Role and group identity and adjustment to the possibility of running group disbandment

Role and group identities are distinct yet related constructs. Both identities may be relevant to exercise yet exercise identity research has focused mostly on exercise role identity.ObjectiveWe examined the relationship between role and group identity among runners. Further, the relationship of runner role and running group identity were examined relative to social cognitive and behavioural outcomes relative to running and the possibility of running group disbandment.DesignAn observational design was used.MethodRunning group members completed measures of runner role and running group identity, self-efficacy for running, and aspects of recent exercise and anticipated reactions to running group disbandment.ResultsRunner role and running group identity showed a small, positive correlation. Runner role identity was associated with self-efficacy for running, vigorous exercise, less group running and adaptive reactions to the possibility of group disbandment. Running group identity was associated with negative self-efficacy, greater percentage of runs being conducted with the group and maladaptive reactions to group disbandment. Runner role and running group identity did not interact in their relationship to exercise-related outcomes.ConclusionsIn the context of running, role and group identities are related but unique variables. Identification as a runner may not only be associated with exercise in the context of the group but may also have protective effects against disruptions to group running. Identification with the running group may compromise exercise in the face of group disbandment.     

Long-term effects of educational and peer discussion group interventions on adjustment to breast cancer.

The authors report a 3-year follow-up of the effects of 8-week support group interventions on the quality of life of women with early stage breast cancer. Shortly after diagnosis, women were randomly assigned to 1 of 4 conditions: control, education, peer discussion, and education plus peer discussion. The education group intervention focused on providing information to enhance control over the illness experience, whereas the peer discussion group intervention focused on providing emotional support through the expression of feelings. Consistent with the results that emerged 6 months after the interventions (V. S. Helgeson, S. Cohen, R. Schulz, & J. Yasko, 1999), the authors found that the benefits of the education intervention were maintained over a 3-year period (N=252), although effects dissipated with time. The authors continued to find no benefits of the peer discussion intervention, either alone or in combination with education.     

Rousseau's Insight

My comment makes a point out ofRousseau's original insight: that education forsocial participation ought to start within thestudent's lifeworld, and not, as in our days, with the immediatedemands of modern, time-ridden consumerculture. When time is turned into a commodityand place is turned into a transit point forpeople constantly on the move, presence in acommon lifeworld is lost. I take issue with thedominant thinking of education in terms of timeand efficiency, and suggest that we startthinking of education more in terms of placeand presence. I propose that modern thinkers ofeducation – of which I mention a few here –contributed significantly to the pedagogy ofplace or presence. I don't see time as a stringmade up of past-present-future, but rather asan expanding mental and pragmatic universe ofhere-and-nows. The term kairos catchesthis presence as the capacity for doing theright thing at the right moment, that is, themoment when the past has prepared the ground sothat the future can come as a gift. Thisconception is, I think, an important ground forthe idea of an education for citizenship.     

Insight and the analytic dyad

Insight reflects the unitary nature of psychic activity in contrast to the fragmentation created in abstracting categories for the purpose of study and discussion. The unique analytic clinical dyad offers a structure in which intrapsychic fragments can be actualized and integrated. As a result, the analyst's contribution is more crucially one of exploration than of revelation. Whatever the area of examination, past or present, the link to analytic immediacy offers the opportunity to make meanings meaningful, to convert known facts to psychic truths. The analyst's clinical task requires his private self-analysis as part of the collaborative exploration of how the patient's mind works. Higher level ego functioning, including acutely active remembering, is at times transiently loosened in order for the analyst to share in the clinical work of discovery. The words the analyst uses to communicate his understanding convey only approximate manifest meanings, though they structurally reveal deeper messages of importance to the patient. These verbal approximations help stimulate self-reflection in the analysand as a step in the process of gaining insight.     

Insight,Creativity, and Cognition: On Sternberg and Davidson's The Nature of Insight

I examined the professional life cycle, global influence, research orientation, and professional productivity of E. Paul Torrance. I also examined Torrance's motivations, worldview, and world orientation. In doing so, I made use of the evolving systematic approach in a limited way to establish the pattern of Torrance's creativity and evolution of some of his theoretical and empirical endeavors.     

Why Insight Fails

Psychoanalysts rely on insight to promote therapeutic change. However, even when a great deal of insight has been attained, significant change may not be forthcoming in some patients, more often in borderline-level patients. The author examines such a case with particular reference to E. Kris' major points on insight, including the role of the ego's integrative functions in the attainment and utilization of insight. The author contends that failure to utilize insight is overdetermined and not necessarily owing to impairments in the integrative functions or to resistance in all its expressions. The author postulates that failure to make progress is due to a combination of the strength of the unmodulated drives, general ego weakness, poor early object relations, particularly preverbal experience, and constitution, in interaction. The whole of the personality is implicated in the inability to utilize insight.     

Insight and strategy in multiple-cue learning

In multiple-cue learning (also known as probabilistic category learning) people acquire information about cue-outcome relations and combine these into predictions or judgments. Previous researchers claimed that people can achieve high levels of performance without explicit knowledge of the task structure or insight into their own judgment policies. It has also been argued that people use a variety of suboptimal strategies to solve such tasks. In three experiments the authors reexamined these conclusions by introducing novel measures of task knowledge and self-insight and using "rolling regression" methods to analyze individual learning. Participants successfully learned a four-cue probabilistic environment and showed accurate knowledge of both the task structure and their own judgment processes. Learning analyses suggested that the apparent use of suboptimal strategies emerges from the incremental tracking of statistical contingencies in the environment.     

Fallibility and Insight in Moral Judgment

This article investigates the relationship between moral judgments, fallibility, and imaginative insight. It will draw heavily from the canon of classical American philosophy, the members of which (from Ralph Waldo Emerson, to C.S. Peirce, E.L. Cabot, to Jane Addams, to John Dewey) took up this relationship as pivotally important in moral theorizing. It argues that the process of hypothesis formation—characterized as “insight” by Emerson and extended by Peirce in his notion of “abduction”—is a necessary condition of moral progress for it allows individuals to think through the boundaries of social and ethical life. In a world of unexpected occurrences and uncertainty, the ability to generate novel explanatory frameworks and normative ideals is a crucial, if normally underappreciated, moral faculty. This paper attempts to respond to this relative neglect.