussion takes up this comparison of empathy and recognition associated with their embeddedness in self-psychology in contrast to relational and intersubjectivity theories. In the author’s view, the essential tension between autonomy and at-one-ness is necessary to both empathy and recognition and should not be split between them. Because recognition is Benjamin’s fundamental idea, the foundation of intersubjective recognition theory, it is incumbent on us to develop and elaborate the precise technical meanings, denotations, and connotations of this term, along with its clinical and social implications. The author believes that the key to this project is to see that, for Benjamin, recognition occurs throughout life across developmental levels and thus actually refers to quite different, although deeply related, phenomena.     

The Validity of the “Mother” and “Father” Cards of the Rorschach

This article presents analyses on psychometric properties of a recent revision of the Substance Abuse Subtle Screening Inventory (SASSI-3). Participants were 772 individuals from a range of clinical settings who were independently diagnosed according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (3rd ed., rev. [DSM-III-R]; American Psychiatric Association [APA], 1987) or DSM-IV (APA, 1994) criteria regarding the presence or absence of a substance-dependence disorder. A development sample (n = 391) was used to formulate SASSI-3 decision rules that yielded 95% agreement with clinical diagnoses of substance dependence. Correspondence with the criterion variable was shown to be 97% in a cross-validation sample (n = 381) from the same clinical settings. Convergent relations were demonstrated with a variety of other indexes of substance misuse, including clinical assessments of substance abuse history, alcohol and drug-related arrests, self-reported use of illicit drugs, and other instruments designed to screen for substance misuse. Further, logistic regression analyses indicated no significant differences in the overall accuracy of the SASSI-3 as a function of respondents' demographic characteristics or clinical ratings of respondents' level of adjustment and functioning (Global Assessment of Functioning ratings; APA, 1987, 1994).     

Discussion of “time and timekeeping in psychoanalysis and psychotherapy”

The American Journal of Psychoanalysis -