Durkheim Revisited: “Why Do Women Kill Themselves?”

Durkheim divided suicide into four social types; egoistic, anomic, fatalistic, and altruistic assigning the first two to modern, western society while relegating the last two to pre-industrial social orders. However, contemporary studies of female suicidal behavior and depression show that such women exhibit personality characteristics of low self-esteem, passivity, dependence and living vicariously for others which correspond to the behavioral indices of impersonalism, submissiveness, passivity, and obedience that produce the lack of individuation characteristic of Durkheim's altruistic/fatalistic suicide categories. On this basis, the author suggests that altruistic/fatalistic suicide may even in the modern world be relevant to the explanation of female suicidal behavior, a hypothesis which, if true, would support the contention that "men and women inhibit different social worlds."     

Where is the “D” in dissonance?1

The experiment tested the hypothesis that cognitive dissonance has a general drive arousal component which facilitates performance on simple cognitive tasks and impairs performance on complex cognitive tasks After writing a consonant or a dissonant essay dealing with proposed changes in university parking regulations, subjects were given either a simple or a complex task (rote memory or creativity). To maximize dissonance, free choice regarding participation was deliberately emphasized, resulting in a high proportion of subjects who refused to comply with the request Data from refusers were retained and compared with data obtained from compliers Appropriate control groups were employed in order to ascertain whether the results were attributable to the process of self-selection among complier and refuser subjects The dissonance manipulation was successful subjects who wrote dissonant essays subsequently displayed more favorable attitudes toward the parking proposal Their performance on complex cognitive tasks was not unpaired, however, nor did they perform better on simple cognitive tasks than did subjects who experienced no dissonance Subjects who refused to write dissonant essays did better on the complex task than subjects who complied in either the consonant or dissonant conditions Data from the control groups indicated that refusers did not differ from compliers in their initial attitudes toward the proposal nor in their ability to perform the complex cognitive task The results seem to be due to the facilitating effects of refusing to comply with the dissonance instructions, and suggest that the practice of eliminating subjects who refuse to comply may result in the loss of some highly informative data     

“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.     

Just How Unlawful is “Euthanasia”?

Those who campaign for law reform to permit "euthanasia" may seek different things and at least some of what they seek may already be permissible under the criminal law of England and Wales. In this paper I examine one means whereby the criminal law delivers outcomes acceptable to the euthanasia lobby, that is the curious notion of "causation" deployed by the law, which adds a value override to the more usual notion of factual causation such that, for example, if medical treatment falls within the acceptable range as normal and proper, the pre–existing injury or illness is treated as exclusively the cause of death and the doctor escapes criminal liability, even where the medical treatment will shorten life to the certain knowledge, possibly even the wish, of the doctor. Thus the law may already be delivering a range of outcomes — euthanasia in a weak sense — acceptable to the euthanasia lobby. If so, it achieves this by stealth. That is inappropriate to the doctor–patient relationship, which is one of trust. So there is a strong case for greater transparency. Moreover, there are limits to the acceptable outcomes which an unreformed criminal law can deliver and in a range of cases the criminal law condemns the doctor to impotence and the patient to a prolonged, miserable and undignified death. So there is also a case for going beyond the current law and legalising euthanasia in a strong sense.     

What Are the “True” Statistics of the Environment?

A widespread assumption in the contemporary discussion of probabilistic models of cognition, often attributed to the Bayesian program, is that inference is optimal when the observer's priors match the true priors in the world—the actual “statistics of the environment.” But in fact the idea of a “true” prior plays no role in traditional Bayesian philosophy, which regards probability as a quantification of belief, not an objective characteristic of the world. In this paper I discuss the significance of the traditional Bayesian epistemic view of probability and its mismatch with the more objectivist assumptions about probability that are widely held in contemporary cognitive science. I then introduce a novel mathematical framework, the observer lattice, that aims to clarify this issue while avoiding philosophically tendentious assumptions. The mathematical argument shows that even if we assume that “ground truth” probabilities actually do exist, there is no objective way to tell what they are. Different observers, conditioning on different information, will inevitably have different probability estimates, and there is no general procedure to determine which one is right. The argument sheds light on the use of probabilistic models in cognitive science, and in particular on what exactly it means for the mind to be “tuned” to its environment.     

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.     

How Interesting is the “Boring Problem” for Luck Egalitarianism?

Imagine a two‐person distributive case in which Ernest's choices yield X and Bertie's choices yield X + Y, producing an income gap between them of Y. Neither Ernest nor Bertie is responsible for this gap of Y, since neither of them has any control over what the other agent chooses. This is what Susan Hurley calls the “Boring Problem” for luck egalitarianism. Contrary to Hurley's relatively dismissive treatment of it, it is contended that the Boring Problem poses a deep problem for standard luck egalitarianism. To counter it, luck egalitarianism needs to be recast as a baseline‐relative theory. This new version of luck egalitarianism is then put to work against some significant problems that have been encountered by luck egalitarianism: Saul Smilansky's “Paradox of the Baseline,” the “Partiality Worry,” and the “Pluralism Worry.” But baseline‐relative luck egalitarianism is not without problems of its own.     

“Did You Bring the Yarmulke for the Cabbage Patch Kid?” The Idiomatic Communication of Young Lovers

The relationships of various aspects of idiomatic communication to the interpersonal sentiments of 100 romantically involved heterosexual couples were examined. After completing measures of love, liking, commitment, and closeness, the partners of each dyad were questioned about any words, phrases, or nonverbal signs they had created that had meaning unique to their relationship. The 647 idioms reported were coded for their form (i.e., verbal versus nonverbal), context of use (i.e., private idioms, which were used only when others were not present, versus public idioms, which could be used in the presence of others), and function (i.e., confrontations, expressions of affection, labels for outsiders, nicknames, requests, sexual invitations, sexual references/euphemisms, and teasing insults). For both sexes, loving, commitment, and closeness were correlated with number of reported idioms that expressed affection, initiated sexual encounters, and referred to sexual matters. The only significant relationship for liking was between females' liking scores and the frequency of idioms with sexual referents. A log-linear analysis revealed a significant association between the function of the idioms and their form; labels for outsiders, nicknames, sexual references/euphemisms, and teasing insults were almost always verbal. A significant association was also found between idiom function and context of use; labels for outsiders and teasing insults were most often used in situations involving other people, whereas sexual invitations and sexual references/euphemisms were usually used in private situations. Finally, males were the inventors of idioms much more often than females.     

“Why My Child?”: Parental Attributions for Children's Special Needs1

Although research exists on how attributions for traumatic life events are related to adjustment, little has focused on parents’ attributions for their children's special needs. Parents were interviewed twice over 1 year about their attributions for their children's special needs. We used parents’ open-ended responses during the initial interview to construct a ratings survey for the second interview. Parents of children with Down's syndrome made attributions to genetic fluke, age, and fate/God's will; parents of autistic children made attributions to heredity and environment; parents of developmentally delayed children made attributions to medical problems and stress during pregnancy. Self-blame attributions and attributions to the environment were related to worse adjustment, whereas attributions to fate/God's will were related to better adjustment. Implications for family interventions and physicians 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.