How Bad Is It? Perceptions of the Relationship Impact of Different Types of Internet Sexual Activities

Internet sex has become a ubiquitous phenomenon that is affecting couples and families. Eight scenarios (from visiting various adult web sites to having sex) involving a male or female character in a committed relationship were presented in a survey format. Participants (n = 242) rated each scenario in terms of emotional and physical involvement, amount of distraction from the primary relationship, and whether the respondent considered the scenario to be an affair. Results indicate that perceptions of internet activities differed depending on the type of internet sexual activity, although the majority of the internet sexual activities were considered to be highly emotional involving, a distraction to the relationship, and sexual in nature, though no physical contact was involved. The gender of the character in the scenario had no effect on participants' responses. Women tended to see the scenarios as being more serious than men. Clinical implications are discussed.     

Israeli Psychotherapy,Politics and Activism: Is There a Way Out of the Trap?

This article examines psychotherapy in context—political, social, cultural and historical. It does so by taking a close look at the Israeli psychotherapeutic community and how it changed over the years. Through this narrative and analysis the author wishes to illustrate how social-political context and professional practices plug into each other. It will be demonstrated how at difficult times when their country faces internal and external hardship and threats, Israeli psychologists have tended to withdraw and, whether unwittingly or not, affirm and support the status quo. This is paradoxical: when mostly needed psychotherapists may become silent and socially or politically passive. A possible way out of this trap, through a change in psychotherapists’ professional position and views, will be discussed. In addition, a politically sensitive alternative will be presented, one that may enable psychotherapists to maintain an independent praxis, which models a proactive and optimistic stance while serving society as agents of personal, social and political change.     

Is Suicide Bereavement Different? A Reassessment of the Literature

The question of whether suicide bereavement is different from mourning after other types of deaths has important theoretical and clinical implications. Some recent literature reviews have argued that the differences may be minimal. In contrast, this article suggests that suicide bereavement is distinct in three significant ways: the thematic content of the grief, the social processes surrounding the survivor, and the impact suicide has on family systems. In addition, problems in the methodology used to compare different bereavement experiences are addressed. Some clinical implications of these conclusions, including the need for homogeneous support groups, psychoeducational services, and family and social network interventions are also discussed.     

Students’ Perceptions of Sexual Harassment: Is It Harassment Only If the Offender Is a Man and the Victim Is a Woman?

The present study investigated 3 potential sources of variability in university students' perceptions of sexual harassment in hypothetical professor-student scenarios: raters'gender, gender of the professor and student, and rater' own sexual harassment. Participants were most likely to identify the interactions as harassment when they involved a male offender and a female victim. They were less likely to label the behaviors as harassment when they occurred between members of the same gender or between a female professor and a male student. Women were more open to viewing the scenarios as harassment and men were unlikely to view the interactions between a female professor and a male student as harassment. Personal history of sexual harassment did not influence participants' perceptions.     

Competing Conceptions of Diagnostic Reasoning – Is There a Way Out?

Diagnostic errors are more frequently a result of the clinician's failure to combine medical knowledge adequately than of data inaccuracy. Diagnostic reasoning studies are valuable to understand and improve diagnostic reasoning. However, most diagnostic reasoning studies are characterized by some limitations which make these studies seem more simple than diagnostic reasoning in real life situations actually is. These limitations are connected both to the failure to acknowledge components of knowledge used in clinical practice as well as to acknowledge the physician-patient relationship's influence on clinical knowledge and on the reasoning process itself. In addition the modes of reasoning described in these studies frequently is oversimplified. In this paper three simplistic and competing models of diagnostic reasoning are analyzed and criticized, followed by an evaluation of two alternative models proposing a combined view.     

Is Satan a Lover of the Good?

There are, apparently, two inherited stories of intentional action. On the motivational story, intentional agents are pursuers of goals. On the evaluative story, intentional agents are pursuers of value. In a spirit of unification, we might try to supplement the motivational story with the evaluative one – or even collapse the former into the latter. The problem with such moves is that they cannot accomodate certain pathologies of agency. Thus, they convert apparently perverse agents – like Satan and self-haters – into closet lovers of the good. I argue that pathological agents like Satan and self-haters are not lovers of the good. They are just lovers of success in action. We can make sense of such agents as practical reasoners because the cares that constitute us as practical reasoners are plural.     

Is Life Skill Development a By-Product of Sport Participation? Perceptions of Youth Sport Coaches

The purpose of this study was to understand youth sport coaches’ perceptions of life skill development. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 23 youth sport coaches across 5 organizations. Analyses revealed 4 themes based on coaches’ perceptions: (a) life skills are a by-product of sport participation, and transfer “just happens”; (b) if intentionally addressed, it's reactive; (c) coaches recognize the value of intentionally teaching life skills; and (d) coaches identify challenges associated with using an explicit approach to teaching life skills. Results provide evidence for the state of the current sport context and highlight areas for coach education related to life skills integration.     

Lord,When did We See You? Towards a Topography of the Visual

As it outlines a Christian topography of the visual, this article argues that the gaze cultivated by attention to art and the gaze of mercy bear important affinities, even if particular artworks exhibit tensions with mercy. Drawing on Augustine, Dionysius and Gregory of Nyssa, we argue that in this topography, the visual registers in multiple depths, which we explore through four distinct moments: seeing, seeing the excess, seeing the claim and seeing the divine. By analyzing the gaze of art and the gaze of mercy together with reference to artworks created during and about El Salvador’s civil war (1980–92) – the homilies of Óscar Romero, the poetry of Carolyn Forché and the visual art of Fernando Llort – we show that the gaze of art echoes and can prepare for the gaze of mercy, particularly in the first three moments, for which there are direct analogies between art and mercy’s gazes. There is no such direct analogy in the fourth moment of seeing the divine, yet even here there is a faint foreshadowing that connects art to mercy.     

Is the Reasonable Person a Person of Virtue?

Res Publica - The ‘reasonable person standard’ (RPS) is often called on in difficult legal cases as the last resource to be appealed to when other solutions run out. Its complexity...     

Is Folk Psychology Different?

In this paper, I seek to refute arguments for the idea that folk psychological explanation, i.e., the explanation of actions, beliefs and desires in terms of one another, should be understood as being of a different character than ordinary scientific explanations, a view defended most prominently in analytical philosophy by Donald Davidson and John McDowell. My strategy involves arguing both against the extant arguments for the idea that FP must be construed as giving such explanations, and also against the very notion of such a different kind of explanation. I argue first that the in some sense a priori and conceptual nature of folk psychological principles does not support the idea that these are other than empirical generalisations, by appeal to recent nativist ideas in cognitive science and to Lewis's conception of the meaning of theoretical terms. Second, I argue that there is no coherent sense in which folk psychological explanations can be seen as normative. Thirdly, I examine the putatively holistic character of the mental and conclude that that too fails to provide any cogent reasons for viewing folk psychological explanations as different from other kinds of explanation.     

Associations of Parent–Child Anxious and Depressive Symptoms When a Caregiver Has a History of Depression

We examined the associations between parent and child anxious and depressive symptoms controlling for co-occurring symptoms in both. One hundred and four families participated, including 131 9–15 year old children considered at risk for anxiety and/or depression due to a history of depression in a parent. Parents and children completed questionnaires assessing depressive and anxious symptoms. Linear Mixed Models analyses controlling for the alternate parent and child symptoms indicated that both parent and child depressive symptoms and parent and child anxious symptoms were positively associated. Parental depressive symptoms were not positively associated with child anxious symptoms, and parental anxious symptoms were not positively associated with child depressive symptoms. The findings provide evidence for positive specific links between parent and child development of same-syndrome, but not cross-syndrome, symptoms when a caregiver has a history of depression.     

Is the Counselor a Woman?

The 16 PF was administered to 75 male and 43 female high school counselors to determine whether they manifested the femininity (loving receptivity) and the masculinity (potency) that have been said to be important to the counseling role. The men differed significantly from male norms in the feminine direction on warmth, tender-mindedness, and trust. They deviated significantly in the direction of potency on brightness, ego strength, adequacy, and tranquility, but away from potency on caution and group-dependency. The women differed significantly from female norms in the feminine direction only on trust, but in the masculine direction on assertiveness, venturesomeness, and practicality. They deviated significantly in the direction of personal strength on brightness, ego strength, superego strength, adequacy, experimentation, and tranquility.     

Is the allure of self-esteem a mirage after all?

Comments on the original article "Do people's self-views matter? Self-concept and self-esteem in everyday life," by W. B. Swann, Jr., C. Chang-Schneider, and K. L. McClarty. Swann et al argued that people's self-views, and their global self-esteem in particular, yield a suite of behavioral effects that are beneficial to the individual and to society at large. The Swann et al article is the latest link in a debate on the causal utility of self-esteem. Specifically, the article is a reply to a report published by the American Psychological Society Task Force on Self-Esteem (Baumeister, Campbell, Krueger, & Vohs, 2003). As members of that task force, the current authors wish to express their broad agreement with Swann et al. At the same time, in the comment presented here, they clarify pockets of disagreement.     

When Is More Better?

Abstract— We examine three determinants of the relationship between the magnitude of a stimulus and a person's subjective "value" of that stimulus: the process by which value is assessed (either by feeling or by calculation), the evaluability of the relevant magnitude variable (whether the desirability of a given level of that variable can be evaluated independently), and the mode of evaluation (whether stimuli are encountered and evaluated jointly or separately). Reliance on feeling, lack of evaluability, and separate evaluation lead to insensitivity to magnitude. An analysis invoking these factors provides a novel account for why people typically become less sensitive to changes in the magnitude of a stimulus as magnitude increases.     

Is Humility a Virtue in the Context of Sport?

I define humility as a virtue that includes both proper self‐assessment and a self‐lowering other‐centeredness. I then argue that humility, so understood, is a virtue in the context of sport, for several reasons. Humility is a component of sportspersonship, deters egoism in sport, fuels athletic aspiration and risk‐taking, fosters athletic forms of self‐knowledge, decreases the likelihood of an athlete seeking to strongly humiliate her opponents or be weakly humiliated by them, and can motivate an athlete to achieve greater levels of excellence in her sport. In the context of team sports, humility can contribute to an athlete being a better teammate, foster unity amidst diversity within a team, and contribute to the overall moral and athletic excellence of a team. I also argue that an individual who is truly the world's greatest athlete can know and communicate this truth, while remaining humble.