Why Are You Betraying Your Class?

Abstract: Social justice concerns us on two counts: One, what is social justice? Two, given that we know the answer to one, then the question is: how can social justice be implemented? Answering the first question requires hitting the right balance between two values: liberty and equality. My concern here, however, is with the second question, the question of implementation rather than with what social justice consists of. I assume that the right balance between liberty and equality is somehow a given. To implement the structural changes that a just society requires calls for a historical agent that can bring about such changes. The working class was a good candidate to be such a historical agent. The working class was suitable for this historical task because it was the class that had the most to gain from a just society and it was a very large class of people. The working class was singled out for this task not for being a particularly virtuous class but by being the class that had the most to gain from a change in the status quo. But the working class is rapidly disappearing; in the developed countries, it has shrunk considerably. Thus, the implementation of social justice is now left without an effective historical agent to carry it through.     

“What Would You Do if You Were Me?” Effects of Counselor Self-Disclosure Versus Non-disclosure in a Hypothetical Genetic Counseling Session

Two prior studies suggest genetic counselors self-disclose primarily because patients ask them to do so (Peters et al., 2004; Thomas et al., 2006). However, scant research has investigated effects of counselor disclosure on genetic counseling processes and outcomes. In this study, 151 students (98 undergraduates, 53 graduates) completed one of three surveys describing a hypothetical genetic counseling session in which a patient at risk for FAP was considering whether to pursue testing or surveillance procedures. Dialogue was identical in all surveys, except for a final response to the question: “What would you do if you were me?” The counselor either revealed what she would do (Personal Disclosure), what other patients have done (Professional Disclosure), or deflected the question (No Disclosure). Imagining themselves as the patient, participants wrote a response to the counselor and indicated their perceptions of her. Participants rated the non-disclosing counselor significantly lower in social attractiveness than either disclosing counselor, and less satisfying than the professional disclosing counselor. Analysis of written responses yielded four themes: Made Decision, Sought Information, Expressed Thoughts/Feelings, and No Decision. Practice implications and research recommendations are provided.     

Communication in preterm infants: Why is it different?

The present paper selectively reviews the literature which compares full-term and preterm infants' communication with their mothers in the first year of life. The review is focused not only on what differences are found between full-term and preterm infants, but also why such differences exist. Particular emphasis is placed on the importance of interpreting the findings in the light of the developmental phase of the infants, the heterogeneity of the preterm population and the situation in which communication is studied. Most studies were not designed to consider these issues in any detail. Differences with respect to these factors can be found between studies, however, which may have contributed to the often contradictory findings. Consequently, comparisons between these studies provide clues about the effects of these factors on communicative development. The ultimate goal of this review is to point to important directions for future research on early communication in preterm infants.     

Why Do Situational Interviews Predict Performance? Is it Saying How You Would Behave or Knowing How You Should Behave?

Purpose

The present study examined two theoretical explanations for why situational interviews predict work-related performance, namely (a) that they are measures of interviewees’ behavioral intentions or (b) that they are measures of interviewees’ ability to correctly decipher situational demands.

Design/Methodology/Approach

We tested these explanations with 101 students, who participated in a 2-day selection simulation.

Findings

In line with the first explanation, there was considerable similarity between what participants said they would do and their actual behavior in corresponding work-related situations. However, the underlying postulated mechanism was not supported by the data. In line with the second explanation, participants’ ability to correctly decipher situational demands was related to performance in both the interview and work-related situations. Furthermore, the relationship between the interview and performance in the work-related situations was partially explained by this ability to decipher situational demands.

Implications

Assessing interviewees’ ability to identify criteria might be of additional value for making selection decisions, particularly for jobs where it is essential to assess situational demands.

Originality/Value

The present study made an effort to open the ‘black box’ of situational interview validity by examining two explanations for their validity. The results provided only moderate support for the first explanation. However, the second explanation was fully supported by these results.

     

“Let Me Tell You Why!”. When Argumentation in Doctor–Patient Interaction Makes a Difference

This paper throws some light on the nature of argumentation, its use and advantages, within the setting of doctor–patient interaction. It claims that argumentation can be used by doctors to offer patients reasons that work as ontological conditions for enhancing the decision making process, as well as to preserve the institutional nature of their relationship with patients. In support of these claims, selected arguments from real-life interactions are presented in the second part of the paper, and analysed by means of a model of argumentation borrowed from classical rhetoric, and refined according to the modern orientation of the pragma-dialectic approach.     

Why Don't You Just Show Me? Performance interviews for skill‐based promotions

Despite the high skill levels needed to cope with complex technical systems and the pace of technological change, there remain persistent skill gaps in the United States workforce. Organizations are increasingly relying on skill‐based programs to encourage and foster employee skill development. Unfortunately, many questions remain about how to make skill‐based promotions. Drawing from research on performance testing and structured interviewing, as well as work that examines broader issues of performance prediction and candidate reactions, we outline the development and empirical test of a performance interview that can be used for skill‐based promotions. Such interviews allow employees to demonstrate their skills on the job, and thus may be more accepted by employees. We first discuss seven design principles that form the conceptual foundation for the performance interview, followed by the specific steps practitioners can follow to develop a performance interview. Finally, using a sample of 230 auto parts manufacturing employees, we provide empirical evidence for the high reliability, validity, and positive candidate reactions to the performance interview.     

“Why Won't My Parents Help Me?”: Therapeutic Assessment of a Child and Her Family

We present a case study of a child's psychological assessment using the methods of Therapeutic Assessment (TA). The case illustrates how TA can help assessors understand the process and structure of a family by highlighting how maladaptive family processes and interactions impact a child's development. It also illustrates how TA with a child can serve as a family intervention. In this case, it became apparent that the child's social difficulties were significant, not minor as initially reported by the parents, and were rooted in an insecure attachment, underlying depression, an idiosyncratic view of the world, and longing for attention, all of which were hidden or expressed in grandiose, expansive, and off-putting behaviors. In addition, the familial hierarchy was inverted; the parents felt ineffective and the child felt too powerful, leading to enhanced anxiety for the child. Intervention throughout, punctuated by the family session and feedback sessions, allowed the parents to develop a new “story” about their child and for the child to experience a new sense of safety. Following the TA, the parents and child indicated high satisfaction, enhanced family functioning, and decreased child symptomatology. Subsequent family therapy sessions allowed the family to further implement the interventions introduced in the TA.     

“Why Didn't They Keep Me?”: The Search For Belonging in the Analysis of a Four Year Old Adopted Child

The purpose of this clinical article is to discuss aspects of the analysis of a child whose adoption functioned as organizer of her personality. Her fantasy life, defensive organization, sense of self and other, and object relations were all organized around a personal mythology surrounding her adoption. These organizing myths took various forms that emerged in the course of the analysis. Her adoptive parents also created a mythology that had a critical impact on the child's development and on their development as parents. The analytic work demonstrates how these organizing mythologies governed the parent–child relationship and how the collision of their mythologies led to a breakdown in the child's development and in parental functioning. In the course of the analysis, the child developed the capacity to grieve and to react to loss in an organized way as progressive development was restored and she was able to feel valued and loved. Her parents began to grieve the dual loss of not having biological children or a perfect adoption, and to develop more motherly and fatherly feelings for their child.     

Can You Feel It? Negative Emotion,Risk, and Narrative in Health Communication

Eliciting emotional responses to mass media messages can be an effective means of changing public health attitudes, intentions and behaviors. This conceptual paper proposes that emotional responses to such media messages can be message-referent, plot-referent, and/or self-referent. Self-referent emotional responses are expected to have a direct effect in motivating behavior change, particularly as they are likely to be associated with an increase in perceived personal risk. Message-referent and plot-referent emotional responses are proposed to have indirect effects on the individual, primarily by stimulating self-referent emotions, and prompting interpersonal discussion about the message. In this paper, it is argued that narrative is a particularly effective message format with which to elicit self-referent emotional responses.     

The American Dream Revisited: Is It What You Want or Why You Want It That Matters?

Previous research found that aspirations to financial success related inversely to self-actualization and that aspirations to community involvement related positively to self-actualization. We argue that diverse reasons can underlie both of these aspirations, leading to more complex predictions. In a sample of 246 participants, we assessed both self-determining and controlling reasons for each class of aspiration, along with endorsements of the aspirations themselves. Initial regression analyses replicated the earlier findings. Subsequent analyses found that endorsement of self-determining reasons for either class of aspiration related positively to self-actualization and that endorsement of controlling reasons for either class of aspiration related inversely to self-actualization. In the analysis involving community involvement, the aspiration itself no longer retained predictive power after the other variables were taken into account. In the analysis involving financial success, however, the aspiration retained an independent predictive role.     

“Why me?”: Low-Income Women’s Poverty Attributions,Mental Health,and Social Class Perceptions

Although much is known about broad societal attitudes toward poverty, less is known about how women perceive their own poverty. We sought to examine the types of self attributions low-income women make about their poverty, as well as the association of self poverty attributions to women’s mental health and upward mobility beliefs. Using close-ended questions in a community sample of 66 low-income mothers from the Midwestern United States, we found these women were most likely to attribute their poverty to issues related to having children, their romantic relationships, and structural/government blame. The least endorsed attributions for poverty were fatalistic and individualistic reasons. Attributing one’s poverty to children and structural reasons was related to greater depression, and attributing one’s poverty to romantic relationships and structural reasons was related to greater anxiety. Moreover, attributing one’s poverty to children and romantic relationships was positively related to upward mobility beliefs, whereas individualistic attributions were negatively related to upward mobility beliefs. Understanding how women view their poverty and upward mobility can help to improve interventions and policies aimed at low-income women.     

“Why Can’t You Control Yourself?” Fat Should Be a Feminist Issue

This article is a comment on Fikkan and Rothblum’s (2011) article “Is Fat a Feminist Issue? Exploring the Gendered Nature of Weight Bias.” They argued that fat women in North America experience significantly more prejudice and discrimination than fat men do, marshaled evidence to support their argument in several domains (e.g., employment, education, romantic relationships, health care, the media), and wondered why feminist scholars have not paid much attention to the oppression of fat women. Here I suggest several reasons why fat women experience more prejudice and discrimination than fat men do: the objectification of women, gender-related aspects of health behavior and knowledge about health and illness, and the importance of self-control to the performance of femininity. I also suggest that there is some overlap in negative stereotypes of both feminists and fat women, which might lead to a desire to distance oneself from both. However, feminists should recognize the intersectionality of fat oppression and the way it colludes with the sexualization and objectification of women in popular culture. Thus, fat should be a feminist issue.     

Why? Versus Why Not?: Potentialities of Aging in Shaw's Back to Methuselah

Bernard Shaw's critique of society's sacred cows, as well as his participation in the social, cultural and political marketplace in which he lived, resemble the new historical/cultural materialism of contemporary theory. In Back to Methuselah, Shaw examines the notions of aging and illuminates the degree to which our chronological standards of old age are sociological not biological constructs. This tour de force on aging both dramatizes age as a function of societal and/or individual choice, not as a biological given, and juxtaposes opinions toward aging in such a way that flexible attitudes toward the subject emerge.     

“If You Love Me Keep My Commandments”: Religiosity Increases Preference for Rule-Based Moral Arguments

Two experiments demonstrated that religiosity affects the way people resolve moral dilemmas. Participants were presented a series of immoral actions and were asked to justify the wrongness of the action by appealing to either the violation of a rule (rule-based argument) or the negative consequences resulting from the action (outcome-based argument). In Study 1, it was shown both among British and American samples that religious individuals preferred rule-based moral arguments to consequentialist moral arguments more than nonreligious individuals, and covariance with political conservatism did not account for this effect. Study 2 replicated these results with revisions to the materials and extended measures. In this study, dimensions of religiosity—particularly Christian Orthodoxy—predicted rule-based morality independent of a personal need for structure, need for cognition, and right-wing authoritarianism. These results imply that religious individuals who are committed to orthodox religious teaching display a deontological style of morality for reasons that extend beyond a need for structure, cognitive simplicity, or submission to authority.     

Vagueness: Why Do We Believe in Tolerance?

The tolerance principle, the idea that vague predicates are insensitive to sufficiently small changes, remains the main bone of contention between theories of vagueness. In this paper I examine three sources behind our ordinary belief in the tolerance principle, to establish whether any of them might give us a good reason to revise classical logic. First, I compare our understanding of tolerance in the case of precise predicates and in the case of vague predicates. While tolerance in the case of precise predicates results from approximation, tolerance in the case of vague predicates appears to originate from two more specific sources: semantic indeterminacy on the one hand, and epistemic indiscriminability on the other. Both give us good and coherent grounds to revise classical logic. Epistemic indiscriminability, it is argued, may be more fundamental than semantic indeterminacy to justify the intuition that vague predicates are tolerant.     

An Exploratory Study of HIV+ Adolescents’ Spirituality: Will You Pray with Me?

The aims of the study were (1) to determine whether adolescents find it acceptable to have physicians explore their spiritual beliefs as part of their medical care, (2) to characterize the role of spirituality and religious beliefs in adolescents with and without HIV, and (3) to examine associations between spirituality/religion and quality of life. Adolescents receiving their medical care at an urban Adolescent Health Clinic completed a study-specific questionnaire about spiritual inquiry by their physician, the Brief Multidimensional Measurement of Religiousness/Spirituality, and the Pediatric Quality of Life Inventory 4.0. Chi-squared analysis, Fischer’s exact test, and t tests were used to assess associations. A total of 45 participants enrolled: 19 HIV+ (53% vertical transmission) and 26 HIV?; mean age 17.2 years; 80% African American. Four out of 45 (9%) had ever been asked by their doctor about their spiritual/religious beliefs, and only 8 (18%) had ever shared these beliefs with their healthcare provider. Most teens wanted their provider to ask them about their spiritual beliefs during some visits, especially when dealing with death/dying or chronic illness (67%). Those with HIV were more likely to endorse wanting their doctors to pray with them (42% vs. 15%), feeling “God’s presence” (Mean = 3.95 vs. 2.83), being “part of a larger force” (Mean = 2.58 vs. 1.69), and feeling “God had abandoned them” (Mean = 1.63 vs. 1.15). There are certain circumstances in which healthcare providers should include a spiritual history with teenage patients. Few differences emerged in the teens studied with and without HIV.     

“Typical Clinton: Brazen It Out”

Ten excerpts of both President Clinton's Grand Jury Testimony of August 17, 1998 and of each of two interviews with Hillary Rodham Clinton (Today Show, January 27, 1998; Good Morning America, January 28, 1998) were analyzed. In all of them, the topic under discussion was the President's insistence on his innocence in the Lewinsky case. Comparisons between the President and First Lady revealed long and short within-speaker pauses, respectively. His replies to questions average more than twice the length of hers. Comparisons were also made with other speech genres, including modern presidential inaugural rhetoric. In particular, President Clinton's statement of his innocence at the conclusion of an educational press conference on January 26, 1998 and his prepared statement at the beginning of his Grand Jury Testimony were found to vary notably from all the other corpora. Both are characterized by several of Ekman's (1985, p. 286) behavioral cues for the detection of deception.