Personal Agency across Generations: Evolutionary Psychology or Religious Belief?

Sophia - Although the authors of modern scientific psychology agreed on precious little, Freud and Jung both insisted that any complete science of psychology requires some way to explain the...     

Faith and Psychology: Integration or Separation?

This article describes the integration of spiritual and psychological issues as it pertains to a woman's coping with her husband's death. This case highlights the need to incorporate theological elements in any caregiving relationship, whether it be professional or otherwise. Finally, it challenges educational institutions to collaborate in working on the interface of faith and psychology.     

Change Blindness: Theory or Paradigm?

The present paper examines a number of recent findings from the induced change blindness literature in an attempt to determine what these findings reveal about the role of attention in perception. The conclusion is drawn that change blindness research reveals that attention is necessary to raise a stimulus to a level of awareness (e.g. verbal report), as has been shown in related literatures, e.g. eye movement, masking, and the attentional blink. Some research possibilities employing the change blindness paradigm are suggested, which may prove useful in future research efforts.     

Analytical Psychology and Science: Adversaries or Allies?

This article examines C. G. Jung's relationship to science as a paradigm and the relationship between the Jungian community and science. The impact of Jungian “isolation” in terms of academic dialogue, cross-theoretical influence, and absence from the public sphere is also discussed. The author examines how findings from science can enhance our functioning as analytic clinicians and improve our ability to communicate the wealth found in analytical psychology to a variety of audiences outside Jungian circles. Finally, research on analytic interaction and analytic theories of the mind/psyche is explored as well as general research that has implications for analytical psychology and psychoanalytic theory.     

Feminism and Evolutionary Psychology: Allies, Adversaries, or Both? An Introduction to a Special Issue

This special issue on feminism and evolutionary psychology addresses current theory and research from feminist and evolutionary psychologists, focusing on gender differences in mate selection as conceptualized by Sexual Strategies Theory. This introduction begins with feminist critiques of evolutionary psychology as well as attempts by Darwinian feminists to integrate the two. It then reviews the papers, which generally fit into one of three lines of research. One group of papers critiques evolutionary psychology claims and presents research to support alternative theoretical explanations. A second group uses evolutionary psychology to support research on gender differences in alignment with Sexual Strategies Theory. A third group utilizes theory and empirical research to integrate evolutionary psychology and feminist theories. The introduction concludes with a call for furthering our understanding of the relationship between these theories.     

Emotional intelligence: new ability or eclectic traits?

Some individuals have a greater capacity than others to carry out sophisticated information processing about emotions and emotion-relevant stimuli and to use this information as a guide to thinking and behavior. The authors have termed this set of abilities emotional intelligence (EI). Since the introduction of the concept, however, a schism has developed in which some researchers focus on EI as a distinct group of mental abilities, and other researchers instead study an eclectic mix of positive traits such as happiness, self-esteem, and optimism. Clarifying what EI is and is not can help the field by better distinguishing research that is truly pertinent to EI from research that is not. EI--conceptualized as an ability--is an important variable both conceptually and empirically, and it shows incremental validity for predicting socially relevant outcomes. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2008 APA, all rights reserved).     

Emotional intelligence or adaptive emotions?

R. D. Roberts, M. Zeidner, and G. Matthews (2001) challenged the adequacy of the psychometric properties of the principal performance measure of emotional intelligence (EI). They raised doubt about the existence of emotion-related abilities that influence behavioral outcomes and social competence after controlling for general intelligence and personality. I agree with Roberts et al. that demonstrating the discriminant and predictive validity of a measure of EI in the context of rival predictors will require more research. I agree with the proponents of EI that emotion-related abilities do exist and show that such abilities in children account for unique variance in measures of adaptive behavior and social competence. However, evidence from developmental and clinical research suggest that these emotion-related abilities and their influence on socioemotional competence stem more from the direct effects of emotions than from a special form of intelligence.     

Honor War Theory: Romance or Reality?

Abstract

Just War Theory (JWT) replaced an older ‘warrior code,’ an approach to war that remains poorly understood and dismissively treated in the philosophical literature. This paper builds on recent work on honor to address these deficiencies. By providing a clear, systematic exposition of ‘Honor War Theory’ (HWT), we can make sense of paradigm instances of warrior psychology and behavior, and understand the warrior code as the martial expression of a broader honor-based ethos that conceives of obligation in terms of fair competition for prestige. Far from being a romantic and outmoded approach to war, HWT accounts for current conflicts and predicts moral intuitions that JWT either rejects or cannot comfortably accommodate. So although it is not recommended as a replacement for JWT, there is good reason think that a fully mature, realistic, and yet properly normative theory of war ethics will incorporate a variety of insights from HWT.     

How Can Evolutionary Psychology Successfully Explain Personality and Individual Differences?

ABSTRACT— Although evolutionary psychology has been successful in explaining some species-typical and sex-differentiated adaptations, a large question that has largely eluded the field is this: How can the field successfully explain personality and individual differences? This article highlights some promising theoretical directions for tackling this question. These include life-history theory, costly signaling theory, environmental variability in fitness optima, frequency-dependent selection, mutation load, and flexibly contingent shifts in strategy according to environmental conditions. Tackling the explanatory question also requires progress on three fronts: (a) reframing some personality traits as forms of strategic individual differences; (b) providing a nonarbitrary, evolutionary-based formulation of environments as distributions and salience profiles of adaptive problems; and (c) identifying which strategies thrive and which falter in these differing problem-defined environments.     

Phenomenologizing with A Hammer: Theory or Practice?

As a contribution towards clearing the ground for a new phenomenological evaluation of the essence of science, in this paper I present a critique of Heidegger's argument in Being and Time for the priority of Zuhandenheit to Vorhandenheit. I argue that Heidegger's notion of presence-at-hand is incoherent, conflating Husserl and Descartes, and that this general analysis has serious phenomenological flaws. Contrary to Heidegger, I maintain that there is a form of exploratory, theoretical activity including causal inquiry which is prior to the type of practical activity entailed by readiness-to-hand. Consideration of this exploratory activity points us in the direction of an alternate conception of the genesis and essence of theory.     

Facial Reactions to Emotional Facial Expressions: Affect or Cognition?

This study investigated whether observers' facial reactions to the emotional facial expressions of others represent an affective or a cognitive response to these emotional expressions. Three hypotheses were contrasted: (1) facial reactions to emotional facial expressions are due to mimicry as part of an affective empathic reaction; (2) facial reactions to emotional facial expressions are a reflection of shared affect due to emotion induction; and (3) facial reactions to emotional facial expressions are determined by cognitive load depending on task difficulty. Two experiments were conducted varying type of task, presentation of stimuli, and task difficulty. The results show that depending on the nature of the rating task, facial reactions to facial expressions may be either affective or cognitive. Specifically, evidence for facial mimicry was only found when individuals made judgements regarding the valence of an emotional facial expression. Other types of judgements regarding facial expressions did not seem to elicit mimicry but may lead to facial responses related to cognitive load.     

Mass Response to the Lewinsky Scandal: Motivated Reasoning or BayesianUpdating?

This study attempts to account for the vastly different trajectories taken by mass andelite opinion in the wake of the Lewinsky affair. Data from a panel study, collected before andjust after the scandal broke, suggest that Clinton's prior popularity indelibly colored massresponse to the scandal, thereby constraining citizens' reactions. As would be predicted bytheories of "motivated reasoning," the influence of various considerations (like thecredibility and importance of the allegations) on reactions to the scandal was conditional uponprior affect for the president. Such findings are difficult to accommodate within the more rational"Bayesian updating" perspective. These data shed light on mass response to theLewinsky scandal in particular and citizen reaction to presidential behavior more generally, aswell as on the cognitive mechanisms that facilitate motivated reasoning in candidate evaluation.     

Does Children's Colour Use Reflect the Emotional Content of their Drawings?

When children draw in clinical contexts, clinicians sometimes rely on children's colour use to make inferences about their emotional reaction to the subject of the drawing. Here, we examined whether children use colour to portray emotion in their drawings. In Experiment 1, children indicated their colour preferences and then coloured in outlines of figures characterized as nasty or nice. Children also drew complex, multi‐coloured pictures about their own happy or sad experiences. In Experiment 2, hospitalized children drew about being worried or scared in hospital and about their positive experiences. In both experiments, we examined the relation between children's colour use and their colour preferences. Three‐ to 10‐year‐old children used more preferred colours to colour in the nice outline. Although they were more likely to use non‐preferred colours to colour in the nasty outline, they tended to used a mix of preferred and non‐preferred colours. When both normal and hospitalized children produced drawings about positive and negative events, there was no relation between children's colour choices and their colour preferences; children primarily used preferred colours. These data suggest that clinicians should exercise extreme caution when interpreting the meaning of colour in children's drawings. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock: Does Evolutionary Psychology Exaggerate Human Sex Differences?

This article looks at the evolution of sex differences in sexuality in human beings and asks whether evolutionary psychology sometimes exaggerates these differences. According to a common understanding of sexual selection theory, females in most species invest more than males in their offspring, and as a result, males compete for as many mates as possible, whereas females choose from among the competing males. The males-compete/females-choose (MCFC) model applies to many species but is misleading when applied to human beings. This is because males in our species commonly contribute to the rearing of the young, which reduces the sex difference in parental investment. Consequently, sex differences in our species are relatively modest. Rather than males competing and females choosing, humans have a system of mutual courtship: Both sexes are choosy about long-term mates, and both sexes compete for desirable mates. We call this the mutual mate choice (MMC) model. Although much of the evolutionary psychology literature is consistent with the MMC model, the traditional MCFC model exerts a strong influence on the field, distorting the emerging picture of the evolved sexual psychology of Homo sapiens. Specifically, it has led to the exaggeration of the magnitude of human sex differences, an overemphasis on men's short-term mating inclinations, and a relative neglect of male mate choice and female mate competition. We advocate a stronger focus on the MMC model.