“Put Your Money Where Your Love Is”: Parental Aid to Adult Children

Qualitative data are used to examine parents’ support to their adult children, and their motivations and feelings about it. The sample is 40 adult children and parents from four racial/ethnic groups: African-Americans, Asian-Americans, non-Latino Whites, and Latinos. Ideals of adult independence versus interdependence emerge as determinants of feelings about aiding adult children. The ambivalence concept provides the means to elucidate the tensions between these ideologies and children’s structurally shaped circumstances. Parental assistance to adult children was seen as acceptable for education, home ownership, and on behalf of young children, especially if the child was “working hard.” Parents still provided aid, however, even if these conditions were not met. In these situations, more intrafamilial tension characterized the aid transfer.     

Who's Minding Your Institutional Memory?

ABSTRACT

This article introduces the reader to the resources that an official repository -specifically the Archives of the Mennonite Church -offers to institutions and researchers. Most institutions are equipped to generate paperwork, and to maintain active files, but few are willing to provide the resources to maintain archival records. A well-organized archives facility collects, preserves and manages such collections. It also offers the researcher or anniversary planning committee access to documents, such as correspondence, legal documents, reports and diaries. Photographs, films, videotapes, audio tapes and artifacts are also catalogued and available to the researcher.     

Can I Have Your Pain?

In the so‐called private language argument, Wittgenstein argues both against the alleged epistemological privacy of sensations and against their alleged ontological privacy, that is, the common view that somebody else cannot have my pain. A prominent proponent of the claim of sensations' ontological privacy was Gottlob Frege, whose position has recently been defended by Wolfgang Künne. This paper reconsiders Wittgenstein's objections to ontological privacy and attempts to defend Wittgenstein's position against Künne's Frege‐inspired arguments.     

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.     

Is Workplace Harassment Hazardous to Your Health?

We examined cross-sectional and lagged effects of sexual harassment (SH) and generalized workplace harassment (GWH) on incidence of self-reported illness, injury, or assault in a sample of over 1,500 university employees. SH and GWH, but not other job stressors, were related to increased odds of illness, injury, or assault. This was true when SH, GWH, and illness, injury, or assault were measured at the same time point, as well as when SH and GWH were measured in year prior to illness, injury, or assault.The data presented here are part of an ongoing longitudinal study of workplace harassment conducted at the Department of Psychiatry of the University of Illinois at Chicago. This research was supported by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism (grants AA09989 and AA13332). Portions of this paper were presented at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology, April 2004, Chicago, Illinois. The data were collected by the Survey Research Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago.     

g: Is This Your Final Answer?

In many ways, it could be argued that the finding of a simple generalizable relation between cognitive ability and performance has inhibited progress in our attempts to understand the prediction of job performance. In this article, we focus on how the reliance on the cognitive ability-performance relation has yielded a flawed model of selection that is overly loaded on cognition. By pinpointing potential theoretical and empirical shortcomings in the relation between g and job performance, we hope to encourage and inspire further research on this important topic.     

Why Is It Easy To Control Your Arms?

The complexity of our muscular systems may be regarded, not as a complication for the brain, but as a source of variety providing enough easily controlled movement recipes to do most of the things we ordinarily need to do. This simplifies the control task, in that if there are enough ways of moving, a recipe involving just a few of them can usually be found that will approximate any desired movement with little supervision. In particular, the presence of “redundant? degrees of freedom allows us to use ballistic (free-swinging) movements, so that physics, rather than computation, accounts for much of the trajectory. Computations are required to set up the constraints defining and initializing a low-dimensional subsystem in such a way that a satisfactory ballistic movement exists. One theme of current research is that these recipes may be generated by specifying the parameters of oscillators and spring-like components. We should expect actions to be represented as patchworks of recipes, each working best for some subset of variants of the action.     

What Would It Take to Change Your Mind?

Most of us have settled views about various intellectual debates, and much of the activity of philosophers is devoted to giving arguments that are designed to convince one's opponents to change their minds about a certain issue. But, what might this process require? More pointedly, can you clearly imagine what it would take to make you change your mind about a position you currently hold? This article argues that the surprising answer to this question is no—you cannot imagine what would convince you to change your mind, since in doing so you would actually have to find those reasons compelling. The article then briefly looks at some implications of this conclusion.     

So You Want Your Employees to Quit Smoking?

Today more and more organizations are trying to limit or ban workplace smoking. These actions are prompted largely by the costs associated with employees who smoke. Despite the proliferation of these attempts, corporate efforts in this area have been generally unsuccessful. In this article the most common antismoking programs are reviewed. After this review, a multidimensional, broad-based smoking cessation program is described.     

Who Do You Love, Your Mother or Your Horse? An Event-Related Brain Potential Analysis of Tone Processing in Mandarin Chinese

In Mandarin Chinese, word meaning is partially determined by lexical tone (Wang, 1973). Previous studies suggest that lexical tone is processed as linguistic information and not as pure tonal information (Gandour, 1998; Van Lanker & Fromkin, 1973). The current study explored the online processing of lexical tones. Event-related potentials were obtained from 25 Mandarin speakers while they listened to normal and anomalous sentences containing one of three types of semantic anomalies created by manipulating the tone, the syllable, or both tone and syllable (double-anomaly) of sentence-final words. We hypothesized N400 effects elicited by all three types of anomalies and the largest by the double-anomaly. As expected, all three elicited N400 effects starting approximately 150 ms poststimulus and continuing until 1000 ms in some areas. Surprisingly, onset of the double-anomaly effect was approximately 50 ms later than the rest. Delayed detection of errors in this condition may be responsible for the apparent delay. Slight differences between syllable and tone conditions may be due to the relative timing of these acoustic cues.     

Your Shelter or Mine? Romantic Relationships Among the Homeless

The topic of sex and love is notable by its absence within the research literature on homelessness. If these topics are discussed, they are generally approached from a negative standpoint with a focus on topics such as HIV, sexually transmitted diseases, sexual victimization, or sexual abuse. With growing bodies of literature on homelessness and the many benefits of committed relationships, it is surprising that there is a lack of studies on these intersecting topics. By way of in-depth interviews, this article takes an initial look at the neglected study of the love lives of the homeless. These narratives provide information on the lives of homeless individuals, the importance of romantic relationships and sex, and challenges to these relationships. Recommendations for further research are provided.     

Are You What Your Avatar Eats? Health-Behavior Effects of Avatar-Manifested Self-Concept

Drawing on the self-concept activation and goal-priming account of the priming effect, this study examined how self-concept—i.e., ideal self, ought self, and actual self—can be harnessed as a model for avatar customization in digital games to promote healthy-eating behavior. Female participants (N = 133) customized an avatar in a digital game to reflect either the ideal, ought, or actual self. Participants then selected food items for their avatar within the digital game as well as food items for themselves to eat afterward. Results suggest that for participants using an ought-self avatar, the extent to which they were conscious of their health was positively related to healthier food choice both within and after playing the game. No such effect emerged for participants who used an ideal- or actual-self avatar, indicating that participants formed the goal of being healthy only with regard to the ought self. This study demonstrates that avatar customization in a digital game can serve a regulatory function by representing individuals’ duties and responsibilities, thus, causing them to adopt such attributes manifested in their avatar during and after the game.     

“Kiss Your Period Good-Bye”: Menstrual Suppression in the Popular Press

The purpose of this study was to analyze the content of popular press articles about menstrual suppression, a relatively new and controversial health care option. Twenty-two American and Canadian articles, published before the FDA approval of Seasonale, were coded for basic information about and indications for menstrual suppression, viewpoints included, and coverage of risks and benefits. Menstrual suppression was most often recommended for women with menstrual disorders but was also recommended to menstruating women in general as a matter of convenience. Advocates of menstrual suppression were quoted twice as often as opponents. Monthly menstruation was frequently described as messy, inconvenient, bothersome, unhealthy, and unnecessary. From this analysis, we concluded that popular press coverage of menstrual suppression is insufficient and biased. The articles reflect and reinforce the taboo status and medicalization of menstruation. This coverage may have primed potential consumers to anticipate the FDA approval of Seasonale eagerly, to evaluate it uncritically, and to pursue it as a birth control and menstrual health option. Implications for research, health care providers, and menstrual activists are discussed.An earlier version of this paper was presented at the June 2003 meeting of the Society for Menstrual Cycle Research, Pittsburgh, PA.     

Your Self: did you find it or did you make it?

Abstract: In this paper ¹ 1 This is a slightly edited version of a paper that was pre‐circulated to members of the Society of Analtyical Psychology for discussion at the monthly meeting of the ‘analytic group’ on 4^th November 1991. Sub‐headings and some references have been added by the Editor, Warren Colman.
, written in draft form in 1991 and now posthumously published, the late Louis Zinkin ² 2 The late Louis Zinkin was a practising analytical psychologist and group analyst, a training analyst of the S.A.P., honorary consultant psychotherapist and senior lecturer at St George's Hospital, London, and associate of the Group‐Analytic Practice, London. He died on 13^th March 1993.
presents a constructivist view of the self. He considers some of the paradoxes in Jungian definitions of the self and compares these to Winnicott's ‘forbidden question’ regarding the transitional object: ‘Did you find it or did you make it?’. He argues that, for the purposes of a coherent scientific theory, these apparent paradoxes need to be formulated in an internally consistent way. Bemused by the many contradictions in Jung's thinking, he proposes making a fresh start by thinking in terms of people in social interaction with each other rather than as solitary subjects, as Jung did. This leads him to the view that the self comes into existence through continuing interaction with other people. Drawing on the work of Harré and Vygotsky, he suggests that the public self is prior to the private self and that one becomes real through recognition by other people in and through language and culture. The paper was discussed at a meeting held at the Society of Analytical Psychology in November 1991 and an edited version of the taped discussion follows.