Genuine Violations of Laws

Could laws of nature be violated, in the sense that some proposition is both a law and false? I argue that opponents of regularity theories of laws should accept the metaphysical possibility of such genuine violations. I begin with a clarification of this claim. The main argument is then developed in three steps. I first argue that opponents of regularity theory should endorse the modal-essence view: certain modal principles are essential to the laws of nature. Second, I argue that the modal-essence view entails sophisticated modal primitivism. Third, I argue from sophisticated primitivism to the metaphysical possibility of genuine violations of laws.     

Two Contrasting Explanations of Involvement Violations:

Among the theories that address the impact of variations in immediacy behaviors during ongoing interactions are expectancy violations (EV) and discrepancy arousal (DA) theories. This study of the effects of violations of expectations on arousal, reciprocity, and compensation in the medical practitioner-patient relationship contrasts EV predictions with DA predictions. EV theory predicts that given a communicator with high reward valence, high and very high involvement (including touch and close proximity) should be met with reciprocation (increased involvement), and low and very low involvement should be met with compensation (increased involvement). DA theory predicts compensating very high involvement with decreased involvement, reciprocating high involvement with increased involvement, compensating low involvement with increased involvement, and reciprocating very low involvement, with decreased involvement. Results supported neither theory as all involvement changes were met with reciprocity. Additionally, although all violations/discrepancies were followed by changes in arousal, size of arousal change was not monotonically related to size of involvement change, as predicted by DA theory. Finally, although positive versus negative emotional experiences were not related to physiological indicators of arousal change, size of involvement change was directly related to the experience of positive and negative emotions. Thus, it appears that involvement change size directly predicts emotional experience and is not mediated by arousal change.     

Quality of Social Support in Mental and Physical Health

The current study investigates the relationship between social support and mental and physical health. Results indicate that poor functional support (or quality of support) is related to physical health problems while structural support (or social network size) is not. Moreover, although both poor functional and structural support are related to depression and anxiety, functional support is more strongly related to these outcome variables, the strongest relationship being associated with depression. Depression and hostility are also related to social isolation, although the relationship is again stronger for depression. The results suggest that the quality of social relationships is more important than quantity for optimal mental and physical health. The clinical relevance of these findings is that the quality of social support in the lives of individuals is central to recovery and should be addressed in medical and mental health treatment planning whenever it is an etiological or maintaining factor. The author dedicates this paper to her beloved father, Charles VanderVoort and her colleagues Dr. Uwe Stuecher and Dr. Gay Barfield whom she describes as “natural altruists, the rarest and most loving type of people in the world.”     

Idealizations and Concretizations in Laws and Explanations in Physics

The paper tries to provide an alternative to Hempel’s approach to scientific laws and scientific explanation as given in his D-N model. It starts with a brief exposition of the main characteristics of Hempel’s approach to deductive explanations based on universal scientific laws and analyzes the problems and paradoxes inherent in this approach. By way of solution, it analyzes the scientific laws and explanations in classical mechanics and then reconstructs the corresponding models of explanation, as well as the types of scientific laws appearing in it. Finally, it compares this reconstruction with the approaches of J. Woodward and C. Hitchcock, C. Liu and with the views of M. Thalos on analytic mechanics.

Getting Emotional About Explanations: Social Explanations and Social Explanatory Styles as Bases of Prosocial Emotions and Intergroup Attitudes

We are interested in the bases of social emotions such as compassion and hostility. Our analysis centers on social explanations, or people’s answers to the question: Why does the target behave that way or experience those outcomes? Below, we review classic approaches to social explanation and then review work linking explanations to emotions. Finally, we focus on work from our lab that connects explanations to prosocial emotions and intergroup attitudes, including compassion for the disadvantaged and reduced vengefulness toward the violent. A crucial contribution of our work is to illuminate complex connections between explanations and emotions: A given explanation has different socio‐emotional implications depending on the explainer’s motives. Finally, we review our work suggesting that individuals have social explanatory styles, and that particular styles are predictive of dispositional compassion. A key implication of our work is that social explanations are another basis of prosociality, in addition to factors such as empathy and moral principles.     

社会支持对慢性病患者身心健康的影响

慢性疾病已经成为威胁现代人健康的头号问题。社会支持作为影响人们身心健康的重要因素,在减轻疾病压力、帮助人们应对压力以及减少心理不适、增进身体健康等方面发挥着重要的作用。从社会网络理论的视角,考察社会支持对慢性病患者身心健康的影响,提出相应的社会支持对策。     

Social Change, Positive Mental Health, and Psychological Androgyny

Recent changes in the timing of life stages, the length of the lifespan, labor force participation, marriage and fertility are described. It is argued that highly-differentiated sex-role orientations are less suited to current conditions than are androgynous orientations, especially for women. If this is true, then developing androgynous sex-role orientations may promote greater adaptability and positive mental health.     

The Social Value of Internal Explanations and the Norm of Internality

Since the 1970s, it has been agreed that ‘internal’ people, who explain what happens to them by internal explanations (their behaviors, their aptitudes, their efforts, their personality, etc.) were more likely to succeed than ‘external’ people, who explain the same outcomes by external explanations such as chance, situational difficulties, the power of others, or fate. The social superiority of internal people is explained in terms of their personality (locus of control). Looking further into the intuitions of American researchers, a French school of thought attempted to show that internal explanations are socially valued. It was suggested that there exists a social judgment norm that could be called the norm of internality and that, perhaps, the success of ‘internal’ people was more specifically due to the fact that social appraisers, whether in school, in organizations, in the courts of justice, prefer this type of person because such people adhere more easily to current social ways of functioning.     

社会焦虑与精神疾病--社会焦虑致抑郁性自杀现象透视

社会焦虑是指在社会成员中普遍存在着的一种心理紧张状态.社会焦虑现象容易导致社会成员的关系紧张,不利于社会人群的心理健康并促使社会问题的产生和恶化.因此,遏制社会焦虑利于有效防止精神疾病的发生和社会的安全运转.     

伊斯兰教关于身心健康的理念

真主说:凡枉杀一人的,如杀众人;凡救活一人的,如救活众人。我的众使者。确已昭示他们许多迹象。此后,他们中许多人,在地方上确是过分的。(5:32)又说:你们不要自杀,真主确是怜恤你们的。(4:29)又说:你们不要自投于灭亡。(2:195)穆圣说:从前有一个人,负伤后不忍疼痛而割腕自杀,真主说:‘我的仆人先我而取了自己的命,我禁止他进入天堂。     

Social Neuroscience: Progress and Implications for Mental Health

ABSTRACT— Social neuroscience is a new, interdisciplinary field devoted to understanding how biological systems implement social processes and behavior. Social neuroscience capitalizes on biological concepts and methods to inform and refine theories of social behavior, and it uses social and behavioral constructs and data to inform and refine theories of neural organization and function. We focus here on the progress and potential of social neuroscience in the area of mental health. Research in social neuroscience has grown dramatically in recent years. Among the most active areas of research we found are brain-imaging studies in normal children and adults; animal models of social behavior; studies of stroke patients; imaging studies of psychiatric patients; and research on social determinants of peripheral neural, neuroendocrine, and immunological processes. We also found that these areas of research are proceeding along largely independent trajectories. Our goals in this article are to review the development of this field, examine some currently promising approaches, identify obstacles and opportunities for future advances and integration, and consider how this research can inform work on the diagnosis and treatment of mental disorders.     

Histrionic Personality Disorder, Physical Attractiveness, and Social Adjustment

Histrionic personality disorder (HPD) is the only DSM-IV personality disorder (PD) explicitly linked to a person's physical appearance. This study examined the HPD–attractiveness link in a mixed-sex sample of college students. Consistent with expectations, HPD women were rated higher in attractiveness than women with other PDs or no PD. However, a parallel HPD–attractiveness link was not found in men. Subsequent analyses indicated that, relative to less attractive HPD women, more attractive HPD women (a) had a more varied and supportive social network, (b) exhibited more negative behaviors in important relationships, and (c) showed greater use of immature defenses, and less reliance on image-distorting, self-sacrificing, and mature defenses. Similar attractiveness–defense relationships were found in HPD men, but parallel results did not emerge for men in the other two domains. Implications of these findings are discussed, and suggestions for future studies are offered.     

A Psychophysiological Examination of Cognitive Processing of and Affective Responses to Social Expectancy Violations

Several models of person perception predict that expectancy violations have both affective and cognitive consequences for the perceiver. Although extant evidence generally supports these claims, the temporal resolution of traditional self-report measures has limited researchers' ability to convincingly link underlying physiological processes with observed outcomes. In this study, we examined these issues by measuring brain (event-related brain potentials) and peripheral (facial electromyogram) electrophysiological activity while participants read positive and negative expectancy-consistent, expectancy-violating, expectancy-irrelevant, and semantically incongruent behavioral sentences about fictitious characters. The electromyogram results indicated that negative (but not positive) expectancy-violating behaviors elicited enhanced negative affect as early as 100 to 300 ms poststimulus. The event-related potentials showed enhanced positivities with latency exceeding 300 ms in response to expectancy violations and negative behaviors. Semantically incongruent sentence endings influenced a separate negative component (N400), suggesting fundamental differences between semantic- and behavior-consistency processing. This difference also was evident in participants' recall. Implications for theoretical models of expectancy violation are discussed.     

Exploring the latent structure of the Perceptual Aberration, Magical Ideation, and Physical Anhedonia Scales in a German sample.

The schizotypy model proposed by Meehl (1990) assumes a discontinuous distribution of schizophrenia liability. The "schizogene" is thought to determine if one is at risk for psychosis (i.e., whether one is a member of the taxon or its complement, which are considered to be the two latent classes). Using a German non-student sample (n = 809) we wanted to (1) replicate the results of prior research pertaining to the latent structure and base rate of schizotypy assessed by the Perceptual Aberration Scale (PER; Chapman, Chapman, & Raulin, 1978), and (2) investigate whether the same holds true for two other prominent psychometric indices, the Magical Ideation Scale (MI; Eckblad & Chapman, 1983) and the Physical Anhedonia Scale (PhA; Chapman et al., 1976), if one uses the same kind of analysis--the MAXCOV-HITMAX analysis based on subsets of items (Meehl, 1973). Pertaining to PER and PhA, our results are in accordance with prior research showing a latent class structure and a base rate of about 12% for schizotypy. However, for MI, there was no evidence of a taxonic structure. Possible reasons for MI's negative results are discussed as well as the role of the concept "anhedonia."     

Unification,Reduction, and Non-Ideal Explanations

Kitcher's unification theory of explanation seems to suggest that only the most reductive accounts can legitimately be termed explanatory. This is not what we find in actual scientific practice. In this paper, I attempt to reconcile these ideas. I claim that Kitcher's theory picks out ideal explanations, but that our term explanation is used to cover other accounts that have a certain relationship with the ideal accounts. At times, versions and portions of ideal explanations can also be considered explanatory.     

Mental Health Values of Psychotherapists: How Psychologists,Psychiatrists, Psychoanalysts,and Social Workers Conceptualize Good Mental Health

Previous research suggests that laypersons differ as a function of gender and ethnicity in their views about the meaning of “mental health.” The current study examined agreement among psychotherapists about the nature of healthy psychological functioning. National samples of psychologists, psychiatrists, social workers, and psychoanalysts completed the Mental Health Values Questionnaire, a measure of value dimensions used in appraising emotional adjustment. Results indicated a relatively high degree of consensus among the four professional disciplines surveyed. Individual differences were associated with gender and with the geographic area in which the therapist was raised.